As I explore t'other sides of the North American political divide, I will not join the Illuminazi Pretty sure my largely liberal-leaning friends are afraid I’m going to join the Illuminazi. That fear is exemplified by the phenomenon of the far-right, Trumpy sort of conservative some former liberals suddenly become. I’ve seen it happen. People tend toward conservatism as they get older, but some go wildly overboard from the left to the far right. A few left-leaning friends told me they’ve blocked friends who became super-Trumpy and anti-immigrant. I de-friended and blocked a Toronto Pagan acquaintance after the 2020 election because she wouldn’t stop harassing me on Facebook about the ‘unfairness’ of Trump’s loss. Then she harassed me with threatening phone calls until I left a screaming voice mail telling her I’d reported her to the police months ago and if I got another phone call I was going after her legally. Do not fuck with Americans. We are heavily armed with lawyers we hate until we need one. The weird thing is, I don’t see it in reverse. While some disgruntled U.S. conservatives left the Republican party after Bush II, or later Donald Trump, I don’t know of any who went from any-flavor-conservative to super-woke. Or even ‘liberal’. They’re just a less crazy flavor of conservative. Maybe MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace, who describes herself as a former ‘self-loathing Republican’, although she may simply be a more moderate conservative - the kind we thought died with John McCain. Still, both sides are suspicious of any member who leaves the political Purity Ball to socialize with t’other side. Anyway, the Illuminazi doesn’t exist. And it’s multi-partisan and keeping an eye on you. Jonathan Haidt and The Righteous Mind Just about every political and social observer/critic I know has read Haidt’s highly influential book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion. I’ve read it twice and will surely read it again. Haidt is a moral psychologist who explores the real reasons we believe the way we do—not the ones we think. He distinguishes between the ‘rider’ and the ‘elephant’, the conscious and the unconscious mind. The rider thinks s/he controls the elephant when in fact the elephant is running the show. We make moral and political decisions believing them to be based on reason when in fact it’s our elephant’s snap decision based on our moral overview, which more often than not goes far more unchallenged than we think. And then we ‘reason’ (i.e., engage in confirmation bias) our view. Haidt distinguishes the conservative, liberal, and libertarian minds and how they generally tend to think, philosophize, and order their moral universe. He lists six moral foundations: Care/harm Fairness/cheating Loyalty/betrayal Authority/subversion Sanctity/degradation Liberty/oppression To oversimplify a bit, conservatives and liberals value each foundation differently. Liberals care most about care/harm, liberty/oppression, and fairness/cheating, in that order. Haidt divides conservatives further into two groups: Libertarianism and social conservatism. Libertarians, he says, care the most about liberty/oppression, somewhat less for fairness/cheating, and don’t bother much with the other four. Haidt notes some have classified libertarians as both liberal (love of liberty/loathing for oppression) and conservative (their love for free markets, which is a mark, actually, of Enlightenment classical liberalism from which they descend). Social conservatives, interestingly, value almost evenly all six foundations, with their most sacred value being the preservation of institutions and traditions that sustain a moral community. Haidt offers his own opinion as to, given what he understands about moral psychology and each group’s level of commitment to each foundation, as to what a healthy mix of liberal/conservative/libertarian policy might look like, based on what he thinks each camp gets ‘right’, i.e., its strengths. Haidt, a former ‘lifelong liberal’, became frustrated with American liberals after watching John Kerry’s ‘ineffectual’ 2004 presidential campaign bid. It convinced him liberals simply “didn’t ‘get’ the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen,” and he resolved to use moral psychology to help liberals win. What he came to realize, instead, was that liberals didn’t have all the answers. They had some very good ones, but they also had some demonstrably bad ones. And he found the same with conservatives and libertarians. ‘Morality binds and blinds’, says Haidt, noting that, when attempting to answer a morality questionnaire imagining how the other political side might answer, liberals were the least accurate in predicting what the other side actually valued. Moderates and conservatives were more accurate in predicting liberal attitudes than vice versa, especially those targets who described themselves as ‘very liberal’. Liberals’ worst inaccuracies came while pretending to be conservatives responding to Care and Fairness questions. Republicans and conservatives, actually, were not the soulless, unimaginative creatures liberals assumed they were. It’s how I know I haven’t been assimilated by the Illuminazi: I still find myself dehumanizing conservatives, but more recently, more the far right. It’s an evolution of rational morality, I believe, but the work isn’t done yet until I’m dehumanizing no one. Not even people with whom I vehemently disagree on almost everything. They’re still my fellow humans and fellow Americans, or Canadians. Haidt’s journey from ‘partisan liberal’ included two turning points: Experiences in India conducting research in which he opened to the vision of broader moralities based on the ethics of community and divinity, and later by reading historian Jerry Muller’s book Conservatism. It distinguished for Haidt the difference between conservatism and orthodoxy, which relies on an external transcendent moral order on which to construct society (i.e, like religious fundamentalism or Communism). Whereas true conservatives didn’t fight Enlightenment thinking and reasoning, but functioned within its main currents. They developed a reasoned and pragmatic approach, a utilitarian critique of Enlightenment. The line that turned the liberal crank away from liberal partisanship for Haidt was this line: What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason. It led him to wonder whether perhaps conservatives did, in fact, have something to offer apart from what it seems to offer now: Science hostility, lack of concern for others and a brainless loyalty to established dogma. Maybe those were the orthodox versus conservatives. ‘The fundamental blind spot of the left’ Haidt describes what he calls moral capital in comparison with the identification of social capital which swept the social sciences field in the 1990s. Social capital described what economists had given short shrift: The norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness between individuals. “When everything is equal,” Haidt notes, “a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors,” and adds that evolutionarily, multilevel selection shaped humans to be contingent cooperators. United they stood, divided they fell. Social capital isn’t a partisan preference: Everyone recognizes the need for trustworthiness in others. But are trusting relationships enough? If you believe humans are inherently good and will do the right thing when constraints and division are removed, as liberals tend to believe, it might work. But conservatives are concerned with ‘free riders’, those that coast with others without contributing much themselves. Conservatives believe we need constraints in the form of rules, laws, legislation, traditions, and customs to preserve the health and integrity of groups, otherwise people will engage in behaviors and actions designed primarily to benefit themselves. (I believe this is what’s happening with the left’s too-easy embrace of declaring one’s self a woman, which has resulted in numerous, documented cases of sexual predators infiltrating women’s protective spaces.) Then there’s moral capital - the resources that sustain a moral community. Moral capital, he extrapolates, is the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible. This could be a religious community, a gay neighborhood, or a commune. What Haidt found in relation to communes - at least those which survive for decades, versus those that fail fairly quickly - will disturb many liberals. He found that communes valuing self-expression (liberal value) over conformity (conservative), and tolerance (liberal) over loyalty (conservative) will probably attract new members more easily, but with lower moral capital, will be less likely to endure than the commune that suppresses or regulates selfishness via conformity and loyalty. Now expand that to the social macroscosm, like a nation. This may explain why the left can’t seem to accomplish its goals as easily as the right, as exemplified by the Democrats and Republicans. The rigorous, almost militaristic conformity demanded by Republican leadership of the rest of their Congressional army is appalling to those of us with liberal mindsets, but it’s hard to argue: They get shit done. They destroyed Roe v. Wade. They effectively prevent controlling gun violence. The Democrats, meanwhile, waste time with too much emphasis on ‘rights’ for marginalized groups, including trans-activists angling for women’s rights—but for men—the least marginalized of all—claiming to be women, not actual biological women. How soon do you think the Dems will return abortion rights? I’m guessing longer than the 49 years it took to destroy them. Haidt identifies the inability of liberals to consider the effects of moral capital changes on organizations and societies as ‘the fundamental blind spot of the left’. He believes it’s why liberal reforms so often backfire and why communist revolutions pretty much always end in despotism (and, I would add, bearing a strong resemblance to fascist governments). But conservatives make moral capital mistakes too. He notes, Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. Which leads to periodic financial collapse, uprisings, rebellions, and revolutions. ‘Let them eat caviar’. (Maybe it’s time to rethink the Bible as a government tool, folks.) How might a more politically balanced society look? I have to skip an awful lot of context and background in Haidt’s work to communicate the greatest strengths of real (not extremist) liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism. Haidt’s identified strengths: Liberalism: Governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms. Haidt describes corporations as literal superorganisms; like life forms that have come to dominate their preferred niches, change their ecosystems and marginalize or eliminate their competition, so too, he says, have corporations become literal superorganisms. He notes the left utilizes the only force left to challenge the largest corporations: National governments, which can still tax, regulate, and break up corporations when they get too powerful. You won’t find many conservatives or libertarians on board with that. Some problems really can be solved by regulation Liberals correctly embrace, he says, another taboo of the social conservatives and libertarians: Regulation. Some problems really can be solved by it, he says, and argues that successful Democratic regulation to eliminate the harmful fumes emitted by leaded gasoline in the 1970s put an end to the retardation of neural development in millions of children (if you were born after 1973 you are almost certainly a few IQ points higher than your parents). Conservative Ronald Reagan tried to reverse that, of course, since corporate superorganisms complained regulation was getting in the way of what was truly important: Obscene profits. Fun fact: Gasoline suppliers could have eliminated lead in gasoline decades prior to 1973 but not doing to saved them .03/gallon. Libertarianism & Conservatism: Markets are miraculous When you don’t have to take price into account for something you consume - like healthcare - prices spiral, which is how American healthcare has come to the $629 Band-Aid. The working market beloved by libertarians is the best answer, rather a lot, Haidt points out, the way food prices and LASIK surgery function. If you think food prices are high now, be glad we don’t have ‘food insurance’ like we do health insurance. When food prices hurt us we stop buying certain types of food. I’ve stopped buying quarts of ‘egg beaters’, which have doubled in price in a year from $4 to $8/carton, which lasts about a week and a half, in favor of oatmeal, a big bag of which lasts about six weeks and also costs $8. I’ll probably never buy egg beaters again, not even at $4. And LASIK surgery, Haidt points out, isn’t covered by insurance, so competition has driven down prices around 80%. Libertarians’ love affair with ‘spontaneous order’ which happens when people can make their own choices, since they bear both the costs and benefits, is more utilitarian than the liberal response to interfere in the markets, which can cause a helluva lot of harm. (Free market healthcare won’t solve everything; we still need a pooled healthcare system, but not for absolutely everything). You can’t help the bees by destroying the hive Liberals hate exclusion, and implement a ‘big tent’ for victims of oppression and marginalization. Make no mistake; these groups, a subset of bees in the hive if you will, really do need help, but not to the extent of damaging the hive. Because here’s the problem: Political scientist Robert Putnam, co-author with David Campbell of the book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, found that being more religious made people more generous and charitable than those who didn’t customarily take part in religious services. Religious folk gave as much to secular charities as religious ones. (There’s that compassion liberals love so much! Whoda thunk it?) Putnam and Campbell found that how involved religionists were with their co-religionists supported a moral matrix that emphasized selflessness, and brought out the best in them. Haidt notes that Putnam describes diverse people, the liberal dream, as tending towards turtling, or withdrawing from their community, rather than hiving as Haidt describes it, working as a community toward the greater good, with bridging capital, which encourages trust between groups, and bonding capital, which refers to the trust within groups. Liberals stand against oppression and exclusion, and as a result push for changes that reduce group cohesiveness, traditions, institutions and moral capital. Emphasizing differences, he says, makes many people more racist, not less. [All italics mine]. In other words, liberals are trying to help a subset of bees who need help, and destroy the world in order to save it. Or the hive. Whatever. Loving Wagner, even if he was an anti-Semite And this is why I’m not worried about joining the Illuminazi, even if my remaining friends fear for my immortal soul. I don’t know why some people turn their backs on liberalism (which has plenty going for it) and run as though from a fire to hard-right conservatism (which has little to recommend it). Becoming a bit more conservative, or moving away from crazy-conservative? I understand both. Just as I prefer level-headed liberalism to ‘woke jobs’. I encourage my fellow rational-minded friends and acquaintances - regardless of political creed - to explore the ‘other sides’. Whether it’s liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism or some permutation of all, which probably most of us are— it won’t necessarily turn them into trans-flag-waving, dreadlocked, overly-inclusive Illuminazis, or red-capped xenophobic gun crazies. Walk among Them and see if they’re the evil monsters we’ve believed them to be. Never mind what they think about drag queens, gun laws or Confederate flags. As Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh encouraged, find your common ground. We all have to agree on something. Without being a big fan of Hitler, he and I would probably get along if all we talked about is the awesomeness of dogs. We could agree on composer and anti-Semite Richard Wagner, who wrote phenomenal music I can listen to without goose-stepping to the grocery store. Don’t care the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Don’t care that Jefferson’s ‘affair’ with Sally Hemings might not have been as consensual as presented in more romantic histories. It doesn’t negate his incredible, Enlightened brain, nor that of his compatriots. I respect and love their fighting spirit (in true liberal fashion) and their rebellion against oppression (along with libertarians) and the need to keep checks and balances on human affairs and government (in service to conservative values). Imperfect, slave-owning white guys uprooted Greek democracy from a plain in Athens, dusted off nearly two millennia of neglect, and brought an anti-monarchical model to the Western world, which benefits all of us today, no matter who we are. Oh, and those same slave-owning white guys were the first in thousands of years to question whether it was truly moral to own slaves, to consider abolishing the institution (eventually, with a lot of bloodshed, sweat and tears), and then pressure the rest of the world to abandon it too. (Other parts of the world were resistant, especially Africa). You’re welcome! The world isn’t pure, and no group, culture, nation, or human being is morally pure. If I look like I’ve ‘gone Republican’, it’s because some are too mired in their own constipated liberal worldview to recognize what ‘moderate liberalism’ looks like. If I look like I’m a ‘screaming wokie’ because I actually do care about lifting up still-marginalized groups, it speaks more to my critics’ moral tunnel vision than it does about me. I’m pro-religion, while recognizing that religions all must have boundaries, including those set by outsiders, since they tend to turn oppressive and imperialist if they don’t. I can safely assume ‘my side’ doesn’t have all the answers, but that it does, in fact, have some very good ones, and that means so, too, do other social/political models. What if we did what the truly orthodox despise, and pick ‘n’ choose what’s best from each, i.e., ‘salad bar’ ideology? When I walk among the ‘woke’ at Toronto’s Pride festival in a few more weeks, it will be to learn. Not to start fights, but to figure out how we can better speak with those with whom we strongly disagree (for me, it’s mostly about what I consider the negative impact of transactivism on a movement I’ve otherwise wholeheartedly supported). Maybe try out some new discussion methodologies I’ve been reading about. The Freedom Convoy has left Ottawa, so I might have to consult Twitter to find righty extremists I don’t like much. It’s a political adventure, and I will not be consumed by the Illuminazi. On either side. I promise. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

A diversity specialist challenges the 'strategic ignorance' of those who'd rather not be on the other side of 'uncomfortable conversations' for a change Pity certain poor beleaguered people of color at Uber. They didn’t like being on the other end, for a change, of ‘uncomfortable discussions’ about challenges people who aren’t them face. Uber just put their DEI leader on leave after she challenged prejudice that isn’t supposed to be on the agenda. Specifically, those who feel a little too comfortable calling white women ‘Karens’. Bo Young Lee intended her two ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ talks in Uber’s ‘Moving Forward’ diversity series to be a dialogue as part of an overall effort to promote tough, ‘uncomfortable’ conversations. “Sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing to do,” Lee said. Except, it seems, when the strategically ignorant are POC. T’other side of diversity Lee’s dual talks on the struggles of white women and the pejorative meaning of the word ‘Karen’ prompted complaints from those unwilling to give up the epithet, which led to Lee’s being put on leave while Uber revisits what exactly they mean by ‘diversity’, and whether this actually includes ‘everyone’. I’m not sure why ‘Karen’ prejudice required two talks, but then I’m not sure why any ‘diversity talk’ including everybody, requires more than, say, two hours, tops. I’m also not clear on why DEI takes up so much corporate time. Isn’t everyone there to do their job and grow the company? Can’t a DEI workshop cover how to treat your fellow employees with decency and respect, without these ugly words, or those awful jokes, and try not to touch your fellow employees’ private parts even if they’re not in your chain of command? An extra-lengthy ‘diversity talk’ series sounds more like social engineering than driving revenue. Is that in all Uber job descriptions? DEI initiatives don’t have to be the woke nightmare the Ron DeSantis types think they are, and it’s laudable the corporate world is finally addressing some much-needed changes in how we interact and engage with each other. But some don’t understand it must include everyone. Sometimes the best lead developer in the IT department is a Marjorie Taylor Greene fanboy and and the candidate hired to be the controller had the best damn accounting skills the recruitment team had ever seen, and she is a black woman who would marry Ibram X. Kendi if she could. These two have got to get along with other associates who may not share their personal points of view. The rest of us, meanwhile, want to do our jobs and treat our co-workers as best we can without being, as one of the two interviewed ‘offended’ Uber POC female employees complained, feeling ‘lectured’ to. Well, welcome to the wonderful world of white people, non-white people. Because we are lectured constantly about race, and most often by people who would rather never challenge their own imperfect views on the subject. Lee’s talks were meant to explore the derogatory meaning behind the ‘Karen’ label and white women’s own challenges. It seems certain POC’s narcissistic prejudice renders them uninterested in hearing about any challenge that isn’t their own. La la la I can’t hear you! “While it was meant to be a dialogue, it’s obvious that those who attended did not feel heard,” said Uber. True, but that wouldn’t be the complainers. The pushback came from them, not white women, who might be the ones who privately requested a ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ discussion. It sounds like it might be in particular need at Uber, since certain POC objected to being called out on it. “I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting," one person complained. An unwillingness to move outside one’s own comfort zone and consider other people’s experiences is a hallmark of prejudice and bigotry, and when unchecked and unchallenged, makes one part of the problem rather than the solution. “I got mine, get yours!” Everyone has a perspective and experience others don’t understand. Including white people. Including men. Including white men. Advantaged groups’ stories may be different, but their stories, experiences and challenges are real. And others need to listen, because no one is immune from our unfortunate tribalist tendencies. No one can truly experience how others feel, but they can certainly open their minds to new information, however uncomfortable, if they’re serious about forging a more equitable world. They can’t demand from others what they won’t offer themselves. I honestly believe it’s gotta be much easier, and far less challenging, to go through life as a bigoted asshole. As Richard Pryor famously quipped back in the ‘70s, “I got mine! Get yours!” Okay, he was talking about female orgasms, but the line stuck with me because it sounded like a subtle, broader description of human selfishness. When you’re a selfish, bigoted, ignorant asshole, life is a lot simpler. It’s all about you, you, you. You never have to think about others. If you actually care about other human beings, and not just your own tribe, life is a lot more complicated. If you know you have certain unfair advantages in a world of human constructs that value others more for their skin color, genitals or how many zeroes their family’s net worth contains, and you recognize it’s unfair, thank you for rejecting, as Socrates famously noted, the unexamined life. If you believe, as the United Negro College Fund once informed us, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” and the lion’s share of your respect for your fellow humans goes to those with the greatest minds, then it will genuinely bother you if you see promising brains in the ‘wrong’ packaging held back, and wonder how much greater we’d all be if everyone was allowed to achieve their fullest human potential. This is especially pronounced if you are, like white women and black men, members of both an advantaged and disadvantaged group. As a white woman who’s striven her whole life not to be a bigoted asshole (thanks, Mom & Dad!), I can relate to the struggles of black people who were kept out of higher education, just as women have, who were enslaved, just as women have been and still are in many parts of the world, who were told they were ‘not good enough’, informed they were inferior because the Bible or some other holy writ says so, who were in many times and places legally permitted to be victimized, raped, tortured, and murdered on the whims of the dominant ruling biota because, well, just because. I get mad, I admit, at sexist black men. Don’t they understand how similar our struggles against prejudice are? Similar doesn’t mean ‘the same’. In addition to sexist black people, I also can’t stand racist women (all flavors). Don’t they understand etc.? It’s kinship with people who are not like us, but the difference only by a very tiny fraction. We are still 99% DNA-sharing human beings. Biology shouldn’t matter, and while it may have been to our evolutionary advantage to be deeply suspicious about members of another ‘tribe’ (Are they hostile? Friendly? Do they like Coors beer or avocado toast?), but it does matter to us, deeply, and we need to challenge that. We have been disabused of our stupidest assumptions by now. Women are, in fact, smart enough to be educated in the highest institutions of learning. So are black people. The fact that the antebellum South prohibited, at one time, teaching slaves ‘because they were too stupid for it’ tacitly acknowledged that slaves were not, in fact, too stupid to educate, in fact Southern whites were terrified they weren’t, which is why they needed a law to prohibit educating them, but not, say, livestock. Biological discrimination today is bigotry, plain and simple. Which brings us back to our diversity-resistant sisters at Uber. ‘Wokeness’ has created a certain artificial privilege among traditionally marginalized people who think not being members of a dominant group gives them carte blanche (ar ar) to ignore the ‘lived experiences’ of dominant groups. They’re not interested in the struggles of white women because, well, what can they possibly have to struggle against? When you can call the police on a black bird watcher in a park and try to get him killed, you’ve got all the power, Karen! (Here’s a more nuanced take on L’Affaire Cooper vs Cooper in Central Park a few years ago.) Uber’s prejudiced POC need to consult an otologist about their ‘tone deafness’. What they’re missing, from a Karen named Nicole We Level Left and Rational Right white people understand that in some respects, we are more privileged than thou. We didn’t make the rules, but there they are. We acknowledge we have ‘white privilege’, and it’s hard to see when you’ve got it. Rather like ‘male privilege’. Many men today still don’t get why women have to be much more vigilant than they. Lotta crazies out there. Some attempt to make us feel like we’re all personally responsible for all the sins of the world, especially slavery, which I guess we invented in 1619. Everything wrong with their lives? It’s all our fault, racism and slavery legacy and stuff. Not, say, taking more responsibility for your life, like successful black immigrants from the West Indies, also with a slavery legacy, have done. Melanin-deficient skin is our ‘original sin’ and we’re whitewashed as racial supremacists no matter what we do. I sympathize with men demonized for everything wrong with the world. Not every man is Andrew Tate or Brett Kavanaugh. Male fellow brain-lovers, like cerebral white women, genuinely sympathize with the less advantaged and want to help us achieve all we can. I met a friend at Starbucks recently who wanted to pick my brain about how to better market her company’s women’s empowerment services—leadership training, at enterprise-level companies. Male executives want to train female associates they think possess real leadership qualities but they can’t get them on board. Their potential female leaders won’t sign up because they don’t feel good enough. Don’t feel qualified. And who would ever listen to them, let alone follow them? Who needs ‘patriarchy’ when we’ve got ourselves to hold ourselves back? I ask seriously: Consider what empathetic white folks face. Just for a second. We strive to be better humans. But for some non-whites, it’s never good enough. It’s emotionally draining and often turns us away from the people we want to help. Stop making it so hard! The POC at Uber who complained about ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ slap the faces of the people who do have a little more power and can help them if they’d stop being such, well, frankly, bigoted assholes. Unchallenged prejudice makes it harder to get along and work with people who you think—and at Uber, have demonstrated—don’t like you for superficial, biological reasons and unexplored assumptions. What if, instead of trying to re-engineer society for the endlessly aggrieved, diversity initiatives addressed how employees can first attempt to handle conflict personally and responsibly with another rather than running to HR like an eight-year-old. ‘Microaggressions’ are pretty minor, and employees can be taught how to maturely and responsibly approach someone with a grievance, and how to maturely and responsibly handle that grievance if approached. The biggest challenge good-faith white people face is tone-deaf POC who look first for the evil in others and the good—well, maybe never. Who hand out pejorative labels like the CEO hands out branded T-shirts at the town hall meeting, and no one wants to wear those either. Who endlessly demonstrate their own privilege with constant complaints and refuse to consider whether they themselves are the reason no one wants to work with them, rather than their birth biology. One’s privilege is expressed in how much power one has, and if they can successfully turn their ears off for a ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ talk and get the diversity specialist who was doing her damn job put on leave, then maybe they’re not as ‘marginalized’ as advertised. Uber has faced many workplace challenges in the past several years including allegations of a toxic hyper-masculine environment. Now they’re challenged by diversity resisters somewhat less pale-faced than the norm. We’ll see if Uber has the balls—and the labia—to bring their diversity specialist back and continue her work challenging ‘strategic ignorance’ for all. Because a half-assed DEI strategy that foments understandable resentment in the targets of ignored bigotry is worse than nothing. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

True progressives still value rationalism, objective truth and free thought. The Regressives subtly reject all. And universal human rights. In the days after 9/11, my Internet friend Kris emailed me a petition protesting the forthcoming attack on Afghanistan. We’d become friends via my Ohio old boyfriend by email, which is where social justice lived before social media. We were all pretty firmly liberal. I responded, “Thanks for sending, this, Kris, but I’m sorry, I can’t sign it. I support going into Afghanistan. They attacked us.” I detailed why, comparing past American conflicts justified and not, and made it clear I held no loyalty to George Bush. In a nutshell: We were attacked by an enemy on Afghan soil, sheltered by religious fanatics who’d been warned by the previous President they were through if their leader attacked us on our own soil. I knew this didn’t bode well for the Afghan people but we had to stand up to religious terrorists. I hoped she’d understand, I said. She responded with a lovely email. She was disappointed I wouldn’t sign but understood why, and it was okay. It was a wonderfully mature response, less remarkable in an era of relative political civility we didn’t know had died the previous Tuesday. Last year, I posted my blog article on Facebook: We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism? Ironically, it was one of the few in which I toned down my customary snark about transgenderism. I wrote with deep sincerity. I believe transgenderism can be a force for good (although it’s wobbling along the way) and that transracialism is no different, and could also be a force for better understanding our biological differences by walking, not in others’ shoes, but inside their skin. Kris immediately labeled it ‘transphobic’. I immediately noted she didn’t know what ‘phobic’ meant since I wasn’t afraid of transfolk. She described the ‘gender blackface’ comparison as ‘hateful’. We went back and forth and I asked if she’d read the entire article. I can be a snarky bitch but I’d thought I did a good job of laying out my case for both transgenderism and transracialism, even though it hardly adhered to the hairy ass-kissing expected of Good Liberals when writing about the former. I knew this would end with her defriending me, but I’ve long since grown used to it. America Be Crazy. I’ve had a few lifelong lefty friends go super-Trumpy and others super-woke. When that happens, I’m either too screamingly liberal for the Trumpers or too screamingly right-wing for the pronouns ‘n’ Black Lives Matter set. I seek people who prefer a more moderate political approach, whether on the left or right, and Kris had been assimilated by the WokeBorg (“Resistance is useless. Or you will be deplatformed.”). I compared her, quite seriously, to the religious fundamentalists we (we’re both Pagans) loved to make fun of when we were younger, those dogmatic sheeple imprisoned by a mind-stunting, misogynist, arrogant, homophobic, anti-scientific holier-than-thou culty shade of Christianity. I reminded her of her greater tolerance for a political disagreement a few decades prior. “What happened to you?” I asked. “When did you stop listening to others, and got so self-righteous, exactly like the Bible-thumpers who infest Ohio and other red states?” She defriended me a few exchanges later. Go, Kris, in perfect love and perfect trust, as we say in Paganism. My door is always open to you. This is what ‘woke’ has become—a mere pretension of social justice (which it once genuinely was), now a mind-stunting, misogynist, arrogant, homophobic, anti-scientific holier-than-thou culty shade of so-called progressive liberalism. This is what happens when ideology overwhelms critical thinking, slowly assuming a mantle of purity and self-righteousness and smugly focusing only on what the other side does or believes wrong, rather than asking what your side gets wrong too. The true social justice warrior remains forever vigilant about its own Shadow. Related: The Return of the Anti-Enlightenment (Cato Institute) The ‘woke’ are neither progressive, nor liberal. They’re the ones we once derided as the ‘Regressive Left’, or as the right taunted them, the ‘Loony Left’. I came to realize that I had not, in fact, given up on liberalism. It was other liberals who had. Liberalism, the Enlightenment and the Regressive Left Modern 20th-century liberalism adheres to rational, analytical, evidence-based principles of the late eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers and philosophes—social critics—boldly challenged the dogmas of their day, embodied mostly in government and religious institutions deeply entwined with each other. It’s always dangerous to speak truth to power; it landed Voltaire in the Bastille for awhile, and he tempered his snark against the royalty after that. Philosophes questioned God’s involvement in humanity’s everyday lives, and lauded reason as the methodology to discover truth, rather than accepting dogmatic ‘revealed wisdom’ such as Scripture. They believed ideas and claims should be tested with rational analysis. They advocated religious tolerance, free thought, and liberty to live one’s life as one chooses (with the usual legal limits, of course). Question everything, they taught. Accept nothing at face value. Philosophes were social heretics. Learning about them in university formed my budding liberal leanings as I embraced its anti-authoritarianism and commitment to free thought, free speech, the right to criticize, discuss and debate. I fell in love with Voltaire. My then-boyfriend (the one who later introduced me to Kris) was a graphic artist who gave me a lovely Valentine’s Day card. Kris and I developed a friendship over the decades, not close or personal but an easy communication between two people dreaming of a better world. We connected on Facebook but when I began writing novels and blogging, I cut down on social media. While I was tapping away, Kris followed the Progressive Liberal primrose path too far. I moved a little to the right myself, but stopped closer to the center. Or did I? It’s possible I haven’t moved, that liberal extremism pulled farther, leaving us remaining progressives closer to the center. We were close enough to wave, exchange pleasantries and chat with the folks on the other side of center, who turned out to be not all that crazy. Just like us. Who’da thunk it? Human rights are only for Westerners The Regressive Left’s liberals hold views and actions in direct contrast to liberal principles, partly in the name of ‘inclusivity’ and partly out of Western guilt for various oppressions, aggressions, and moral outrages committed against other nations, people and cultures. Points taken—we’re all familiar with the bloody history of Western culture—but some liberals lose their moral compass when they stop believing there are, or should be, certain universal human rights. Like the right to not be murdered, tortured, enslaved, sexually assaulted, beaten, or mutilated. On more positive notes, liberal principles embrace the right to enough healthy food, clean water, decent sanitation, healthcare, and basic freedoms to live one’s own life without impinging on others. Their compassionate hearts are in the right place but it’s an idiot compassion - not doing what’s best for others out of deference to your own feelings. When feelings supplant rational analysis, it becomes possible to ignore human rights violations so as not to deal with the cognitive dissonance of thinking, Well, here we go again imposing out arrogant moral absolutes on others. Except maybe we should impose our moral values on others, as others have done unto us. Especially if we wouldn’t tolerate in our own culture what we see in others. The U.S., for twenty years, put an end to Taliban outrages against women. Europe pressured the U.S. and Australia to abolish slavery. The British put an end to Indian suttee. If it’s not okay to burn our own widows, it’s not okay for other cultures. I noticed what would one day come to be the moment liberalism really split on human rights—one side hewing to the Enlightenment principle of universalism - ‘what’s good for one is good for all’ versus a sort of Orwellian ‘All people are equal, but some are more equal than others,’ view—or, the so-called ‘marginalized’ are more equal than ‘identities’ with more power. I, who had vehemently criticized, dissected, and challenged the Christian Right for nearly two decades in the U.S., suffered an attack on my country by foreign fundamentalist fanatics who greatly resembled the Christian fanatics in my own country, corralled by the U.S. Constitution. It wasn’t a hard call to make, I thought, to hit back hard and show foreign terrorists you can’t attack us on our own soil. I recognized and sympathized with the reasons why some in the Muslim world were so mad at us, but pointed out their own stained history into modernity. While Islamophobia and Islamo-hatred blanketed Red State America, liberals who hewed to white, Western guilt refused to condemn Islamic violence and attacked liberals who did. Far-right commentators like Ann Coulter correctly observed the Regressives were ‘Blame America Firsters.’ In retrospect, I glimpsed a sign of Kris’s Regressive Left vulnerability. She primarily blamed America, as many others did, for this error or that oppression, for Western colonialism and imperialism, ignoring or perhaps ignorant of the pretty nearly-identical guilt of the Islamic Empire in this regard. At least, I pointed out, Jesus was a peacemaker who never killed a man; the Prophet was a warlord. An enlightened, spiritually advanced person, for sure, but still, a fallible human being who ended many others’ lives prematurely. After 9/11, some progressivism backtracked on human rights for others, refusing to tolerate any criticism of an obviously flawed foreign religion that was 600 years behind Christianity, which had reformed and rehabilitated itself rather a lot since the Enlightenment. The Regressive Left pretended that never happened. They commonly asserted, “Things haven’t changed at all,” or “Things are worse than they’ve ever been,” and refused to acknowledge how much genuine progress we’ve made. Regressives rejected objective truth for flawed subjectivism. They came to enshrine highly unreliable ‘lived experience’ as the primary ‘evidence’ for opinions and hot-takes they mistook for confirmed facts, like that ‘white supremacy is baked into everything’, or that identifying you as the opposite sex makes it so. They automatically discounted any idea originating in a brain under a white skin, and cast the Enlightenment thinkers including America’s Founding Fathers into the furnace. They ‘canceled’ and de-platformed people on social media for demanding evidence for their claims instead of uncritically accepting their tweet-drops of wisdumb. It was the same dogmatic, authoritarian, we-know-better-than-thou arrogance of the Christian right that I grew up alongside, even if I wasn’t within it myself. And they greatly resembled that remark. The ‘common liberals’, I’ve found, haven’t died or joined the Pod People. The Regressive Left have always been with us, but until the rise of social media they never had the numbers or power to be anything more than our embarrassing fringie children living in the basement fantasizing that trans-flagging their Facebook profile constitutes real social justice work. How large, exactly, is the Woke Army? You might be surprised. A More In Common research project studied the ‘Hidden Tribes’ of America’s political (or non-) masses and compiled a fascinating, highly readable report dividing us into seven ‘tribes’ and exploring which core principles drive each. Turns out the extremes - the ‘Progressive Activists’ (the woke) and the ‘Devoted Conservatives’ (MAGA types) are only a fraction of American political thought. But like dogs, the littlest tribes make the most noise. Their numbers? 8%. Combined. The anti-liberal liberals ‘Illiberalism’, the direct opposite of liberalism, doesn’t refer to partisan labels, but instead to the principles of ‘Classical Liberalism’, which sound interestingly like a mix of both liberal and conservative thought today. According to an article on ThoughtCo, it’s “a political ideology that favors the protection of individual liberty and economic freedom by limiting government power.” Brittanica defines modern liberalism as “political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.” Liberal extremism ends in Communism, an authoritarian ideology the left has flirted with for a very long time. The Boomers fetishized the brutal Cuban dictator Fidel Castro along with Argentina’s revolutionary Che Guevara, remembered by those who fought with him as ruthless and brutal, executing anyone he suspected of being an informer, deserter or spy. One historian described him as having a ‘remarkable detachment to violence’, noting how Che spoke of one such execution: ‘…so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe].” The authoritarian streak the woke claim to loathe in the right manifests in their demonstrated hostility to free speech or honest critique and debate, and their willingness shut down any challenge to their power, on social media, just as their Communist forebearers did with guns. Each side of the political divide deludes itself with self-aggrandizing fantasies about how we support life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while they hate America and everything it stands for. They’re both a little right, and a lot wrong, and most of us, according to Hidden Tribes, are with neither. And we’re sick of them both. It’s time for those of us on the Level Left and the Rational Right to stop being the Silent Majority, talk to each other, and devise how we can work together for some common causes, compromise on others, and reign in our respective extremists. It’s time for both sides to draw boundaries - the woke for whom inclusivity knows no bounds, and for MAGAs for whom there’s no limits to their ‘freedoms’ and ‘rights’ - including shooting people who annoy them. Most of all, we need to reclaim ‘progressive’ from those who are regressive, and ‘conservative’ from those who aren’t. We need to speak out loud and clear on social media, where both sets of crazies live. Remember: We are the 92%. We can outshout them. We have to reclaim our political power. We have to draw the boundaries our crazies won’t. Because authoritarianism never ends well no matter who’s in charge, and I don’t want to live under either. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

They feel powerful enough to pressure libraries to censor books they don't like. Maybe they no longer need our support. A Whitehorse library in Canada found itself targeted by social media in April, drawing the attention of a ‘concerned’ legislator about the ‘blatantly transphobic’ ‘staff pick’ book by Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. The typical Twitstorm pile-on caught the attention of Lane Tredger, the first openly non-binary MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) in the Yukon Territory. They called it ‘a really hateful book’. I haven’t read Irreversible Damage myself, but when the alpha-gang calls something ‘transphobic’ and ‘hateful’ it almost certainly means, ‘We have no logical, evidence-based response, and we can only allege fake damage.’ I’m not sure whether Tredger has read the book either. The gender-critical Irreversible Damage is one of those hot-button books that drives the queer community insane. It’s not without its problems; it was published by a conservative outfit and the clickbait title doesn’t help. Shrier defends her book, claiming it’s been ‘misconstrued’. Also, some respectable sources have taken issue with the accuracy of the science presented. There’s so much that’s reprehensible about this kerfuffle, so let’s start with Tredger’s contradictory statement about their intentions: “My personal opinion is that I don't think we should ban books but I do think for me, the line is when we start promoting them." This is how censorship, banning and authoritarianism begin: With the contradictory conjunction ‘but’. ‘Re-education’ for libraries The Yukon public libraries director, Melissa Yu Schott, has launched the requisite reconsideration-of-materials process to address the concerns. "I love the library so much — I think it's such an important space that's so welcoming, so it was pretty blindsiding to see that really hateful book be promoted there," Tredger commented. What’s ‘hateful’ for LGBTQ today is any discussion, however reasonable, questioning ideological gender claims. Thou shalt not analyze and critique their narratives. Ever. The Media Is Spreading Bad Trans Science (Unherd) Ledger cited how ‘pretty upset’ and ‘pretty concerned’ the usual Last Words on intellectual policy were—the customary culprits on social media. Yu Schott notes that they, like most libraries, strive to provide a wide, divergent range of views on many topics, controversial or otherwise, and notes it doesn’t connote a library endorsement of the topic. Tredger says they want library picks to be ‘in line’ with the library’s values. Which they are. So they don’t, really. Queer Yukon has offered ‘inclusivity training’ for the library staff. The library reached out to them for help in addressing this issue, and if they’ve reached out to an alternative organization for a differing opinion, say to a gender-critical or an unbiased science group, the CBC article doesn’t mention it. It demonstrates the customary lack of questioning that has come to infect the so-called responsible news media on this side of the border, too. The Queer Yukon executive director emphasized the importance of ‘inclusivity’ training, and the CBC never asks the larger question: How can they claim ‘inclusivity’ when they want a book excluded from ‘staff picks’? Someone clearly thought it was worth recommending. It’s not censorship, but one gets the distinct feeling Tredger and Queer Yukon would be much happier if the book wasn’t offered at all. The optics might be bad at the moment if they outright asked them to remove the book from circulation. That would make them look like ‘censors’. Or even worse, right-wing. As if these people were any different from the conservative Nanny State. ‘Inclusivity training’ smacks of Maoist and Vietnamese re-education camps of yore. Communism contains several similarities to fascism. Tredger wants to ensure ‘this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.” What ‘sort of thing’, exactly? An alternative opinion that may not be perfectly in-line with science, rather a lot like numerous queer community narratives and claims? I’d bet the Yukon library system contains far less scientific books no one ever complains about, like Erich Von Daniken’s ‘Chariots of the Gods’ nonsense from the ‘70s or The Celestine Prophecy. What Tredger disputes is the library’s right to promote books with divergent views the queer community dislikes. What they object to is an opinion not their own, because they are, at heart, like their right-wing adversaries, ideological fundamentalists with unquestioned faith in their own immutable dogma. The most disgusting comment Tredger made was when they rehashed the nonsense about how books like this are ‘getting people killed’. This is a bald-faced alpha-gang lie. If gender-critical books resulted in murders as much as they claim there would literally (they love that word!) be no trans or non-binary people left. This is the queer community’s excuse for censoring, banning, or prohibiting free speech or free thought: This is getting people killed. Evidence-based statistics, please? Because the numbers I’ve found indicate that transpeople are getting murdered, but according to the Human Rights Campaign it amounts to less than fifty every year. That’s one-quarter of the number of women killed in Canada in 2022 (a new high). And not one of the transmurders, to my knowledge, is attributed to the perpetrator reading a book, watching a documentary or listening to a gender-critical panel discussion. In fact, it’s questionable how many transpeople killers read books. If males are responsible for most violent acts globally, every single year, and certainly against transfolk, let’s remember males are historically less inclined toward book-reading than females. No murder is ever acceptable. Everyone has the right to live violence-free. Any trans murder is one too many. But zero evidence of content-influenced transperson murder refutes the queerists’ claims that books like Shrier’s, however scientifically unbalanced or poorly argued, are getting people killed. In fact, the most common way to get trans-murdered is the same as becoming the victim of female homicide: Via a male domestic partner. Or the unfortunately legal ‘transpanic defense’ when a date discovers he’s just had sexual contact with a transwoman. The blatant myth that gender-critical content is ‘getting people killed’ or worse, ‘literally’ killing transpeople, is a fallacy we need to challenge publicly. Murder, gender-based or not, is always appalling and transpeoples’ lives are every bit as valuable as anyone else’s. But it never helps to inflate the numbers and use it as an excuse to shut down free speech for one’s own ugly anti-intellectual agenda. Ledger claimed books like Shrier’s were getting people ‘banned from public spaces and denying them healthcare’. There’s a little truth to that, but hardly the whole truth. Gender-critical content may harden peoples’ hearts toward trans rights but it also delineates just how far they should go. As far as I know, no one is saying transfolk have no right to visit libraries, supermarkets, town halls, or public events. In fact, the only places where they get appreciable pushback is in public-private places like bathrooms and changing rooms. It’s true that many would deny them certain types of healthcare, but mostly ‘gender-affirming’ care, especially for kids. Talk about bad science! You won’t see Queer Yukon complaining about pro-‘gender-affirming’ staff picks. It’s a little more concerning that the right is now using it as a slippery slope to deny affirmative treatment to adults. Legal adults have the right to make their own decisions about their bodies. Transfolk still get rushed to the emergency room if they suffer a heart attack, and in fact, they may deny themselves proper healthcare if they’re not honest with medical professionals about their birth sex. Because female bodies differ from male bodies, even after years of gender-affirming care. The wrong treatment could kill the patient. The brave little libraries who waved bye-bye While Queer Yukon takes baby steps toward intellectual dictatorship with a Maoist-reminiscent re-education camp up in caribou country, Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver libraries showed more balls and labia than, so far, has the Whitehorse Public Library. A few years ago, Halifax and Ottawa waved au revoir to their respective local Pride organizations after they refused the outright book bans Pride demanded, while the Vancouver Public Libraries did so after they refused to de-platform a gender-critical feminist who gave a public talk at the library. In 2021, parents of alleged ‘trans’ kids and activists pressured Halifax Public Libraries to remove the Shrier book, with the usual bold lies they weren’t ‘censoring’. A trans intern at one of the libraries issued the usual contradictory pr-censorship statement denying it, claiming they and other activists aren’t trying to censor books ‘broadly’, but they didn’t want it in the library’s collection. Translation: “Look, I’m only trying to censor books narrowly . For now.” Another activist offered the typically tortured view that asking the book to be removed from the library system doesn’t constitute censorship, that it “isn’t stopping [Shrier] from selling her book or publishing her book…” Like maybe on Amazon, where LGBTQ censors were unsuccessful in getting it removed? The parents and activists offered the same old tired bullshit about how it was getting people killed, and not supporting trans kids. The aforementioned trans-nutzi intern, demonstrating breathtaking ignorance and disavowal of democratic free speech, not to mention the foundational principles upon which North American libraries are built, claimed, “ BUT [emphasis mine] libraries can’t take a neutral stance, because taking a neutral stance means you are siding with the oppressors. If the library is safe for transphobia, it’s not safe for trans people. Full stop. And I don’t believe it violates the mandate of free speech for libraries to pick and choose” their content. This is EXACTLY what libraries are supposed to do, as defined by their own charters and the Canadian Federation of Library Association’s statement on intellectual freedoms. Instead, we get the self-appointed arbiter of appropriate content, a kid in their twenties who thinks they know better than the rest of us what we should be allowed to read, and who seems to think books they disagree with are going to jump off the shelves and beat trans people senseless. Shortly after, Halifax Pride censors severed ties with their libraries when they flat-out refused to remove Shrier’s book, which over twenty people were on the waiting list to borrow. Halifax libraries didn’t participate in the 2021 Pride festival, and their rooms no longer rented by Pride members until and unless they changed their policy on how to review and determine books for circulation. The Ottawa public library system also bid their Pride organization So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. They refused to remove Shrier’s book from circulation upon the trans-dicktators’ demand. A little earlier, on t’other side of the country…. The Vancouver Public Library joined several other city-wide organizations banned from the Pride Festival in 2019 when they refused calls to deplatform Canadian gender-critical feminist Meghan Murphy , who made headlines the year prior by getting banned from pre-Musk Twitter for challenging transwomen. "During this event, five speakers asserted that trans women are not women and should not be treated as women," stated Vancouver Pride, accurately. Murphy has been highly critical of both transwomen and the sex worker trade, but they’re still opinions , and hardly qualify as ‘hate speech’, which in the olden days not so long ago required actual threats or encouragement to act violently against other groups of people, rather than simply disagreeing with their self-image. Pride met with the library but claimed their concerns about Murphy and other prominent feminist speakers were ‘not addressed’, meaning their calls for censorship were rejected. The library noted they consulted lawyers which determined the library was not in violation of the B.C. Human Rights Code before holding the event. Vancouver Pride had nothing to stand on, so they withdrew support of the library. They banned the Vancouver Police in 2018 over concerns from Black Lives Matter and other groups who felt ‘unsafe’ around them, as Toronto Pride did a few years ago as well. If Pride doesn’t stop banning groups who don’t uncritically do what they’re told, perhaps there will be no more Pride festivals, or their parades will last about five minutes. Do Canadian Pride orgs really need our support anymore? Trumpery seemed to have arrived in Canada early last year when the so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’ effectively shut down Ottawa for several weeks. Canadians looked nervously at each other as truckers arrived to shut down debate, carting with them all the usual symbols of real hate speech: Confederate flags, Nazi swag, and threatening toxic male swagger. But it’s much harder to identify the enemy from within. The LGBTQ movement has begun turning its back on the principles of democracy, on both sides of the border, and also in Europe. Transactivists, mostly biological men, routinely assault feminists like Kelly-Jay Keen who speak out against what they see as an attack on women’s rights by the oppressor class dressing as women. Barring or severing ties with libraries, when they’re doing their damn jobs providing alternative opinions, helping visitors determine what to think about, rather than what to think as the Pride organizations prefer, is the very definition of authoritarianism and aspiring dictatorship. I won’t call it ‘fascism’, yet. I’m striving to be more concise in my speech, to not use and abuse emotionally-laden verbiage as we all are inclined to do, but Pride groups’ actions toward Canada’s bastions of free thought bear some resemblance to what we’ve seen from Nazi Germany and other fascist dictatorships. Including Communism. Like that if you repeat a lie often enough eventually it will be believed, as has happened with the statistically bankrupt claims that consuming certain ‘dangerous’ content inclines people to violence. That’s not a completely false claim - history documents the Bible and the Koran guilty as charged - but it doesn’t apply to probably 99% of everything that’s ever been published, that wasn’t specifically designed to incite hatred and violence. Exceptions: Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Anarchist Cookbook. The anti-democratic attack on libraries by the woke in North America demonstrates the alpha-gang are today somewhat less marginalized than advertised, when they boldly attack free thought and appoint themselves our intellectual masters. They want one viewpoint promoted and circulated, and one viewpoint only: An uncritical submissive acceptance of gender ideology, unchallenged by any critical analysis and untainted by rational thought. These same people would lose their rainbow minds if library systems bowed to the other side’s demands to promote only conservative, Christian-centered views on gender ideology. Pride groups have every right to prohibit others from marching in their parades. Perhaps pro-democracy groups who still respect democratic Canadian values can proactively withdraw support in service to rational thought. It's clear that Pride isn’t much marginalized anymore, and no longer needs us. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

As a former belly dancer who taught a few children myself, I don't think I sexualized anybody. Even though a few parents worried about me. “What the hell is going on? How can they allow something like this? How is this appropriate for children?” Le monsieur raged at strangers at a downtown family festival, watching local performers, and for God’s sakes, what were the festival organizers thinking? How could they allow a belly dancer to perform? On stage? In front of children? Claire, the local costume-delivery florist responsible for this outrage, was well-familiar with the town’s outspoken uptight, conservative. She watched as Claude-Michel made his way through the crowd, demanding of various onlookers how outrageous was this, right here in downtown Torrington? “Oh my God!” she said to her husband. “Look! Claude-Michel is heading RIGHT FOR NICOLE’S PARENTS!” Mom says Claude-Michel spouted off to her and Dad, upon which Mom snapped, “That’s my daughter up there!” with the sort of look she customarily reserved for my brother and I growing up when we’d pulled some Really Serious Shit, Prepare Your Will Now. Dad, perceiving the accent, answered in French, explaining that yes, that was his daughter, and they were just fine with me. By the time I was done the stage was ringed with mostly wide-eyed little girls who didn’t gave a rat’s patoot about Claude-Michel. “You know what?” Mom told me later. “For the next month there won’t be a single bedsheet or spare towel safe in this town from aspiring belly dancers!” We’re subversive! Children were always my best audience. Belly dancers are bright, flashy, and ridiculously girly. The art form is a celebration of being a woman. So I understand why children are drawn to over-the-top drag queens. Hey, drag queens wear more clothes than I did and I didn’t think I was harmful to children. I hoped to teach young girls and women to be proud, develop confidence, celebrate their womanhood and their inherent beauty. Drag-positive parents say events like Drag Story Hour teach their kids who may be consciously gay, or otherwise trying to figure themselves out, that they’re not alone—and it’s okay to not conform to gender stereotypes. Anything that dismantles toxic masculinity/toxic femininity is fine with me. My gay friends have spoken about how difficult it was growing up fancying the ‘wrong’ gender, with sex ed classes and discussions oriented around heterosexuality, where one dared not go Oscar Wilde in class. Diaries of a Middle School Eunuch - Anthony Eichenberger, Medium But what about ‘kiddie’ drag shows? Is that where we draw the line? As a former belly dancer and, as far as I know, not a corrupter of children, I think there’s a happy medium. Somewhere. Out of the cabaret, into the library I remember a belly dancer at my brother’s elementary school talent show. She was probably eight or nine. I don’t know if her mother danced but I know their daughters often follow in momma’s bare feet. I had a pre-teen belly dancer in my own class and later a high school girl, both with their parents’ permission. I was respectful, if disappointed, of parents who hustled their children out of the room when I arrived at a party to embarrass some 40-year-old birthday boy with a ‘bellygram’. Hey, it was their parents’ call. Is there a problem with drag shows? Are kids being ‘groomed’ for pedophiles? And what about kid drag performers? In the right environment, and tailored for children or young people, they can be honest, good clean fun. Just like belly dancers. When Claire booked my events she made it clear I offered a family-friendly performance. I bristled when asked, “Do you strip?” No. Never. Belly dancers don’t strip, strippers strip. I can’t swear there aren’t strippers dressed as belly dancers, but it wasn’t me or anyone of my friends. But. While the far right has been obsessed with pedophilia for decades, many of us on the Level Left and Rational Right have this nagging, persistent feeling there’s more to drag shows, however child-appropriate, than its proponents let on. We detect the unpleasant whiff, less of pedophilia but of genderfluid recruitment, already in full swing targeting children. Are drag queens an adjunct to the movement’s clear agenda to push gender questioning on young children? Given the optics surrounding drag queens, homosexuality, and the mostly unfair connection the right has drawn to pedophilia (we’ll get to that shortly), I suggest the drag community could help by reacting less defensively and addressing these real concerns for parents who want to support their emerging-whatever kid, but don’t want her or him to be encouraged to think they should be unhappy in their birth body, that they should be the opposite gender, and that it should start now. Even worse, possibly have the idea planted in their heads that they’ll be suicidal if they don’t ‘fix’ this, since trans-activists won’t stop pushing the long-debunked claim that post-transitioners are less suicidal. We know that 80% of kids outgrow their gender dysphoria, which is sometimes confused with mental illness. Gender dysphoria, often accompanied by depression, anxiety or agitation itself isn’t a mental illness, but how a person feels. It can be a passing phase, or it can be more persistent, when medical intervention may become necessary. Many of us critics are quite suspicious of this newly-manufactured body dysmorphia. Kids functioned just fine as little as twenty years ago in their birth bodies before Queer Theory gender obsessives taught them to worry they were born in the wrong body, just in case they didn’t already feel fat, ugly, unmanly or weird-looking enough. If 80% of gender-dysphoric kids outgrow it, then instead of immediate medical intervention, an alternative is allowing them to present, dress, act, dance, and live as they want, going through all the phases of discovering themselves we all must go through as their pubertal bodies undergo absolutely natural, universally-shared changes. I wonder how many parents would welcome drag shows and drag queens if they were assured their kids wouldn’t get encouraged towards medical treatments their parents don’t think they need, because they’re okay with having a gay kid, as long as s/he’s happy. Maybe they’re more amenable to supporting a trans child once they’re old enough and haven’t outgrown it. Is going through puberty really all that terrible for the genuine trans? Every transsexual since Christine Jorgenson did it, until about 10-12 years ago. Many later-breaking transfolk had kids before they transitioned, which today’s trans kids may not be able to do, long before they’re old enough to know whether they want children or not. I think especially of young girls and women who think they don’t want children, until the biological clock starts ticking at 28-30 and they change their minds. There are no backsies if today’s treatments ruin fertility at puberty. Jazz Jennings will never have a baby of her own. I don’t know if she preserved sperm before her vaginoplasty, but the ideal age for it is 40. She was in her teens. Team Trans doesn’t listen, and emotionally blackmails parents with suicide threats if they don’t agree to immediate ‘gender affirming’ treatments of uncertain science and potential long-term harm. See why we find drag shows all a tad suspish? An agenda that may go beyond ‘we’re just helping queer kids’ is the first reason why many of us suspect the new-ish kiddie drag show fad may be more than just fun and acceptance games. And no, we’re not all on the far right. Or even the Rational Right. Sharkpædo Gay men have long been painted by the homophobic right as pedophiles, ignoring mountains of homo- and heterosexual pervos who prey upon young children, including within the right’s own ranks. It’s universally understood that a lot of gay men, although not all, love camping it up in women’s clothing. So do plenty of straight men, for whom it’s a sexual fetish. The connection between gay men, sexual fetishism. and drag culture is indisputable. The LGBTQ movement embraced, as part of its rainbow sexual outliers, kink and BDSM sexual fetishists. Who cares? as any logical liberal would ask. Consenting adults! The far right, who sees pedophilia everywhere like the far left finds racism under every rock (Earthworms are racist!), think drag queens are out to molest peoples’ kids because, and they offer you proof, what about those drag queen perverts in Pennsylvania and Texas that got busted with kiddie porn??? Touché. But not the takedown they think it is. Two busts do not a movement reputation make, and every single person likely knows a few closet kiddie porn aficionados, probably none of them drag queens. With the proliferation of porn today and the popularity of kiddie porn, countless families never expect they’ll hear what British women have come to call The Knock: When the police come to your door and tell you your husband’s just been arrested for an online crime they won’t yet strictly define. I’ve known at least one: An old IT customer of mine who bought a scanner from me. I remember him because of his unusual name and because scanners at the time were thousands of dollars. Later I read he got busted for possession of kiddie porn. Oh God, that scanner! I remember him as a nice guy. The closet kiddie porn aficionado might not be your friendly neighborhood drag queen, but someone much closer to your kids. Or it might be one of your kids. But point taken. Fact is, pedophiles are universal. What they have in common is they’re mostly male. And a desire to be where the children are. Drag show promoters need to be wary of this as do the adult leaders of any gathering of children you can think of: Boy/Girl Scouts, religious leaders, play date organizers, child beauty pageant patrons, schools. Drag event organizers who got blindsided by a performer’s kiddie porn arrest can’t be accused of negligence if they had no prior records. So pedophiles are a legitimate concern, and drag queen organizers need to be extra-careful about this since drag also has a long and established history as highly sexualized performance (for adults). It’s also fair to point out the LGBTQ movement effed up a bit back in the ‘90s. A prominent gay rights organization made a regrettably bad decision which gave the movement a somewhat complicated and uncomfortable connection with pedophiles. The International Lesbian Gay Association’s reputation exploded in 1994 when it was granted consultative status on the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Senator Jesse Helms ‘busted’ the ILGA when he discovered they’d allowed NAMBLA to become a member in the ‘80s, somewhat grudgingly, in service to inclusivity. The ILGA quickly divested itself of NAMBLA after that, but the optics were ‘problematic’. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen again. Inclusivity needs boundaries. Like much of the left, the Alphabet Soup Gang is not always very good at drawing sexual boundaries. It hasn’t, for example, effectively dealt with the sexual predator problem the trans movement has introduced with well-documented incidents involving ‘trans’ sex offenders committing sexual assault or other sex crimes in formerly ladies’-only spaces, or declaring themselves ‘trans’ and getting themselves transferred to women’s prisons where they can, and sometimes do, re-offend. Like Rikers Island’s Ramel Blount, a transwoman accused of raping a female prisoner. This report only seems to be in the far-right media. And, oh, lookee here, also from the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office. I wonder why there’s no mention of it in the popular left-wing media? I Googled ‘Ramel Blount’ with MSNBC, CNN, ABC News and CBS News and found nada. You see why the right and critics on the Level Left don’t trust the LGBTQ set to always tell the truth. Or know when to say No. More recently, there’s the recent British trans children charity Mermaids scandal, in which a board member was forced to resign when he was revealed not as a pedo, but a bit too pedo-friendly. I suspect Mermaids may have not done their proper due diligence, or had never heard of ‘Google’. So yeah, folks, be extra-cautious about pedophiles. Because when we see drag queens and kids together, we wonder—however innocent and authenticity-supporting it may be—whether there are an unknown number of ‘bad actors’ taking advantage of an Ado Annie movement that just cain’t say no. What might be positive about kiddie drag shows? And kid drag performers? My inner aging belly dancer, currently sitting around naked in an imaginary old folks home since I sold all her clothes on Craig’s List a few years ago, is screaming, “But what do YOU have in common with drag queens?” You mean besides glitz, glitter, great music, and making 40-year-old men blush? “Yes! And fetch me a bathrobe, dammit! It’s only May and this is CANADA!” I watched videos of child drag performers, and then child belly dancers, and didn’t feel like either were evil. The belly dancers were quite good, and while they were light-years from what pole dancers do, I can understand why parents might not want their own child to do that, and disapprove of parents who do. It’s their call. We need to be respectful of that. What’s different today is the Internet, and social media. Decades ago, a kiddie performance stayed on stage, it wasn’t shared all over Da Internetz. I watched Desmond the Amazing, the drag tween queen social media sensation, who’s already attracted the attention of one pedophile. I was critical of the ‘responsible’ adults around him a little while back. Desmond strikes me as a decent kid. I suspect he’s probably gay. I’m happy he can dance and prance around in female garb with his parents’ approval, which many wouldn’t offer, and might actively discourage. Parental permission removes the shame of ‘borrowing’ their sister’s clothing, not to mention the constant anxiety of worrying about getting caught and punished. Perhaps severely, if Daddy is homo/transphobic. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make Desmond a child star, even though he may be in better hands than Brooke Shields, Drew Barrymore, and Hollywood child stars were. Wil Wheaton of Star Trek: The Next Generation tells horrifying stories of his abusive childhood with a father who was clearly jealous of his son’s fame. Any child star, drag or not, will attract sexual predators. Very, very few make it out of fame with their mental health intact, although Shirley Temple appears to have been one outlier who did. And while I’m sure all attracted their share of sickos, even global reach didn’t mean as much before the Internet, when only people who could afford movies, or lived in countries where they weren’t censored or prohibited, were exposed to them. I like the idea of keeping it to the ‘hood, or local community theatre, rather than on social media. That goes for young belly dancers, too. I love the girls in the video above but if I had a belly dancing daughter I don’t know that I’d want her on YouTube. As for Drag Queen Story Hours, they might improve their image if they left alone stories with gender/queer themes. It looks more like normalizing transvestism and promoting Queer Theory/genderfluid ideology rather than teaching children the joys of reading which can be accomplished with other books, ya know. Why not Cinderella—With Dogs! or The Day The Crayons Quit? There’s a happy medium for drag shows for kids (except for the far right, who are agin’ anything da libtards aren’t) and that’s to at least trust children to figure out what they are and how they feel on their own, and give them the space to explore it. The far right needs to stop terrorizing drag queens and children with guns and threats. If it’s their call to keep their own children from such events, it’s other’s call to allow them. Had my two young students not gotten their parents’ permission, that would have ended it. Belly dancing was fun and glitz and feminine support, and so can be drag queen events, if they ease up on the recruitment and fetishism optics. The Level Left and the Rational Right hve reason to be suspicious. So does the far right even though they’re just as guilty of trying to colonize children’s brains and might arguably be exposing their own children to dangerous weapons and violent ideology while transactivists target them with gender questioning. My own views are still evolving on this. What do you think? Am I wrong? Am I right? I’m open to respectful alternative opinions. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

The red flags were everywhere. 'Maria' has no idea where she made mistakes, and no one will tell her. The truth hurts too much. Everyone’s got a superpower; mine is not getting abused in romantic relationships. Okay, it helps that I’m never in them anymore but even in my tawdry twenties I never had an abusive boyfriend. It’s why one of my missions in life is to help women primarily, but everyone else as well, take back their power and avoid or get out of abusive relationships before shit gets real. I know something abuse victims don’t know: How to avoid domestic violence. I steer clear of all the red flags. Unfortunately, no truth-telling victim ever seems to learn anything new from her experience, like what women can do to protect themselves better. Like, what warning signs they’ve learned to avoid. Like, examining what she could have done differently or what she missed, perhaps because she didn’t know what she didn’t know. Like, avoiding toxic men and getting out early long before he’s invested enough to go all O.J. on her. Tedious railing against the injustice of a deeply patriarchal world in which men are more physically powerful only gets you so far. Focusing attention and the demand for change solely on men is like stopping six feet from the front door in a burning house and bitching that your back is on fire. It’s long past time to start doing post-mortems on the ways women get mistreated, abused, and murdered. Not to judge or blame them, or ourselves, but to learn from these mistakes so we don’t make them again, and help others to avoid reinventing the ordeal. In project management a ‘post-mortem’ is when a team conducts an analysis on a completed project - a building construction, an ERP system implementation, a large order fulfilled and transported to a customer overseas. It asks What did we do wrong? What did we do right? What caused the mistakes? What can we do to mitigate future risks? Why did we make the right decision in a crisis? What can we improve? The goal is to learn from their mistakes, and team members need to take responsibility and be accountable for their own errors, and recognize what everyone did right so they can do it again. I recently ran across a Newsweek article titled Woman Blames Andrew Tate For Turning Her Boyfriend Into A Rapist. Number one, no, I don’t think so. And number two, she missed all the waving red flags including one so big you could unfurl it down the side of the Rock of Gibraltar. How To Avoid A Bad Boyfriend The first really big red flag the article’s Maria missed was her boyfriend’s ‘obsession’ with misogynist huckster and now alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate. If she didn’t know who Tate was then, she must surely have Googled him. I’ve written about Tate before. Maria described how her boyfriend would play Tate’s social media videos in all their vainglorious misogyny. Loudly, for her edification. I wonder how she could tolerate listening to Tate spout off about how men own women and how women share responsibility in getting raped and not thought, “Hmmmm, maybe I can do better than this bozo.” What would we think of a black woman who stayed with a white boyfriend who watched white supremacy videos? All throughout the relationship the boyfriend displayed clear signs of his disrespect for her, and pretty certainly other women. I don’t believe listening to Tate turned him into a rapist (spoiler alert, she was the victim) but it may have accelerated it. He was drawn to Tate because he already had issues with women. A therapist quoted in the article speculates that compassionate, empathetic women, as Maria seems to be, are the sort of women misogynist men are drawn to. They easily forgive and want to do what’s best for the man. (There’s another red flag!) Every relationship has problems, and no one is perfect, but women like Maria are missing some critical recognition in their brain of clear and present danger. It’s unclear whether she comes from a history of abuse; if she did she doesn’t mention it. One doesn’t require an abusive childhood or prior abusive relationships to be abused, as Nicole Brown demonstrated. Maria even missed the second-biggest red flag, which came later, after the initial Andrew Tate Fanboy flag: She got raped, and it’s clear she unconsciously enabled it by permitting toxic behavior in the bedroom from the beginning. The Boyfriend had groomed her for this moment. Yes, she was collusive. Not blameworthy; the fault’s all on her rapist boyfriend, but she unwittingly collaborated. This is the most difficult insight against which so many women, feminists and abuse advocates resist acknowledging: Tolerating bad behavior encourages abusers to push it farther, to see how much more she’ll take. Dina McMillan outlines and details exactly how abusive men do this in her superlative book “But He Says He Loves Me!” It’s detrimental to women, and the antithesis of what domestic abuse advocates and activists seek to eliminate. We have to recognize the role the victim plays when she allows a man to mistreat her. If she doesn’t have the insight, knowledge, or self-esteem (or grew up with my mother) to identify the red flags and know when to get out and move on, she will continue walking down a dysfunctional staircase, giving away a little more of her power every step down until she passes a point where she can’t save herself, someone else will have to. If anyone does. It’s her power. She agrees and decides to give it away to him, whether she realizes it or not. We’re doing a disservice to women, victims, and ourselves when we refuse to accept responsibility for our personal power and the decisions we make. And if there are women who honestly can’t see those red flags, who are genuinely blind to the warning signs, we have to address that too. This isn’t something men can do for us. We have to address these problems ourselves. The Boyfriend exhibited all the common traits of abusers: Manipulation, gaslighting, derogatory comments, blah blah blah. Nothing new here. The red flags were everywhere, and Maria missed them all. Like: Double-booking a date Tristan Tate, Andrew’s less-famous brother, advises men to save time by double-booking two women at once, and tell each woman that the other is just a friend. The Boyfriend did this to Maria, repeatedly. Dissing #MeToo and feminism He repeatedly expressed dislike for feminism, #MeToo, and left-wing activism, which didn’t bother her until he made some ‘inflammatory’ posts on Facebook. Controlling the bedroom He began ‘leaking controlling sexual behaviors’ in the relationship and blamed her if she complained. A particularly telling comment without greater context is when Maria said, “He would say that I’m making it sound like he raped me.” I don’t know exactly what she meant by this but it sounds like somewhat rapey behavior began for a certain time before the actual rape occurred. She stayed with him. She clearly allowed it. This was another really huge mistake on Maria’s part. The Boyfriend wouldn’t take ownership of his behavior when she tried to discuss it with him. This is typical of abusers, regardless of sex. ‘Nother red flag. Changing her behavior for him Maria changed herself, lost weight, did her makeup as he claimed he’d like, all in an attempt to get him to like her more, or love her, I’m not certain. This is also classic abusive, controlling behavior on the abuser’s part. The questions I wished she’d asked herself were, Why am I doing this? Why for him? Then shit got real. The rape I want to make it clear: I’m not blaming Maria for her rape. The Boyfriend is 100% responsible for that. But you can’t rape a woman who isn’t there. I hope that Maria, and women like Maria, will learn something from her honest mistakes and not make those same mistakes themselves. Don’t be the victim! This is how you learn. You can be a career victim or you can learn to watch for early red flags to avoid this tragedy. I listened to my mother when she talked to me from an early age about controlling, abusive men and not to put up with any of it. How women think if they love him enough he’ll change (no), how you can never change a man (or anyone, really), how if he hits you once, he’ll do it again, so don’t give him another opportunity (YES! YES! YES!). Post-mortems are useful for any traumatic event in your life, whether it’s an abusive partner, a horrible job, a relationship with a toxic parent or child, or the unproductive way you handled a trauma you couldn’t control. To reiterate: The point is not to blame yourself, but to learn from your mistakes. Believe me, I haven’t gotten involved with another alcoholic since my ex-partner. An abusive relationship is a grooming process, in which the abuser (consciously or unconsciously) tests his partner constantly to see how much she’ll take. Every step in which she doesn’t set boundaries, or allows him to sidestep them, gives him permission to continue pushing the envelope. We don’t like to think of it that way but it’s the truth. Assholes only go as far as we let them. That’s why we encourage children to stand up for themselves, to stand up to bullies. Because bullies prefer easier victims. Related: She Is Willing To Do Whatever It Takes To Be With Me - The women who accused Marilyn Manson of abuse Related: The Two Women Marilyn Manson *Didn’t* Abuse Maria’s ignored, or unrecognized red flags were many, and in the bedroom, at some point before the rape, The Boyfriend exhibited ‘controlling sexual behaviors’ for an unspecified time before the rape, including saying, “You act like I’m raping you.” When the actual rape occurred, after a lot of alcohol, Maria says he said ‘derogatory things’ to her during the rape. Maybe things he, or maybe they’d both heard Andrew Tate say, or advise? Was this the first time he’d said them, or had he said them before? Red flags, red flags, red flags. I don’t know her history, but if she can talk to Newsweek, she can ask herself these questions. Rape wasn’t even a red flag for her after it occurred; she actually tried to patch it up with him, but once again, The Boyfriend didn’t take ownership. She felt she should be able to trust him, but why? What had he ever done to make her think she could? Eventually, it seems, she finally left him. Maria’s mistakes Maria never questioned his preoccupation with Andrew Tate; the toxic philosophy she knew the guru subscribed to; the toxic videos The Boyfriend listened to. She didn’t challenge him in the bedroom (or likely, out of it), when he became controlling, manipulative and abusive. She tolerated a lot of toxic behavior for unknown reasons, which may or may not involve previous abuse or abusive relationships. Whether it did or didn’t is irrelevant; these are the mistakes she made, that she must not make again to avoid another Andrew Tate-styled relationship. I can only speculate on what went pear-shaped with Maria, because the Newsweek article didn’t ask several critical questions or offer much backstory, perhaps for space reasons. But it’s clear Maria was breadcrumbed every step of the way because she allowed it, most likely out of ignorance because who would choose a toxic relationship like this? It strikes me that compassion and empathy, two highly valuable qualities in a prospective romantic partner, can function as a weakness if one isn’t careful to guard against others willing to take advantage of one’s good nature. Maria chose not to report The Boyfriend for the rape, and for once I’m glad she didn’t. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have gone well for her. It would have fallen, rightly or wrongly, in the ‘grey rape’ area where the authorities could argue she was in a relationship, they’d had consensual sex before, he claimed it was consensual, so now she’s saying it wasn’t? She was too drunk to know what she was doing! I bet he planned that for his potential legal defense. Every step of the way The Boyfriend groomed her to take more of his shit, and his first shot across the bow was subjecting her to Andrew Tate’s toxic philosophy. She allowed it. She didn’t leave his apartment or house when he played it. She allowed ‘controlling sexual behaviors’ which culminated in a rape. She’s not to blame for what happened to her, but she colluded, whether she realizes it or not. What we want to do, whatever toxic situation we’re in, is to stop colluding. Here’s a depressing little tidbit to end this otherwise depressing article about how some women collude in their own oppression: The Women Who Love Andrew Tate: ‘He’s What Every Man Should Aspire To Be.’ Good luck with that, ladies. Remember, I told you so. How to avoid abuse: This Is What Zero Tolerance For Abuse Looks Like What We Can Learn From Nicole Brown Simpson’s Bad Choices Mama Didn’t Raise No Victim Feminist The 5 Best Books For Avoiding Abusive Relationships Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

A weird sort of half-assed defense of Tucker Carlson, recipient of the most disingenuous justified firing in the history of the world “Who do you want to see fired next from Fox News?” asked some wag on Twitter a week and a half ago, right after host Dan Bongino got the first boot-to-the-butt after the Dominion settlement. “F*cker Carlson,” I replied, never expecting it would happen. But lo and behold, Christmas came early in 2023! Last Friday was Tucker’s last day, as he discovered Monday morning when they were all like, “Yeah, uh, Tucker, can we see you for a minute in HR? We thank you for all your hard work here at Fox News but your services are, uh, no longer needed.” Why, Rupert, why? Why did Fox News cast out its Golden Goose, their most popular anchorliar? Were they turning over a new leaf and perhaps finally committing themselves to journalistic integrity? (No, Rupert Murdoch has not yet fired himself). Was it because Tucker is targeted in a workplace harassment lawsuit by a former Fox News producer? (Maybe, sexy stuff brought down Roger F/Ailes and Bill O’Lie-lly, but not, like, a day or two after it was announced). Was it because Tucker demonstrably lied so much on the air? (Now that’s just crazy talk!) The Wall Street journal sez that the Fox brass axed him because he’s got, well, a bit of a potty mouth, to put it mildly. Seems some last-minute, under-the-wire texts he expressed after the 2020 election and its wake revealed some pretty critical and uncomplimentary things the Tuckster had to say about Fox management, in particular, a particular Fox senior exec, with, uh, how shall I put this delicately? Tucker has a real fondness for the c-word, and I don’t mean ‘conservative’. Rhymes with ‘runt’. The word was liberally (ar ar!) used on the production of Tucker’s show, if not, obviously, on-air itself. According to Abby Grossberg, not the aforementioned rhymes-with-runt but the plaintiff in a harassment lawsuit against both Tuck and Mu’ch, Tucker used the word freely as did many of the production bros. Apparently, this wasn’t a problem for Klan Murdoch. But when he used it against a female Fox executive with whom he took a Panzer tankload or two of umbrage, and it came out in redacted private messages as part of the lawsuit (which Tucker allegedly didn’t want redacted, he wanted the world to know exactly what he thought about this rhymes-with-runt), Klan Murdoch and the network’s female CEO decided Tuck had to go. I can’t imagine anyone I’m happier to see go Fox himself than this overgrown perpetually pouty frat-boy waste of protoplasm, unless it’s maybe that withered old squinty-eyed cockTucker at the top, but firing him strikes me as a level of hypocrisy so high that even the Geezer of Ancient Gall should have been embarrassed to Tuckernate him. The only bigger rhymes-with-runt than Tucker Carlson at Fox News is Rupert Murdoch, and firing him for calling someone a rhymes-with-runt now is, well, wouldn’t you say, awfully late to the Nazi party? Like, this alleged rhymes-with-runt senior executive is such a little feminazi liberal snowflake after God knows how many years at Fox News with Tacky Carlson that senior management has to break out the smellin’ salts, Aint Pittypat? It was okay, it seems, for Tucky to use the word for just about any other woman who displeased his lordly self. Will they fire all the other free-flinging rhymes-with-runters? We’ll see. Speaking of delicate, fragile Fox flowers, let’s talk about Abby Grossberg, the woman behind the toxic-harassment lawsuit. Her beef with The Big Ham is that Carlson created a hostile work environment for her with rampant sexism and antisemitism and gratuitous rhymes-with-runting. Okay, I’m no fan of sexual harassment or workplace harassment and maybe I sound all blame-the-victimy again, but—isn’t that considered part of the package for working at Fox News? It’s a super-conservative-ultra-right-wing ‘news’ network that worships Donald Trump, defends Vladimir Putin and treats Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as though he took over Hillary Clinton’s pizza pedophile CEO role after she had to quit to terrorize insecure white males by running for President. Why would Grossberg expect a mature, responsible, adult, #MeToo-sensitive work environment? Did she work her way through college at Hooters and complain how she was constantly ogled and sexually harassed? It’s like listening to black Trump campaigner Omarosa Manigault Newman whine about how she had to put up with racism while she was working for Donald Trump. The guy who called for the execution of the Central Park Five, later exonerated of the infamous Central Park ‘wilding’. The guy who refused to rent to black tenants, hobnobbed with white supremacists, kicked black people off his casino floors, fired a black Apprentice guy for being ‘too educated’, started the rumor about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and suggested Obama got into Columbia or Harvard for reasons other than being good enough? I’m no fan of racism, but sorry, bitch, you asked for that!!! Donald Trump aside, I’m thinkin’ if you don’t like misogyny, or racism, or antisemitism, or homophobia, or Nazi fanboys, or sexual harassment, or Wars on Christmas, or climate change denial, or kids’s candy sexual fetishism, then, just sayin’, maybe Fox News isn’t the right professional opportunity for you. The grand irony of Grossberg’s lawsuit is she helped craft the vicious environment for which she now requires her smellin’ salts. She’s suing not just Tucker Carlson but also Fox News itself because—as she alleges—and get this, you’ll never believe what Fox News—Fox News!!!—asked her to do— —Give ‘misleading testimony’ in her deposition for the Dominion lawsuit. That’s right, believe it or not, Fox News actually asked her, then pressured her, to lie. I’m hoping she’ll use whatever money she gets from Fox News and Tucker to buy herself a nice makeover and update her look a little, since she looks like your grandmother’s eight-grade music teacher in 1952. 1996 and counting Hard to imagine, but Fox News has been on the air for over 25 years now. Seems like just yesterday we had a fourth major non-cable network for the first time since 1956 after the demise of the late great Fourth Network of Black ‘n’ White Three-Channel TV, the DuMont. My my, time flies when you’re having fun. Not. Fox News has long consorted with the enemy. I wrote them a polite but critical email about a news story I’d watched in the weeks after 9/11 demonstrating how easy it was for terrorists (the ad hoc terrorists being the Fox News crew rather than Al Qaeda) to breach a supposedly secure nuclear facility by insecurely driving right in like they owned the damn reactor. I didn’t fault them for investigating and breaking the story—job well done!—but for showing the real terrorists how it’s done! Fox News, intent on destroying America since at least 2001, and pretty arguably before that, too! Jon Stewart called out Tucker Carlson in 2004 when he guested on Crossfire and disappointed Tucker by asking him to stop hurting and ruining America, rather than—being funny. Tucker didn’t listen. In Fox News’s infancy, aiding and abetting terrorists was then-unintentional, but I had no idea that twenty-odd years later, with Tucker Carlson at the on-air helm, they’d be cheering on a filthy Russian dictator, damning the people his army had invaded and brutalized, supporting that consummate tabloid moron Donald Trump for President, cheering on kids in cages, and fomenting an attempted coup d’etat against his own country. Lying all the way. But that’s not, ultimately, what he got fired for. No, he upset some little chickie-boo in the executive suite, and, okay, countless other women at Fox News, for years, by freely flinging around the word that rhymes with runt in a workplace that had no problem with that, until they did. That’s when they finally fired Tucker Carlson, that filthy rhymes-with-dastard. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Because only those fascists on the *other* side ban and censor. Real radicals read and watch what they damn well want. Banning and censoring: It’s not just an obsession of the right anymore! When I was in college, the Rise of Reagan led to immediate carte blanche for conservatism’s fear-driven pet pathologies, arising like a purse-mouthed cobra flicking its tongue and swaying over the country, daring liberals to step out of line. The Hippie Era was over, pinkos. The Moral Majority were your new strict, strait-laced mommies and daddies. And boy, did they love censorship! Emboldened Christian fundamentalists attacked books, movies, record albums, and video games. While I wasn’t much into Pac-Man, or the record albums they disliked (I preferred Pat Benatar, the Go-Gos and Loverboy to ‘Satanic’ heavy metal), I did love books, and like any young person I strongly disliked so-called grownups telling me what I could or could not read. I read classic novels without a class requirement: Whatever the Religious Reich banned around the country. A Separate Peace. Lord of the Flies. 1984. The Diary of Anne Frank. Slaughterhouse-5. Lolita. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Catcher in the Rye. I worked briefly with the nuclear freeze movement and watched the newer anti-nuclear war movies the right disdained: Threads, The Day After, War Games. Special Bulletin, a TV-movie about American terrorists holding the government hostage with a homemade nuclear bomb they threaten to detonate if the government doesn’t disable its weapons, was treated as a live broadcast like other breaking events. Never tell me I can’t read, see, hear, or watch something. If the right has customarily embraced censorship, bans, and shutting down free speech, it would be dishonest to say the left never has, and it’s certainly getting comfy-cozy with it now. Scattered examples of the left’s new-found love for old-school censorship are rooted in the not-so-distant past: Angry college students attempting to ‘de-platform’ (not yet a word) scientist E.O. Wilson in the 1970s, invading classrooms to shout him down and putting up posters denouncing him as the ‘Right-Wing Prophet of Patriarchy.’ According to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, students brought noisemakers to Wilson’s lectures, and at a 1978 scientific conference protesters stormed the stage chanting anti-racist slogans, one grabbed his microphone and another attacked him with a pitcher of water. This was all over Wilson’s book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in which he argued that animal and human behavior is driven by heredity, environment, and past experiences, refuting the left’s belief (still common today) that we are born with a ‘blank slate’ brain, and that all we are is due to nurture, rather than nature. Claiming ‘free will’ is an illusion, as Wilson did, was perhaps a bit hyperbolic, and today scientists accept that the question isn’t nature vs nurture, but now much of each. Let’s not forget the left’s ‘cancellation’ (also not yet a word) of sportscaster and prognosticator Jimmy the Greek in 1988, who made some idiotic, racist pseudo-scientific remarks about black athletes and consequently got fired in the uproar (back then, as now, the left offered no forgiveness for an apology. ‘Redemption’ was for right-wing Christian whackos, like Jesus). Today, it’s even-steven, with the left and right running neck-and-neck in the race to ban, censor, and prohibit content they don’t like. So I say, let’s find it and read, listen to or watch it! And don’t forget to strap on your protective mask, as the classic ‘80s countercultural comic Bloom County warned us, in case the fishes tear-gas you! Books the right doesn’t want you to read The 50 most banned books in America, 2021-2022 - And Tango Makes Three, based on two male chinstrap penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo who were trying to hatch a rock like an egg, so zookeepers put a real egg in their cage and they hatched it. Neurotic and massively anthropomorphizing parents didn’t like its ‘homosexual overtones’. And also Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You by Ibram X. Kendi. Even if you don’t like Kendi’s anti-white tone, Ted Cruz can’t stand it and used it to figuratively beat Supreme Court Justice nominee Ketanji Jackson over the head with it. So you should read it just to annoy him. The right’s book-banning campaign reaches a new level - A Kansas school district’s conservatives pulled, among many other books, The Handmaid’s Tale from libraries because, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t want girls to see their game plan. And ban-ny state Texas went after 850 books they were afraid might make students feel ‘uneasy’, including Amnesty International’s We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures, along with books that explained puberty and reproduction, and An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which tries to correct inaccuracies in American history and add a dash of nuance, sorely needed in our black-hats-vs-white-hats world. Maus, an eighth-grade graphic novel banned in Tennessee for depicting what the Holocaust was really like (conservatives wanted a kinder, gentler Holocaust, I guess) To Kill A Mockingbird - Censors’ long-time favorite, this time banned in California because it contains racism. (Boy, wait’ll they read Ibram Kendi!) The Twilight series - Well, the occult is always right out for Christian fundamentalists so falling in love with a vampire is verboten. Oddly, the series also met with conservative disfavor because it explores ideas about death and sexual desire, despite Bella and Edward, the two protagonists, not sleeping together until they get married, in accordance with the Mormon author’s religious beliefs. Fifty Shades of Grey - No surprise here that a book full of weird kinks including a ‘Red Room of Pain’ met with disapproval by conservatives who’ve probably never stuck ben-wa balls up their hoochy-cooch after sucking on them even once, although others have argued the books should have been banned for bad writing. Desire pools dark and deadly in my groin. His voice is warm and husky like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel... or something. He's my very own Christian Grey popsicle. [You mean we can buy these at Stop ‘n’ Shop?] Banned by Amazon - Books the left doesn’t want you to read Pretty much anything critical of the transgender movement can count on bans and boycotts by the blue-pink-and-white set, if only in angry blog articles. The right hates anything pro-LGBTQ and the left hates anything critical of it. The ACLU and their transgender lawyer attempted to get Abigail Schrier’s controversial book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters removed from Amazon. It was successfully removed from Target stores until Twitter stepped in to shame them away from censorship (demonstrating there’s at least some genuine social justice still hanging in there). When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment also met with far-left disapproval. Parler, a right-wing social media app, was removed from the Apple and Google stores and also Amazon Web Services. A fair chunk of the planning for the Jan. 6 attack occurred there and also on Gab, a fellow right-wing Twitter and Facebook alternative, but the planning also went down in plain sight on Twitter and the government didn’t shut that down. (Only Donald Trump, the Proud Boys, and some other right-wing groups implicated in the attack). Too rich and powerful to be banned by the left The ‘Joe Rogan Experience’ Disappears and Reappears - The controversial podcaster’s phenomenally successful series disappeared from Spotify in 2022 in response to criticism and a Twitter campaign against him about presenting COVID-19 misinformation and ‘racial slurs’. Love him or hate him, he made too much money for Spotify to ‘cancel’ as hippie rocker Neil Young and others had urged on Twitter. Supposedly Rogan himself removed over 100 episodes with the demon N-word in them. The Joe Rogan Experience remains available today. Spotify stood by their $200 million hypermasculine golden goose. Kanye West, a/k/a Ye - He’s down but not out after threatening to go ‘Defcon 3’ on the Jews and other anti-Semitic comments last year. Fans did not noticeably stop buying his albums in 2018 when he told Donald Trump slavery was a ‘choice’. He’s a conspiracy theorist and an occasional white supremacist, and his anti-Semitism cost him several lucrative business and partnership deals. Today he makes a paltry $3.7 million from Spotify, which is a drop in the bucket for a guy who’s now worth only about $400 million. But it’s still a lot of money for anyone as Spotify pays less than a half-cent a stream. Considering he’s been lauded as a ‘genius’ and was extreme even before he went super-right-wing-Trumpy, he might win back a few fans if he tones down the hostile rhetoric and produces another great album. Whether he’s got it in him to do that remains to be seen. Too rich and powerful to be banned by the right The Christian right in particular has a long history of boycotting everything they don’t like, but we could easily argue boycotts were ‘cancel culture’ before the left made it a thing. Although the right successfully ‘cancelled’ the Dixie Chicks, Colin Kaepernick, and Samantha Bee, it must be noted that Beyoncé is still going strong, Ellen DeGeneres (called ‘Ellen Degenerate’ by Jerry Falwell) went on to become a successful talk show host after aggravating the homophobic right by ‘coming out’ on her TV sitcom in the ‘90s, and Target failed to go bankrupt after a right-wing boycott of the store in 2016 in which it claimed it wouldn’t discriminate against transgender people. There’s nothing more offensive to the Religious Reich than failing to discriminate against others. Too rich and powerful to be banned by either The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling - A wonderful 7-part podcast series. Let’s remember, the Religious Right banned, censored, pilloried and monstered Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling before it was cool. Hell, some of these young whippersnappers calling Rowling a c—t, a bitch, a TERF, et al today were still swimmin’ around in their daddy’s balls when ‘Christians’ burned and banned Rowling’s books for ‘promoting witchcraft’. One of the best explanations I ever got for all the right-wing Rowley hate was that Harry’s adoptive family the Dursleys represented what life was like in a relentlessly normal, boring, repressive family, vs Hogwarts which was fun, free, and magical. Even being Nigel Longbottom was better than Dudley. Why the left-wing hate? Angry men in dresses who desire marginalization, can’t stand reasoned argument and who will do anything to shut feminists up. Things the right doesn’t want you to say—or else I encourage you to say ‘Gay’ all over Florida - just not on school property. You could get fined, imprisoned, or drawn and quartered by Governor of Florida and presidential wannabe Ron DeSantis if you say ‘gay’ or several other words including ‘transgender’, ‘queer’ ‘genderqueer’ or ‘Ron DeSantis is a fascist poopyhead’, but you can say them everywhere else, especially on Gay Disney Day which this year is Saturday, June 3rd. Things the left doesn’t want you to say—or else If Elon Musk has been good in any way for Twitter, it’s to restore a little sanity and reality to the trans debate. I’m not sure how far he’s gone in permitting unpopular opinions about trans ideology, but under the Old Regime people regularly got suspended and banned for stating biology is real, that you can’t change your sex and for ‘misgendering’ or ‘dead naming’ people who’d switched teams. Except for dead-naming Caitlyn Jenner since it was pointed out the entire world knew who Bruce Jenner was as a famous athlete, and who she was now. Things the left and right don’t want you to do at football games Don’t kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Don’t kneel in prayer. Banned elsewhere by the right, because Amazon only bans the left’s no-no’s Gender Queer: A Memoir - Written by a nonbinary asexual, Maia’s cathartic biography about a person born female with eir own really customized pronouns (‘eir’ is not a typo), Gender Queer became the most banned book in the United States, reports the American Library Association. The 1619 Project - The right really hates this one, a Pulitzer Prize-winning report on the history and legacy of slavery. James Patterson’s Maximum Rides books, by once again, the ban-crazy Ronald DeSantis. I’m not sure Emperor Go-Go Boots has ever seen a book he approved of, much less read. No one, especially Patterson, seems clear on why his Young Adult novels are deemed unsuitable for children, unless DeSantis has a particular bug up his butt about a lab-created family of bird people, or something. Maybe Patterson depicted them pooping on a DeSantis statue? While I’m not in favor of banning Patterson’s books, I am in favor of banning Patterson on the grounds of impersonating an author. I haven’t read the Rides books but I’ve read two others and they were so bad I Googled on ‘why James Patterson’s books suck so much’. Answer: He’s got an army of fourth-rate hacks churning out his story ideas which made perfect sense considering they seemed written by sixteen-year-olds living in some place that isn’t New York which is why they got so much about New York wrong. Just about anything by black authors - This includes anything about Critical Race Theory, Brown Girl Dreaming, about growing up black in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and The Story of Ruby Bridges, first a banned book and now a banned Disney movie, about the six-year-old who was part of the original Little Rock school integration fiasco in the late ‘50s. Banned from Vimeo by the far left, then restored by the Level Left Dead Name - A documentary attacked by tranactivists, the Religious Reich of the left, for 'being ‘transphobic’, which is a social justice term meaning ‘Anything feminist that doesn’t fit our misogynist, gynophobic narrative’. Vimeo removed the documentary for violating its policy against ‘hateful content’, which in this context meant, ‘It exposed the harms brought upon others by the gender transition industry’. Affirmation Generation - A documentary about trans kids who de-transitioned. De-transitioning is growing quickly and transactivists lose their minds when people talk about it. De-transitioners are often ostracized from the trans tribe for admitting they made a mistake and prefer their original body. One wonders why those who are truly happy post-transitioning don’t just shrug their shoulders and say, “Good for you. Be authentic!” Psychology shows that liberals aren’t as tolerant as we think. Consider this just a very short list of content the left and right don’t want to you see, hear, watch or read. Fascism is fascism, and I leave you with a liberal burning a JK Rowling book. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Anti-porn activists may have had a bit of a point. Is there a healthier middle ground between today's violent sexual exploitation and 'ethical' porn? “For fuck’s sakes, don’t pick up men on Tinder,” I thought unsympathetically when I read experience pieces by women on Medium about meeting up with men on the notorious pickup app, and suddenly finding themselves the recipient of rough, violent sex. 'What’s up with the choking, slapping and hitting?’ they’d ask and I’d wonder, “What’s up with going to a strange man’s house to fuck him? Are you trying to get murdered?” I didn’t understand how common violent sex had become, or where it came from. Most of the last twenty years after my Big Breakup has been an endless conveyor belt of coffee dates. If men had gotten more violent in bed, it flew under my radar, since most men were too boring for more than a single Tim Horton’s. I didn’t know how pervasive porn had become, and how much more violent and misogynist, than when feminists protested Hustler depicting a woman in a meat grinder. Learning about the 2000s mainstream Porn Revolution showed me those Medium gals’ experiences weren’t just young women being dumbasses. The left would rather not talk about what garden variety violent porn means for women, lest we come across too much like the cross-bearing sourpusses of yore. But did the right, maybe, just sayin’, have at least a bit of a point? Man, we loved to make fun of Bible-thumpers back in the day. The Religious Right had risen like the Zombie Apocalypse to ruin our orgasms. Anti-porn zealots ran amok chasing everything they deemed inappropriate for children under 80. Ronald Reagan appointed Attorney General Ed Meese to investigate and document what they believed were the harmful effects of consuming pornography - which back then was magazines, strip clubs, catalogs, and Blockbuster rentals. Big cities offered famously seedy neighborhoods like New York’s Times Square where you could anonymously view ‘peep shows’ and wank in peace to Patti Porks Peoria. We liberals hooted and hollered at porn critics and laughed at Meese’s sexophobic and inaccurate report. Before its release it blackmailed convenience stores and other porn purveyors, threatening to name them in the report if they continued to retail raunchy reads. It found, unsurprisingly, what it was commissioned to find. Porn was harmful to human relationships. Man, those stiff-necked uptight stick-up-the-butts couldn’t handle some good old-fashioned healthy filth! But still… Maybe the Meese Report was stupid and inaccurate and rife with scandals and errors, but today’s porn ain’t yer grandaddy’s porn. It’s been an evolution from Larry Flynt, who fought for First Amendment rights in multiple obscenity trials to the increasingly violent porn today’s hardened consumer requires to—stay hardened. Today’s sex-trafficked, often highly illegal porn is the other side of the First Amendment victories we once cheered. The object of one’s desire I resist turning into a harridan for either side of the porn debate: Neither a Meese anti-sex fanatic nor an All sex is rape, women are uniformly brutalized feminist extreme. The 1960s Sexual Revolution was imperfectly implemented at a time when ‘patriarchy’ was only the barest shadow of comprehension in feminist brains, so the Revolution was run and guided by men, for men. Women slowly claimed, or reclaimed, their lost sexuality and to exercise more choice and control, aided by The Pill, and later Roe v. Wade. Women were empowered to explore their own sexual desires, fantasies, and to challenge the notion that women who sleep around are ‘whores’ and men who do it are ‘studs’ (the parlance of the day). I viewed porn like every other ‘70s teenage kid - we ‘borrowed’ my best friend’s dad’s magazines and read them in her bathroom. I saw a few porno movies in college, at the end of its ‘golden age’. Is it inherently wrong to want to see naked people having fun? We delude ourselves thinking only men objectify, and only objectify women. Men objectify themselves and other men, as exemplified by all the super-ripped mostly naked male bodies in action movies that customarily draw more men than women. As for saintly women, who aspires to those rail-thin bodies and big Kardashian butts they see in the media? Like, is anyone holding guns to their heads and forcing them to pass up eight meals in a row? Or jamming silicone bags into their chests in a back alley? One of my male friends a few years ago was furious when he commented on Facebook that he thought some female Canadian politician was attractive, and his female friends feministed all over him, complaining he was ‘objectifying’ her. A few months later those same women went all oogly-googly over famous world hottie Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister. Because, you know, only men objectify. In 2015, Barack Obama came in second to Trudeau in a Top Ten of the World’s Hottest Leaders. Sorry, Mr. President, eh? You know what would be awesome? A BARACK OBAMA AND JUSTIN TRUDEAU MÈNAGE Á TROIS!!! Bow-mow-mow chakka bow-mow-wow! Oh shoot, I’m objectifying, aren’t I? But hey, politics just got more—exciting! Does porn necessarily have to be degrading? Here’s the crux of what I see as the essential problem with porn: Eroticized domination, lodged in all human brains. Porn depicts men dominating women sexually, as does the popular female version, spicy romance novels. Although I’ve never been a fan of the genre, I’ve read enough bodice-rippers to know that being dominated by a hot, spicy man is, well—bestselling. Humorous fake romance book covers from the World of Longmire website Women’s view of erotic male domination differs. In romance novels, sex and romantic love are intertwined; in porn, romance is about as welcome as Jesus and your mom standing beside your bed. Rape is ‘gray rape’ in romance novels; she wants him, can’t give ‘it’ up to him for some contrived reason, he overpowers her and ‘forces’ himself on her when in fact she really wants it. It’s the classic exoneration card for women compromised between being a slut (wanting sex) and being a virgin, i.e., a ‘good’ woman. She certainly doesn’t suffer PTSD from the resulting sexual act. In porn, rape is depicted as - or actually is - a violent rape, devoid of emotional commitment, consent, or any sexual desire on the woman’s part. The victim has zero control over what’s happening, unlike the romance novel heroine who is usually strong or competent or spit-fiery in some way to keep the hero, a decent if imperfect man, in abeyance. It’s the very nature of the force and humiliating conquest violent porn aficionadoes get off on. Which leads me to ask: Why would a ‘good’ man want to watch that? Even if it’s just a fantasy? What would we think about him if he confessed he liked faked videos of animals being tortured, but he loved animals and would never harm them? Would we want to date him? Whether certain male consumers have demanded more violence or pornographers delivered it to keep consumers from getting bored or jaded by more pedestrian sex (at some point those badly-acted secret egg beater parties and ‘spontaneous’ suburban orgies begin to look all the same), the sexual domination of women by men is where the eroticism—and the malevolence—happens. Is erotic domination always wrong? Would sex be dull without it? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer. I find ‘bodice rippers’ troubling too. I suspect they indoctrinate women with desires for a strong, powerful man that may well not match his real-world counterpart, where hyper-masculinity often connects underlying insecurity expressed via violent physical abuse. In my admittedly limited experience, I don’t remember any romance novel heroes whacking the heroine around and getting rewarded with sex and love, but more experienced readers are welcome to correct me. And so I wonder why others have to be harmed and victimized for someone’s sexual pleasure, and whether watching violent porn indoctrinates men to believe women want rape, want abuse, want to be dominated and humiliated. Given that 30% of Pornhub’s accounts are women’s, perhaps they’ve been indoctrinated to believe that’s what they should want. In Nancy Jo Sales’s book Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno, she details how a man shows her women’s ads on the very app Sales met him on. Young women claimed they wanted to be raped, choked, slapped or threatened during sex. Is this a female kink, liberated by our evolving ‘sex positive’ culture, or have they never been properly exposed to loving, gentle, mutually satisfying examples of sexual pleasure? ‘Sex positive’ liberals, conditioned to be inclusive, accepting, and never question others’ ‘freedom’, must somewhere wonder deep down how free we are if we’re still entrapped in the undeniable appeal of violent masculinity. Maybe my friends and I were weird or vanilla back in the day, but in our late-night jam sessions we didn’t talk about secret desires to be treated violently. In fact, we laughed at men who wanted anal sex or a threesome. “What’s up with this bisexual thing?” one would ask. “The way to kill the ‘threesome’ idea,” I observed, “is to say, ‘Sure, great! I’ve secretly wanted to do you and your best friend!” Sales theorized that perhaps one element driving the high alcoholism rate in Millennial women is getting drunk enough to deal with the shitty, painful sex they got from hookups. Only 40% of them experienced orgasm in sex - most got it from their vibrator later. Stripping human sexuality down to raw animal lust, as porn does, treats women—fellow human beings—as things to be fucked, disposable sex toys, beneath one’s contempt when done filling them with sperm (or jizzing on their faces), the very definition of toxic masculinity. Porn has always been primarily for pleasing men, and many don’t need that romantic love crap interfering with their desire to just fuck like bunnies without consideration for their partners’ pleasure, feelings, or even their essential humanness. This is where we’ve arrived, fifty years after the first cum shot fired over the bow-mow-mow of the Sexual Revolution. This is where the backlash happens, when feminism demands greater maturity, accountability and emotional understanding of one’s sexual pleasures. But on the more sex-positive porn side, a male friend once sent me an amateur porn he thought I’d like based on conversations we’d had. Which was that what I mostly disliked about porn was how degrading to women it was. “You’ll like this one,” he emailed me. “It’s an older groupie having sex with a cute young rock musician.” I have to admit, it was pretty hot! Just two people enjoying each other and treating each other well. I bet it’s not very high-ranking. ‘Ethical’ ‘healthy’ porn - can it even exist? I wrote a little about ‘ethical porn’ a few years ago. Everyone in ethical porn is paid fair market value, and the actors and actresses agree to what they’ll do, without pressure. The sex is genuine, the female orgasms are real, and there’s a lot more of the f-word than you get in regular porn films—foreplay. What might this teach men about what a real female orgasm sounds like? Ethical porn is created for women as well as men. The sex, from what I’ve read, is joyful and playful. The downside is it’s usually not free. Ethical porn is like Whole Foods groceries or fair trade coffee—it costs more to produce, so you have to pay for it. It also offers more body varieties and diversity - young, old, trans, queer, folks with disabilities, different races, different body types. Everything is clearly consensual, and yes, you can even get ethical kink at kink.com. Beat me, hurt me, and we’ve got safe words unlike those filthy wankers at YouPorn! My gut feeling is the concept of porn doesn’t have to be degrading or humiliating, and we should be able to get off without other human beings getting treated like shit. What if ethical porn introduced healthier practices, mutual (real!) sexual pleasure, and introduced certain men to a whole new arena of sexual pleasure they’ve perhaps not experienced before—sex with someone you like or care about, even if it’s just ad hoc? I won’t argue for a return to the sexual puritanism of yore. The traditional conservative approach to sex was as deeply disturbed as the anything-goes, let’s-not-analyze-what-we-consume-too-closely willful blindness of the modern world. Back then, people got married as much to have sex as they did because they were in love—and if they were in love, they didn’t question why, and whether that person could make them happy. Another ugly truth the puritans don’t want to acknowledge: Human beings can’t all be pigeon-holed into lifelong monogamous unions. They aren’t all content with missionary marital sex, as exemplified by all the Republican and ‘Christian’ politicians caught having the gay sex they rail about on C-SPAN. The spectrum of human sexuality must also embrace a variety of partners and sexual practices, which is where ethical polyamory comes in: Where everyone agrees to and abides by the rules. And if anyone really wants to enjoy pain during sex, it’s BDSM with their own rules and especially ‘safe words’. That’s where ethical sex and ethical porn meet, where I’m more willing to concede that a person who likes a little pain, degradation and humiliation may simply be exploring parts of their psyche that don’t necessarily mean they need a shrink. In a world of eight billion people it will be many generations before patriarchal domination addicts will let anyone pry it out of their cranial folds. But it’s something to think about. Working toward a healthier, more civilized, more mature world starts with vision. The left rightly regards itself as sex positive, but it can’t visualize a less violent, less patriarchal world without closely analyzing today’s porn and asking uncomfortable questions about what’s being produced and why, how much criminality feeds the machine, and how many enslaved human beings, including children, are suffering unspeakable horrors for someone who considers themself a ‘good’ person, who would never hurt another human being, so s/he can jack off to it. We ain’t there yet The United Nations reports that misogyny is on the rise globally. Does graphic porn contribute to that? Experts have debated the content question for decades. Maybe it’s not that porn drives sexual aggression, but that the sexually aggressive are driven to consume it. We’ve debated video games, television, comic books and ‘penny dreadfuls’. And we still can’t agree. Censorship is something everyone dislikes, yet excuses. Most (perhaps not NAMBLA) agree child porn is horrible and should be illegal. Does child porn drive pedophilia or are pedophiles attracted to child porn? Does anybody care? Jail them all, we say! If you wouldn’t trust a guy to pet-sit who thinks fake kitten torture is fine only to watch, can a grander world vision include treating women like garbage to get one’s rocks off? Pornography traps liberals between a rock and a hard-on place. We worship the First Amendment, even if today’s porn looks creepily close to real-world violent assault and misogyny. Even if we magically eliminated all porn’s human trafficking, would a woman truly be free to consent to getting forcefully penetrated in all three of her orifices if she’s desperately poor? Do we give misogyny a free pass for wanting to see something like that because now she’s ‘consenting’—well, sort of, but at least getting paid? Porn, sex positivity and the left. It’s complicated. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. 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It's game time, liberals! We've got to screw Trump and his MAGAs harder than they screwed America! This may be easy for me to say because I don’t live in the shooty Ignited States anymore, but— —We have to hold Donald Trump fully accountable for his countless crimes. We can’t let him get away with any of it and we can’t be swayed by accusations of political witch hunts, not to mention threats (perhaps encouraged) his base will get violent and/or attempt to pull another Jan. 6. I find it heartening that what may have been Trump’s ‘trial balloon’ last week resulted in a far less violent response from his base, which may have sent not-so-Teflon-Don a message that his base’s support for him has eroded. A Fox News poll—Fox News, people!—showed 61% of Americans don’t want Trump to be President again. Trump must surely be aware of this, and his ex-fixer Michael Cohen, a reigning talking head since he got out of jail for paying a porn star to pretend she hadn’t had sex, claimed from the beginning that Trump’s ‘election campaign’ is a bid to stay away from jail (so far, so bad) and that it’s just a giant grift of his clueless, easily manipulated base (so far, so good). Trump’s nutty MAGAs pose a real threat. They can’t entrust future victory to elections, at least not for Trump since they can’t fix and steal them, although their gerrymandering and games to prevent minority voting are still an effective technique for Keeping America Stupid. Last week, police around the country responded to bomb threats and some white powder mailed to the Manhattan DA’s office presiding over the grand jury which was quickly determined to be not a dangerous substance. This is a long-time right-wing intimidation tactic; they did this to countless abortion clinics in the ‘80s and ‘90s. We know Trump’s base is packed with heavily-armed extremists. But they didn’t seem terribly inclined to put themselves in danger of getting arrested, and the few protesters who showed up, anywhere, were largely peaceful. But we’ve got to stay strong, and brave. I know. Easy to say when you’re sitting safely in Canada. Lessons from t’other side of the world One huge mistake the Middle East has made is to put their homegrown terrorists in control. People in Islamic countries are often afraid to speak out against terrorism, fearing the terrorists may attack their families or themselves. That’s a very real threat, and it’s why terrorism runs free in some parts of the Middle East. Too many governments tolerate it, either because they love it to squoodgy-woodgy pieces, or they at least partially agree with known terrorist groups, or because they’re simply afraid of them. On the other hand, popular terrorists could help them win whatever passes for elections in their countries if they play nicely. Citizens, too, have varying views on terrorism. Some fully support it, some not, and some sound as wishy-washy as America’s not-quite-racists: “You know I’m not a prejudiced woman but—” “I’m not a racist but—”. The gay Muslim writer, speaker, and Islam critic Irshad Manji has noted the same about wishy-washy Muslims. They announce they’re about to say something kinda pro-terrorist with something like, “I don’t support terrorism but—” I think we’re all guilty of this at times. I found myself thinking last year after a lefty went to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh (and lost his nerve), “Well what did you expect, MAGAts? You’re the role models, didja know guns shoot right as well as left? What’s it feel like to be on the other side of the gun barrel? You asked for this!” That’s not an acceptable response. It’s understandable, I think, but we have to be better than they. We have to hold ourselves to the same high standards to which we hold others. I agree with Michelle Obama’s statement, “When they go low, we go high,” at least up to a point. We do have to protect and defend ourselves, but we have to take the moral high ground on violence. We can’t debate whether it’s okay to punch a Nazi in the face. We can’t punch Nazis in the face. Not unless we’re defending ourselves against a proactive attack. It’s otherwise against the law. If there’s one area where Republican vision has failed, is its traditional respect for law ‘n’ order. It’s glaringly obvious which party now is more on the side of law ‘n’ order, however imperfectly and wishily-washily, today. Kudos to Joe Biden’s administration for having the balls and labia to go hard after everyone they were able to arrest in connection with the Jan. 6 attack. As of January of this year, close to 1,000 people have been charged and arrested for numerous attack-related crimes. Three hundred and thirty-five people have been sentenced and over 100 Congresspeople and others have been issued subpoenas, along with companies like Meta, Twitter and Reddit. Watching so many get arrested and subpoena’ed and testify under oath to lawyers much smarter than the ones who chose to represent Donald Trump may have dampened the enthusiasm of many to engage in anarchic destruction. There are undoubtedly many who are plotting something now, and may have the will to carry it out. But how many are willing to go to jail for it? Possibly far fewer. For many it will be just fantasy. We have to be vigilant for the ones for whom it isn’t. We can’t know whether extremist reticence is influenced by a desire not to rot in prison, or whether they’ve simply lost their will to be violent. Some may have moved on, accepting halfway through Biden’s term that Trump ain’t coming back. Nearly two-thirds of Americans not wanting him to be President again indicates he’s lost at least some of his base, like those who count themselves as ‘Never Trump’ Republicans. We have to take Trump and his base through the wringer of all the crimes of which he’s been accused, recognizing at the same time that if no one is above the law, everyone is also presumed innocent. We all have our personal opinions as to how true that is about Trump, but that’s how the law works. Due process is also for everybody. Democrats and liberals don’t have a great track record for being tough on crime and corruption. We’re pretty squishy on drawing moral lines in the sand and we’re as afraid of our own extremists and outrageous regressives as the Republicans and conservatives. While we watch a wishy-washy GOP try to find its balls and labia to just throw itself behind Ron DeSantis or maybe some other not-Trump candidate like Nikki Haley, Democrats and liberals twist themselves in knots whispering into the wind about whether medical-transitioning children or maybe MeToo accusations go too far. Speaking of going too far, why do we allow our own extremists to wield the cancel culture weapon as recklessly as a Gawd-Bless-’Murica thug swinging his mighty baseball bat on Jan. 6? We kowtow before our bullies just as Republicans and conservatives kneel submissively before their own. One wonders who Trump’s base will vote for if the Republicans just say, “Screw it, deal with it, people, we’re backing DeSantis/Haley/Herschel Walker’s favorite vampire, Trump is so over!” Will they vote Democrat? Or stay at home and sulk the way Millennials did in 2016 because their boy Bernie Sanders wasn’t the Democratic candidate? Remind me again, who won in 2016? We have got to send a strong message not just to Trump’s wannabe successors but also to his morally bankrupt and violent base: You are not above the law. Not your candidate, not his violent fanboys, not anyone’s. Not even a guy as rich and powerful as Donald Trump. Not even an ex-President. Let’s remember why the indictment of a former President is ‘unprecedented’. It’s because 49 years ago, President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon after he resigned in disgrace in the Watergate era. It’s entirely possible Nixon would have been our first indicted, arraigned, and perp-walked former President had it not been for Ford’s pardon, widely credited with why he lost the 1976 race to Jimmy Carter. Yes, this may become an excuse for future Republicans to harass Democrat Presidents, ex- or otherwise, with the law. And Goddess knows how violent the rabble may get again under a Republican-dominated government. But this is on us, folks. We the people. We the voters. Will we let Republicans push us toward a failed state? Will we allow them to shred what’s left of our democracy? Will we continue to elect politicians who think payback’s a bitch, bitches? Consider this: The GOP hasn’t even attempted to launch an impeachment attempt against Joe Biden, after two attempts on Trump. They used to angle for it for Obama, who wasn’t tarnished by a fuckup kid with a drug problem and Ukrainian friends, or a penchant for starring in his own porn videos. But it went nowhere because there was no there there. I think liberal voters require at least a baseline decency in most of our candidates, along with a certain level of intelligence and competence we no longer see on Republican resumes. Although our candidates don’t necessarily score appreciably higher than the Republicans on the corruption-o-meter. What we lack is the gumption to pursue criminal charges against the other party, gumption the GOP has in truckloads. We let George Bush get away with what were likely war crimes, and twenty years later the Senate has repealed authorization for the Iraq War, 4,700 allied troop deaths and over 100,000 Iraqi deaths too late. Where the fuck was their resolution in 2003? Why wasn’t George Bush investigated for war crimes? Why didn’t we at least make the attempt? We let him get away with it. All of it. We empowered them to think they could get away with more. And they were right. I hope Trump’s indictment is a sign America’s liberals and progressives - the real ones, not our illiberal extremists—are ready to grow some balls and labia and do the right thing. Hold criminals accountable. Hold Trump accountable. Plan for how we’ll deal with future Republican witch hunts, and continue ensuring our own candidates don’t have fatal moral flaws or criminal tendencies. It’s up to us. We the people. It’s our country. All of us. Yes, even them. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

What makes us so sure *any* of us think critically about the ideas we consume? The Middle East looked pretty damned stupid to me, in the weeks and months after 9/11. The media spotlighted just how pervasive conspiracy theories were for the Islamic world, especially regarding Jews. Big surprise, that’s where the ‘Jews were behind 9/11’ story crawled out. Ha ha ha! Those Muslims looked so stupid! I know Americans believe some dumb shit, but we don’t believe shit THAT dumb! Down the rabbit holes I had a contentious conversation with a friend recently. Sam has always been an interesting conversationalist, more liberal than I, but customarily able to defend himself, with only occasional mild tinges of conspiracy thinking. In recent years, he’s begun to go down some rabbit holes. He thinks Building 7 near the WTC was brought down by explosives on 9/11 rather than having caught fire from falling debris. He thinks Jeffrey Epstein might have been up to worse than trafficking young women because he saw a photo of a backhoe on his property. “What was that backhoe doing there?” he demanded. “I don’t know, maybe he was building a swimming pool or something?” Sam suspected they were looking for bodies. “Whose? Women associated with him?” I hadn’t heard this allegation before but I hadn’t followed the Epstein saga that closely. “What else could it be?” “Backhoes are designed for construction. The most likely explanation is he was building something.” But, you know, I couldn’t say it wasn’t a search for bodies. “Are there any allegations of young women associated with him who’ve disappeared?” It was a perfectly sound question. Maybe there were suspicions Epstein had disappeared women, or the people around him. But Sam started yelling. “That question is OFFENSIVE! It’s OFFENSIVE! And I don’t want to talk about this anymore!” “It’s a perfectly legitimate question!” I protested. “I don’t know if he’s been accused of this or not. I’m asking: Are there allegations Epstein might have done this, or overseen it? Are there girls or women in his orbit who’ve gone missing?” He got angrier, didn’t answer the question and changed the subject, for the second time that evening, the first over Building 7. For reasons for which I am unclear, 9/11 conspiracy theorists are obsessed with completely unnecessary explosives. The image flashed through my mind of an angry little boy upending the checkerboard. The next day I researched Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged murder rampage (zero allegations, not even conspiracy theories), Building 7, and ‘why people believe in conspiracy theories’. While I was doing this, I was re-thinking my now ten-year friendship with Sam. I love him dearly, but in the last few years he’s gotten more easily triggered and prone to losing his temper. We’ve mixed it up a few times in the last few years, including sometimes over my behavior which was more hurtful to him than I realized. I was careful how I spoke to him that evening. I kept in mind some of his complaints about me and worked to make sure I didn’t repeat those mistakes. But I hadn’t asked offensive questions. I’d asked questions he couldn’t answer. There is such a thing as conspiracy There are genuine conspiracies, however loosely defined and perhaps collectively unconscious. Sam’s biggest conspiracy theory has a loose basis - how much the ‘1%’ control the world. Financial elites for certain have more power and pull than the rest of us, and we’re worse off for it. But Sam thinks it’s hopeless to fight them because they ‘control everything’. “Who shares the blame in allowing financial elites this much power?” I pointed out. “Who voted for them? For the politicians who support them? Who votes against their own interests over and over?” I was thinking of those gullible What’s The Matter With Kansas? Republican voters and more recent MAGAs, since liberals are less inclined to vote for guys like Trump or Bush. But to be fair, we Democrats and liberals voted for Barack Obama, who was forced to pay his dues for all the money he accepted from Big Finance by going easy on them during the Big Financial Collapse. The Clintons like their Big Money too. “You can’t say that! That’s blaming the victims!” Sam replied. “No, that’s acknowledging who allowed them to come to power,” I pointed out. “Voters. Maybe not you and I specifically, but others who voted for rich or paid-for politicians. They’re complicit. We’re all complicit. We’re all collaborators.” It’s hard to read Kurt Andersen’s excellent history and analysis (Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America) of how the Republican Party allied with increasingly conservative voices, powerful financial interests and later the far-right to take over and control large parts of the government, business, the economy and political discourse. Much of it started with the Reagan Revolution, undercover and happening in places most don’t see, like academia and the legal profession. But Americans voted for it. Famously, in a 1984 landslide election. “It’s blaming the victims,” he insisted. “The voters are accountable. Whether they vote or not. We have to demand better than we’re getting. We have to stop settling.” I wasn’t at all sure Sam voted at all, but I didn’t ask. The ‘1%’ has been ordering and reshaping the world, not so much to screw the rest of us as to benefit themselves. If you want to pull agenda-driven conspiracy theory into it, what they are aware of is they’re destroying society and the environment and making plans to remove themselves and leave the mess for us. There’s a new book about it. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff Still, the 1% looms larger between Sam’s ears than my own. We disagree on how much control they have over the rest of us, and how much responsibility we share. He buys into a powerlessness that I don’t. Conspiracy theorists want answers, like we all do. But sometimes the truth is more boring, or it doesn’t feed their need to feel ‘special’, keyed into ‘the truth’ that the rest of us ‘sheeple’ ignore because we have too much faith in the ‘lamesteam media’. Well, I do consult the ‘lamestream’ media more than Alex Jones, but I check my sources with Media Bias Fact Check to gauge reliability. I also like Snopes, Politifact, and AP’s & Reuters’s Fact Checks. When I deal with conspiracy theorists like Sam, these are the four responses I offer to their common faulty logic: 1) ‘Connecting the dots’ Dot patterns aren’t evidence, merely the suggestion something might be going on. But you have to have proof. Sam confused ‘connecting the dots’ with ‘evidence’. When I’d ask for evidence he’d respond, “Don’t you think it’s weird that—” followed up with something like People said they heard explosions coming from Building 7 yet no one can find these people, and acoustics experts have determined such demolitions would have been heard by everyone in the neighborhood, not just one or two witnesses no one can find. 2) Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence If there’s no evidence to support the theory, discard it. Or put it on the back burner in case something new turns up. If anyone finds corpses on Jeffrey Epstein’s property, I’m happy to listen (and then Google). Holding my judgement on the still-highly questionable ‘lab leak in Wuhan’ explanation for the COVID pandemic. 3) The more people who are in on the conspiracy, the less likely it will remain a secret Look, Bill Clinton couldn’t even cover up a sexual affair and initially, only two people knew about it. Then his mistress blabbed to someone she thought was her friend and that ended in an impeachment. It would take considerably more conspirators - like, in the thousands - to engineer 9/11 within the American government. Do you think Bin Laden pulled it off in two weeks with twelve goat herders in a cave? He did not. His conspiracy was years in the making and even then the future terrorists left clues and hints something was up, but fortunately for them George Bush relentlessly failed to pay attention. There is no way someone ‘inside the job’ wouldn’t have sung for CNN by now. Probably several someones, each racing to be the first to publish their book. Had there been any evidence 9/11 was an ‘inside job’, putting the suspects in front of lawyers under oath would have revealed everything including where Jimmy Hoffa is buried. Exhibit A: People spilling their guts for the Jan 6th committee. Exhibit B: Etc. etc. Fox News’s lies machine. We know about real conspiracies. Watergate. Iran-contra. The plot to kill Margaret Thatcher. The plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The plot to overthrow a fair federal election, conducted in plain sight on social media. You can’t keep real conspiracies secret. The truth always comes out. The more people who are in on it, the faster we find out. 4) What’s the motivation? What’s the point? What makes all this worthwhile? If George Bush had wanted to start a war with the Middle East for oil, couldn’t he have just invaded a country that hadn’t attacked us—oh, yeah, he did that, didn’t he. Except his first war was in Afghanistan, a country which has so little oil they don’t even make the top 100 oil producers. So his Grand Plan, apparently, was destroying the financial center of the United States with a ridiculous amount of needless roundabout complexity including an initial invasion of an oil-scarce country, and then finally Iraq, and I’m unclear how much oil we actually took from it. Then there are those pernicious alien bodies stored in a top-secret military facility somewhere. There’s no way generations of military officers could know about this and not tell a soul. Even Mark Felt, ‘Deepthroat’, revealed his identity just before his death. Some dying general, somewhere, would have said, “The American people have a right to know about this. The aliens are in a meat freezer at Cape Kennedy!” And then kacked it. Why? Why, Sam? No one wants to think they believe something untrue, even though we all get hornswoggled sometimes. We all tend to forget whatever critical thinking skills we have when we’re emotionally bound to a belief that would harm our self-image if we acknowledged the unthinkable: We were wrong. According to a Scientific American article, there are a number of psychological factors that incline people toward conspiracy thinking. These include: Frightening global events. Research consistently shows how much anxiety fuels conspiracy thinking, especially when coupled with feelings of disenfranchisement. Conspiracy theories can alleviate those feelings if one believes in a mysterious ‘they’ behind it all. Then one need not contemplate the evil of fellow human beings, random events, or whether one is personally or collectively responsible for driving any of it Political power. If your side isn’t in power you might be more inclined to theories about the other one (this goes for everyone) Control. The more or less control you feel over your life feeds whether you buy into conspiracy theories, or how much Feelings of rejection. Feeling like an ‘outsider’. The more isolated one becomes, the fewer avenues of logical thinking can penetrate, especially when one is in government-mandated lockdown and one’s primary companion is social media. The article describes a ‘conspiratorial double whammy’ when personal alienation and anxiety combine with a sense society or the future is in jeopardy (the Wokes vs the MAGAs) Conspiracy theories might be mostly harmless, like freeze-dried aliens, but believing stuff without any facts or evidence behind it can incline one to believe crazier ideas like a stolen election. We’re watching the unfolding timeline of Fox News and how its willful, ratings-driven agenda to draw back their factphobic audience drove the violence on Jan. 6. We can’t vote intelligently, if we vote at all, if we can’t comprehend real-world explanations. We put ourselves and our families at risk when we believe anonymous strangers and an idiotic president over medical experts when the latter tell us to get vaccinated against a killer virus rather than consume horse de-wormer. How can you behave like a responsible citizen, if you really believe liberals are baby-eating Satan worshippers? How are you hurting the country if you encourage distrust of the government by promoting ludicrous alternative explanations for a nationally traumatic historic event? Unproven, fear- and anxiety-based beliefs have real-world consequences. Bill Maher traces it uncomfortably for many back to religious belief, and it’s hard not to acknowledge he’s got a bastard of a big point. Plenty of carte-blanche religious beliefs are bugshit insane if you look at them with, you know, a critical eye. QAnon plays into peoples’ brains because it’s based on, and ergo specifically feeds into, religious belief. The lie the rest of us tell ourselves is that ‘religious belief’ requires a belief in gods and afterlives. And that we’re, ergo, immune. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

The misogyny backlash is here. The government won't help. It's up to women to avoid violent men. Public domain photo by kalhh on Pixabay I wonder what would have happened if she'd listened to her big brother. I can't remember her name. I'll call her Alyssa. She was my then-boyfriend's younger sister. He didn't like her boyfriend. I do remember his name. It was Patrick. Ben told me about her as we drove to his company Christmas party, where I met Alyssa. He adored her and felt quite protective of her, and he wished she'd get rid of Patrick, who was too controlling and jealous. Patrick suspected every man of encroachment, and of course he scrutinized Alyssa's every move and glance. The next morning Ben called. "They had a fight last night," he said. "Patrick thought she was too flirty with other men. He beat her up and raped her." We drove to Alyssa's friend's place where she'd spent the night. Alyssa was curled up on the friend's couch who immediately signaled for us to be quiet. "This is the first sleep she's had all night," she said. We sat down. A few minutes later, Alyssa began struggling and crying. She wept and pled and curled up tighter. "Please stop, don't! No, please don't!" she sobbed. I have never forgotten her rank fear that morning as she relived the attack in her dreams. Or wondered how anyone can assault anyone who's begging and pleading like that. The police couldn't locate Patrick. He'd escaped to Florida. As of a few years later they hadn't found him. It wasn't Alyssa's fault she got assaulted and raped. It happens rather a lot. But what has always bothered me, along with similar stories, is why she didn't listen to her big brother, and others who might have been warning her Patrick was dangerous. She ignored the #1 red flag It's so tediously predictable. I no longer care anymore why women stay in abusive relationships. Let's learn to avoid them! There's a dating Best Practices beginning with recognizing the early red flags. It's up to women to end male power over women. It's up to us to protect each other, and ourselves. The government's priority to protect women has never been what it should be, regardless of who's in power. We're sorely in need of more discussion and advice on how to avoid bad relationships, period. Here's my expertise: I've never been in an abusive relationship. So who the hell am I to give advice to abused women? Because I know something they don't know: How to avoid abusive relationships. An ounce of prevention, right? I want to see domestic violence shelters disappear. Not because Republicans destroyed them, but because they're no longer needed. I want to see women decide for themselves to stop shagging abusive men. It only encourages them to remain abusive; it's a time-honored effective way to control one's partner. Here's The Number One Red Flag women shouldn't ignore but, like Alyssa, do. I'm going to put it in huge red letters to make everyone crystal clear on this. The moment a man tries to control you, tries to tell you what to do, you come down on his ass like Homer Simpson on doughnuts. I've only had to do it once, when I was twenty. I forget what some guy told me I wasn't going to do. I replied, "Oh yes I am! You do NOT tell me what to do, understand? You do NOT order me around!" I don't know if he was a potential abuser. Not every man who likes control is, but I fully embrace my agency and self-determination. A man needs to understand he's not allowed to dictate to you, and he's out the door if he persists. He's not good enough for you. So many times over the decades I've said to women whose boyfriends or partners were controlling, "Why do you let him get away with this? You need to be careful, these guys can turn abusive." I hope for their sake he didn't. It doesn't always. But isn't feminist empowerment all about making choices? I have always chosen not to allow controlling men into my life. Ergo, no abusive partners. I have my mother to thank for that. Prevention, etc... When the pandemic began in the spring of 2020, domestic violence advocates warned of heightened danger to women experiencing Intimate Parter Violence (IPV) with lockdown forcing abusers and victims into a 24x7 danger zone. To no one's surprise, domestic violence and femicides shot up in the last two years and shelters were overwhelmed. I remember thinking: Damn, I'll bet they wish they'd left sooner. Sooner is better when it comes to IPV, but many women wait until it's too late. The abuse descent, one step at a time. Photo by sagesolar on Pxhere Meanwhile, the authoritarian War on women, led by American Republicans' example, circles the world. The U.S. Violence Against Women Act was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994, and a year later Republicans tried to cut funding. It's had spotty support in recent years. It expired during the last Republican (natch) shutdown, was temporarily reinstated, and shut down again. Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or contrarian, liberal or conservative, feminist or misogynist, men are never going to care as much about women's safety and protection as women. We can't rely on The Government Patriarchy to protect us. Victim feminism sure as hell won't, with its incessant post-modernist navel-gazing blather about intersectionalism and power and its utterly defeatist whine that 'It's not our job to protect ourselves, it's men's job to stop raping/hitting/stalking!' Women with a desire to not get raped or beaten can make a commitment to themselves not to tolerate controlling, and especially jealous, behavior in a man. Long before he gets to the partner stage. Women have THE POWER The obnoxious question "Why doesn't she leave him?" strikes a nerve in victim feminists. They recognize the implicit acknowledgment: She has a choice. Or did. Maybe she still does. We must ask that question much earlier, when he's acting like Patrick before events get critical. Here's what might have happened had Alyssa left Patrick before that fateful night. She had a burly big brother who engaged in muscular sports and would have happily kicked Patrick's shrimpy little ass had he hassled his sister. Had Patrick murdered her, Ben might well have followed him to Florida. Not every woman can't leave. Young women don't always listen to wiser voices. They're still young enough to think they know everything. They think they know him better than others, are overly compassionate, hope to 'fix' him or have other mystifying reasons for allowing controlling, potentially abusive men into their lives. According to Ben, he and Alyssa grew up in a loving single mother home after their father died. He described their family life as warm and loving and I observed nothing to challenge that. Alyssa wasn't beaten or abused growing up, but for some reason she found Patrick's jealous, controlling behavior acceptable, if unwelcome. It was the '80s. We weren't as sophisticated about relationships as every succeeding generation becomes, and maybe Alyssa's mother didn't drum it into her head she should never tolerate abuse. My mother would have had plenty to say if I'd brought a Patrick home. So would my father. Sometimes women learn the hard way they should have listened. Make no mistake: It's always a choice. It may be an ignorant, uninformed headstrong choice, but it's still a choice. Instead of pretending it's not, let's be proactive with ourselves and each other, and especially the girls and young women in our lives, and make sure they know the score. Maybe the first time she gets into an abusive relationship will be the last. Not every woman gets primed for further abuse. I've known women who said after the first time, "Never again!" THEY MADE AN EARLY CHOICE. Every Republican an incel! Here's some good news from one quarter on how things have improved since Alyssa's and my day: Trump-loving young men are unhappy that liberal women don't want to date them. Good job, ladies! Let's Drive Republicans To Extinction! Seems liberal women eschew Republican, especially Trump-loving men because their values don't match up, and I hope they also recognize that today, a man who still supports the Republican Party is a man who may very well harbor repugnant ideas about women. Identifying misogyny is difficult for many women, and victim feminism has muddied the definition to embrace anything annoying about men. There's a palpable sense of phallophobia in their mountains-out-of-molehills hysterics. Every interaction with a man turns into an Epic Battle With The Patriarchy. Discriminating against Trump lovers is a great way to avoid potentially abusive men, since the Republican Party has given itself over to rank bigotry and misogyny. It's interesting how Donald Trump, but not Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, broke up marriages, families and friendships. Let's not assume lefty boys are by definition misogyny-free. [See also: Misogynist 'Bernie bros'] But it illustrates a great point: Toxic masculine subcultures are herds to watch out for. These include: Sexist, misogynist religions and cultures Sports (male athletes have a long ugly history of sexual assault) Muscleheads/gym rats The military Affluent, rich, men (white men are especially prone to this, but wealth [green] privilege works for everyone who has the green) Homophobes. Underlying genuine homophobia is rank misogyny offended that a man would let another man 'treat him' like a woman (And what's wrong with penetrative sex, exactly?) Men who fetishize women of other races Not every man in these groups is a misogynist or a beater, but one must be especially wary and come down hard on any early misogynist treatment. But hey, you don't have to listen to me. What would I know about abuse, having never been abused myself? Would you rather listen to Dina McMillan, a domestic violence social psychologist who's worked with over 600 abusive men, who says she can train women in two hours to avoid a lifetime of abuse? How to not get abused You decide Three waves of feminism have failed to address the missing piece to the IPV dynamic: The elements in female psychology, apart from or missing a history of dysfunction, that encourage some women to allow abusive men into their lives. As Dina McMillan notes, we need to impress this upon young girls and teens. My mother did, when I first showed interest in boys. She didn't want me to get 'played', a word that didn't exist back then, and she didn't want anyone pressuring me into sex and perhaps leaving me with a baby. She wanted me to have happy, functional relationships and impressed upon me that it's always a woman's choice to stay. That's how I know something that a lot of abused women don't know: If you listen to trusted adults wiser than yourself, you can avoid a lifetime of pain and suffering. Not everyone has my mother, but she's my hardcore evidence that IPV perpetuates because women don't recognize the primary early warning sign. Let's review: Capiche? Public domain background image by geralt on Pixabay My experience with Alyssa demonstrates there was something in her psychological makeup that allowed her to keep Patrick in her life despite a trusted older brother telling her otherwise. I wouldn't be surprised if there were others. Some women have to learn the hard way. Some women learn their lesson the first time. Time for feminist response for growing IPV to become more proactive, rather than reactive. 'Don't blame the victim?' Don't BE the victim. It's your choice! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!