The good, the bad, and the guys who just need to try a little harder ‘Ridiculously overmuscled man’ AI image request generated by Poe, because even the Hulk wasn’t he-man enough for this! I need a hero, I’m holding out for a hero ‘Til the morning light He’s gotta be sure And it’s gotta be soon And he’s gotta be larger than life (Larger than life!) -Bonnie Tyler, I Need A Hero I wrote recently about manipulative men and the younger women easily played. Modern feminism—two waves past my own—has often failed at teaching younger females how to navigate the vagaries of dating and mating. A more power-centered feminism emphasizing personal agency attempts to counteract the sabotaging message of self-imposed victimhood— if the message reaches the vulnerable. And if the vulnerable are amenable to the message—which they aren’t always. For someone who never had a date in high school until a week before graduation, I nevertheless managed to avoid a lot of the potholes other young girls didn’t when I started dating in college. It helped that I wasn’t desperate for male attention. I graduated with a keen nose for lower-quality males based on my high school observations—the ‘burnouts’, the self-impressed jocks, the bullies, the jackasses—and avoided them. I observed that guys from working-class or lower-class families treated girls less respectfully than middle-class boys. I wanted a ‘nice guy’, although he needed to be cute. Some of this development in good taste I can lay at the feet of my late mother. The rest I figured out on my own. “How?” My first encounter with misogyny came from the little boy next door. Billy possessed a weird phobia about girls I found mystifying. Sometimes he played nice with me and sometimes not. I asked my mother why little boys hated girls and she couldn't answer. That's just the way they are, I think she said. It seemed pretty stupid. In grade school, I learned to recognize the 'nice' boys who didn't hate girls versus the little jerks. (A few of the 'nice' boys I now suspect were gay, although I had no concept of that at the time.) In middle and high school I began to connect hypermasculinity to misogyny. In college I connected homophobia to a hatred of women. Homophobia became a red flag for identifying the misogynist male, who got the cold shoulder. As I entered the dating scene in college, I found I attracted mostly ‘nice’ boys, and they were attracted to me. The macho he-men didn’t have much interest in me, nor I them. It seemed, I thought, as though they could tell I wouldn’t put up with any hairy-chested strongman bullshit. Hyper-masculine men, like the characters in the-then Golden Age of action heroes, were very sexy, but I recognized real he-men were Bad News. I did notice that hyper-masculinity worked very well, nevertheless, on other women, and I privately felt sorry for them. I figured they must be getting abused or mistreated. But what about the good ones? What I know now that I didn’t then is that not all hyper -masculine guys are guilty of toxic masculinity. Nor do they deserve the hatefest they get from certain ‘progressive’ feminists. Sometimes the biggest badasses are the nicest guys. Years ago, when I worked downtown, I had to take the streetcar to work. At Spadina station, a group of kids clustered every morning who seemed, for lack of a better word, developmentally disabled. One particular large, heavily muscled, tattooed, pierced transportation worker looking like a bouncer at the toughest nightclub in Toronto, treated the children with genuine friendliness, and knew their names, and talked to them while we waited for the streetcar. I felt envious of his wife. She had found a good one. ‘Hyper-masculinity’ must be approached with caution. And one mustn’t believe the movie fantasy, which is this: Action movie characters, hyper-masculine AF, always ‘nice’ guys, heroic types, often very violent, but never toward women. They consistently play The Protector. In reality, it’s much harder in Real Life to prevent emotional violent spillover. Some men can do it, but many can’t—like police officers and military men , both of whom offer a higher risk of domestic violence. For many women, regular masculinity is just fine, and safer. Hyper-masculinity need not be demonized, even as we recognize the capacity for violence. For men who consciously adopt that persona, they need to understand that it is, on its face, threatening to the more canny women. Women who consciously avoid abuse will be naturally wary of them, and if they aren’t looking for women who accept abusive behavior , they’ll need to exhibit patience and to prove themselves non-abusive first. But what about the less masculine man? Taylor Swift and the transgender fish ‘Romantasy’’ is a primarily female-focused fiction genre—a romance/fantasy mashup. According to Bill Maher , it’s fiction built around women falling in love with and having passionate sex with vampires, werewolves, fairies (or ‘fae’ as they’re called), demons, elves, even a Minotaur. Anything but human males. Maher blames it on the lack of masculinity in modern males, and says Taylor Swift ‘epitomizes the entire journey women have been going through’. He’s serious. He notes that until she landed Travis Kelce, a six-foot-five smokin’ hot football player from Ohio, Swift “…dated a procession of skinny, fay, gay-adjacent, meek, porcelain doll shy guy twink-like tortured poet metrosexuals in America and Europe,” and finishes, “but the second she got some old-school wood from the heartland, it was game over.” Kelce doesn’t do it for me, but I get why Swift and other women fancy him. He’s reputed to be a genuinely nice guy, described as generous, fun-loving, charismatic, supportive of the family, and authentic, a trait sorely lacking anywhere anymore, especially on the left where one is taught that whatever you are, you should be ashamed of yourself. Kelce is also a generous philanthropist, including a foundation he created called Eighty-Seven & Running, for ‘empowering disadvantaged youth’. He established a Robotics Lab at a Missouri-based non-profit, and gave money to some Ohio school foundations to help them weather the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s even paid for repairs to a senior former athlete’s home. Kelce advocates for social justice, calling for less homophobia in American football, and support for Black Lives Matter. All told, he seems an all-around good guy. He’s not perfect but criticism of him seems pedestrian, like his admittedly declining abilities in football, but at 36, that’s not surprising. He’s got a few old tweets he probably regrets, but most of the criticism is aimed at occasional disrespect (we’re all guilty of that), being a ‘clout chaser’ (maybe, or maybe just critical jealousy), and unprofessional behavior like making obscene gestures or shoving a teammate during a game. No critical sexual assaults alleged, bitter ex-wives spilling it to the NY Post, or Surprise Babies in his family tree. No mention in the Epstein Files! Maher suggested a point he didn’t explore: Travis Kelce is a manly man and what would seem to be a healthy mix of the best of both liberal and conservative values: He’s gay-supportive, wants to marry and start a family and he wants to make a positive difference in others’ lives. I don’t know if they’ll be happy together—she’s a billionaire and he hasn’t even cracked $100 million in net worth yet. That kinds of pressure can break the strongest, most loving partnerships. Or, the pair could turn out to be like Pat Benatar and Neil Geraldo, still together 44 years later. Maher was perhaps a bit harsh in his assessment of modern masculinity, or lack thereof. There is some evidence, not yet conclusive, that synthetic hormones in the water may be feminizing human males. What is established is that it’s definitely feminizing male fish , producing ‘intersex’ specimens who produce female eggs inside the testes, and these are fish that aren’t hermaphrodites. Other effects include reduced sperm count and resulting population declines. One of the primary culprits is suspected to be synthetic estrogens, originating in birth control pills and HRT replacements, that aren’t completely removed by wastewater treatment, as are plant-based estrogenic sources as well. There’s an interesting video making the case that male celebrities looked much older and more masculine in previous decades than today. It’s from the NY Post, not the greatest source ever, but not the worst either, and it makes a provocative case. What it all comes down to Travis Kelce strikes me as a good model for the new Modern Masculine Male - if you can look beyond his less important manly looks and towering height. I honestly don’t think that matters quite as much as many think. I’m a ‘sapiophile’ myself; I’m drawn to very smart men, and I don’t care if they’re short. ( Many other women don’t, either .) I discovered my sapiophilia in high school, with crushes on some of the brightest students, not that I got anywhere with any of them. One turned out to be gay. Most were too shy to deal with girls even if they weren’t. But many of us also value a man who’s strong but not abusive. It’s a spectrum. The ‘porcelain doll shy guy twink-like tortured poet metrosexuals’ are on the low end, with the Highlander Kurgan on the other end. The best men are somewhere in the middle. I like to be hopeful, and with the extended end of wokeness, I’d like to see normal, decent men ‘come out of the closet’, ar ar, and challenge the crazed harpies bathing in male tears. They’ll have plenty of support from women too. I run into many like myself, fans of neither patriarchy nor Patriarchy Derangement Syndrome. I listened to Rafaela Siewert’s interview with neuroscientist and sex researcher Debra Soh on The Free Press, where Soh discussed how hypermasculine men are often temporary flings for women, but not someone you necessarily bring home to Mother. I mourn the loss of normal, manspreading, chest-exposing, at least reasonably-groomed masculinity fraught with sexual tension and playful romantic banter, a prelude of possible things to come while getting to know someone. I miss guys who know how to flirt. It’s one cock fight where Canada actually led the United States. When I left in 2005, American single guys were still fairly, you know, average-masculine—enough to pique one’s hormones. After I moved to Toronto, I found a distinct lack of masculinity in the native locals. Today, even the immigrants are beaten into submission by over-the-top #MeTooism and, although I can no longer speak from personal experience, from what I’ve read, so are American men. It’s not all men’s fault, though. The manosphere exists in a symbiotic relationship with toxic feminism. Which means women have to change too, and I’ve spilled plenty of electrons writing about that for the last several years. I reiterate: You don’t need to be Travis Kelce or a fireman charging into a burning World Trade Center to be a Real Man. Heroes come in all forms, not just male, but also female and four-footed furry. Even children can be true heroes. Heroism doesn’t always require big muscles. One of the greatest historical heroes is Vince Coleman, the man who saved 300 lives in 1917 during the Halifax Explosion by bravely staying at his telegraph post warning an incoming train that a ship in the harbor was about to explode—knowing by staying he was surely to die. You don’t have to be a man to be that heroic, but it helps. The desire to protect the weak is ingrained in almost all of them, even if some fall tragically short. Men possess a unique testosterone-driven courage many women don’t. We chickie-boos freeze , even when we have the ability to protect ourselves. Ask yourself: Would you willingly leave your family forever to save 300 strangers’ lives the way Vince Coleman did? Now that’s a man who had courage we only aspire to, and the strength to stay in place until the train stopped. I’d like to think I would have, but I know: I’m not even close to being the man Vince Coleman was. Random Stuff Men Say That Make Me Go, “WTF, Feminists?” Masculinism 2.0: What Would A Positive, Healthy, New Men’s Movement Look Like? Bears vs. Strange Men: Who Would You Rather Meet In The Woods? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

Do you really think anything will change with a Democratic landslide in November? Photo by goodfreephotos.com We see that willful angelic cluelessness on the left as from the finger-pointing right— “They’re the racists and homophobes, they’re the anti-science side, they’re the censors and free speech haters,” and especially, “They’re the violent assassins and mass shooters, not us!”— despite thirty years of research showing near-monopolist market share violence from the right, with an uptick in left-wing violenc e only in the past two. How gobsmacked progressives are when I point out they have a bigger jones for antisemitism than Tucker Carlson’s fanboys. How the left taught the right how to censor and oppress free speech . The faces they make when I challenge their pediatric genderwoo ; institutionalized racism , just like ‘ No Coloreds ’; how countries have the right to decide who to allow into the country, or not; how ‘defund the police’ only sounds trendy in safe neighborhoods; how you’re not ‘antifascist’ for defying the Trump administration when you’re screaming for the Intifada. I just finished Veiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam by Yasmine Mohammed, a self-published author whose book has been widely read and quoted. She barely mentions liberals until the last chapter, focusing mostly on her memoir as an abused child in a fundamentalist Muslim family and whose arranged-marriage abusive ex-husband became a prominent Bin Laden terrorist. But she does excoriate liberals earlier when, as an eight-year-old, she reported her horrendous abuse to a schoolteacher who brought in the authorities, and the liberal judge dismissed her case, arguing that “corporal punishment wasn’t against the law in Canada, and due to [her] ‘culture’, sometimes those punishments can be more severe than in the average Canadian household.” The ‘corporal punishment’ in question was bastinado and regular beatings for minor infractions like failing to remember prayers properly. Not all Canadian citizens are equal in progressive eyes, especially when they’re children. What would be unacceptable in a white family was perfectly okay when a culturally relativistic judge sat on the bench. Beatings and abuse, Mohammed points out, aren’t any less damaging to Muslim children than they are to those of German or Dutch descent. The progressive love affair with Islamic authoritarianism negates any claims to ‘antifascism’ as it excuses the gross abuses of women, children, homosexuals, and the transgenders they otherwise passionately defend when it’s white men ‘oppressing’: Mohammed’s story exemplifies the very worst of a pervasive progressive racism: Brown children aren’t as entitled to the same human rights as lighter-skinned Canadian children, or simply Canadians who were fortunate enough not to be born into a religious fundamentalist family. Authoritarians don’t respect the rule of law, and as they damn the Trump administration for it, progressives do exactly the same. Criminality is excusable if you’re from a different culture. The darker one’s skin, the better the chance liberals will excuse or even applaud looting, stealing cars, assaulting others, rioting, and spouting racist thoughts. Many who consider themselves ‘liberal’ are not. Many who regard themselves as ‘progressive’ are not. They’re illiberals, like their counterparts on the far right, and they simply prefer their own brand of authoritarianism. Many believe the Democrats are headed for a landslide this November, including, possibly, even the Senate, for which they only need four seats. Many Americans hope and pray they will deliver us from the insanities and inanities of Donald Trump. I wish I could believe them. Kamala Harris was never our savior Countries go bad when ‘good’ liberals embrace hierarchizing humans and granting them special rights others aren’t allowed. The ideology is enforced through social controls like speech policing, content policing, gaslighting, public ridicule and ostracization, surveillance and monitoring, and cancellation. Eventually, they pass laws and policies mandating practices like DEI and ‘loyalty oaths’; refusing college admission applications for coming from the ‘wrong’ color applicants or who fail to espouse the ‘right’ political opinions; and forcing parents to accept decisions about their children’s welfare to which they object, whether it’s for puberty blockers or vaccinations . This is the playbook for both right- and left-wing authoritarians. See: Fascist Germany, Italy and Japan, the WWII Fascist Fun Trifecta. See: Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. The 2024 U.S. election was less a decision on whether to head down an authoritarian path, but rather which one. Kamala Harris didn’t tote her own Project 2025 for America, nor did she espouse anything nearly as dangerous as Trumpitarianism. But neither did she promise to address some of the worst existing authoritarianism problems in America, some Democrat-created, like the criminals freely allowed to enter the U.S. via Biden’s open-door policy. She had nothing to say about addressing the Nazi problem among woke progressives, people who claimed to hate Nazis but screamed for the death of the Jews and the end of Israel, and who have driven an appalling jump in antisemitic acts, nearly consequence-free wherever progressives call the shots. She made it clear that male-driven ‘trans rights’ were more important than women’s safety. She suffered Sudden Onset Dementia when she denied ever supporting taxpayer-paid transition surgery for convicted criminals. And did she have a clear stand on anything? Her word salads approached Trump’s sometimes. ‘Woke’ progressivism’s oppression had been such an authoritarian nightmare for so many years that many Americans decided Trump really couldn’t be as bad. However they feel about their vote now, I can’t fault them for voting ‘anything but Democrat’. I did too, just not for Trump. Democrats are the party that claimed Nazis were only on the right while jumping on antisemitism like Harvey Weinstein on a new starlet, goaded by professional antisemites in Congress like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. This is the party that punishes pronoun resistors more swiftly and virulently than Jewish synagogue vandalism. Or religious fanatics who beat a little girl’s feet. This just in: Authoritarian progressives still scorn free speech According to FIRE , students saying it’s okay to shout down a speaker, block her entry to the venue, or stop it entirely are at “all-time highs”. Barnard College, Columbia University, Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Northeastern University comprise the bottom-feeding Filthy Five of FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings . And they wonder why the cancelmonkey Trump administration attacks universities and pulls their funding. He’s no better than they , but Kamala Harris would in no way have attempted to bring diversity of thought, expression, or political opinion to overwhelmingly progressive universities. Just like Trump is trying to exorcise any opinion to the left of the farthest-right as unforgivable treason. Meanwhile, woke progressive academics decry the same reason and rationalism he scorns, calling it ‘ white supremacist ’. I’m not at all convinced the Democrats and progressives are our only hope for saving us from the Trumpocalypse. I cheer while I watch them resist ICE: Warning others of their approach, reporting on them, and documenting the brownshirts’ many crimes against their own citizens. I’m happy they’re speaking out and challenging Donald Trump and his minion Nosferatu Stephen Miller. Yet these are the same people who have shut me down on blogging and social media platforms because they didn’t like my anti-woke articles. These are the same people who would disrupt my speech or deplatform me if I was important enough to speak on a college campus. These are the people who claim to be pro-science yet support the insanely nonsensical ‘gender-affirming care’ for children. The same people who, if I was in their family, would disinvite me to family celebrations because I refused to vote for The Brat. These are the ‘antifascists’ who worship New York socialist love god Zohran Mamdani who’s pretty near-Communist, an ideology that oppresses its unfortunate citizens every bit as effectively as right-wing dictatorships. So of course woke progressives ‘bend the knee’ for it, not against it. Yeah, tell me again how Democrats and progressives will save us. They offer, instead, Stalin rather than Hitler. Research shows that liberals skew the highest on reported mental health problems, while conservatives skew the lowest. It wasn’t always so. While mental health distress rose highest in liberal girls around 2012 when smartphones and social media really took off, liberal theories connecting it to the ‘awful things conservatives were doing’ failed to note that 2012 marked the second term for Barack Obama, bringing four more years of liberal governance. Try again, ideologues. Liberal women, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argued, adopted the disempowering ‘ Three Great Untruths ’ which lighter social media-using conservative young people did not. These were cognitive distortions pushed by progressive universities that taught youth exposed to them to trust their emotions over reason, to avoid all bad experiences, and that there was no middle ground in human conflict; the sides were straight-up all-good or all-bad. Social media algorithms drive what we want. If your authoritarian bag is progressive rather than MAGA political outrage, then that’s what you’ll see. If you’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, it will feed you more. Or maybe it’s the cause of your TDS. When progressives need to conserve I don’t see any authoritarian relief for America so far, and I don’t have high hopes for Canada either. Had the Democrats stayed in power I think we would have seen that same relentless march toward their ever-growing list of thou-shalt-nots, and protection of identity groups far less marginalized than advertised. Their Gestapo wasn’t ICE agents on the streets, but anonymous anti-free speech cyberbullies on Twitter. Both ruin lives. There’s simply more visual drama when burly, unqualified men wrestle a woman to the ground or shoot one smiling at them in a car, or an armed man who never brandished his weapon, than there is in someone fired because he refused to take his employer’s ‘unconscious bias’ training or a DEI consultant put on leave for addressing the ‘wrong’ racism. After the Republican War On Democracy, I don’t expect the Democrats to reinstall the guardrails once they return to power. I expect them to take advantage of their new freedoms. With a vengeance. MAGAs, Republicans, and anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders should be afraid. It won’t be as bad, initially. They’ll dial back Trump’s worst excesses, but also, the things he got right. They’ll return DEI. And men to women’s sports teams. And genderwoo (Make Gay Kids Straight Again!). Authoritarians believe they know what’s best for us, and don’t tolerate dissent. The woke social justice set has made that abundantly clear. They’ll go after their political enemies (again). They’ll reinstate language policing. Alligator Alley and other Trump concentration camps may be repurposed for their own ‘enemies’. Liberals’ and progressives’ big mistake was in not knowing when to quit and instead, to conserve what they’d accomplished. Instead of acknowledging their many great victories—civil rights, gay marriage, more equality for women, making bigotry uncool—they kept looking for more fights, which led them down the road to finding and fighting problems that weren’t there, like ‘microaggressions’ and humor . What those accomplishments needed was guardrails for those who’d roll them back. While they were fighting for pronouns, the right slowly chipped away at abortion rights until—well, you know how that ended. Conservatives conserved traditions and not all of them were good ones. Those were the liberal victories. Other traditions needed protection, and liberals failed them. Instead of reaching across the aisle they demonized their opposition. Worse, they assimilated the right’s discriminations and moral wrongs by changing them a little. They turned historical hatred against blacks to hatred against whites; misogyny into misandry; and Enlightenment values replaced evidence with ‘feelings’. S I woke up the morning after the 2024 election wondering who I’d be happier with as the winner. I found I didn’t really give a damn. Oh, Trump won again. This time I shrugged and said, “Okay, whatever.” It was easy to do safely in Canada. But I would have reacted to the same to a Harris win. It didn’t matter. Authoritarianism is bad for whoever are their enemies. As a freethinker, a skeptic and a social critic, both parties hate me. What interests me is this: Which authoritarianism will Democrats and progressives ultimately choose: Communism or Islamofascism? Or will they surprise me and return to a commitment to level-headed, normie democracy? We’ll find out. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

When women write misogynist kink for women. Because, like, pirate rape empowerment or something. Photo by Sophie Dituri on Flickr What if someone, under a pseudonym, wrote a kink lit trilogy about a beautiful teenage virgin from a warm and loving home who is raped while unconscious and taken away by the rapist, with the reluctant permission of her parents, to a place far away where she is forced to be naked at all times, is strung up for a man’s pleasure over his bed, is spanked until she technically should have no ass left, is trained to be a slave and sexual plaything for, like, everybody, is beaten and tortured, and pretty much horribly mistreated 24×7 until her spirit is broken and she learns to like it? Then engages in increasingly weirder and abusive sexual adventures consensually  — because looking to be brutalized more is apparently the only form of consent Our Heroine possesses in this quartetverse — because she was ‘awakened’ to how ‘boring’ her life had been before she was ‘rescued’ by a Prince who relieved her from the terrible, burdensome bonds of loving parents and personal safety? What if you learned that the mystery kink lit author was a man — especially an unpopular man — say, sex crime-probed U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz, or Alex Jones, or maybe schoolgirl killer Paul Bernardo? Betcha people would be screaming blue murder over the positive depiction of ‘hate-fucking’ and misogyny and violent imagery of sexual assaults on a woman and how just this sort of thing contributes to rape culture . Now what if you learned that it wasn’t Roosh who’d written it, or Bernardo, not even a screaming incel, but instead good ol’ vampire queen Anne Rice? (a/k/a A.N. Roquelare in 1982). And that it was written not for men but for women? Beauty and the Stockholm Syndrome I happened across a New York Times story from 2012 about how Rice’s hardcore kink lit BDSM Sleeping Beauty trilogy was re-issued to capitalize on the 50 Shades of Grey popularity (which made ‘mommy porn’ a household word. Who knew housewives could be so kinky?) One of the comments in the sidebar, though, written by a man, made me stop and think: So– I need to get this straight — men are pigs because they read and watch porn where women are dominated and sexually degraded (everybody knows this). But we now know that it is admirable for women to express themselves by reading “erotica… about being overwhelmed by a pirate, [because] that’s her right.” Huh…? Um….good point. Uh, conflicting messages about rape culture, ladies? I’ve read the first Beauty book, borrowed from a kinky friend, out of curiosity. By page 57 I was quite certain even the most dedicated spanking fetishists must surely be tired of all the damn spanking. I didn’t even think I’d likely finish the book, not because it was alternately offensive, horrifying and boring (boy oh boy did everyone have a thing for spanking) but because I’d vowed never to read another Anne Rice book until she’d learned about the Mysteries of the Plot Line, which were, IMO, missing in action in her first two vampire novels. I stuck with this one because even though its plot line was thinner than a Condé Nast fashion model’s breakfast, it nevertheless existed. Needless to say, I didn’t read the next two books, which I understand involve a move from spanking to sticking everything you can think of up southern regional orifices. Still, the whole time, I was keenly aware that I was reading porn for chicks. And that if it had been written by a man it would be held up as a classic example of What’s Wrong With Men And Misogyny. But…wow. I can see where men — a decent man, by the tone of the commenter — can be confused by the conflicting messages here. Violent porn is bad when men write and read it, but empowering when women do it? The thing is, even if I don’t understand what’s erotic about stringing a naked woman up by her ankles and wrists in the garden and smearing her ladyparts with honey to attract insects, I get that there are people who do. In the olden days I’d have guessed the prime suspects were, ‘men who virulently hate women,’ but now I know there are, apparently, empowered women who find this erotic. At least in fantasy, which is what the Beauty trilogy is. And I do understand the attraction of fantasies, even violent fantasies — because you, the star and producer, have complete control over what’s happening, even if your fantasy is that you have no control. No sane person wants to be in a real situation like that without full control — that’s why BDSM culture has safe words and rules and clearly delineated discussions about consent and permission. Beat me, hurt me, but hold on a minute, Wankel rotary engine, I need a breather. And no, you may not insert an egg beater up my hoo-ha, but yes, the spatula is just fine. Aunt Jemima me, baby!!! Maybe Anne Rice can ‘splain… We should ask the question the NY Times commenter asked — why are men pigs if they seek violent kink lit, but women are empowered when they do? I’m not condemning BDSM/kink lit or culture — whatever floats your boat in a free society, baby, and as long as you go about your somewhat risky business in as safe a manner as possible, which BDSM culture does, have at it. But consider what Anne Rice wrote on her blog about her re-release: It has to be remembered that within the frame of a sadomasochistic fantasy like the Beauty trilogy, the readers are invited to identify with and enjoy the predicament of the slaves. The books aren’t about literal cruelty; they’re about surrender, the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex. Beauty’s slavery is delicious, sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating. This is all part of the framework. Now imagine Matt Gaetz saying that. Or saying he identified with the Prince or other Master, and that ‘Beauty’s slavery is delicious, sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating.’ Oh yeah. Or Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Jeffrey Epstein, any other misogynist man you love to hate, or even Ghislaine Maxwell. So how come Anne Rice gets a free pass? Standing outside kink culture, I don’t see any difference between the Beauty book I read, and the violent, humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing porn lit and imagery certain men are flagellated for consuming. Is Rice’s “erotica” more socially acceptable because it’s equal-opportunity abusive? Not just man on woman violence, but woman on man, woman on woman and man on man? 50 Shades of WTF Since I’m a woman who tolerates zero male control in a partner, I seriously don’t get the appeal of 50 Shades of Grey , but hey, I guess for women who like masochism and bondage and submission and especially nailing a filthy rich guy it’s awesome. ( Mommy, where do stereotypes come from?) Beat me, hurt me, make me read badly-written erotica. Photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr There’s certainly a double standard going on, and I’m just as confused as the NY Times commenter. Let’s just say it out loud: ‘Erotica’ like Rice’s Beauty series (Ugh, she wrote a fourth one) is contributing to rape culture, an idea that will not sit well at all with the kink community and many feminists (some of which, I suspect, are privately as disturbed by the 50 Shades and Beauty popularity as I am). Let me make something perfectly clear: The kink/BDSM community doesn’t offend me. Violent, degrading, humiliating porn does. Regardless of who writes it and consumes it. Remember the olden days, when women helped pioneer rape culture with bodice-ripping romance novels? I’ve read only a few, they’re not my cuppa, but I always wondered about the rapes women enjoyed complete with orgasms. Is porn desensitizing men to violence against women? Shortly after Toronto’s Jian “I want to hate fuck you” Ghomeshi scandal broke, the Toronto Star asked Is porn desensitizing men to violence against women? "Can she truly give consent in this situation?" Read it and then consider the following questions. Go ahead, I’ll wait. If violent porn as described in the article contributes to rape culture by making violence against women seem more acceptable, then doesn’t Rice’s Beautyverse also contribute by making it seem like that’s what women really want, and does it ‘train’ some to be willing to accept that treatment? If the Beauty books are just ‘harmless fantasy’, then isn’t violent porn by men and for men as well? After all, as the writer notes, we can watch an action film without wanting to shoot up a mall, right? What about the 50 Shades of Grey series? I haven’t read any of the books myself, or seen the movies, but others argue they glorify rape. If you ask, “Why the hell would a normal, sane man want to watch a woman being choked nearly to death?” why then would you not ask, “What normal, sane woman would want to read about a teenage virgin getting raped in her sleep?” We condemn that up one side and down the other when high school football jocks do it to a drunk, passed-out teenage girl. Maybe the question now is, is violent, misogynist kink chick lit desensitizing women to violence against women? Serious question. Okay, but just remember the safe word is “Mr. Rogers”.

What forty years of dating taught me about female "empowerment" Public domain image at Pxhere I ain’t no spring chicken. You can’t sweet-talk yourself into my pants. A recent dating experience re-introduced me to the romantically manipulative man, and reminded me of how much nothing changes in forty years of dating. I met Bruce in late fall on the last dating app I tried, overpriced eHarmony, theorizing the cost might filter out lazy-asses, has-beens, and never-wases I found on other apps. It didn’t. The washouts were a little higher socioeconomically, but otherwise identical: Flaky; too interested in polyamory; can’t hold a conversation; overweight and dresses like his dad; can’t be not-boring. The best-looking ones were always scammers. Their only commitment was to render themselves hopelessly single with gremlin-worthy photos and profiles so empty they cast an echo. That’s right, bowl ‘er over with that red-hot sizzlin’ manhood while you squint your pudgy face into the sun with your shoulders hunched like Quasimodo. I lowered my minimum age from 45 to 35 just in case I might be blowing off my Emmanuel Macron. I did encounter one 37-year-old who really did sound as mature as he claimed, was adamant about not wanting children and being accepting of someone a quarter-century older than he but—and it was a big one—he had a very high sex drive. “Not even when I was 21,” I told him. The last guy I talked to was a 45-year-old fellow immigrant. Bruce was good-looking, had a decent, verifiable job and was interesting to talk to. But…(there’s always a ‘but’)… When I asked what he was looking for, his response was, “To find a woman I can spend the rest of my life with.” He too, claimed he had no problem with the age difference, that he didn’t mind if I grew old and died before he did. So, what’s the problem, right? The previous guy spoke like a man much older than his years when we talked voice. Bruce was unconvincing. Plus, he came from a culture I know from experience fetishizes white blonde women. He oozed terms of endearment immediately—sweetie, honey, baby, darling. I’ve had to tell everyone not to do it. We never met F2F. Bruce always had some creative reason why he had to break an in-person date at the last minute. First his office was going out for drinks that night to celebrate a great sales month (plausible, given his LinkedIn-verified job). The next bag-at-the-last-minute: He’d wound up in the emergency room with a migraine. He hadn’t mentioned them before. I’ll admit my sympathy was a bit rote. I forget what the third date break was. Now, he had my attention for a different reason. He wouldn’t drop the terms of endearment. Customarily this nonsense is my exit ramp, but he became a short-term research project in male phony-baloney. He managed to make one Zoom meeting but blew off the second one. When I texted him he didn’t respond. I was quite certain I was being blown off for other women, but I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t emotionally engaged and I knew I was being played. He texted me a few days later so I blew him off. I told Bruce I’d actually Googled, twice, first on romance scammers and later video scammers to see if I’d actually Zoomed with an AI. That’s how phony I think you are, I told him. He texted that he ‘wanted me’, and ‘ur my girl’. He told me he loved me. I told him to go peddle it somewhere else, ‘coz I ain’t buyin’. His last text before I blocked him was, “I love you so much.” Brand new model, same as the last Does that lovey-dovey crap still work anymore? It must, since just about everyone is trying to sweetie-baby-honey their way into our drawers. Aging pimp Andrew Tate says he and his brother discovered that women were more willing to do webcam work if they thought they were in a relationship. So they each juggled multiple ‘longterm commitments’. It’s hard for naive women to understand how manipulative men are when they seek female compliance, and how driving emotional engagement early is a critically important tool. I think of all the naive young women who actually fall for this emotional manipulation. I speak from experience as a former young woman. Not all men are manipulators or abusers so much as just people who unthinkingly string women along. Women do it too. When you’re young and insecure, on some level you want to keep someone in the background in case you need a date or to ease a lonely night. You can’t know what you’re up against without life experience, and today’s feminism has taught young women that bad experiences are never their fault. Often they aren’t; a young girl can’t know what she hasn’t yet learned, or been taught, so she’s unprepared for the games manipulators play, whether they seek female attention (especially from a plethora of admirers), or a girl’s commitment, or, of course, sex. My mother prepared me well but not for everything. Every generation is different. Some women never learn just how predatory men can be. Consider how compliant progressive feminists have become to transactivists: I think some of them really believe that biological sex is ‘all in your head’ and that genital differences are no more remarkable than hair color. Manipulators always find a way to groom women for romantic and sexual compliance: Transactivists, driven primarily by autogynephiles and misogynists, easily manipulated woke progressive feminists, already self-primed to never say no, so it became easy to persuade them to accept men in places they never belonged and more importantly, never to question it. Ironically, they’re the feminists most outspoken about ‘patriarchy’ and ‘consent’. Men cleverer than they induced them to give it up, and enforce it against non-compliant resistors (‘TERFs’). What’s interesting is this: Each generation questions, changes, and evolves, but somehow, we always seem to wind up back at the model men have always preferred: Unfettered, non-consequential access to multiple women, particularly the youthful. I’m not jealous of younger women; I sympathize with them. I’m in the same boat. We’re both playing in each other’s pools. I can get younger men, they can get older men. I don’t know if it upsets them that they’re competing with attractive older women, but I don’t mind them playing in my pool. As I see it, it’s become so difficult to find anyone with whom you can be compatible that we all have to cast our nets as wide as we can. I do understand something about older men that they don’t: The men my age aren’t any more mature than when we were twenty. Rich older men seeking naive young women are red flags for controllers. Every generation wants to break its chains Marriage looks unappealing to generations more sophisticated than their mothers’. It’s a big lie sold by feminism, that women should be ashamed of their inherent evolutionary drive to settle down and have children. (Gee, I wonder where that came from?) The marriage model worked, however imperfectly, with children raised in largely stable homes. The Sixties counterculture sundered it. The refusal of marriage and parenthood was a more radical departure for women than men, especially the encouragement to pursue a career instead. As women, but not men, realized eventually that finite fertility means they might not ‘have it all’, Millennials and Zoomers gravitated to bisexuality, expanding the pool. Eventually, the biological clock kicks in. It did even for me although it didn’t say, “Make babies!” but rather, “Settle down.” Engaging in a lesbian relationship may make sense for young women who want a child, but with a responsible partner. The pool would seem to be more spacious with lesbians rather than man-children . Yet, ironically, the majority of identifying bisexuals end up in long-term relationships with the opposite sex. The fundamental evolutionary drive never goes away, regardless of our attempts to subvert it. Today’s women are dealing with wanting boyfriends (however quietly since that’s not ‘cool’ ) but can’t find acceptable mates . Instead, they do what the young and naive do who haven’t yet learned how to parse the players from the ‘good ones’: They submit to men’s terms, such as undefined ‘situationships’ (known to Millennials as ‘hooking up’) which of course better suits men resisting the nest. Or they accept polyamory, grudgingly. They don’t know they’re being played, just like their hippie grandmothers. ‘Free love’ worked better for men than women in the Sixties. Hippie dudes were passive-aggressive about female experimentation, as a formerly hippie friend experienced. Other women were pushed to accept multiple sexual partners, or be derided as ‘square’, ‘uptight’, or ‘hung-up’. Today’s young women are playing the same naive game we all played with males we love who love too many. Women don’t know that if they ‘keep it loose and casual’ to please him he’s not likely ever to come around, because he’s already quite pleased. Many younger women settle for half-assed men and piss-poor sex, especially the rough kind Millennial and Zoomer men learned from porn . But they can set the terms themselves. Not all men are players, and the ‘good ones’ often don’t know how to talk to women, so traumatized by #MeToo are they all. Standing up for what you want requires acknowledging what you won’t settle for and sticking to your guns: No matter how hot he is, or how attractive his financial position, she has to reject him if he demonstrates he’s not a serious contender. That’s hard to do when you’re younger and want to settle down but not to ‘settle’. You don’t know the signs, you second-guess your own inner warnings, and it becomes easier to believe he might come around when he probably won’t. Whether it’s Roaring Twenties ‘anything goes’, hippie ‘free love’, the Millennial embrace of bisexuality and bi-curiosity, or the Zoomers’ love affair with kink (possibly inspired by porn) it still comes down to: What men want , not what women want. (What did Gen X introduce sexually? AIDS-era fear of sex.) I’m in a knowledgeable place now that only comes with decades of experience. Oh, to have known then what I know now. Today I’m confident in the men I reject, the ones who’ve demonstrated for forever that they’re not serious contenders, and that the mediocre ones aren’t, as I’d hoped for too long, simply guilty of not knowing how to market themselves, but rather, of an explicit honesty: I really am as boring as my profile suggests, or I’m not serious about finding a longterm partner. If I could persuade young women and girls to read one book, it would be Neil Strauss’s The Game , published in 2005 about pickup artists. It’s the most accurate dissection of female psychology I’ve ever encountered. Pickup artists in their heyday were the masters of female manipulation. They knew exactly how to probe women for weaknesses and guide them into the nearest bed or dark corner. The Bruces of this world will always be with us. I laugh about my short experience, it was the perfectly stupid ending to over a year of goofballs and clueless dipsticks. He thought I was as guileless as women his own age or younger. He’s too young to understand that I wasn’t. Just remember, ladies: Whatever your generation, none of us ever change. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

Christians had one. Jews had one. Now Islam needs to catch up and align responsibly with the modern world. Image from Rawpixels Last year I wrote my highest-performing Substack so far, my critical 2025 Is Not Shaping Up To Be A Good Year For Muslims.   I took a lot of heat for it, ironically, not from angry Muslims but from others who damned me for not being critical enough. I hope they saved some venom for radical Islamists as we head into 2026. Antisemitism is partying like it’s 1935 driven primarily by a historical widespread culture of violent hatred in its heart, the Middle East. Islam is a religion of violence, as its predecessors once were, but it doesn’t have to be. The Islamic world needs to fix itself. Now. Like its sister religions have done. Radical Muslims In December, father-and-son team Sajid and Naveed Akram turned Australia’s Bondi Beach into a shooting gallery for Hannukah celebrants. An unarmed man brought Junior down—just like in the gun-mad United States, where the only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good man without one. Predictably, the two gunmen were Islamic State fanboys. But: The hero is a Muslim himself named Ahmed al-Ahmed who migrated from Syria in 2006. “My son is a hero. He served in the police, he has the passion to defend people,” his father is quoted as saying. “I’m proud that my son was helping people, rescuing people,” added his mother. I mean, they must have known by this point he was saving primarily Jews. I hope he doesn’t become the target of extremists. In Toronto, three young men planned  to kill women and Jews and attempted two alleged kidnappings this past summer. One of them has been charged with, among other things, conspiracy to commit murder as encouraged by ISIS. In the U.K., police foiled what they described as “ one of, if not the, deadliest terrorist attacks in UK history ” targeting Jews planned by a couple of IS fanboys for this past October. At Christmas, the IS instructed its faithful to kill Christians and Jews, to turn it into a ‘season of terror’. A few tried in Los Angeles  and North Carolina . To my knowledge, neither Jewish nor Christian groups have issued any similar ‘back atcha’ calls for murder and mayhem of Muslims. There are plenty of ‘good Muslims’ in the world like the al-Ahmeds, but unfortunately, jihad-addled followers of the Prophet lead the world in harming others. According to Fondation pour L’Innovation Politique, a French think tank, Islamist attacks  have killed nearly 250,000 people between 1979 and April 2024 (this includes wars and insurgencies). Not surprisingly, people in Islamic countries are most at risk. The Real War On Christmas  - The Free Press Islam needs a Reformation Islam isn’t the problem. Modern Muslims’ unwillingness to resolve ancient doctrines with an open, democratic world committed to essential human rights are. Do I need to spell it out? Violence is bad. Peace is good. That’s the difference. Islam needs a Reformation. Christians had one in the sixteenth century, and Jews in the 19th century. They brought both religions more in-line with the modern world, recognizing personal freedom, the rights of the individual, and embracing a less murderous view of religious competitors. Since Christian and Jewish doctrine have been at one time, violent, but today much more peaceful, Muslims must similarly reconcile. Most go about their daily lives while managing not to murder anyone, just like everyone else. They prefer to distance ‘those people’ from themselves and pretend jihadism has nothing to do with them, as though the religious umbrella stretches only enough to cover themselves. Young men are prone to radicalization of one sort or another no matter what religion they are (or not), particularly when they’re unemployed and/or living in a country with weak governance and security. For the Muslims who can speak out, do they? Do they teach their own sons that violence is not acceptable in our family? There’s no such thing as an ‘honor killing’ for family terrorists. It’s simplistic to claim ‘most Muslims don’t approve of or support terrorism’. A more granular question would be, “Where do Muslims fall on the spectrum of support for terrorism, from 1-10?” Such a yardstick would offer a more nuanced view of who does and doesn’t support it, and by how much. One can support, collaborate with, and finance terrorism without personally killing anyone by enabling the radicals. Others don’t speak out, afraid of ‘stigmatizing’ their religion, or of putting their families in danger. (Why?) As a result, extremists get away with as much as the surrounding culture allows. And that’s the key: The culture.  Many ‘good Muslims’ exist inside a culture that has not modernized enough  to give them the freedom to call out the crazy fun-demented-lists. The culture is as much their responsibility as those of the terrorist recruiters. When Christians in the United States complained to me, “Don’t judge us by those awful fundamentalists! They don’t stand for what we’re about! They’re such embarrassments!” I’d counter, “Do you stand up to them? Do you challenge them? Do you point out their non-Biblical, non-Gospel-oriented values or beliefs?” No, no they hadn’t. And they didn’t even have to worry about armed cross-bearing Crusader wannabes showing up on their front porch to behead them for their ‘blasphemies’. “Silence sounds an awful lot like assent,” I noted. “If it’s not, speak up!” It’s not Islamophobic to say You’re not doing enough! The dangers of Reformation Martin Luther’s life was worth nothing after his excommunication for challenging the very foundations of Catholic authority and practices. Once a heretic, anyone could legally kill him without consequence, but a sympathetic nobleman faked his kidnapping and hid him in his castle. This occurred during the most brutal period of the European Dark Ages, amidst socially-acceptable public violence and executions. Like breaking on the wheel, one of the most excruciating (and publicly popular) executions for the worst of the worst. Luther’s German Reformation, followed by a parallel effort in Switzerland, served to remove the focus from the all-powerful clergy who didn’t want the common man to read the Bible for fear he’d ‘misinterpret’. The movements later rejected theological violence and embraced separation of church and state, along with ‘just war’ theory, which defined how to determine whether a war is truly just. The West eventually ended judicial torture in the 18th and 19th centuries, heavily influenced by Enlightenment thinkers partially emboldened by Christian reformers. Christian Reformation has long since trimmed away non-Biblically-supported practices introduced via selective priestly interpretation, and recognized where their sacred texts fall short. Like the uncomfortable fact that the Son of God himself promoted compassionate slavery rather than calling for its elimination. Violence and death are the risks serious Islamic reformers also face from jihadist death cults like Hamas  and IS and isolated ‘lone wolves’ committed to destroying Western civilization. They justify killing unbelievers (including those of their faith who disagree with them), and who welcome death as it sends them, they believe, to a glorious afterlife with, of course, those famous six dozen virgins. Danger defines rebellion: Luther faced a powerful and violent Catholic Church, while the power against Muslims today rests in the hands of corrupt governments wielding self-serving Koranic interpretations, and crazed young men with nothing to lose, since they win even when they die in battle. Human rights violations continue to stain the Muslim world: Political imprisonment, suppression of free speech, child marriage, and denial of body autonomy (women, gays, transfolk, children). British Pakistani Muslims engage in sex trafficking while their communities look the other way; they’re ‘only’ white girls, after all, and ‘stigmatizing’ a ‘marginalized community’ is worse, apparently, than organized child rape. Abroad, Islamic countries’ various challenges include ongoing or worsening economic problems, poor education systems, poor governance, corruption, economic inequality, low literacy rates, and especially gender inequality, a huge driver for keeping many Islamic countries figuratively stuck in the desert. Where women prosper, so prospers the nation. Islamic reform’s greatest challenge after the risk of violent retribution, is one many Muslims want the least: The separation of mosque and state. Human rights demand more open, liberty-oriented governments. When religious authorities freeze interpretation, when enforcers, clerical or terrorist, crack down on dissent, and most importantly, when theology’s greatest strength is political power—violence ensues and human rights disappear. Policies and sacred dogma, for any Reformation, must become fair game. The Catholic Church has never been as powerful since Luther. It’s a less violent world as a result. The Jewish Reformation, by comparison, was much less dramatic. They weren’t a violent people anymore, not since their Biblical glory days. They were the persecuted minority everywhere they wandered. Yet still they modernized. Minor Islamic Reforms Some Islamic leaders are making real efforts to alleviate radicalization in the young. Violent extremists recruit free-floating rebellious young people; if they’re spotted early, there’s hope for intervention. ‘Good Muslims’ must drive the Reformation movement because the jihadists belong to them . The meaning of jihad is a major obstacle, which for some means waging a personal struggle within yourself for self-improvement and greater moral integrity, while the more authoritarian interpretation emphasizes violent response and warfare. Islamic modernization movements have embraced low-level reforms, but have yet to embrace major  reforms that would align it better with a West that clearly sees its flaws. Which are primarily: Violence; jihadism; gender inequality; violence against homosexuals; and ancient, endemic antisemitism. Westerners must begin scrutinizing Muslim immigrants to identify refugees for the ability to assimilate, without demanding they abandon their religious culture which, sorry haters, isn’t all bad, not by a long shot. Will these new permanent residents and citizens teach their children and grandchildren to take advantage of their new open societies offering greater economic opportunity, or will they allow them to succumb to the smorgasbord of violent death cults easily accessed on social media? Every affiliative group, religious or not, owns their radicals, which flourish only when permitted by lax oversight or tacit agreement. What to do next? Helen Pluckrose  recently argued in favor of liberalizing Islam , crossing swords with a devout young Muslim who likened the idea to ‘genocide’. Liberalizing Islam, as Helen pointed out, encouraged discarding bad ideas. To which I would add, because she didn’t, keeping the good ones: Bettering yourself, helping the poor, treating orphans well, forgiveness, kindness to one’s neighbors, giving debtors the time to repay their debt, treating your spouse kindly. Yes, there are contradictory verses (like ‘acceptable’ wife-beating) just as there are in the Bible. Blatant contradictions are also reasons why religions need Reformations. Islam—Muslims—are not, as some believe, ‘hopeless’. The more violent regions in the Middle East look an awful like like Luther’s Europe—violent, filthy, uneducated, deeply oppressive. Reformation starts with separation of religion and state, a hard truth for cultures in which religion is woven deeply into society’s fabric. Furthermore, secularization is a match to the Islamist powder keg. But let’s sally forth nevertheless with better ideas: Re-interpreting ancient texts to purge literalism and align it better with modern values (which don’t necessarily mean 100% liberal values). Re-embracing the principles of the European Enlightenment, or  Islam’s Golden Age, when education, scientific inquiry, the arts, and philosophy flourished from the 8th to the 13th centuries, in sharp contrast to Dark Age Europe. Moving away from cultic glorification of death and emphasizing that God didn’t send humans to earth to die, but to live and make the world a better place. Gender equality for sure. Women have proven in the West that we’re as smart, capable, and competent as men. Please, no more shooting girls in the face because they want to go to school. An embrace of diversity of thought and opinion, including religious. An embrace of the right of all humans to exist, including and especially Jews. The antisemitism of the Islamic world is a clear and present danger to all of us, a primary driver of Islamist terrorism, and no accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ will erase that. Muslims have a long, documented antisemitic history that dates back many centuries before the creation of Israel. If Muslims can figure out how to reform without democracy, have at it. But no more excuses. This is 2026, not 1106. When you’ve lost liberals like me, time’s a-wastin’. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

The birth dearth is a fake right-wing crisis. Declining fertility is real; the fix is easy but the U.S. government discourages it Motherhood, as depicted by the pro-natalists. Image by Satya Tiwari from Pixabay When I was six or seven I told my mother before Christmas, “I don’t want dolls anymore. I’d rather have stuffed animals.” Barbie was the exception; she wasn’t a baby doll. I played house and emulated my mother as she took care of my new brother, but there was an early tell I might not be as motherly as I’d been acculturated: When Mom took my brother out in the stroller I followed along, pushing Winnie-the-Pooh in my toy pram. I felt more love for Winnie than I did for baby dolls. I was drawn more to peoples’ pets. Dogs wagged their tail and cats rubbed against your leg. Babies were boring and mostly cried or screamed. When they weren’t screaming they slept. “Come on, don’t you want one of your own?” my cousin’s wife asked me years ago after she had her one and only child. She couldn’t, really couldn’t, understand how any woman could not want a baby of her own. She asked me several times. “Look at this! Look at this child! How can you not want one?” Because I’d rather have one of these! Image by bertin23 from Pixabay “Meh,” I’d answer. Then I’d go back to playing with their dog Martin, who was a thousand more times adorable, and after whom I never had to clean up. Ten years later, I got my tubes tied. I never changed my mind as so many had warned. At thirty-nine, I hadn’t felt even the tiniest pull toward motherhood. I’ve never regretted my decision. I am a free spirit. I was never wired to be a parent. Sexless In The City Declining fertility is real, as are the problems we’ll face without more humans, but it’s not the crisis the right pretends it is. The childfree by choice differ from the childless, who don’t want to be, even as the Western world suffers an epidemic of sexlessness. Predictably, the answer from the tech bros is, not surprisingly, technology, along with a return to good ol’-fashioned unrestricted penising. The sixty-year era of hippie (not-so) free love appears to be drawing to a close, more out of lack of sexual desire than incipient morality. Love and sex aren’t dead, and never will be, but they are on indefinite leave as humanity recalibrates and decides whether it wants to continue propagating. Or even surviving. We work on finding ways to perpetuate humanity without ever having to deal with the messiness of choosing a partner and doing it the traditional way. God help us, anything but having sex with someone else’s body! Billionaires pay strangers to gestate their progeny. A German (of course!) biotechnologist is developing a ‘designer baby’ lab . It’s envisioned from a sincere desire to help infertile couples or women who’ve had their uterus removed to produce their own dual-biological babies just like everyone else. It will also reduce or eliminate C-sections and premature birth, because guess what, the young’uns are grown in a lab ‘womb’ too. This was funnier in 1993. Now it’s just sad. It’s positively Brave New World. Even when allowance is made for human-to-human contact, ‘ polycules’ , fashionable in the ‘effective altruism’ movement, reinvent the male desire for feelings-free polyamory. Like in Brave New World, ‘everyone belongs to everyone else,’ and getting overly-attached to one person is discouraged. Problem is, neither technology nor polyamory has ever truly worked for a species whose ability to procreate and raise good humans is reliant on sexual relations and pair-bonding. Fortunately, not all men are as divorced from their emotions as tech bros. There’s a natural evolution for both sexes to eventually settle down, despite us outliers. Many ‘sow their wild oats’ until one day someone comes along who changes their mind. Like Neil Strauss, who documented the Pick-Up Artist culture he engaged in, and later rejected, in his controversial book The Game. Many women who think they’re ‘too feminist’ to have children find that pull to settle down and propagate as they get older, including old-school radicals from the First Wave. Bernardine Dohrn, ‘70s radical Weatherman leader, found as she approached 30 that she’d rather blow up birthday balloons than government toilets. Sexless gooning, MG/WGTOW-ing, and fake wombs as dangerously untested as sex changes for children are depressingly unnatural and anti-human. The right suggests the solution—a return to marriage and the two-parent family—but doesn’t take it seriously enough. Make America Fertile Again J.D. Vance, America’s only hope if Dozy Don kacks it in office, wants Americans to make more babies, despite having only three himself, when he’s rich enough to support many more. Maybe Usha has put an ‘Out of business’ sign over her cervix. Vance and the rest of the Make America Fertile Again gang don’t seem much interested in why people choose not to have babies . They pay lip service to parenthood while the President denies the affordability crisis, perpetuating parenthood untenability, leaving it to their biggest donors farming their progeny out to strangers on the Internet. Keep America Fatherless! Trump at least is calling for IVF treatments for all, despite his Veep’s historical opposition to it. J.D. and the MAFA gang assume they know what’s best for us non-conformists. They’re hell-bent on forcing parenthood at least on women by making abortion harder to find than a rent-stabilized apartment. They’re frowning at birth control too, especially emergency contraception, encouraging women toward celibacy. It otherwise leaves rape as the only way to perpetuate one’s genes. Fortunately for today’s women, the virgins have no idea where to put their ding-dong. Trigger warning: Sexual violence As always, the subtler reason behind MAFA is returning women to the home and nursery, leaving men as to run the world without a Great Feminization. Or HR. The clear and easy answer to the birth dearth is filling in the blanks with surplus humans from other parts of the world. Like maybe an immigration policy that falls somewhere between throw-open-the-doors and white-South-Africans-only? Rampant xenophobia and consequent government raids in the current administration is only one of many reasons why Americans can’t have affordable produce. Some farmers report 70% of their farm workers are missing which means cutting back on planting and higher supermarket prices. Alien hysteria impacts child care too , as parents and guardians are forced to cut back their hours, leave their jobs, or just return to stay-at-home parenthood. Some day, when the ICE Age is lifted and sane federal administration returns to Washington, we can also ‘lift our lamp, beside the golden door,’ to take in once again the huddled masses yearning to be free. And to raise the kids parents don’t have time for. We will survive Society changes and adapts to every unexpected blow, like most recently the pandemic. It adapted to the Baby Boom explosion and so too, will we, for fewer humans. We’ve survived famines, volcanic eruptions, and countless wars. At eight billion and counting, there’s no birth dearth in the world; simply a misalignment of humans. What we should be worried about is our planet’s finite resources we’re blowing through with every pointless new iPhone release. Scientists argue whether we’re in the midst of an Anthropocene Era-driven sixth mass extinction . We merely haven’t imagined yet how it will look with fewer future adults. We’ll just invite others back, if they trust us not to keep electing senile old men to positions of great responsibility. The ‘birth dearth’ is a course correction. Parenthood is not for the casual and irresponsible, and we are as free as we ever were to not produce other over-consuming humans. We can barrel forward childfree, guilt-free, inventing and creating and traveling and communicating with people who don’t pronounce the third number as free. I feel for kids who weren’t wanted, whose short miserable lives passed before my eyes in newspaper headlines. Like Charlie Wright , a 7-year-old Akron boy in 1987 beaten to death by his hooker mom who had “no desire to be a responsible parent.” Or the starved Turpin kids , or Jeffrey Baldwin , a 5-year-old starved to death by his Ontario grandparents when his mother lost custody. I feel for these kids because I was born into a good family, with parents who loved my brother and I and supported us. They didn’t beat us, rape us, starve us, tell us we were worthless or leave us alone for days at a time. I don’t know what I did to deserve my parents, nor what those dead children did, either. I was luckier, I guess. We don’t have to breed to fill jobs sitting idle. Just as you wouldn’t want a frustrated pro golfer operating on your dad’s heart because his parents insisted No, that’s a silly dream, you’re going to be a doctor, you want only the truly dedicated to raise children. We merely have to get rid of our political xenophobes and reintroduce a sane immigration policy with better screening for criminality and terrorist leanings. How else might we adapt? We could reduce our consumption considerably, and challenge how much we need all our useless stuff. We might find other things to do with fewer running factories. We could farm, return to hand-crafted items, and hang out with our fellow humans more. Do you really need a virtual reality set? What if reality is more fulfilling than fake-Tenerife? There’s no guarantee being a good parent, or a co-parent, will result in a child who makes you proud, but at least you can die knowing you did the best you could, despite your mistakes. We don’t need more humans. We need more humanity—the kind that emanates from our hearts, and allows us to connect as God or evolution designed us, before we allowed the tech bros to offer us a depraved new world. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

What do you do when you've been illegitimately accused of 'mansplaining'? I gotcher answers right here! “Is he ever going to shut up?” Image by Megan Judge  from Pixabay Men explain things to me, but they never mansplain . Sometimes I ask for information, other times they lecture, uninvited, which is more annoying. Sometimes they simply don’t know when to shut up and I sit there thinking, “He answered the question ten minutes ago.” What are the differences? Some men get accused of mansplaining when all they’ve done is challenge  a woman on incorrect assertions or sloppy assumptions, or who’ve not thought through a particular proposition. A male commenter on Substack recently noted that ‘mansplaining’ is a particularly male dynamic because men simply love to explain stuff!!! Including to each other, regularly. What is actual mansplaining? he wondered, vs ‘regular old ‘splainin’, or just challenging in response? Let’s take a look at the two conversational male misdemeanors, beginning with the two that sometimes drive women to contemplate murder: Mansplaining and lecturing. We’ll end with challenging , which is perfectly acceptable, along with what to do when you’re wrongly accused, and how to avoid oversplainin’. Mansplaining The original, and most concise definition is, ‘when a man explains things to women he should expect she’d already know or that she’s already told him she knows.’ For example: I’m in IT sales. Today, basic, essential computer knowledge is hardly gendered; but when I entered the profession thirty-two years ago, IT was more female-free than a mancave during the Superbowl, and it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption to expect female ignorance, because most women had no interest in computers. When I joined computer BBS’s back in the early ‘90s, I ruled  the mostly younger male cohort because there was maybe one woman for every five (horny) males. The only other female who could compete with the French Wench in a photo-free dialup world where photos would have taken a geological age to load was Blue-Eyed Sex-Kitten. So if a man were to explain computers to me say, in 1997, I might say, “Oh I know this already, I’m in IT.” He’s not mansplaining unless he continues to explain things I just said are my literal profession. Mansplaining started when the God of All Mansplainers kept explaining a book he’d just read to its author, whose girl friend told him this several times,  ergo, that she knew exactly what it was about. He wasn’t sharing his insight, he was explaining it to the author. That’s it. THAT is the definition of mansplaining. When a woman tells you she already knows about something—skip to the point. If you can’t tell from looking at her that she already knows this stuff (like, when I wasn’t wearing my company-branded uniform), then it’s not mansplaining. Men mansplain mansplaining! Men mansplain mansplaining! There are other types of ‘splaining too. Whitesplaining: Explaining the ‘Black Experience’ to black people. Techsplaining: Talking over someone’s head without asking for their knowledge level. And I once accused a feminist of ‘femsplaining’ although she countered she wasn’t sure how much feminist history I knew. ‘Femsplaining’ might be better defined as when women ‘splain’ things to men in a manner designed to patronize rather than sincerely enlighten. Yes, gentlemen, call her out. “Hey, you’re not psychic, you don’t live in my head. Don’t tell me what I think. You’d raise the roof if I did it to you. And for your information, I know  how to operate the washer and dryer, I do my own laundry, including ironing!” Progressives expand and change the meaning of words at will, so progressive feminists schooled in professional victimhood have misused and overused ‘mansplaining’ to cover practically anything men say they don’t like, and especially when they feel intimidated by a man challenging their opinion or facts. That is not what the originator of the term , Rebecca Solnit, described, and we need to return to the original definition. It no longer means, a la Humpty Dumpty, exactly what any woman chooses it to mean. Just make sure your own riposte or assertions are true, because, as Solnit pointed out in her essay, men often assume women don’t know things they do, and more to the point, men often don’t know as much as they think. That guy who’s the expert on everything? Everyone knows one. Don’t be that guy. Lecturing This is by far the most common conversational misdemeanor men commit, and a lot of y’all are doing it. This isn’t lecturing to a class or to your wayward child, it’s when men start running off at the mouth about something that interests them, or even worse, something they think they know about, but don’t. This, I believe, is the distinction the ‘splainin’ the aforementioned commenter asked about. There’s no shortage of female know-it-alls, but they’re less inclined to monologue to display knowledge. What they are more inclined to do is bore your ass off with every detail of their forthcoming wedding or to complain about some chronic problem. I have a male friend who ‘lectures’. He loves to explain stuff whether I asked or not. In fact, he literally can’t shut up. He’ll push past your cries for rescue. He’s a wonderful person but he’s deeply insecure; lecturing is his clumsy way to establish status, but also to add genuine value, however foolishly. Some men just boldly walk up to others and start lecturing. A friend in community college complained about a man she already disliked who waltzed up to a conversation she was in with three or four people and just started popping off about some documentary he’d watched the night before. Just interrupted and started lecturing; no one was discussing it, no one was interested, and he was so busy impressing himself he was oblivious to their irritation. Lecturers aren’t good at reading the room, or watching for glazed eyeballs, averted glances or other signs of impatience. I watched my lecturing friend destroy a pandemic-era friends Zoom by lecturing and troubleshooting a minor tech issue that wasn’t important. He missed the clear signs of irritation on my other friends’ faces and I knew they would never agree to another Zoom. I was right. Challenging - Not a misdemeanor! This isn’t a particularly male impulse: It’s gender-non-specific when we encounter misinformation, bad ideas or ill-thought-out proposals. But it’s also what’s most likely to trigger accusations of mansplaining because no one likes being criticized or corrected, however politely, in public. Problem is, incorrect statements in public forums invite it. It’s a public forum. It invites feedback.  Posters, writers, and commenters never object to positive feedback (“You’re so right!”) but hackles rise with negative response (“Good point, but you’re wrong about….” or even worse, “Jane, you ignorant slut!”) NSFW: An adult woman will own up and admit she got something wrong; perhaps even thank the person for the correction. A less mature woman will react badly, which happened to a male friend of mine recently. The lady made a proposition on Facebook; my friend pointed out there were some flaws in her plan; and she got pissy and accused him of ‘mansplaining’ to the ‘silly little girl’. He called me to vent because she’s one of my Facebook friends, although I haven’t talked to her in years. He invited me to check out the thread, which did. He didn’t mansplain; he was polite; never suggested she was a child. She wasn’t mature enough to handle a direct challenge when a more mature person would have said, “You’re right, not everyone can do what I propose.” Later, she deleted the entire thread, cementing her lack of maturity. This is a woman in her mid-forties. Men don’t have to tolerate female hypersensitivity when they’re legitimately challenging something she said. Keep it straightforward and non-insulting, as a patronizing or condescending tone can easily sound like mansplaining. But it’s fair game to return with, “Sorry, but human blood is always red; it’s a myth that it’s blue until oxygenated.” Link a credible source if needed. Men’s conversation-dominant style works better in male-only spaces, where, the earlier-referenced commenter noted, it’s de rigueur . Some jerks intentionally dominate, talk over and belittle women to shut them up. Don’t be that guy, remember that women’s speech and conversational styles are different, managing ego protection, rapport-building, and softening bluntness, dynamics men should incorporate, too, for fewer misunderstandings. We all need to accommodate each other and recognize that what works at a ‘hen party’ , or in the mancave, requires refinement in a mixed setting. And ladies: DON’T LET HIM DOMINATE. The woman is not always right Comedians still joke about this when a man is married, although I don’t find it as funny as I used to, because too many women, especially progressives, seem to believe it. Which just goes to show you, it’s not just men who suffer from intellectual self-delusions! To recap: Mansplaining is never okay. It’s explaining something to a woman you already know she knows. Lecturing is annoying and often gets confused with mansplaining. Read the room and release your hostages. Challenging is perfectly acceptable, because public forums literally demand it. Refute charges of mansplaining by defining it via Rebecca Solnit and restate why you challenged what she said. I hope this makes it all clear. Please spread the message far and wide, gentlemen; you don’t have to tolerate female tantrums if you truly haven’t done anything wrong. The blueprint’s pretty easy: Skip to the point, wrap it up, or challenge her wisely. You’re not responsible for her feelings beyond that. She’s a a big girl, whether she knows it or not. NSFW!!! Or if you must watch this at work, turn down the sound. Rather a lot. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

Liberalism has become a zombie movie. You never know who will get infected with the woke mindvirus and turn on you. Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay I understand why so many rational people find themselves drifting to the right. Or maybe, should I say, persistently pushed. I met up with a liberal single guy this summer. He slipped into the conversation, “I’m very supportive of LGBTQ,” I think to see how I’d react. “Live and let live,” I think I said. Didn’t seem like the right time to observe Skrmetti got it right. His comment gnawed at me. Even if we saw eye to eye on my squarely normie view of ‘trans rights’, how do I know he won’t flake on me eventually? How do I know he won’t go woke? Is it something in the avocado toast? What if he comes to believe I’m a fascist for believing drag shows are for adults , not children? What if he becomes an intolerant illiberal? What if he gets bitten by a transwoman??? Who can I trust anymore? Liberal friendships are fragile; loyalty has become conditional—subject to ‘high’ standards of performative ideological purity. No matter how much one liberal might agree with another, one might be found unworthy of friendship because he pish-poshes reparations. Or thinks #MeToo has jumped the shark. Conversation with liberals is like tiptoeing through a mine field; you never know what will set them off. How do I know they won’t succumb to the lure of belonging to a group that love bombs you with affirmation and makes you feel specialer-than-thou by uniting against a common enemy—people who don’t capitulate? So many of my friends, people I’ve known for years or even decades, slip away into the night, their Purity Balls becoming ever-more-exclusive to rational thought or dissent. One was someone close who didn’t just defriend me on Facebook, but blocked me. We hadn’t exchanged a single harsh word. But she got married and we lost touch, and all she knew me by was my Facebook posts, and I’ll bet she didn’t like my take-no-shit feminism. Hers was fairly ossified , whose commitment to feminist activism was texting ‘Happy International Women’s Day’. People become disposable; you can toss them and not think too deeply about how little you value genuine human relationships; how devotion to a narrative is more important to you than that she was one of your bridesmaids who put up with your Bridezilla crap for months or that she’s been your best friend since second grade. Lifelong loyalty becomes a used napkin you leave for the waiter to pick up. To be honest, I deserved a few blowoffs. My mouth runneth over, along with my ego. Sometimes I am possessed by my former know-it-all 21-year-old. I own that. I am absolutely an arrogant asshole sometimes, even as I’ve worked on that for years. I reconnected with one ex-friend by not being an asshole anymore. There are a few others I have to find emails for. The ones who struck first, with whom I never exchanged harsh words, I bid, as Pagans say, Go in perfect love and perfect trust. After all, it takes an ideological arrogant asshole to defriend one. A few came as a relief. They ended tiresome late-night phone calls regurgitating self-aggrandizing social justice mind dumps. Wokies are in love with the sound of their own voice. I cherish the peace and quiet. Research agrees: Liberals are more intolerant Consistent research, the most recent coming from the Skeptic Research Center , supports my experience of the intolerant left and liberals’ greater willingness to defriend and defamily. It’s most prominent among Zoomers and Millennials but liberals in all age groups admit they’re more likely to cut people off for their political views than those in other political groups. It’s not just me; the anecdotes proliferate online. A Democratic operative who worked closely with the biggest progressive stars speaks of her shunning after announcing on TikTok that she was breaking ranks and voting for Trump, and went viral. A former Pro-Palestine activist speaks of longtime friends who blocked her when she left the movement. And, leaning into the whole women-are-bigger-political-bitches-than-men angle, you’re less likely to get blocked or deplatformed by your male conservative opponents than by women on your own side. They can’t trust liberals either. They’re vicious when you break rank. Which is not to say that conservatives always open welcoming arms to political deviators. The SRC found the stronger one’s views, either side, the more likely one is to cut the cord, and the ‘very conservative’ were more likely to wave bye-bye than more mainstream liberals or conservatives. Millennial conservatives were more likely to go no-contact than moderates on either side. But overall, ‘very liberal’ towered over all the other groups in the intolerance bar chart. Telling your friends you just defriended another ‘toxic person’ virtue signals higher status to your group, since the less -ist you are about anything, the better a human being you’re considered to be. By casually dismissing the person as a ‘right-winger’, ‘Kool-Aid drinker,’ or a ‘transphobe’, the woke progressive reassures the group her moral purity is never sullied by differing views. Stick within your safe little bubble, as a recent conversation with a progressive I had did. She told herself a pretty little lie about a ‘stolen’ election that didn’t go her way from a fake news site. She didn’t ask herself whether she was reacting with the same denial as Donald Trump’s followers in 2020. We’ve all lost our social skills over the past mobile-driven decade. Zoomers have almost none, tallying their likes vs negative comments with the calculated efficiency of a CPA. We’ve become angrier, but some of us are working on it. One woke friend I almost defriended when he screamed abuse at me a few years ago apologized sincerely when I finally told him why I wasn’t comfortable with one-on-one get-togethers. He must have done some self-reflection, as he’s not screamed since, when we’ve disagreed on something. On Halloween, we stood together on a dance floor swaying back and forth to the band with our arms around each other. I felt close to him. There’s hope for those who genuinely value friendship over tribal moral contempt. Why aren’t there more of them? Can’t we develop a vaccine for illiberalism? No Tyrants! (Except our own) I’ve written about my multiple takedowns and bans by ‘woke progressive’ blogging platforms and social media. They don’t like it when you don’t bend the knee. I met a woman at Toronto’s No Tyrants rally with a T-shirt that read “NO BOOK BANS!” I said, “Great shirt, I hate them too. I’m curious, are you against all book bans or only some ?” Of course , she approved of book bans if they ‘harmed’ people. “But who decides who’s being harmed?” I asked. This is the gotcha with wokies. Like their comrades-in-arms on the right, they think they’re the arbiters. She proudly informed me she supports all of Canada’s hate speech laws. “They’re censorship,” I pointed out. “You can get in big trouble just for stating scientifically that transwomen are men.” And her mouth took off. I eventually walked away from her verbal diarrhea , but she came up to me a few minutes later. She asked, sincerely, “Why are you even here?” waving her arm around the crowd as though she couldn’t imagine what I might have in common with these people. “Why are you here?” I asked. “Since you’re authoritarian yourself!” Bad answer. In retrospect I should have challenged her (typical) authoritarian blind spot by saying: “For the same reason you are: I hate Trump’s authoritarianism. I’m quite certain we agree on that. Where we disagree is whether all authoritarianism is bad, or just some. And frankly, someone who wears an anti-book-ban shirt while supporting book bans and speech suppression is an authoritarian hypocrite.” Clearly, she thought everyone at the protest was just like her. But I know something she doesn’t: Not all conservatives are Trump-loving sycophants. The MAGAs can’t agree on him. Plenty of his voters experience buyer’s regret. His historically low poll numbers indicate he’s less popular than $9 a pound coffee. I’d bet there were several conservatives present that day. But they often feel they can’t speak up, as their side has never been particularly tolerant of internal criticism, either. And God help them if the book ban dictators find out they’re there. Who can I still trust? I love my liberal peeps. I’m not a closet Republican slouching towards Candace Owens, and don’t believe I’ll lose my liberal views if I hang out more with conservatives. Rather, I might get a word in edgewise. People who lean left like me are the Silent Majority. I know I’ve found a comrade in arms when we both question wokeness, after proceeding cautiously, like two strange cats, testing the other to see how much heresy she can handle before she leaps for attack. They’re the keepers: They can handle differences of opinion and believe diversity is only skin-deep. They don’t lecture like the No Tyrants lady. They haven’t adopted hypocrisy as a virtue. They haven’t abandoned compassion as so many liberals have, and which the Republican Party abandoned decades ago. They don’t get huffy when you condemn all antisemites and fascism fans, rather than just the other side’s. Their skepticism, critical thinking skills, and ability to ask hard questions aloud provide natural immunity to the zombie’s bite. I’m not worried about turning Republican. I’m worried that when enough liberals embrace illiberalism, they will eventually realize how much they have in common with the other side and realize The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right now, we normies outnumber both the far right and the far left, but if they unite against us that could change drastically. Remember, Hitler sent intellectuals and freethinkers to his concentration camps, especially in Poland. We see that same pattern repeat itself over and over in totalitarian regimes whether they’re fascist or communist. We question authority and challenge corruption, we stand up for groups marginalized by the ruling party. We weaken their control. They respond with persecution, pogroms, incarceration, torture, and execution, often public, often cruel, to serve as a stern example to others. Progressives and liberals think they’re ‘not like that’ yet many embrace antisemitism, the world’s oldest hate crime, which sounds terrifyingly far-right. Yes, I fear ‘progressives’ could turn on all of us. Yes, I think they might one day re-embrace concentration camps. And they’ll start with us, the moderates and freethinkers, so there is no one left to defend their ultimate scapegoats. We are the resistance, which Hitler understood. Once you eliminate us, you can do as you please. No, I don’t trust liberals anymore. And this is why. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

"The Great Feminization" illustrates why women shouldn't run everything, either. What we need now is a Great Social Integration, led by us Normies. Photo by August de Richelieu on Pexels My friend Sam called me a few weeks ago. “You know Roberta So-and-So, right?” he asked. Yes, I told him, we’re connected on Facebook, but I haven’t talked to her in years. Sam wanted to vent. It seems our Ontario premier in all his buttheaded glory wanted to end rent control and Roberta, ever the progressive activist, posted that the working class should launch a day-long strike. Sam agreed completely with her dislike for the housing proposal, but pointed out that a strike simply wasn’t feasible for many working class people—like immigrants who would lose their status if they didn’t work. Or dog walkers—doggies gotta exercise and poo, even during hurricanes. Or au pairs—children, same thing. Or people who depend on whatever peanuts they’re paid and couldn’t afford a self-imposed day off. Or to get fired. Roberta didn’t like the challenge. She got a little snippy with him. Sam invited me to review the exchange. He’d kept it polite but called out her rudeness as well as her illogic. She accused him of ‘mansplaining’ to the ‘silly little girl’. I’ve known Sam for about fifteen years or more and he’s a good debater. He quotes facts and sources and can be sarcastic sometimes but he’s no mansplainer, ever. “Did you point out how she’s speaking from a position of privilege?” I giggled. The housing proposal (now tabled) would adversely affect Roberta, a self-employed artist, and her partner, an actor, but they can both arrange their schedules to include a strike. When I returned to the thread to make sure I was attributing Roberta’s words accurately, I found all the comments removed. Roberta had played the pouty child and whined ‘misogyny’ at someone who merely observed her lack of situation consideration in a public forum—then erased the evidence. Her immature reaction was oh-so-woke: Getting mad, playing the victim, and shutting down the conversation. All hail the Matriarchy? Just earlier that day I’d read Helen Andrews’s viral essay for Compact, The Great Feminization. She argues that women’s success in breaking several glass ceilings are the cause of wokeness, that it’s the result of female social and relational dynamics subsuming formerly male cultures. She notes that once sex parity occurs in a culture, the imbalance flips. The men leave, she speculates, because they don’t like a dominant culture that treats them as the enemy and complains to HR if they make a rude joke or state a controversial opinion. Men will talk over each other, bust on each other, and self-promote in a way that women aren’t socialized to do. Women, she says, introduce themselves and then proceed with the business at hand, guided by the female dynamics of consensus and cooperation. It’s not that either style is bad, they’re different, and both exist for good reasons. You don’t bring an olive branch to a knife fight, for example, and you do, in fact, catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Andrews doesn’t believe women are simply outperforming men to explain the new lopsided F2M disparity; she credits, instead, affirmative action and DEI; ‘the thumb on the scale’. Andrews’s connection between wokeness and female psychology isn’t new; it emerged in non-woke forums for the last couple of years. I disagree with her that female dominance is the reason why wokeness arose, although she’s correct that it maps in the same direction. I think it’s one, rather than the reason. She has a point about the ‘thumb on the scale’; DEI panders to increasingly deteriorating ‘marginalization’ and has introduced real doubt about certain suspiciously woke-candidate public figures, but there’s no question women are also rising because of genuine competence, motivation and ability. It’s hard to blame DEI when men don’t enroll in university as much as they once had, or come to class as much, or drop out more often. Women graduate with impressive degrees and run businesses because many men have ceded the glass ceiling to play video games and and worship Nick Fuentes. Women are also running the show at college campus protests, which, love them or hate them, are early hands-on lessons in leadership, which will carry into the world beyond. I certainly understand why men wouldn’t want to attend classes with hostile chickie-boos who collectively shout down anyone without a pre-approved progressive opinion, but men have been falling aside also of their own accord. No snowflakes, please! Andrews’s article is one piece of the complex puzzle surrounding the rise of wokeness, rather than, as she assumes, the sole explanation. Especially as we watch the rise of the clearly male-dominated woke right . The connection between wokeness and the now-obvious female characteristics—gossip, ostracism, inclusivity, non-offense, and a Nazi-like devotion to agreeableness—is so glaring I’m surprised I never noticed it myself. I, who was subjected to so much female toxicity in school. On then-Twitter, it was hard to know who you were actually engaging with in a faceless anonymous world. The LGBTQ gang blurred the lines further and you never knew which cyberbullies were male or female between the ears, where it really counts. Now it seems clear, biological women have been leading that Charge of the Indict Brigade. Other writers have argued similarly. The serious chill on free speech, the authoritarian desire to coerce agreement, the obsession with inclusion for anyone except conscientious objectors, the love affair with hurting rivals via ostracism—that’s eighth-grade girly crap, inside and out. Can I borrow your sparkly unicorn lip gloss? We normies don’t want to see a matriarchy replace the patriarchy. I’d much rather explore how we can now dial it back a bit and make it safe for men and their style, too. What could we accomplish if we weren’t so busy fighting over ‘sex parity’ in a way that would sound stupid if we suggested ‘eye color parity’? A failed experiment I explored how men and women can combine the best of their strengths earlier this year in Better DEI Will Teach Women How To Handle Conflict With Male Employees. I argued that women aren’t taught properly how to handle conflict like adults, and that if a woman has a problem with a male colleague, she needs to bring it up with him first, rather than drag HR or the U.S. Supreme Court into it. If thousands of years of patriarchy is a bad idea, so, clearly, is the emerging Matriarchy. I already feel oppressed by woke progressive women and their panting male lapdogs, and it’s only been fifteen years so far. I absolutely, positively, cannot abide another 11,985 years of this bitchy high school shit. What can we do to teach males and females to treat each other as respected colleagues rather than chromosome-based enemies? I’ve found various exercises that can be incorporated into the workplace, activist groups, academia, and elsewhere to foster better communication methods and reduce interpretive friction. Like taking a workplace statement, “The project deadline needs to be moved up,” and take feedback on what participants think was said. Was the person frustrated? Blaming? Withholding information? Another exercise forces people to shift from blaming and accusing language to focus on why something needs to change, without, I hope, putting too much emphasis on feelings, of which there’s already too much. (Thanks, ladies. Not.) Another confronts the assumption that one’s preferred style on how to handle a particular decision—a restaurant or a picnic in the park for the annual company summer social?—or whether meetings are best held in person or on zoom—to force participants to understand others’ differing approaches and to consider ideas that aren’t necessarily their own. Others focus on collaborative problem-solving, and handling conflicts, like two demands for an employee for the same time. The exercises don’t address male and female work or communication styles specifically, but still challenge certain gender-related habits and styles, and to temper one’s inclinations that don’t foster greater collaboration (like the notion that one’s opinion is superior or that we always need to arrive at a group consensus, which often actually means others aren’t satisfied but assent just to get the hell out of the meeting). I think it’s good to push women to stand up for themselves more, say, with salary negotiations. It’s good to expect men to consider others’ feelings, to contemplate the impact of a given action on others. We can debate and discuss, but sometimes, consensus rather than arbitrary rule is the best way. It’s good that men take risks; it’s good that women point out how many people might get hurt if a particularly risky plan goes awry. The Great Feminization screams for a course correction. Its companion wokeness, as one writer argues, poisons at a very young age. With it now on the chopping block, powerful men and women can change imbalanced policies and force recalibration of existing toxic workplace styles to offer more adult conflict management and resolution. I hope one day to see the HR ‘profession’ eliminated entirely. Or simply devoted to finding the best corporate insurance plan. With DEI largely purged from decent society (yes, thank you, Donald Trump), the world may one day become safe again for grownups. What This Country Needs Is An Enema—And It’s Getting One Men needed First Wave feminism to recognize how difficult paternalism and mindless sexism was for the other half. Today complacent entitled women need a similar bottom blaze. If we’re strong enough and genuinely good enough to make partner or lead a project team to build something new, we’re strong enough to conquer our own humophobia , and understand the difference between mean-spirited jokes and humor that builds camaraderie by making it okay for all of us to laugh. Helen Andrews made some good points, although some are a little weak (feminization won’t destroy Western civilization), and a few of her critics haven’t effectively rebutted her either. As the future’s female leaders leave the cossetted campus environment and encounter the Real World, it will be critically important that we un-teach the negative and counterproductive thought patterns and beliefs they learned at school, and remake them with a new workplace style more inclusive than they would have tolerated back at Harvard U. We’re the Normies. We’re the true progessives, seeking human, not gendered, progress. United we stand. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

Because we can't wrest democracy back from only one side. We have to kill all the cancer. Image by Alejandro Lizardo  on Public Domain Pictures Democracy is no longer ‘precarious’ in the Ignited States of Trumpistan, but swirling down a golden toilet. One might argue that rather than critiquing the excesses of liberalism, I should instead turn my attentions to Messolooni, currently heaping up a veritable guerra lampo   of gross abuses of power. But the left’s own excesses are what’s also brought us to this place—we, the other arm of the ambidextrous authoritarian monster. “This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” comments Senator Padmé Amidala in Revenge of the Sith. I’m clearly no MAGA Trumpanzee; I love liberty, and I continue prodding my fellow liberals and my not-so-fellow illiberals on their own lack of commitment to it, to the great annoyance of those who still wish to pretend they had nothing to do with this fine kettle of fish. Those applauding now are the far right. Those applauding until January 20th were the far left. We, and they too, are more like them than we know. And now that our side is out of government power, we have to take inventory of our failings, as they say in AA, and make amends, because we can’t fix them  without restoring our own abandoned moral credibility. Who are ‘them’? Too many progressives, liberals, and social justice junkies don’t understand who ‘they’, the problem Americans, are. They’re neither ‘the left’ nor ‘the right’, neither Democrat nor Republican, neither red nor blue: They are, as I’ve discussed before, liberty lovers vs authoritarians. I criticize not just the woke illiberals, but the ‘nice’ liberals, the ‘good’ liberals, and the true progressives unfortunately clinging to clearly flawed policies and values, ‘buggy whips’ they should have abandoned decades ago. If You Still Hold The Same Beliefs Thirty Or Forty Years Ago—Why? Conservatives are much less united behind the Trumpocalypse than the left realizes; the Republican Party has been bleeding the disenchanted  for years. As I see from The Bulwark  articles I get, written by conservative disenchanteds, their gloomy assessments of Trump almost entirely mirror mine and my fellow liberals. Many moderates and disenchanteds don’t speak up because the guerra lampo of hate and danger from our respective authoritarian masters is brutal, online and off. But we are their heretics, their hidden ticking liberty bombs. We agitate for what they don’t dare, by doing and saying what they dare not. We get to know and befriend moderates of whichever side isn’t ours, and develop a respect for their opinions, and are more inclined to listen to them when they say something we disagree with. It’s what’s been missing from the national conversation for decades. We don’t listen; we don’t share a beer with people who don’t go to our church, raise their kids the same way, own guns, vote for who we voted for, or have a distaste for abortion. I critique my own tribe more than the other, even as I feel like all  of us liberty-lovers need to circle the wagons. I take on liberals because too many won’t listen to anyone they fashcast  as ‘right-wing’. You don’t subscribe to Holy Trans Dogma? You don’t think Israel is pure evil? You dare to criticize the less-than-angelic George Floyd? Defriend. I speak to the liberals who haven’t yet given their brains over to the social justice cult. Thanks for sticking around! If you think our side could never do what Trump is doing now, I offer Exhibit A: Venezuela, headed by the now-late Hugo Chavez, who dismantled democracy, one brick at a time. Going after political enemies? Check. Shutting down oppositional broadcasters? Check. Watching the swiftness with which the guardrails are broken; knowing the motherfucker in power doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about you or your problems; politicizing everything, blurring the lines between state, government and society to make it all about him. Check. Check. Check. Check. Chavez wasn’t a right-winger, as many might assume, but a credentialed left-winger: A socialist, a nationalizer of key industries, proponent of welfare programs to eradicate poverty and inequality. You know who loved him? The working class and the marginalized. Sound familiar, mis amigos liberales? It’s the Authoritarians, silly. We purple liberty lovers unite to fight against the Pol Potbellies and Pinheadchets who now battle for control of America. It’s great to see citizens fighting back against the brutal masked ICE Gestapo, while knowing those same ‘warriors’ may well be the far-left authoritarians who simply want their power back. Who, if they’re taking notes, will bring us Woke Trump one day and perpetuate, rather than end, the current horror. Yes, I DO believe our side is every bit as authoritarian as theirs. It just hasn’t matured and emerged from its chrysalis like Sil in Species . Yet. And the little blockheads shall lead them What I never imagined is that my fellow liberals would turn ‘progressive’ into a dirty word, smelling of bad milk and broccoli in the garbage. My increasingly-estranging compatriots embraced a cancel culture censorship for public statements that were often offensive, ill-considered, or downright stupid, but not illegal. Our Regressive Left is what’s compelled us to lose our minds over opinions, but turn away and whistle in the dark when a black man kills a white woman for no reason or the wrong President brings about a ceasefire we’ve been demanding for two years. Lackadaisical liberalism and true progressivism found itself hijacked by our dumbasses—the Regressive Left, who devolved into the ‘woke’ with too much unchecked, unquestioned ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusivity’ and a serious distaste for open inquiry. They opened the door to our very worst elements the same way Republican small-tentism  led to Trump’s MAGAtry. Both sides’ regressives are motivated by the same nihilism, all-purpose bigotry, itch to manage, fear of critical thinking, the desire to tear it all down, and to remake society to fit their own twisted utopia, by violence if necessary. Authoritarians must control everything, especially education, because freethinkers and intellectuals wonk it all up by asking too many questions . Regressives possess their own built-in seeds of social destruction, showering the faithful with a wide chrysanthemum of stupidity: Christian fundamentalism on the right, encompassing the most dogmatic and bass-ackwards elements of religiosity, and the left’s fetishization of moral weakness and group identity, leading to much the same sort of hate and bigotry as we see now with Jew hatred parity. Once the left embraced exclusionary diversity, Trumpist authoritarianism, rooted in one man’s own mad desire to seek revenge on anyone who ever crossed him, cracked like a whip against anyone to the left of J.D. Vance, boosted mightily by understandably pissed-off once-reasonable conservatives who’ve been silenced for too long. This was explored and explained beautifully in a recent Free Press article, What Shakespeare Understands About Trump’s Thirst For Revenge . The author observes that while the left watches in horror as Trump turns around their own recent ideological actions and takes them three steps further , Democratic presidents exhibit their own authoritarian streak, on occasion, although less, so far,  than Republican administrations. But. The actions are identical: Jawboning political opponents ; pressuring private companies to suppress free speech (Biden with Google/YouTube  and Facebook ); the bipartisan love affair with book bans  and compelling universities to comply with a political agenda (Obama’s extremist #MeToo-driven dictates ). Just because Democratic administrations haven’t lately been ‘just as bad’ doesn’t mean they’re not ambitious. Remember, the Democrats, formerly the ‘white man’s party’, once fought a civil wa r to preserve  slavery. Truth is, we each have our own little Dr. Evil living within. That itch to rule over others because we know what’s best , it seems, is ingrained into the human soul. Unless we consciously fight our own Little Caesar, we ask not whether authoritarianism sucks, but which we prefer. The devil you know 2025’s censorship handover is a prime example of how badly we need to clean up our own mess. It’s so, so, so hard not to roll my eyes at the liberal multitudes suddenly getting woke to censorship, now that the right is in charge of it. Our Joseph Goebbelsism is that one must be the right  kind of liberal, and most importantly, liberal enough, in order to be taken seriously. Progressives hobbled and crippled themselves by yanking the reins on diversity of opinion. Now they whine while the tables turn on them.   The ‘Peace Protesters’ Who Won’t Give Peace A Chance   - The Free Press If the left, and especially the Democrats, don’t exorcise their own authoritarian demons quickly, when they return to power, as they eventually will, they may be as bad as or worse than the Trumpocalypse. Or they might never return, because voters might decide, fuck it, the devil you know, until there are no more elections. At the moment, hand-wringing born-again democracy mavens, the ‘fat generals’ of The Resistance, can’t rally together to strategically wrest democracy back from the tinputt dictator who is destroying the country. Who will one day subjugate even his own airheaded fanboys and fangirls, cheering for their own liberation from financial security and freedom, and for their own destruction. We truly have met the enemy and he is us Liberal, conservative, and libertarian liberty lovers need each other. We who value the original vision of the Founding Fathers need to unite together to fight bi-divisional reality denial, whether it’s transmania or vaccine phobia, the Intifada or de-gunning the least violent citizens. Trump may babble like a maniac about having ended wars between countries who are at peace or flooding Los Angeles with non-existent water, and almost everything he attempts is done in the worst way imaginable, but he couldn’t have done it without our help. He’s primarily an ambassador for right-wing lunacy with a visceral rejection of all true liberals should hold dear: Reality, truth, skepticism, evidence-based policy-making and common sense . For all the talk about what a malignant psychopath Donald Trump is, it takes one to know one. They voted for him, but we  gave   Trump the power to behave much like ourselves. We can remain in denial and pretend we want to fix America’s problems, or we can just sit back and wait for ICE’s stormtroopers to claim us. We’re no longer red and blue. We’re not Republican or Democrat. We are the liberty lovers, who fight all  authoritarians, regardless of which flags they fly. It’s up to us. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!

You never know what you're made of until the air raids sound. All. Day. Long. April 1942. The residents of Valletta, the capital of Malta, survey the latest bombing damage by the Axis powers. Public domain image Lt. J E Russell , Royal Navy photographer on Wikimedia Commons Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of England, and Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’ head of the German Imperial army, didn’t agree on much, except one thing: If the Axis powers couldn’t subdue the tiny tri-island country of Malta, the Axis was, to put it more bluntly than either of them did, fucked. “Without Malta, the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa,” Rommel warned. “Malta is the master key of the Mediterranean: the battlefield on which the fate of the Mediterranean war will be decided,” said Churchill. I’ve visited Churchill’s bunker too. He had much better lodgings than the Maltese, but he had a fair idea of life underground. I recently visited my aunt in Malta, whom I hadn’t seen in over thirty-five years. She kept encouraging me to visit Mellieha, a town on the northern end of ‘Big Island’, the largest and most central of the Maltese triad, the other two islands being Comino and Gozo. My last full day, I visited the World War II bomb shelter just around the corner. Aunt Nancy was born a year before the war ended, and two years before the Axis’s five year Siege of Malta ended. She doesn’t remember the war or the air raids, but her toys as a small child included broken glass and rubble. Malta, as I heard at least eleventy-hundred times from everyone while I was there, was the most bombed country in Europe. This tiny little island that some people have never heard of—I had to enlighten my Indian Uber driver who drove me to the Toronto airport—was one of the most strategically important points of World War II. My aunt, who lives just a few blocks from her old ‘hood, pointed out some caves, natural and man-made, a short walk from her apartment where she and her friends played. The Axis objective was to subdue Malta by starving the populace and destroying their morale with relentless bombing attacks. Because Malta and Italy have intermingled family ties, Italian pilots ‘missed’ a lot. The Germans, however possessed no such sentimental decorum. A newspaper headline in the shelter mentioned ‘15 attacks in 24 hours’; this must have been sheer hell on those below and the Axis actually came very close to achieving their objective. What they didn’t count on was how resilient the Maltese had become. Given how tiny these chunks of land in the middle of the Mediterranean are, it’s hard to imagine what the big conquest jones has historically been, but pretty much everyone has taken a whack at them over the centuries. When you speak of the ‘Siege of Malta’ you have to specify which one. The French, the British, the Ottoman Turks and the Barbary corsairs invaded, blockaded or raided for hundreds of years; so did the Kingdom of Sicily in 1429; the Normans invaded in 1091; and the Arab-Byzantines besieged them in 870. This isn’t even a comprehensive list! In some respects the bomb shelter reminded me of both the current Russian-Ukraine and Israeli-Gazan wars. Like Mussolini’s military, reports are that many Russians are unhappy with going to war with a country with which they have many blood ties; the Russian Air Force knows they may be attacking their families. The history of the scrappy little country with very powerful friends recalls Israel. And, while watching a short video on the course of the war on Malta, the scenes of destroyed buildings and endless piles of rubble from relentless attacks reminded me of the scenes we see today in Gaza. Mellieha’s tunnels—about 2.1 meters high, seemed terribly claustrophobic. At five-foot-three, I felt how close the ceiling was to my head (the Maltese themselves are roughly my height) and for my non-guided tour were lit by dim electric lamps, which were only available to the wartime Maltese when it was working. Otherwise, the shelters were lit by Italian-imported candles until they ran out, and after that by olive oil lamps which were plentiful as Malta has plenty of olive tree plantations. I imagined how horribly depressing it must have been to live like rats undergound. Not everyone was fortunate enough, even, to live like that; at the beginning of the war, when the air raid sirens sounded, there were only a few shelters that could only hold so many. Malta is largely made up of porous limestone, and mining and digging is as natural as breathing. My aunt’s 19th century church sits atop limestone but the square and the museum are carved out of it. Across the street is the beautiful Our Lady of the Grotto shrine, in a carved cave. It’s quite lovely. Photo taken by my aunt Miners continuously carved tunnels and cubicles all throughout Malta, often without shoes or the protective gear we have today. Early in the war, they created them for their families but as the war progressed the Maltese government decreed they must do it for the public, and later, families could dig their own private rooms. Babies were born here; the injured were attended to and operated on in surgical units; others died. How much will does one have to live when you suffer like this? I honestly don’t know. Food supplies got through but it certainly wasn’t easy or always successful. Malta was in no position to defend itself, and the best it could do is survive. They even managed to preserve some of their most precious artworks and valuables in a space little bigger than a Burger King restroom. And of course, they prayed to the Lady who always watched over Malta. In the end, 17,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the country from over 3,300 air raid warnings; 1,500 Maltese citizens died and over 2,000 were injured, which seems remarkable to me as the population was, in 1940, around 250,000-275,000. I would have guessed much higher casualties. Likely many of them came at the beginning of the war. By its end Malta had more than enough underground space for all its remaining citizens and their refugees. Artifacts in Mellieha from the Siege. What would you do? How would I live underground like this? I ask myself, even though, despite the growing hostilities around the world and Canada’s increasingly unstable neighbor to the south, I don’t, at this time, harbor great fears about invasion. But, I can’t rule it out. I wonder how capable any of us are of defending our respective motherlands. Only our refugees have real-world experience with home-made wars. Not to downplay the very real existential threats many of us face now, but it truly puts the price of eggs in perspective when one considers huddling in a tunnel with unwashed neighbors not knowing when you’ll eat again and worrying about your mother who’s developed a concerning nagging cough. Oh, have to go to the bathroom? Push past the elderly and the crying children and use that chamber pot in the alcove over there. The smell. The disease. The infections. The people you know could have been saved if they’d been treated in a proper hospital. The terror of wondering what you did to make the Germans hate you so much. How your Italian neighbors could do this to you. What must it have been like sleeping wherever you could, reminiscing about your old bed now broken in a pile of rubble you used to call home. Wondering what might happen if a land invasion occurred. If the armies found the people huddled in the tunnels, the mothers clutching their pretty daughters and young sons, knowing they might not be able to protect them from becoming some horrid commandant’s mistress or being forced to serve in the Wehrmacht. We have no idea how spoiled we actually are until we’re faced with danger we couldn’t even imagine before. I imagine that if Toronto was bombed or invaded, our Ukrainian refugees could teach us survival tips and best practices. Other subject matter experts are those who escaped the Communists in North Vietnam; or the slaughter of the Tutsis; or the hellholes of Third World Asia and Africa. Today, these Toronto refugees are terrified by the screaming of fighter jets over the city every year for the annual air show, but at least they can be grateful it’s now only once a year. One wonders how would fare the ‘victims’ of elite overproduction Rob Henderson recently wrote about , furious to have been deprived of the good jobs and higher pay they feel entitled to. They need to take a day off when they hear an idea they can’t handle and can’t define what they think when challenged, and these able-bodied kids are our best defense. What would they do when faced with a drone attack? I don’t know I would handle it with any more aplomb, but I would head for my bathtub. Today’s effete elites— all of us, who’ve never experienced a war on our own soil—would have no choice but to take up arms and fight back. Suddenly, a guy who thinks women should marry, submit to a man, and pop out babies, or a woman who claims all men are sexual predators become insanely irrelevant. Europeans in World War II had already lived through another world war preceding this one; perhaps they were used to it all. I think of my aging self crouched in a hole in the ground, my arthritic knees aching to stretch, and wonder just how much fortitude I’d have waiting for the ‘maybe’ of an invading army. What could I do? At 62, I can’t kick anyone’s ass, but I might be able to improve the morale of sobbing teenagers completely unprepared for what’s unquestionably a horrifically challenging future. I’ve been around long enough to see some shit, even if only on the news, so I know how resilient human beings are. So what if we weren’t tempered by a recent world war like the 1940s Europeans? It’s gotta start somewhere, right? I can write. I can fact-check. I can counter mis/disinformation and remind people what they’re really made of. That’s what I like to think I’d do. I hope I never have to find out. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! 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Today's T&D Day requires more than blame. Let's explore what the Indigenous, Canada's perpetual children, can do for themselves Photo from  the 2014 Barrie (ON) Friendship Center Pow-wow. Photo by Antefixus21  on Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0  license (Since Truth & Reconciliation Day comes one day before this week’s Wednesday publication date, I’m publishing today instead of tomorrow.) One of the best-kept secrets in Canada is that Indigenous bands claim there are 6,000 graves of children in or around former ‘Indian’ residential schools. Yet, so far, and Canadians are surprised to learn this, confirmed by Google, they’ve found Not. One. Single. Body. ‘Deniers’ who snuck onto a former school property  in British Columbia attempting to find some, were stopped by Natives. The incident exemplifies the growing credibility problem for Canada’s First Nations. While we know children died—usually of common diseases in the pre-vaccine era—and are buried near the former schools, band leaders seem strangely incurious about producing some remains, especially in light of some of their more extraordinary claims of savage murders at the schools. You’d think they’d want to possibly prosecute still-living perpetrators, right? Kimberly Murray, an independent special interlocutor for the alleged unmarked graves and burial sites, claimed ‘denialism’ is “the last step in genocide. Denialism is violence. Denialism is calculated. Denialism is harmful. Denialism is hate." Denialism is what happens when you can’t or won’t provide evidence. ‘Genocide’ accusations are nothing more than an attempt to shut down legitimate exploration of these allegations. Hellacious stories of abuse and neglect emerged from the residential schools during the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s investigations over a decade ago. These horrors were detailed in a massive government report via former student testimony that made it sound like the entire residential school system was the ninth level of hell. For sure, many of these indignities did occur, sometimes and somewhere. Others felt they got a good education from the schools, but the Truth and Reconciliation Commission  weren’t much interested in their stories. The mass graves/residential school hellholes debate defines much of what we think we know about most things Indigenous. In the woke world of progressive politics, one must never challenge anything an Indigenous person claims. Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada, and we’re going to ask some more uncomfortable questions. Let’s reconcile with some real truths, shall we? Last year for T&R Day , Substack writer Fortissax  at Fortissax Is Typing  wrote a lengthy and well-researched treatis e about how violent pre-European North America was. James Pew , meanwhile, over at Woke Watch Canada , had critiqued the national myth that all the residential schools for ‘Indians’ were abusive hellholes and that no student emerged better, or more educated, than when they went in. (Truth is, many went on to lead successful, happy lives.) And I read two books this year: Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools ) and Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation . One truth is that many Canadian reserves are in atrocious condition, with many living in squalor—substandard homes, unclean water, insufficient or ridiculously expensive food (which has to be shipped from other parts of Canada to remote reserves without airports), high domestic violence, sexual abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, and all the other pathologies commonly associated with poverty. If you ask the Indigenous leadership why, they’ll start droning on about white supremacy and racism and stolen land and ‘genocide’ and the ‘horrific’ residential schools and the Indian Act of 1876. If you ask those living in squalor, many will fill your ears with complaints about how the money the Canadian government has given to improve reserve lives doesn’t seem to trickle down into those communities but man, the local leader sure is driving a nice shiny new truck. Canada cares Most Canadians don’t want to see anyone suffering or living in poverty on Canadian soil, and would genuinely love to see First Nations thrive. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry describes the problems facing Indigenous reserves customarily ignored in what it is still a primarily liberal-leaning country. Those at fault include Indigenous leaders, for whom keeping their people poor results in a rain of federal manna from Ottawa, and their white progressive allies whose job it is to kowtow, bow and scrape, and never, ever, question any Native claim, however outlandish. But the fault at large lies with the mostly non-Indigenous  ‘industry’, primarily lawyers and consultants, who receive obscene amounts of government money defending the Indigenous in court (land claims are THE best way to get rich), with the help of their kind-hearted progressive lapdogs. Conservatives, liberals and moderates who ask whether that money might be better spent improving life quality on the reserves are immediately smacked down as racists, haters and fascists. The reality is most critics, too, want to see Indigenous communities thrive and prosper. A huge obstacle, unfortunately, is the desire of both Indigenous afraid of progress, and Canadians who wish to preserve an antiquated way of life as a sort of living museum rather than help the people adapt and assimilate into our multicultural society. Any suggestion that the Indigenous need to modernize or assimilate is met with hostile accusations of ‘cultural genocide’. But as the Fraser Institute notes , “Extensive research on both sides of the 49th parallel shows that the American tribes and Canadian First Nations who achieve a higher standard of living do so by getting involved in the marketplace and generating income for themselves— ‘own-source revenue’ in the vocabulary of Indigenous affairs.” Because Canada has, at one time or another, attempted to 'rub out the Indian’ in Natives, and engaged in genuine cultural erasure, ‘cultural genocide’ has become the emotional rather than logical response. It’s not true anymore, and it’s detrimental to Indigenous self-determination to not explore how they can do both—preserve their culture while evolving with the new one, just like all of us have done. We  don’t live like we did even twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, and we don’t want to. Disrobing argues that First Nations need modern education and to give up cultural elements which don’t work for them anymore. First Nations, just like us, already don’t live like their ancestors. Very few reserves, if any, bear no  stamp of the White Man’s Modernism. Even their substandard pre-fab housing is an improvement over the homes of their ancestors. The Inuit at the Arctic Circle don’t feed themselves with hunting and fishing the way their ancestors did. They rely on the White Man’s Groceries flown in, which is why their food prices make current American groceries look like bargains. The rest of the world has moved on and modernized. None of us make our own butter or dip our own candles like our ancestors. We embrace childhood vaccines, unless our parents belong to weird religious groups or listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Our libraries are in our pockets. And we sure as hell don’t rely only on TV for our news and entertainment anymore. Modernization is how the Indigenous can thrive, which those who’ve embraced it can attest to. Thousands of immigrants from other lands join Canada every year and know they’re expected to assimilate while preserving their cultures however they want. They see the benefits of taking a job in technology, or medicine, or starting their own business, which they might not be able to do back home. They still celebrate Diwali, wear a hijab to work, take the Jewish holidays off, eat what they like. No one is stopping Canada’s Indigenous from doing the same. There’s no sound, rational reason why they can’t live in the modern world, whether by living self-sustainably on reserves without depending on regular government handouts like children , or modernize. No one is stopping them, but they can’t expect Canadians to support them in perpetuity. Disrobing asks the huge question that too many Canadians won’t, at risk of accusations of being a ‘genocidist’. What can Indigenous Canadians do to help themselves? Marginalized groups too often contribute to their own suffering by refusing to release cultural elements that no longer serve them, or question anything they believe about themselves . It’s time to speak freely about what Indigenous Canadians can do: Time to close the museum Disrobing examines this at length. First Nations’ ancestors were still at the level of subsistence living when the European conquerors appeared, more technologically advanced, healthier and stronger. The Natives never stood a chance. Subsistence living has been much romanticized by many generations of freethinkers, hippies, back-to-earthers, and environmentalists. The plain fact is that native North Americans lived shorter and exceedingly violent lives pre-European, exacerbated by ‘kinship’, another ancient tradition they need to bury. It meant higher levels of violence, since if you weren’t related to someone else, a Best Practice was to kill them before they killed you. Today, we live in societies in which we may not even know our neighbors but we don’t suspect them of evil intent, so we  don’t plan murders either. If ‘land acknowledgements’ were honest, every single band and tribe in North America would offer their own, acknowledging whose land theirs belonged to before they stole it. Genuine subsistence living also results in death and suffering from preventable diseases, childhood deaths, and poor dental health. Indigenous leaders must account for government money The First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA) was passed in 2013 by Parliament to require financial accountability for First Nations band leaders and chiefs after media stories detailed their very nice salaries while their people languished on reserves. Needless to say, this act wasn’t popular with the leaders who argued it was ‘discriminatory’ and ‘unconstitutional’. Justin Trudeau, who never met a special interest group whose asses he wouldn’t kiss, refused to enforce it. Own their non-conquest-related problems The only one of Indigenous problems that originated with the White Man was alcoholism. Already present was the universal culture of patriarchal entitlement to women’s and childrens’ bodies. Unsurprisingly, rape and child rape have always been a part of the universal tradition where men with too much power, to be blunt, fuck women and children without their consent. As detailed by the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley and others, traditional male violence is universal. Rape, sexual abuse of children, women as spoils, spousal abuse—they were as omnipresent in Indigenous communities then as they are today. Disrobing  delves heavily into the sexual abuse and coverups on reserves, identical to off-reserve communities anywhere else. They’re enabled, of course, by their witlessly progressive patriarchal allies who never demand sexual accountability  from any other than white men. Violence and domestic abuse are on the Indigenous, not the White Man. They need to stop blaming us and ‘do the work’. Traditional ‘medicine’ is pseudoscience Not a single one of Native ‘traditional medicines’ will cure cancer or relieve or slow the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Instead of embracing modern medical treatments that work, too many First Nations promote long-outdated ‘medicine’ treatments hoping to receive more monetary compensation (of course) for ‘intellectual property rights’ via the uncritical academic institutional support it gets for ‘ethnobotanical’ research. It’s just one of many traditional values that hold them back. Native ‘medicine’ was all their distant ancestors had; today’s aboriginals have a choice, which is to live long or die young, depending on how badly they want to emulate their ancestors. This is another waste of Native time and taxpayers’ money which does nothing to improve their lives. Restore Western education The biggest truth today’s Canadian Natives must acknowledge is that they are, in essence, Canada’s loser kids stuck perpetually in the basement constantly asking for handouts but frittering it away on land claims and other wastes of money that don’t serve them, along with an unwillingness to modernize. Non-native Canadians acknowledge that many gross injustices have been committed against their ancestors but, like nonsensical ‘slave reparation’ arguments, it was a long time ago and no different from how they treated each other pre-European. Perhaps the first step, now that we’ve got a new Prime Minister, is to start enforcing the FNFTA Act. Forcing financial accountability at the top would be a huge first step in evolving the too-prevalent dependency mindset of Canada’s perpetual children. It’s 2025, not 1625. On Truth & Reconcilation Day, Canada’s Indigenous can commit themselves to becoming self-sustaining adults. It’s time to grow up, and move out of their parents’ house. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify  podcasts of more recent articles!