My mother called Marisol ‘a doormat’ because she tolerated verbal abuse. I learned never to be one. Wipe your feet here. Photo by Zipnon on Needpix My mother was a radical feminist before it was cool. Not ‘radical’ the way we know it today. Her radicalism stemmed from her uncommon conviction that on some level, women possess a certain amount of control over whether they’re abused. Mom never suffered physical abuse herself, nor do I know of any friends she had who did. They sometimes suffered what today we recognize as psychological or emotional abuse. Including Mom, who could deal it herself if Dad provoked her enough. If men possess the physical edge over women, one can argue women possess the same between the ears. We’re better wired to understand and process feelings, we express language with greater precision, we understand better the value of relationships and how to manage them, with which we’ve refined our darker powers of emotional manipulation. Men can kill us, but we can still destroy them. It wasn’t just the lessons Mom drummed into me growing up, making it crystal clear I had the power to decide how a boy or man would treat me. It was all those dinner conversations about Don and Marisol. Dad met Don, a fellow engineer, at the large U.S. government contractor where they worked in Orlando. Don was from France and a fast friendship grew with my American-born French immigrant family father. Mom and Marisol, both young mothers, hit it off. Sometimes we’d visit Marisol. I played with her two youngest while the moms chit-chatted. Mom regaled Dad over dinner with Marisol’s stories. Don was a real pain in the ass — dismissive, combative, rude. Once he called Marisol’s mother ‘a big fat cow’. Other times, he insulted or criticized Marisol or the way she handled their four kids. There’s no reigning expert on parenthood quite like a man in an office five days a week. “So I said, ‘Marisol, why do you put up with this? Why do you let him talk to you that way? I told her, ‘He treats you like a doormat.’” Later, I asked Mom what she meant. She replied, “Mr. V mistreats Mrs. V and forgets about her. It’s like he wipes his feet on her and she doesn’t argue. Neither does a doormat.” In the 1960s, women didn’t often recognize abuse for what it was. But Mom recognized the power Marisol wouldn’t claim. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, an unrealistic view. We’re responsible for ourselves, always, and in a modern world we possess far more agency than women had over fifty years ago. We have more power to decide who to allow into our lives, and how we’ll let them treat us. One can argue 1967 ain’t 2020. True. Marisol had her reasons for staying with or tolerating Don. But Mom didn’t tolerate crap from my father, a product of the same generation that produced Don. I sometimes wonder how many men — and women — would be more abusive if their partners allowed it. Respect. It starts at the beginning. Thanks to Harli Marten for sharing their work on Unsplash. The ones who disrespect women, who try to control and dictate their choices, who insult and condescend to get their way, need to depart forthwith, and never darken her doorstep again. Before the beatings begin. I’ve finished a book on the psychology of abusive men and the author, a male counselor who’s worked with them all his life, notes how difficult, almost impossible it is, to root out the entrenched sense of ownership and entitlement these men feel. Mom knew then what we’re only beginning to understand today: You can’t change another person, but you can change yourself. You decide how you’ll be treated. The sooner, the better. Prevention, etc. Her words of wisdom defined my life, even if she didn’t always take her own advice. I repeated her words back when she railed years later about how my emotionally remote father needed to change for her. Marisol may have not had as much choice with four kids, but today she would. She met Don at her dream job working for a cultural attache in a foreign country. Single motherhood today is no picnic, nor an option for all, but with 60% of divorces initiated by women, it’s not the entrapment it once was, either. Every child she bore for Don was a choice to stay, and to further tighten the bonds with him. Mom never liked Don. She told me years later she put up with him because of Dad’s friendship, and because she liked Marisol. Don once put the moves on her when Dad and Marisol were out of the room. Mom demanded my father never leave her alone with him again. His kids seemed to react against him. Mom believed they committed deliberate acts of rebellion. Once they crushed an Easter marshmallow bunny in Don’s workbench vise. It solidified before he discovered it, making it even more of a devil to fix and clean. I complained that Mr. V hugged me too hard. Mom said Mrs. V complained he was sometimes too harsh in his punishments with the children. I don’t know if it was abuse or not. I don’t remember the details. In one of our hoary old family movies, Don is at a 1968 Christmas party hosted by my parents. I love it for the sheer kitsch/camp value of a bunch of ‘squares’ celebrating like the party scene in The Graduate . Don is on the couch. When the camera points his way he makes a few silly, rude gestures, then a Seig Heil move. It wasn’t his only expression of racism according to Mom. She got mad one year when the avowed atheist blasphemously referred to Jesus as ‘That cat on the cross’. She didn’t say anything, of course. Good ’60s wives didn’t call out their husband’s friends. I don’t remember all my parents’ dinner conversations. Most had little to offer a preschooler. Dad talked about work, Mom about friends, church junk, boring adult stuff. I knew, though, anything involving the V family was bound to be engaging, even for a four-year-old. Don was a source of endless drama and Marisol an abject lesson in how to be a doormat. I didn’t realize how ingrained was my notion that women have control over their own lives until I caught a badly-imagined passage in my first dark fantasy novel. The main character, Samantha, has just broken up with her more-casual-than-she-would-have-liked boyfriend. She flees to a friend’s house after a demon set upon her by a frenemy almost beats her to death after she resists its sexual advances. A young male friend comes over to give her something and sees her bruised face. “Samantha,” [he says, assuming her ex was responsible], “how could you let him do this to you?” It took six or seven drafts before I realized how horribly misogynist it sounded. Especially from a male character who treated women well. But that’s how I thought. Still do. How can she let him treat her that way? The revision reads: “If it was that movie Indian asshole, I’ll kill him.” Dunham leaned back against the door and crossed his arms, leveling me with his own steely gaze. Samantha is a strong, powerful character. Her sort-of boyfriend Andrew isn’t an abuser, but he has a wandering eye. When she finds out he had sex with a friend who didn’t know about her own involvement with Andrew, she breaks up with him. In my mind, Dunham saw her the way I see women like her: As someone who, whether her trust or body was abused by a man, would never allow it to happen again. I realized how screwed up the passage was, and I changed it. Old thought patterns die hard. One can’t obliterate millennia of patriarchy, female ownership and entrenched male privilege in one century since the advent of modern-day feminism. Toxic beliefs and values permeate our beings as they do men’s, including women’s greater willingness, I believe, to accept victimhood and tolerate abusive behavior. Our brains are wired by our biological sex along with our evolutionary social conditioning, although we always have the power to change. Our neural pathways connect in malleable brains, not cement. We can change our thinking patterns, values, beliefs and perceptions. We can decide not to be slaves to our cave brains. If men need to uproot their entrenched toxic patriarchal belief systems, so do women. Men don’t have to abuse. Women don’t have to be abused. We can choose not to be victims. But first we have to recognize that power. Then seize it. This appeared on Medium in September 2020.

Women unconsciously collude with sexual predators. Know their tactics, and reclaim your power Women aren’t helpless little ‘targets’. We can fortify ourselves against males who seek to exploit our psychological weaknesses. Photo by SilviaP_Design on Needpix The smarter a girl is, the better it works. Party girls with attention deficit disorder generally don’t stick around to hear the routines. A more perceptive, worldly, or educated girl will listen and think, and soon find herself ensnared. — Neil Strauss, ‘The Game’ Loren blew into my life like a Highland warrior, the literal embodiment of the sexy, chesty, take-charge, long-haired hero of a medieval romance novel. We both belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval re-creation group I was part of in my twenties. Charismatic and compellingly attractive, dark-haired, dark-eyed, brash and brimming with sexuality, he glommed onto me like a Scottish laird to a guileless virgin. Except I was a flamboyant and outrageous belly dancer, famous throughout New England SCAdian ‘kingdoms’ for my flirting and sexual innuendo as well as my energetic performances. Loren epitomized the hottest, most popular guy in school whose head, just a few years previously, my dorky ass could never hope to turn. But, ugh, he flirted with every woman he met and often had a woman (or two) under each arm. Right in front of me, even as he actively worked to crank my every sexual button into hyperdrive. Seventeen years later, pickup artist (PUA) Neil Strauss, a/k/a Style, explained in his exposé and how-to manual The Game how this was ‘social proof’: “The notion that if everyone else is doing something, then it must be good.” Have one or more beautiful women around you, which always looks better than if you’re alone. I was no longer La Dorkola. Now I was Gisèle, with a ton more self-esteem and male admirers than high school. I disliked arrogant assholes, hip to the games they played with women to massage their own mammoth egos. Today we call them ‘players’. Back then I called them ‘sluts’. I decided not having sex with Loren would give me far greater pleasure than bedding him. I made a conscious decision to be the one woman he couldn’t nail. The best and worst of pickup artist practice Not all The Game’s advice for men is bad. It offers some pretty basic female attraction lessons many men never learn, even well into middle age. Here’s what makes me want to scream, “Hallelujah, Brothah Style! Say it again! Tell them like it is!” Smile when you enter a room. The game is on. You’re together, you’re fun, you’re somebody. Be well-groomed. Have a sense of humor. Connect with people. Don’t approach a woman with a sexual come-on; learn about her first. Strauss thinks she should earn the right to be hit on. No, he must earn the right to hit on her . Demonstrate value. Be different. (Oh dear gods on Mount Olympus, if men learn just one thing from The Game let it be this! ) The Game, for women, is a road map to every easy exploit in the female brain. Patch your weaknesses , and you’ll be impervious to the perv-ious. Ladies, take note of the following. This is just a taste of what women need to understand about themselves to effectively avoid not just PUAs but other toxic men. The less laudable, if lamentably effective advice: Negging. Alienating her by lowering her self-esteem and displaying an active lack of interest in her. (Remember: This works, particularly for those women PUAs correctly label LSE: Low Self-Esteem.) Cat string theory. If they make it too easy for her she loses interest and goes away. ( The Game ’s female counterpart, The Rules, is entirely based on this same premise.) Using NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques to, essentially, trick her into wanting to be with him. NLP is considered hogwash by scientists, but it seems to work for PUAs, and strikes me as being at least a little based in current neuroscience: We can, indeed, rewire or ‘reprogram’ our brains. Strauss really nails many women (figuratively) with what I call woo-woo. He calls it ‘chick crack’, the conversational ice-breaker psychology ‘tests’ and New Age fluffy nonsense many women adore. One example: He writes down a number and asks you to choose between one and ten. You chose 7; he reveals that’s the number he wrote down! He knew you were going to say that because you’re meant to be together or some such crap! Amazing! (Except that 70% of people choose 7.) Or, he gives you and your friend some silly ‘best friends test’ and spouts a bunch of psychobabble he made up utilizing fairly pedestrian knowledge about people. Not only is he rarely ever wrong, but if he is he can find a different frame to make it look like he wasn’t. It’s what fake psychics do: ‘Cold reading’. The really execrable advice for men: Challenge yourself to overcome shyness doing things like talking a homeless person out of a quarter. If you can overcome that, you can be an effective PUA. You’ll also be a horrible human being, and everyone in Strauss’s book paid a price later. TANSTAAFL. Still, there’s a point: Push yourself to face rejection, and get so good at what you do you don’t get it nearly as much. Relentless rejection saps your will to live, but only occasional rejection is just part of The Game. I can’t wholeheartedly condemn their tactics. I’ve been in sales for almost all my career; we, too, know a lot of little tips and nudges to win prospects over. (As PUAs dehumanize women as ‘targets’ or ‘sets’, we salescritters refer to prospects and leads. No, nothing dehumanizing here.) Early in my career, a savvy, successful salesman told me, “When someone objects or resists, distract them by talking about something else; then go back to it, and keep doing this until they give you what you want.” I did this just the other day to a woman resisting booking a meeting with our team lead. I cracked a joke and she laughed and I laughed and then I cracked another joke and then went back to booking the meeting. And I did. These tactics work. Who’s truly being victimized? The #MeToo movement has focused much-needed attention on predatory men. Women have slid male manipulation, control and abuse under the microscope, scrutinizing experiences and exchanging data like scientists parsing the differences between ancient fossilized bacteria. Some women don’t yet connect the fact that we’re not, or don’t have to be, helpless recipients of male machinations. We can draw lessons from #MeToo, studying The Enemy, those predatory men who seek to use and abuse women à la Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly and Game rs. The Game helps us to better understand our own psychological weaknesses and eliminate them. Forewarned is forearmed. I was right speculating that PUAs were more adept at understanding female psychology than many actual females. But here’s the rub: Not all The Game’s ‘targets’ are the helpless, naive victims one might assume. Female readers will identify with the seemingly hapless ‘targets’ while guided dick missiles Style, Mystery, Extramask, Papa or Tyler Durden walk into a club or party and hone in on their ‘prey’. They’re about to ‘put one over on her’! They’re about to ‘use her’ and discard her! Don’t they understand these women have feelings? That’s how it would be if these guys targeted us, the mortal less-than-10s. These guys have set high standards for themselves. They weren’t good-looking or rich enough to score the really hot high school girls, so they learned The Game not just to get the head cheerleader, but the head cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys. They’re all style and little substance. But the women they’re going for aren’t exactly Michelle Obamas either. Often lacking in substance themselves, both ‘targets’ and PUAs cater to the equally callow and shallow. Many have been super-hotties their entire young lives. Males have always come easy to them, and they’ve developed a hyper-awareness of the games men play. They retaliate with their own games. There are probably as many books on how to emotionally and sexually manipulate men as there are for men seeking the same for women, even if the desired outcomes are different (monogamy versus polygamy). Strauss was surprised to learn not all women are out to isolate a man from sexual nirvana with a ring, a house and a baby. Many women, he found, are just as interested in sex as men, but have to contend with matters like the Slut Rep. And sometimes women are commitment-phobic, too. Or accept behavior others would find creepy and threatening. Like the woman Strauss dropped off at her address, then followed her into her apartment without asking, and she didn’t object. And they had consensual sex. If you act as the authority, says his friend Grimble, many women won’t question you. He’s right. These women let them do these things. It’s not always oppression. Sometimes they consent, for their own reasons. One woman’s meat (ar ar) is another one’s poison. So women have to learn to not let them. Our bodies, our choices, right? Now that we know what they’re doing, we can put the kibosh on it if we want to. Often, women collude in their own oppression. Perhaps they don’t know any better, especially if they’re very young. Ignorance is bliss, for abusers. The good news is women don’t have to take it! I can’t emphasize this enough: Women respond to The Game ’s cheesy tactics because they work. For those who seek something more substantial than cheap hookups, it’s our job, as women, to educate ourselves, and educate girls better on how to identify and avoid men who are only out to use us. How to handle early male attempts at control. How never to allow a man to mistreat us. We decide how we want to be treated. We’re not victims. We empower ourselves. Image by Harmony Lawrence from Pixabay “Take my power. Please.” One PUA observed that the ‘weakness’ of small, petite women turned him on. Naomi Wolf observed in The Beauty Myth that super-skinny, anorexic women may be attractive to men because an undernourished woman is too weak to resist. The anorexic also conveys an important dark message: She’s so desperate for male approval and/or a partner, she’s willing to nearly starve herself to death. Anorexia is one way women hand over their power to men. The kind who will likely mistreat them. Women find other ways to collude with sexual predators, however unconsciously, to victimize themselves and others. And some of the ‘targets’ are little better than the PUAs themselves. There are some other pretty depressing truths about The Game’s ‘targets’ and ‘sets’: Men may drop women easily, but women will dump men just as quickly for a bigger, better deal. A particularly depressing observation is how women still think and allow themselves to be defined as ‘sluts’, as though men still held all the power of their perception, not to mention their reputation. Strauss describes LMR (Last Minute Resistance) as an understandable ASD (Anti-Slut Defense). The woman pulls back a bit so he understands she’s not easy. Women married three or more years were easier to bed than single ones. (So much for the evils of tomcats.) One PUA’s conquest accidentally sent her judgemental review of their date to her entire address book, revealing several details of how shallow and stereotypical she actually was. PUAs screen for women who are ‘users’. Touch é. ‘Style’ (Strauss) found women were usually okay with learning he’s a PUA after sleeping with them, and didn’t believe he’d been ‘running game’ on them. But once they broke up or stopped seeing each other, they used it against him. They were okay with what he was until the end. “If you lower a woman’s self-esteem, she will seek validation from you.” If there’s only one lesson I want women to learn from reading The Game, it’s this one! What I wish men would draw from The Game: Learn about women, understand them better. PUAs may be cads and rapscallions, but if guys with good will understood women as well as PUAs, there’d be no such thing as ‘incels’. Learn about ‘social proof’, something everyone responds to — if everyone else is doing it, it must be good. FOMO! My seducer-wannabe Loren exploited women for social proof, but a solo, confident man with lots of people around him is a good fortune magnet. Most importantly, Strauss learned one of the core lessons about women that many men never, ever seem to figure out: Women are not as ‘ready to go’ as men are. Most men are thinking and acting on getting into a woman’s pants before she’s even thinking about what’s in his pants. There’s a stiff (erm) price to be paid for focusing too much on one field of knowledge while ignoring another. The Game doesn’t end on a very positive note. Strauss, a professional writer already well-versed in analyzing and drilling down, details how the PUA community fell apart when the need for something deeper necessitated focusing on one compelling woman, perhaps marrying, and having children. These guys only knew how to get women into bed; they had no clue how to connect with them on a deeper level. Often the relationships fell apart, and they didn’t understand why. One PUA student who’d only wanted to get married found a wife, but his marriage fell apart a few years later for his lack of relationship skills. Mystery, Strauss’s best friend in the community, suffered a suicidal nervous breakdown over his failed real relationships; like a typical PUA with little self-awareness, he attempted to intellectualize failures with evolutionary psychology and other things he’d learned, rather than recognizing that neither he nor she had the requisite human connection skills. (Easily-acquired men and cheap, shallow sex comes with a price for women, too.) Goodbye to you Rather than go for Loren, I turned my attentions to David, his roommate, who’d caught my eye just before Loren blew in like a gale force wind over the Orkney Isles. Loren backed off. We remained casual friends. Several months later I learned he was leaving our community so I stopped into his place of work to say goodbye. “I will tell you something, Gisèle,” he said. “If you hadn’t gone for David I would have done my damnedest to get you into bed. But I wouldn’t do that to a friend.” “No you wouldn’t have bedded me,” I told him. “You were far too arrogant and women come too easily to you. I decided to be your one and only failure.” “You’re wrong,” he said, “I would have nailed you, but I guess we’ll never know.” Au contraire . As compelling as he was, as much as I wanted to do the dirty with him, I valued myself too highly. I refused to give him my power. I derived my own power in being the one woman he couldn’t get. Not all women can be Gamed. Seventeen years before the how-to manual came out, I’d studied and analyzed dating dynamics and the games men played. And I had a mother who armed me well against the games men have always played. You can’t Game a woman whose weaknesses have been identified and patched , like a computer network. Forewarned is forearmed. This originally appeared on Medium in October 2020.

Our own fear of personal power serves The Patriarchy quite nicely, thankyouverymuch. We need to uproot that #%^&. Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels “I want to marry a rich man,” some of my peers said in the 1980s. I tried to control my expression, since these were more often my office colleagues rather than close friends, few of whom valued themselves so little. These gold-diggers weren’t mired in poverty or hopeless circumstances with little ability to see a future over which they had any control. I worked in an upscale payroll services office crammed with overeducated entitlement-oozing ‘Yuppies’ in expensive suits and a certainty they were Going Places, all of which required flying First Class. Or marrying it. Twenty-five years into Second Wave feminism women positioned to Do Better were still willing to give up their power, hand it over to men. I guess a quarter-century wasn’t enough time to erase thousands of years of patriarchy between female ears. Sure, just let a man run your life. That’s the ticket. The one abrogating her power the most was the drop-dead gorgeous highest-producing account executive, the lone woman on the sales team. Solange, oozing a sense of beauteous female entitlement against which her colleagues were powerless, boasted about how a man had to have enough scratch to scratch her itch. “So the bucks started circling,” she recounted in the office lunchroom after a ski lodge weekend. Her voice oozed with condescending triumph, her face suffused with power. “But you’ve got to pay to play! If you don’t got the dough, you don’t get to go!” A faint, sick smile crossed my lips listening to Solange reduce marriage — her well-publicized goal — to rank whoredom. She was embarrassing. Didn’t she realize how unfeminist she sounded? Didn’t she understand rich men expected deference, submission and dependence from their often multiple women, whether they were married or not? A harem is part of the male entitlement package, and each woman is expected to cater unto him and him only. It’s why they want to be rich. They do it for the p**sy. ‘Scuze me, plural. Didn’t she understand how domineering and controlling rich men often were? The word I sought was patriarchal , but it hadn’t joined the vocabulary yet. Solange was partially the woman I wished I was: Strong, ambitious, successful. She made a lot more money than I. Solange embodied the New Woman birthed from the early labor of Second Wave feminism: Beautiful, street smart, educated, and made her own money. She didn’t have to depend on a man for survival. Underneath the whip-smarts go-getter was just another self-sabotaging princess willing to give it all up for, if not love, at least a big house in Fairfield County and a country club membership. The guys sniped behind her back she was the top producer because she slept with her prospects, something they couldn’t do. It wasn’t an unwarranted, misogynist response. Solange bragged about dating her leads. Working in that money-crazed office was an early lesson in how unquestioning women give up their power. The women I worked with came from good families, could have supported themselves, had careers of their own, but instead, they aspired to marry a rich man. Somewhere, the daisies rocked as Jane Austen nodded. “I don’t want to marry a rich man,” I’d say. “I don’t want to give up my financial independence. Why would you say that? We don’t have to do that anymore! This is the ‘80s! We can do whatever we want, be whatever we want!” While we organized Take Back The Night marches, maybe we should have also organized a few to Take Back Your Brain. It’s unreasonable to expect the human race to change thousands of years of male domination — patriarchy — in the century since First Wave feminism brought women’s suffrage to nervous males worried how female votes might cancel out their own or that politics and public policy might distract her from the only things she should be concerned with. Kinder, Küche, Kirche as they said in Imperial Germany. Children, kitchen, church. Patriarchal thinking, and submission to male will, dwells as much between female ears as it does male ones. I don’t know if as many young women still aspire to marry rich men — everything I’ve read about them indicates they’re too focused on their careers to even have sex — but I see how The Patriarchy is alive and well even in feminists. I researched personal development coaches on LinkedIn the other day and ran across one coaching women on how to nail a ‘high value’ man. A friend tells me he’s seen her, and other coaches like her. Old habits die hard. Marriage may be dying, but abusive partnerships aren’t. As smart, capable women gave their power to well-off men thirty years ago, many smart, capable women are still giving their power to controllers and abusers, ‘high value’ or otherwise. Women bare their teeth, patriarchal thinking fully displayed, when you question whether women are as powerless as they think. Just because a woman’s afraid to wield her power doesn’t mean it isn’t there. She doesn’t even know it’s there, especially if she’s an abuse victim. It’s buried treasure. Abusive traps don’t start in the seventh level of Hell. They begin at the top of the staircase, each step a choice the woman makes along the way. The educated, aware woman stops no more than a few steps down and backs away. She exercises her knowledge and power. The less savvy proceed down, giving away a little more of their power with each choice. Photo by Undermind on Needpix We, as women, need to stop being afraid of our power, to acknowledge we can avoid a lot of ugly drama in our lives, sleepless nights, self-blame and endless rumination on woulda-shoulda-coulda if only we’d known better. The longer we wait, the more w-s-c we accumulate. Not to mention psychological torment and worse. We live in an ocean of information in the 21st century. Time to stop blaming and start self-educating. Just as I saw nailing a rich guy as ‘something we don’t have to do anymore’ thirty years ago, I see tolerating control and abuse as something we don’t have to do anymore, today, either. Female patriarchal thinking is rooted in victimhood identification, the female acceptance of the traditional masculine view of women. We see it in some women’s inability to endure the everyday slings and arrows we all encounter. We can let every little insult or offense eat at us, screaming about victimhood, or we can choose to push them aside and not give the offender more power over us. We can be more vigilant and, instead of complaining to our friends how unfair life is for women, recognize it’s unfair for damn near everyone, and we’re not as different from others as we think. We can save our outrage for critical important battles and not waste energy and headspace on ‘microaggressions’ and other minor hypersensitivities. We can learn from our mistakes and break our own toxic cycles. We can continue to hold others fully accountable for the transgressions they make against us while acknowledging we must make better choices next time. We can stop making excuses for ourselves, and for others. When we don’t challenge our friends to do better, aspire better, choose better, we encourage a toxic subconscious dependence keeping women in their place — subservient to the larger patriarchy. We become enablers similar to those encouraging women to go back to their toxic relationships and ‘make it work’, by helping her stay stuck in life without tasking her with asking the woman in the mirror, ‘What can I do differently? What do I believe that needs to change?’ Photo by dawolf- on Flickr(CC BY-NC 2.0) My mother always said, “Even in an abusive relationship, it takes two to tango — one to abuse and the other to take it. They’ll give it to you if you’re a doormat.” She was often referring to her friend Marisol , whose husband was verbally abusive. Mom didn’t tolerate verbal abuse from anyone. Marisol allowed it. And that was almost sixty years ago. For some, it’s controversial to suggest women can educate themselves better. They can protect themselves against abuse by considering and tracing any ill-considered choices they’ve made already leading to, and deeper into, abusive relationships. Some self-infantilizing thought is still stuck in the ’80s populated, ironically, by many who hadn’t yet been born. It’s patriarchal residue designating helpless little girls to a realm once lorded over by husbands with near-supreme power. Just as right-wing gadfly Phyllis Schlafly once feared the liberties and scary new opportunities feminism brought, so, too, do some women still resist, on some unconscious level, personal responsibility for one’s life and safety even as they pay lip service to ‘empowerment’. When I was growing up young girls were counseled by assault prevention advocates not to ‘act like a victim’. Act strong, confident, walk tall and with purpose, like you know where you’re going. I believe this works. I don’t take a lot of dumb risks like walking down a dark alley alone, and while I attracted far more attention when I was younger, I don’t remember many fearful incidents from my youth. Now, victim feminists counsel women, “It’s not our job to not get raped; it’s men’s job to not rape. We need to keep the attention on them, and teach them not to rape.” Classic patriarchal thinking. First, suggest all men are potential rapists. Then give the rapists the power to stop, or not. Don’t seize the power yourself and protect yourself better, or learn how to stay away from patriarchal, misogynist men, thereby reducing the chances you’ll be assaulted or abused. ‘Don’t blame the victim’…rather than don’t be the victim. My youthful peers were women who didn’t believe in tolerating abuse, who looked out for each other. We reinforced each other. Today, some women reinforce misogyny and patriarchal thinking — in women. Educated prevention is always better than a cure. That’s what I want women, especially young women, to understand. We can do better. We can grow more. We can take back our power. We need never give it away in the first place. This originally appeared on Medium in October 2020.

Except world peace. Try not to answer like a beauty pageant contestant. Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash We solve the world’s problems every week at Archer’s virtual cocktail hour. You’re welcome. She started the practice in April to give us something to look forward to in the early days of lockdown and quarantine. Once we had a dance party to celebrate her birthday. It would be another month or two before we began habituating the Question of the Week. Five or six Canadians Zoom for an hour on Friday night to chat, complain about quarantine and enjoy a drink or two while pondering a Great Question to keep our brains from joining our waistlines in mushing out. Great questions in the past have included: “You have a time machine, you can pick one thing in your life to go back to. Where, when do you go, and do you just observe it from afar or do you change something?” (This inspired my article The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Me May Have Changed My Life. ) “If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?” “My misspent youth: Tell us, if you dare, about some youthful misbehaviour that either taught you an important lesson or was memorable in some way.” Then we stopped thinking about ourselves so much: “Is there a statue or monument you’d like to get rid of, or revise? What would you replace it with, or how would you change it to reflect more aspects of the story it attempts to tell?” “Does free will exist? Is everything that happens determined by what happened before? Are our actions inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action?” One conversation-provoking question was to imagine our ideal retirement community. Our ideas little resembled long-term communities today, places where old people go to play until they die. We imagined car-less sustainable communities, with great Internet access, and lots of resources to continue learning and pursuing one’s own projects. Libraries. Training centers. A diverse population different from today’s almost all-white LTC residents, taken care of until their end of days by non-white aides and caregivers who, at least today, may never be able to afford such care themselves. Recently we wondered: What ONE gift would you give to humanity, that isn’t world peace, and preferably doesn’t interfere with free will? It turned out our ideas fell under a few highly cohesive themes. Emotional intelligence Archer and a man who jokingly referred to himself as ‘The Emperor’ began with ideas that recalled two Hollywood movies. Archer named a Freaky Friday setup like the 1970s movie in which a mother and daughter exchange bodies for a day. Archer believes that at least once, we should spend a few days or maybe a week living in the body of someone quite unlike us for a brand new perspective. The Man Who Would Be Emperor’s idea was similar — the chance to feel most of someone else’s reality through just a few seconds of touch, which reminded me of the Stephen King book/movie The Dead Zone , where a man returns from a years-long coma to find he has the ability to foretell someone’s future by shaking hands or otherwise touching someone. Except in The Fantasy Emperor’s scenario, you would experience what it’s like to be that person. Not only would you see life from a different perspective, but in the immortal words of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! Sharing someone else’s reality includes what they think of us. Maybe we’re shocked to find we’re not ‘all that and a bag of chips’, as we might like to think if we’re inclined farther down the narcissist spectrum. Or we might be even more shocked to find that others don’t judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves. My own answer also involved the power of touch, but centered upon one’s self. What if each one of us could experience five minutes of absolute, total peace — our fears, insecurities, and anxieties completely removed — and we saw the world clearly, for the first time in our lives? In other words, what if we lived for a few fleeting minutes the enlightened, joyful ‘clear seeing’ many Buddhist monks experience daily — and then, when it was taken away five minutes later and we returned to our now clearly miserable existence, we were told: You can have that back again but now you must work to achieve it. Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash Most of us are simply unaware, or are too busy struggling to survive, or are too afraid, as a Christian psalm describes, to undertake a foreboding journey through the ‘valley of death’, the darkest parts of ourselves, to face the fears, insecurities and anxieties that keep us locked in an existence far less fulfilling and joyful than the one we might live. Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash Freedom to create and innovate The Artist’s idea suggests one potential benefit that’s been floated as an argument for a Universal Basic Income. She would give humanity the opportunity to set aside a certain amount of time every day for some sort of creative project, and to be encouraged to spend it wisely, rather than, presumably, wasting time bingeing on useless time distraction. It sounds a bit like Google’s ‘20% Project’ , itself based on its predecessor, 3M’s ‘15% Project’, initiated in the years after World War II when 3M realized a company must ‘innovate or die’. It allows employees to spend 20% of company-paid time on their own projects, reasoning it will make them better, more creative, more innovative employees, and Google, by extension, a better company. Just imagine if we all had 2–3 hours a day in which we actively engaged in a creative pursuit — writing that novel, painting, learning all six chords on the guitar, starting up your own business, writing that killer app, exploring a better way to streamline an old, kludgy manufacturing process. The funny thing about imagination-capturing projects is they don’t depart when we have to go back to ‘real’ work. Our brains keep working on them, in the foreground if our ‘real’ work is the sort that doesn’t require much brainpower, and in the background if it does. Our mental downtime wastes fewer cycles on the externalities that annoy us, especially those we can’t change. Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash Fixing those externalities Our nuts-’n’-bolts folks focused on global issues. The Scientist believes overpopulation is our biggest problem and that reducing our numbers would increase environmental stability. One might observe the pandemic is doing exactly that. It’s hard to reproduce from six feet away unless you live with someone. His partner, The Nurse, wanted to remove the desire to commit crimes from everyone, which would reduce a lot of global angst when everyone felt safe (and perhaps more inclined to take up The Artist’s 20% Project). She wondered if it might accomplish the opposite of her partner’s idea and drive up human population with everyone feeling better. Archer considered that feeling safe might make people consider more carefully having children. Archer’s husband, a recently retired tech exec, wanted to give everyone free, non-polluting energy, but only after ten years’ preparation, to give people the chance to think about how to prepare for this future. The Man Who Would Be Emperor, living in dark times in the United States, commented it might just give people ten years to plan for how they might kill their enemies! These ideas all integrate well with each other for a kinder, gentler world. Except, of course, for sustainably killing one’s enemies. Archer’s, The Nurse’s, The Emperor’s, and my own ideas emphasize increasing emotional intelligence, compassion, and appreciating perspectives different from one’s own, all contributing to more peaceful individual existences. This will incline people more toward The Artist’s idea to make more time for creative, innovative pursuits. With eventual free clean energy provision, and perhaps a slow reversal of climate change (or more brainpower to plan better for the impetus we’ve created we are now powerless to stop), we would also work toward The Scientist’s dream of a more sustainable environment with fewer people vying for scarce or limited resources. And we’d have something else to do besides shag irresponsibly. In other words, to quote an Internet meme I’ve seen: What could we accomplish if we stopped being dicks for just, like, five minutes? Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash What would your one gift to humanity be? I’m curious! This was first published on Medium in 2021.

I was my worst abuser. I’m not the only one. We all are our own worst enemy. Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash Blaming the victim? Oh, don’t talk to me about ‘blaming the victim.’ Been there, done that, got the toxic private journals to prove it. No one has ever been more vicious to me than myself, including Dan, my worst bully in high school. After my longtime partner dumped me out of the blue and I found myself low-valued in the singles market (over 30, quel dommage ), I turned on myself. We women like to think it’s our unique female cross to bear, that we’re ‘socialized’ to blame ourselves, but I argue it’s human, and if you want to blame socialization, let’s point the finger at American culture, presided over, if you can call it that, by America’s most swaggering self-hater. I know plenty of self-hating men, including one I suspect is as vicious to himself as I have been to myself in the past. On the other hand we do love to blame others, who can and will commit cruel, heartless, or just plain thoughtless crimes and misdemeanors against us. Yet we soon turn on ourselves. Women tie their identity and value to their personal relationships; men to their jobs. When women lose a friend or a partner they think, What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I a good enough friend/partner? And when a man loses a job he thinks, Wasn’t I good enough? Why wasn’t I worthy of retention? When life goes tits-up, as the British like to say, a ‘post-mortem’ on what happened and what went awry is a terrific healing practice, but it can create new trauma. Every examination into what we might have done otherwise turns into a toxic dance of woulda-shoulda-coulda. Especially “WHY THE HELL DID YOU HAVE TO WAIT SO LONG TO DO/STOP/START/UNDERSTAND THIS?” Insight sucks. I’ve compared the descent into an abusive relationship as a spiral staircase where one makes decisions, conscious or unconscious, informed or uninformed, giving away a little of one’s power each time until one reaches the bottom where there’s none left. Within a few years of the partner split, I thought of it as a hole. There were key differences between myself and the woman at the top of the abuse staircase: I was the abuser, not some man. Every goddamn foot deeper I dug, I knew , consciously, I was hurting myself. I was making things worse. I was going through a bad time and saying the most vicious things to myself I’d never tolerate another human being saying to another within earshot. It sounded shamefully brutal when I thought of saying it to any other human being, including my ex, the person I hated most. I even wondered why I gave myself permission to be so vicious to myself. “Nicole, you worthless piece of shit, what makes you think a guy like him could ever be into you?” “This is your fault, you big fat lump of protoplasm! Who can ever love a fat piece of shit like you? You stuff your damn face and then wonder why no one wants to go out with you!” (I was overweight, but no Jabba the Hutt.) “You are so stupid. You put up with all of Jerry’s alcoholic bullshit and you were dumb enough to take him back! Now you’re over the hill and no one wants you and it’s all your damn fault! Why did you have to pick the Loser of the Pack? What does that say about YOU?” “Don’t even bother getting out of bed this morning, you stupid bitch. It’s Saturday. What do you have to look forward to except another day of nothing to do and all day to do it? Why can’t you just die? You’re fucking useless. You’re a fucking loser.” “I hate you. You’re ugly. You’re fat. You’re unlovable. Guys ignore you because they can get better-looking, younger women, you old fat slob. Judging a woman for growing older, for something we all have to do, is men’s fault, but you CAN do something about the rest of you, and you won’t, because you’re lazy and stupid and there’s no point because no man will ever love you again no matter what you do.” “You worthless piece of shit.” “You worthless piece of shit.” “You worthless piece of shit.” My favorite slam. I still made plenty of time for man-blaming and man-hating. When I criticize victim feminism (not representative of all feminists) for its misandry, I know whereof I speak. Been that, done that, made all the castration jokes. Just like there’s nothing worse than a reformed alcoholic or smoker, there’s nothing worse than a reformed misandrist. The difference was, my problems with men weren’t political or feminist, they were personal, served with a heaping side dish of romantic entitlement. But misandry comes from the same toxic spiritual waste pool; the belief others are more responsible for our lives than we are. As we’re fond of saying, the personal is the political. And, vice versa. I always returned to my favorite scapegoat, the worthless sack of shit calling herself Me. I dug deep down, then dug some more. Sometimes I reminded myself, “Nicole, you’re digging this hole and no one else will pull you out of here. The deeper you dig, the harder and longer it’s going to be to climb out.” So great was my self-hatred and self-loathing. Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay. The post-Jerry nadir of my world-class victim-blaming Olympic-level self-abuse marathon is what I think of as the Angry Drunken Bitch Years. The self-loathing in my old journals appalls me. Now, instead of wanting to beat up on that poor critically wounded woman, alone and rejected, I want to beat the snot out of the vicious bitch who tortured her at every opportunity. Who, when the hurt woman was feeling most down, laced up the spike-toed red-hot steel boots and kicked her some more, just to remind her what a worthless piece of shit she was. Victim-blaming? No one else has ever blamed me as much as I’ve blamed myself. I’m not alone. What we shoulda done, or not tolerated in times past, is a new way to torture ourselves once we move into healthier ways of managing our lives and anxieties. Our own personal Terminator doesn’t like it when we start to heal. It regards personal insight as a direct threat to its existence. In a sick sense, our worst abuser is a trying to protect us against further pain. I began digging out of the Angry Drunken Bitch hole four years ago, when I embraced Buddhist teachings and listened more to podcasts and YouTube talks than to my Terminator. Image by David Mark from Pixabay Now I think about that poor hurt girl and want to embrace her and tell her it’s okay, rather than kick her with the spiky-toed boots. The other bitch still exists, but she’s weaker. Still, she likes to get her licks in every now and then. Last year, when I was unemployed and crying, curled up on the couch, getting treated by hiring managers the way I once got treated by single men (and for the same reason — age), the bitch said, “Nicole, you have no marketable skills!” Now I have the presence of mind to respond, “Huh? No marketable skills after decades in the workforce, with a resume hiring managers once salivated over to realize I was versatile and could move from one damn thing to another I knew little about and get our sales team in the door?” Just as single people (not just men) often don’t know what they want in a partner, neither do hiring managers or their department heads know what they want, either. (Hey, nothing is all our fault.) The toxic bitch was wrong, as usual. Because I’m back to doing what hiring managers think I can’t do: Working with small to medium-sized businesses moving into the initial branding phase of selling their product or service and getting their foot in the door. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a Ph.D. in genetically modified AI-driven cold fusion-powered superwidgets or whatever else I’m flogging at the moment; in fact I only just learned they exist. I’m doing what I do best, and then I move on to the next shift. The bitch was wrong about me lo those many years ago, but it’s still hard to move on and not woulda-shoulda-coulda myself. “Nicole, why did you wait so long to realize the only person you can change is yourself?” “You described yourself years ago as a ‘Pagan with Buddhist leanings’. Why didn’t you just embrace it when you were so unhappy? Why did you reject the antidote?” “What if you’d lost weight sooner? What if you’d dyed your hair blonde sooner? What if you’d stopped digging in, say, 2009 instead of 2016?” “How many great guys did you push away because of the Angry Drunken Bitch thing?” I have to remind myself of the answers. Because I didn’t know. Because I didn’t believe I had to change myself. Because Buddhism didn’t resonate with me until the third time I read Tara Brach’s book, when I was ready for the message. Because I didn’t believe the antidote would work. Because I hadn’t yet read He’s Just Not That Into You. Initially, it hadn’t even been published yet. The thumbnail answer encapsulating all of it is: Because I didn’t know any better. And sometimes it was because I rejected the answers, or didn’t know what I didn’t know. Sometimes, the information wasn’t even available yet. Like what we know today about the neuroplasticity of the brain. I didn’t know I wasn’t a victim of my own history and experiences and could change my own brain. I can’t blame myself for that. Even as I castigate myself for not getting healthier sooner I think, “Well, better now than ten or twenty years from now!” I force myself to reflect on all the things I did, the decisions I made, right for me at the time , and if that doesn’t sit so well with my present self then tough shit, Bitch Nicole. We struggle through every damn day of our lives one day at a time, without ever having a clue what we’re doing. I beat myself up this past year for not striving harder professionally, getting stuck in a world where I did the same thing for too long, then remembered saying to my brother and sister-in-law, “I made the decision not to climb the corporate ladder. I valued my personal time too much.” Seems like a 20/20 bad decision when you’re on unemployment benefits and you’re not sure how you’ll survive and you beat yourself up over woulda-shoulda-coulda, but then I consider all the miserable people on LinkedIn posting hopeful positive-thinking memes, or inspiring messages about believing in one’s self and not letting others define you, and I wonder, who are they trying to convince? Me or themselves? I know everyone suffers from Imposter Syndrome. Someone I once admired I know has been suffering a bad bout of it this past year. None of us believed a pandemic would shut down life as we know it. Yeah, we were warned, but no one believed. We didn’t want to. It seemed silly! Wouldashouldacoulda. I didn’t climb the corporate ladder, but I traveled because I had the time. I’m glad I didn’t listen to the old folks saying, “Why are you traveling? What will you have to look forward to in your retirement if you go everywhere now?” Uh, staycations because Quebec is a pandemic mess and the U.S. is so bad even Mexico has shut its doors to Americans? I became a belly dancer and have great tales to tell from those days. I spent my twenties going to medieval re-creation events, flirting outrageously, dancing during feasts, camping during the summer at events with battles, campfires and games. I dated Vikings, bards, samurais. I had a wonderful life. I read a lot of great books others didn’t have time for. I published several novels even though almost no one read them. I immigrated to a new country and live better here than in the now-Ignited States. I have far more friends than when I was an isolated hot mess in Connecticut. Now I’m learning how to become a personal development consultant and help women, and eventually others, claim or regain the power we give up, give over, and give to others because we don’t know any better. I still blame the victim. I still beat myself up sometimes. I push the message of taking responsibility for one’s life and people snap, “Don’t blame the victim!” and I’m beginning to understand why. It’s not because I’m blaming them for their traumas, it’s because I point out we have the power to learn from those mistakes, however unconscious, to move forward more fearlessly. Insight sucks. Did I mention that? Not everyone’s ready for the message, but for those still crying on the couch as they realize, “The only person I can change is myself,” and get up to take that first power-reclaiming step — those are the folks I believe I can help. I’m registered to take a course on becoming more assertive. It promises to teach us to learn how others manipulate us, and understand how we hold ourselves back. Most importantly, how we submit to being a victim, something we all need to work on in our finger-pointing, responsibility-abrogating, self-obsessed, self-victimizing culture. The hell with why I didn’t do what I woulda-shoulda-coulda. We enter this life screaming protest without a road map or a user’s manual. We’re always moving into the future semi-blind. The past is always much clearer. But fuck the past. The present and the future are what I can also change, besides myself. I don’t want to waste any more time just because my worst victim-blamer still exists. Fuck her too. Getting there. Photo by Filipe Delgado from Pexels This post originally appeared on Medium in November 2020.

Was it the misogyny, or what I didn’t do that nags me decades later? Boys will be boys. Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay My French uncle’s comment still drives my aging brain into woulda-shoulda-coulda mode. It was what I didn’t do to get back at my cousin, and teach my lackadaisical uncle and aunt a lesson. I’m still kinda pissed, forty years later. “Dat’s what you get for playing weet boys!” I have enough to be neurotic about without adding the Fireworks Stunt to my existential angst. I began pondering the crazy mini-traumas lodged in our brains after reading a writer’s tale of sexual harassment on the school bus . Her debut into the sexist world for her tween-age self still bothered her twelve or thirteen years later. It’s funny, isn’t it, how little events can mark us for life, when we often move on from the larger, more serious ones. What’s done to us by others is what sticks far more than ‘shit happens’. Studies after Hurricane Katrina found survivors were more traumatized by the government’s half-assed heckuva-job-Brownie response than by the hurricane itself. Hurricanes gonna hurricane, but government officials make choices. Getting groped by a schoolboy, not knowing what to do about it, or how to make him stop, still stuck in the writer’s craw. I wondered if she’s tormenting herself with the woulda-coulda-shoulda years later, as an adult, thinking now what she should have done? I can relate. Forty years later, it’s glaringly obvious I should have taken my cousin’s knife. Or hidden it really well. Ona hot July night my cousin played with my brother and some of the neighborhood boys in the yard. My cousin was the oldest, about 17, and the others were a little younger — my brother was twelve, the other kids in between. I went down to the basement via the outside entrance. The basement doors slammed shut and locked. I was enveloped in darkness. “Let me out!” I demanded, and of course they didn’t. Boys! “Come on you guys, cut it out!” I yelled, but they laughed. Exasperated, I groped for a broom I’d seen next to the fridge. My uncle and aunt were upstairs, directly beneath me. I pounded on the basement roof to get their attention. After a minute or so, they failed to show up. What the hell, had they fallen asleep up there? It was early evening, right after dinner. “Hey, let’s get a firecracker!” my cousin suggested. Was he out of his mind??? The others exploded with excitement. He wasn’t serious, was he? Were they really going to throw a firecracker down here? Don’t they understand how dangerous that is? Boys don’t think, or if they do they don’t care. They opened the door, tossed a lit firecracker down, and slammed it shut. I felt held hostage. I knew the most important parts of me to protect. I shut my eyes, turned away, and plugged my ears. The firecracker exploded, as did the boys. How hilarious! They locked The Girl in the basement! Would it have been even funnier if they’d blown a hole in my leg? If I’d been rushed to the hospital with a flesh wound? What if I hadn’t had the forethought to protect my ears and eyes? How funny would it have been then? The adults didn’t take it any more seriously than the hormone-addled morons. I ran upstairs to my aunt and uncle, placidly reading on the couch. “Where the hell were you?” I demanded. “Didn’t you hear me pounding on the basement roof?” “Oh, is that what that was?” my aunt replied, regarding me over her half-moon reading glasses. “We wondered where the noise was coming from.” I exploded. I named my cousin, their son, as the ringleader and instigator. My French uncle’s reaction? He laughed. “Well, dat’s what you get for playing weet boys!” “I WASN’T PLAYING WITH THEM!” I yelled. “I went downstairs to get a soda! And even if I had been, it doesn’t matter, what they did was dangerous! Don’t you understand? I could have been blinded, my hearing could have been damaged, it could have hurt my leg!” They laughed the whole thing off and told me to forget about it. My cousin didn’t get in trouble. I’ll take his knife, I thought. The Family Shuffle to accommodate our visit left me in my cousin’s bedroom, who moved upstairs to share bunk beds with my brother in the furnished attic. We’d celebrated my cousin’s birthday a few days previously, and he’d gotten some special knife he’d really wanted. I forget what was so awesome about it. Probably it was some sort of Swiss army knife. It was on his dresser. I decided to take it home to Ohio and call him to say I’d bring it back next year. Maybe that would teach him a lesson. But as I thought about it, the more I considered this would backfire on me with the unsupportive adults. When I told my parents about it, implicating my brother but still holding my cousin primarily responsible, they were sympathetic and my brother got scolded, but they wouldn’t confront my uncle and aunt about my cousin. My mother didn’t think it was her place, as the in-law. My father looked up to my aunt, who’d been a bit older and sort of a second mother to him, and he would never stand up to her. My parents’ wimpiness didn’t help. But what really bothered me was my uncle’s comment. “Dat’s what you get for playing weet boys!” We didn’t talk about misogyny and male privilege back then. We accepted oh, ha ha, boys will be boys. Society didn’t yet recognize toxic masculinity starts early, accompanied by sexual harassment. No one yet realized tolerating sexist behavior in children often cements male entitlement for life. Girls were expected to grin and bear it, get over it and move on. I sat on my cousin’s bed, still burning with righteous anger over the lack of empathy and concern for my safety. This wasn’t a silly, annoying boyish prank; my cousin should have been punished for putting me in danger. I kept thinking about my sight, my hearing, the permanent scar on my leg I might have gotten. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash A lifetime of summer vacations with my misogynist cousin acting like a little dick flooded back. Like not allowing me into his treehouse because it’s ‘no girls allowed.’ My aunt argued with him but didn’t make him come down if he was going to act like that, and she was a girl. “Why does she let him do this?” I asked my mother. I was only five or six at the time. “Shouldn’t she tell him to let me come up too, or he has to come down?” That’s exactly what my mother would have done. I knew it. But she wouldn’t say anything because it wasn’t her son. Many times he and my brother ganged up on me because I was The Girl, and times we ganged up on my brother because he was The Kid. But my brother was never the little misogynist my spoiled cousin was. I remembered all the times my cousin treated me like crap because I was a girl, and I resolved to confiscate his precious knife for a year. But oh Darwin, the consequences. What would my parents do when they found out I’d taken it, even as I explained I didn’t want it for myself, I wanted to punish my cousin since no adults would? Given neither of them had the balls or the labia to stand up to my aunt and uncle, I guessed their reaction would be to mail it back, and make me pay for it out of my allowance. I wasn’t sure how much shipping cost but I didn’t get much of an allowance anyway and I didn’t fancy being money-less for the rest of the summer, which would be all my cousin’s fault and yet another reason to dislike him. I decided not to risk it. Maybe a better option was to hide it, and call him to say I’d tell him where it was when I felt like it. I stuck it behind his bed near the dresser. I knew he’d find it before Christmas. It wasn’t much of a punishment but as my anger lessened, so did my resolve to make him pay for what he’d done. The next morning, I decided I was over it and I put it back on his dresser. The memory pops from time to time, I suspect because I want to help others, particularly women, become more assertive, take back their power, fight genuine misogyny, and ‘grow some labia’. (Hey, we can’t ‘grow some balls’ like we tell men.) Now, of course, if I could do it over again, I’d take the knife back to Ohio, hide it from my parents, call my cousin, and tell him he’ll see it next year. I’d talk serious turkey to my parents, make it clear they abrogated their responsibility not forcing my aunt and uncle to reckon with their reckless child, and if they insisted on mailing it back, they’d pay for it, not me. And if they punished me I’d dispose of it. But I didn’t. I was sixteen, and a Good Girl, as they raised me to be. I didn’t have the forethought to plan things out further. To realize the better-laid plans of mice and wronged women emerged after sleeping on it. I could have announced as we were leaving that I‘d taken his knife and he wasn’t getting it back until I got an apology. I could have thrown it into the bushes after receiving it and made him work a little for it. Woulda-coulda-shoulda. What good does it do me now to think about what I should have done about a past I can’t change? Here’s the funny part: My cousin turned out fine. He grew up, stopped being a dick, has a daughter from his first marriage and is married to a wonderful woman. He runs his own liquor store and he’s an expert on wine, how to cook with it, which one to pair with your meal, and he does it in a non-snobby, utterly engaged way. He believes in what he’s doing. He’s not some upper-class asshole trying to impress everyone with his tortured oenophile jargonbabble. The 2000 White Zinfandel from De Carro Winery combines crude crack-cocaine essences with a voluptuous rose flavor. Pusillanimous without being too obfuscating .— Random Wine Review Generator , with a little addition from me We never talked about it, and today I’m more inclined to beat myself up over beating myself up about it rather than for my non-response to the incident itself. It didn’t end badly, although in some alternate universe I may be wandering around half-blind, half-deaf with a permanent scar. I can’t change the past, but I can change my relationship with it. I guess it’s desire for closure. The feeling someone got away with something. Why is it so important? It’s an ego thing. He should have experienced consequences for what he did. He didn’t. It’s an unfair world. Now I wonder: What consequences have I never experienced for something I did to another I’ve long since forgotten about, that the other party hasn’t? Whose craw might I be sticking in? I can think of several likely candidates, and I’ve just identified one. Digitizing my life last year I ran across something I’d completely forgotten about: A couple of essays detailing my freshman year in college. I was utterly appalled at the way I treated someone with a crush on me whose feelings I didn’t return. Long story, but I Googled to find the guy. I’d send him an apology, if I could find him. I did, but with multiple email addresses and I didn’t want to email random strangers with the same name. Then I wondered if it was even a good idea. What if I re-traumatized him? I didn’t email him, but I still think about it. Some of those emails must still be active, especially his Gmail addresses. Gmail never dies, right? I read another Medium story about a ‘hit and run’ apology someone made for abuse she dealt the writer many years ago in a so-called drug abuse rehabilitation program called Straight Inc. Now I wonder if I’d be better off thinking about the wrong I’ve done to another, and others, rather than the one done to me. This originally appeared on Medium in January 2021.

It’s the ultimate hypocrisy destruction weapon, yet its power unites by exposing us all. “Are we racist for laughing at this?” “Probably, but damn, that’s some funny shit!” Image by Omar Medina Films from Pixabay Carroll O’Connor had passed away , and some cable channel ran a marathon of his classic TV series All In The Family in tribute to Archie Bunker, America’s Most Lovable Bigot. I finally understood the adult political humor my parents’ generation adored in the early 1970s. Nineteen years after All In The Family ’s introduction, In Living Color debuted, a sketch comedy show largely produced by blacks. They slaughtered enough sacred cows to threaten McDonalds’s bottom line. Their favorite target? Racial stupidity, ALL of it. They made fun of women and men; they even offered humor bombs like the disabled superhero Handi-Man and a fire safety burn victim. The characters didn’t look ‘less than’ or inferior. Anyone caricatured on In Living Color could become a member of Our Tribe if they chose: The ones who know to be human is to be funny, and if we can laugh together we can stop fighting each other. One of us! One of us! Gooble-gobble gooble-gobble! Do you know who was most offended by the Handi-Man sketches? Not the disabled. They thought he was funny. Performer Damon Wayans reported criticism came from those who weren’t handicapped, or with handicapped relations they didn’t support very well. Wayans himself grew up with a club foot, the butt of far crueler humor than anything on the show. Handi-Man: He brought laughs, and justice for for the physically disabled The late quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan’s assessment of the offense his disability cartoons caused was far more blunt. “My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands, he said. “Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and the patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.” Seems the disabled felt a lot less ‘untouchable’ once allowed into the fraternity/sorority of fun. Set hypocrisy phaser to Stun, Lefty! The Left’s politically correct, hypersensitive, oh-so-woke War On Humor faction is largely oblivious to how exclusionary it’s become. Their well-intentioned search-and-destroy missions for the moral and spiritual toxins poisoning North America, metastasized in the Age of Trump, has unwittingly obliviated avenues for confronting our fears and discomforts, and most critically, to bond with others who are different. Hard to imagine today, but in the days of Archie Bunker and In Living Color ’s prison-release inmate Homey D. Clown, the Left possessed an actual sense of humor. Before ‘cancel culture’ and career-destroying ‘call-outs’ and J.K. Rowling wizard hunts, the Left understood the bonding benefits of laughing with each other, at each other, and at ourselves. Homey D. Clown: He hated kids and white people The Left’s head would explode if Netflix re-created these comedic takedowns for 2021. Although I can’t think of a more desperately-needed time to Make Humans Funny again. Oh, the comedy motherlode for the Abhorring Twenties…! I’d love to see Blaine and Antoine, the flamboyantly gay movie critics from In Living Color’s ‘ Men On…’ sketches remade with two narcissistic overprivileged transwomen. Humor’s greatest gift is in exposing the foibles and fundamental heart of what it means to be a human being: We’re bloody hypocrites. Liberals loved laughing at Archie Bunker’s ignorant vitriol, but The Meathead’s social justice views got challenged too, like when his childlike wife Gloria discovers ‘women’s lib’ and spreads her nascent feminist wings, telling her husband she wants to be an equal partner in their marriage. That goes over like a Watergate break-in. When is humor a hypocrisy blaster, and when is it ugly bullying? We need to ask ourselves an important question. Do the targets deserve it? In 2021, Generation ‘Snowflake’ replaces pinch-faced aunties and bewhiskered, monocled moralists of yore with pursed-mouthed purists obsessed with the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, may be having a laugh at someone else’s expense. What America needs now, more than ever, are outrageous new challengers to our assumptions of what we think we know about the world. Archie Bunker was an ignorant racist, (take that, you conservatives!) but he also possessed a human, kinder side (And you too, liberals!). Who knew bigots weren’t 100% evil? Even Mary Trump describes a few occasions of kindness from her notorious cousin. If you think no one should ever be made fun of, because they might hurt someone’s feelings, I have one word for you: Trumpistan. No one deserves satirical derision more than Donald Trump, except his toxic hyper-testosteroned fan club. Even though Trump appears to be a genuinely mentally troubled individual, likely suffering from dementia, with the sort of beneath-the-surface low self-esteem that customarily sends the Left running to fetch the tissue box. Few decried the four-year flow of often mean-spirited humor memes. I shared them too. Hey, is fat-shaming okay when it’s applied to an obese fat-shaming narcissistic psychopath? Donald Trump painted the target on his own chest. The most powerful man in the world had zero sense of humor. His ‘jokes’ were cruel barbs aimed solely at tearing others down to lift himself up. The last person who could get away with a disabled-person ‘joke’ famously mocked one anyway, and his spiritually disabled base roared with laughter. Imagine feeling so low about yourself you have to tear down a guy with cerebral palsy. Down. He had to tear down . Even the handicapped guy made Trump feel ‘less than’. The President of the United States subconsciously felt inferior to a guy with CP. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And Bill Maher. Trump’s loyal sheep couldn’t stand to see their guru mocked. Snowflakes also wear MAGA hats, flag pins and gold crosses. Collectively, they beg for comedic jabs. Compassion is one of the Republican Seven Deadly Sins. We love watching Trevor Noah or Steven Colbert mow down our own bête noires with comedic assault riffs, but the laughter too often stops mid-track when the barrel of the insult weapon turns toward ourselves. It’s why some on the Left detest Bill Maher so much. He’s an equal-opportunity political offender. Make fun of Trump all you want, but staaaaaay awaaaaay from us! Move along! Nothing to see here! “Okay, but if you spend your time combing through old TV shows looking to identify stuff that by today’s standards looks bad, you’re not ‘woke’, you’re just a douchebag.” The Wokenati fear humor’s soul: It’s the ultimate hypocrisy bomb. It destroys on impact. What if someone notices our biological sex science denial is near-identical to a Trumper’s denial of climate change or the COVID crisis? And why do some of these transwomen talk and act an awful lot like entitled white dudes? And when did we all become white supremacists? I for one have never burned a cross on anyone’s lawn! Didn’t we look an awful lot like clueless, irrelevant morons when we attacked John Wayne for being a racist, sexist, product of his time and generation? What if someone digs up that regrettable Halloween costume choice from 1984 before I became woker-than-thou? What are people going to say about me thirty, forty years from now, or after I’m dead? The Regressive Left knows, deep down, we all have much in common with the Trumpers. We’re hypocritical too, and we’d rather focus on their hypocrisy than ours. It’s ironic, because in destroying contradiction and exposing hypocrisy, humor is actually a Secret Equality Weapon. The mark of the emotionally intelligent and truly secure — left or right — is whether they can make — and take — a genuine joke about themselves. The humanizing power of humor Dave Chappelle takes heat for his trans humor , a movement ripe for risibility with its self-obsession, misogyny and science denial. Some see him making fun of transwomen; I see someone making fun of transphobia. I understand why some don’t find funny his joke about a perfectly-dressed transwoman walking into the boardroom on her high heels and slamming her dick on the table; but I see the ones who aren’t yet ready to give up their male entitlement. The ones who lead the baying mob against a children’s book author for speaking science. He speaks of one transwoman, Daphne, who laughed at all his jokes and then invited him to have a drink with her at the bar. “She said, ‘I thought it was interesting that they blamed you for R. Kelly, they said you ‘normalized him’ for telling jokes about him. I wonder why they never said that you ‘normalize’ transgenders by telling jokes about us.” There’s a key point: The humanizing and normalizing power of humor. Tragically, she committed suicide in 2020. Some of Chappelle’s trans humor comes across as a little homophobic, but he may ruffle feathers with his more-truth-than-poetry commentary. He says America embracing transfolk makes him a little jealous. “How the fuck are trans people beating black people in the Discrimination Olympics?” he asks. “If the police shot half as many transgenders as they did n — ers last year there’d be a fuckin’ war in L.A.!” Touché. What’s really eating Generation Snowflake? A veneer of social justice may provide a convenient excuse for oversensitive young people behind ‘cancel culture’ imbroglios to avoid examining the more painful, and real, feelings behind their almost programmed outrage over a lame attempt at humor or a poorly-executed joke. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff note in their book The Coddling of the American Mind , later Millennials and Gen Z exhibit the common cognitive distortions and catastrophizing exhibited by depressed, stressed, and relentlessly anxious psychiatric patients. No wonder, considering how Millennials were raised by obsessed helicopter parents hell-bent on keeping them safe from any negative feelings while driving them to achieve and perform practically before leaving the womb. In eleven years, from 2007 to 2018, the suicide rate for the 10–24 age group increased over 57%. No one’s quite sure what’s behind it specifically, but Millennials — heavily educated, underemployed, and never allowed to relax — also exhibit increased rates of the aforementioned mental health problems, juiced by social media absorption, self-comparison and FOMO, and today, enforced isolation. Is the problem really a comedian’s homophobic-sounding joke, or are Millennials reacting to a literal entire lifetime of being driven to succeed, only to find themselves stuck with their parents because, post-Great Financial Collapse, much of their opportunity disappeared along with their parents’ investments portfolio? Is the problem really someone who disrespects a Gen Z’er’s self-perceived right to an unchallenged assumption, or adolescent problems in a climate of decreasing personal intimacy, sexual pressures and gender identity conflicts, increasing misogyny/racism/ transphobia and a seemingly collective national downward spiral into violence, civil unrest and maybe even the breakdown of democracy? All at a time when younger generations aren’t old enough or experienced enough to understand and process what’s happening, at a time when their elders can no longer reassure them We’ve seen this all before. It will pass. Believe me, I remember when I thought Ronald Reagan was the end of civilization. Let’s make the world safe for humor again We need to make humor, and humans, funny again. Like knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud, and often cringe-inducing did s/he really say that? hysterical. The Left (and the Right) be damned. If we can laugh, we don’t have to cry. If we can only cry, then please, someone remove all the pointy objects in our vicinity, and lock up the handguns. We need to learn how to laugh at ourselves again. And with each other, occasionally at each other, and our common human silliness, stupidities, hypocrisies, contradictions, overblown egos and essential differences. You know, all the faults and frailties that universally make us human. The humor that doesn’t kill us will make us stronger, and today is the worst possible time to be spiritually and morally delicate. It’s not only the other side’s problem. It’s hilarious you think so! “I didn’t even hear what you had to say because the objectionary programs that my mind carries that I mistake as my own thinking reflexively went off.” We need to be emotionally intelligent enough to recognize the difference between cruelty and bullying, kinship and common ground. Every time the far Left complains jokes about others are really racism, sexism, or your least favorite -ophobia, it sounds more and more like Pay no attention to that bigot behind the curtain’. If you laughed, it’s because you’re an anti-American bigot. I’ll bet you’re a Canadian. Or worse yet, a European!!! This post first appeared on Medium in February 2021.

Bigotry comes naturally to all of us. When we can joke about others, we’re not slaughtering them in caves Image by Jakaria Islam from Pixabay Homo Sapiens is a fearful species. Possibly genocidal since we left Africa, anthropologists and archaeologists note that with every migration into a new land, an extinction of most native species occurred shortly thereafter. This may have included our human rivals. The Neanderthals and Denisovans also disappeared with the arrival of us. We’ve uncovered countless millennia-old suspected murder victims. Like Otzi the Iceman, who died of an arrow to the back 5,000 years ago. They got him good. He probably wouldn’t have survived even with modern immediate medical attention. Image by bastiaan from Pixabay The oldest so far is a 430,00-year-old Homo Sapiens — that’s us, folks! — in a Spanish cave. A reconstructed ancestral skull contains two holes unlikely to have happened by accident. There once were no fewer than nine human species in the world, up until about 10,000 years ago. Then they all disappeared around the same time , coinciding with the appearance of Guess Who. And no, not the old hippie band. We emerged from Africa newer, smarter, and better prepared to adapt. It was a game of Ten Little Indians, starting at nine. Nine human, eight human, seven human species, six human, five human, four human species… There’s no corresponding event to otherwise augment or explain the systematic disappearances. Not climate change, nor a pandemic (which likely wouldn’t have reached some of the more remote species), nor famine. There isn’t hard evidence for genocide theory, but if you follow the trail of victims, where Homo Sapiens moved, the Others, the animals, and the land all died off. We may have good reason to fear each other, even if it’s a chicken-and-egg condundrum: Do we fear Others because a few prehistoric assholes started it all, or are we proactively bigoted against anyone we don’t understand? One wonders how interspecific humanity might have fared if they had comedians back then. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial — a young woman did not fart on her husband’s lap. — The world’s oldest recorded fart joke, by some anonymous Sumerian wit, circa 1900 BC I explored the Left’s gelotophobia in my last article. Humor: Why The Left Fears It So Much Other primate species share our ability to laugh and it emerges in infants in the first few months. Researchers theorize laughter emerged to create social bonding, especially after humans organized into more complex societies. If another can make you laugh, you’ll feel more kindly toward her. Laughter triggers a stress- and tension-relieving endorphin rush. It relieves pain, strengthens our immune system and encourages a sense of belonging. Which leaves humor rather like The Force: It can be used for evil as well as good. Laughing at others with others creates bonding; laughing at them without them creates harsh division. Key & Peele: Make fun of everything! I guess you had to have been there. The comedy duo Key & Peele, in a 2014 Time Magazine op-ed article, argued for the right to Make Fun Of Everything without a bunch of politically correct pretend-to-do-gooders jumping all over comedians’ asses. Make Fun Of Everything — Key & Peele They note how how rendering others ‘untouchable’ is exclusionary. It becomes, however unintentional, a form of bullying. One wonders who’s truly uncomfortable with others who aren’t like them: The person cracking wise about them in their presence or the politically correct with their patronizing assumption If you want to read it first, go ahead, it's a quickie. I’ll wait. that the other group is too weak-spirited to laugh at itself, or too stupid even to know it’s happening? Permission to laugh What the politically correct’s Nervous Nancys don’t understand is how humor takes fear’s power. What they think are jokes about race or other differences often poke fun not at differences but bigotry. The Canadian comedian Russell Peters endlessly jokes to highly diverse audiences about race, culture, religion, and accents, in a country where accusations of racism are more shameful than actual racism. “I want to see white people preserved. If white people go missing, who the f**k are we gonna blame?” Audiences know it’s okay to laugh because his targets are laughing along with him. The outsider shows us what’s funny about our tribe. Like stereotypes. We know they’re harmful, but they originate from a place of observed commonality. Laughing at stereotypes isn’t the same as laughing at people, but the intent of the humorist makes a difference. ‘Russell Peters can make fun of white people because he’s a member of the oppressed minority,’ the Humor Not-zis inform us, referring to the comedian’s Indian roots. Peters’s pedigree is a valid point. Humor punches up (at those in power) and sideways (at those on your own level), but when you punch down it’s cruelty pretending to be ‘just a joke’. A white comedian can’t get away with the Spanish accent imitation or celebratory salsa steps Peters dances to illustrate someone mistaking him for a fellow Latino. Peters jokes about addressing a Hispanic guy who doesn’t speak much English and imitates the slower mental process the other guy goes through to respond. ‘Hello,’ translate it into his head — ‘Hello — — equals — — ¡Hola! — — reply with — — ‘Hello!’ I laugh not because I think he’s making the Spanish guy look stupid, but because it’s the exact same process — and likely facial expression — I go through when someone speaks French to me. Slow down, Jeanne-Marie! My brain ain’t Google Translate! I feel a kinship with the Hispanic guy — a fellow human who also speaks a second language poorly. One of us! One of us! I love Bad Translation humor sites like Engrish.com. Why are so many of them Chinese-to-English? Chinese is the most complex language, spoken for millennia, with thousands of pictogram characters backed by an ancient culture. Greater mistranslations with far more modern English are bound to occur, especially by a translator not as fluent in the target language, or a poor machine translation. I regret I can’t see the Chinese versions of Engrish.com making fun of English translations of Asian languages. I’ll bet they’re hilarious! What’s their own equivalent of All your base are belong to us ? Apparently they’ve got too much as it is. By Wright — Own work, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Can white people ever make fun of out-groups? Maybe targeting hypocrisy, which is like privilege: When you have it, you can’t see it, and you need others to call it out. Not everyone has privilege, but we’ve all got hypocrisy! So I think it’s possible, but I’m not sure any white comedians are doing it, at least well. Those who argue hypocrisy-busting humor is an excuse to put others down are often just embarrassed when some of their own designated ‘untouchables’ get called out. Or even worse, themselves. If I laugh, am I racist? The Canadian author, humorist, and First Nations playwright Drew Hayden Taylor noted Canadian whites’ need for ‘permission’ to laugh at ethnic humor. In one of his Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations From A Blue-Eyed Ojibway books, he describes what happened when his Indigenous-focused comedy Bootlegger Blues played to an audience of First Nations and white people. As the play unfolded, no one laughed except for the Indigenes. Then a few whites carefully laughed, and then a few more, and then everyone laughed, once they understood they weren’t ‘racist’. In the months and early years after 9/11, when tensions between Americans and Muslims were bowstring-taut, Muslim comedians mocked it all — the terrorists from their own cultures, the hypocritical imams, the ignorant Americans who didn’t know a turban from a derby, who jumped out of their skin every time a brown guy belched. Nothing quite like calling out the stupidest American foibles: Terrorist bigotry and the victims’ bigoted response. Canadian Muslim Zarqa Nawaz responded to mid-oughts Islamophobia with her hilarious sitcom Little Mosque On The Prairie , about a small Saskatchewan community of Muslims with a mosque in the basement of a Christian church. Racism and Islamophobia looked pretty damn silly, and Muslims much less scary when, in the fine tradition of Key & Peele, they made fun of everything, including themselves. Their multicolored lampoon included a Rush Limbaugh-caricature radio host; a redneck farmer always on the lookout for terrorist activity; a retired imam with conservative extremist views; and, quite sweetly, a warm friendship between a younger imam and a Christian minister. Babar from Little Mosque On The Prairie: Islamic extremism never looked sillier! When we’re laughing with each other we’re not laughing at each other, which leads to fewer cave slaughters. Being a part of the tribe means protection; fundamental to survival. No human punishment is worse than ostracism. Audience members want to be included when Mexican comedian Fluffy riffs on everybody. Fluffy describes Germans who aggressively demanded he include them in his riff on people from differing countries and what they like to drink. His answer’s really pushing it! Starts at 5:24. Properly and vigilantly wielded, humor unites, rather than divides. What we can laugh at makes us stronger, not weaker. Let’s make humans funny again The overly-humorless make me wonder: What are they trying to hide? What are they afraid people will see? The right terrorizes with violence, but the left’s terrorism is professional and personal destruction on social media when they don’t like a joke, or even a thought. Righteousness is the mighty fortress of the cyberbully. Making others cower before your world-class hissy fit over an ill-considered tweet distracts from one’s own personal bigotries. If people see you thundering against someone you’ve identified as ‘transphobic’, then you can pretend to yourself that while you’re personally okay with transfolk, you wouldn’t want your kid to marry one. You keep them safely Over There where they can’t actually harm you. Because, you know, transgenders might try to steal your mammoth meat or your mate or something. We live in dark times with an uncertain future, and far-left gelotophobia prevents us from blurring our differences and bonding in the camaraderie of knowing fark it, we’re hilarious! Not everyone will find it so but what makes us laugh won’t kill us. Or more importantly, each other. You don’t have to be French or speak French to get the humor, but it helps! I love this. He nails us. This first appeared on Medium in February 2021.

And no, her name isn’t Ghislaine Maxwell. Image by Ibrahim Asad’s Photography on Flickr She’s been bothering me since I read her story on social media a few weeks ago, detailing vicious abuse by a narcissistic psychopath. I wish I could feel unadulterated compassion for her, but there’s an ugly underlying message I can’t stop thinking about. Her tacit admission she aided and abetted child porn and the global trafficking supporting it. She didn’t report him, of course. Because abuse. I won’t fault her for not allowing police to charge him with assault and attempted murder when he pushed her down his staircase and broke her arm in several places. Nor, I guess, will I fault her for staying with him for a few years after. It’s her life. It was her choice. But she allowed him to keep consuming kiddie porn, plus other highly questionable content with technically legal, even clearly adult women who may have been no more consensual. Now it’s no longer about the writer, but all the children and adults forced into the pornography slave trade for sick, vicious bastards like her former ‘Mr. Perfect’ to wank off over. If she bore no responsibility for herself, she did for the children she knew were being victimized, however indirectly, through his voracious appetite for what she described as the very worst, most abased, most destructive pornography. Not all of it depicting children but some, she said, almost certainly illegal. I can’t make excuses for her. She chose to stay, and she proved it was a choice when she chose to leave. The victims of his sick wank material, including the ones who were of legal age but possibly also just as enslaved, didn’t have choice. The woman aided and abetted the ugly world of child pornography and sexual enslavement, even after she left the filthy sonofabitch. The ugly truth a lot of women aren’t going to like: Women contribute to child trafficking too, when they refuse to turn in those they know support it. There’s no getting around it. This woman enabled the child trafficking industry by never reporting. Period. If she can choose to leave, she can choose to report it. Was she afraid of post-breakup violence? I’m not sure she was, considering she posted under her real name, and gave his real name. I don’t know why she stuck with Mr. Perfect given he could only be more loathsome if she’d found him sneaking young bodies into his bedroom or discovered a few in the basement. He only had sex with her for about a year, ending when she refused to allow him to do the repulsive things he wanted to do to her, or the equally repulsive things he wanted her to do to him. She went sexless after that. I’ll bet he didn’t. She didn’t describe the details, but claimed she’d seen content she could never unsee. She begged him to stop, to seek help, even vomited a few times at what she saw, to no avail. I’m not sure what she ever got out of this relationship after he removed his human skinsuit. He was good-looking, I guess, and of course charming while they courted. He was well off, as she described a really beautiful mansion with a gorgeous Italian marble staircase when she moved in with him. Then, in accordance with countless abuse case studies, he revealed his true self. The doctors told her she’s lucky she didn’t die from the fall, that it was fortunate she fell on her hand, even though they initially considered she might lose part of it. (She didn’t.) After Mr. Perfect drove her home, stopped at the drugstore to get her prescription Percocet, and kept the pills for himself so he could get high while wanking off to filth, leaving her alone with Tylenol, she didn’t leave him. Years later, she finally did. It had something to do with the fact that the doctors had to cut off two precious, meaningful bracelets to treat her arm. That’s what drove her to leave, not the victims of Mr. Perfect’s sick obsession. And she still has yet to report him. I wonder who he’s f**king now. I wonder how old they are. I wonder how consensual it is. I wonder what he’s doing to them before, during, and after. She let him get away with it. All of it. Image by Ruslan Gilmanshin from Pixabay People don’t like when I ask embarrassing questions about abuse, like why it persists. You know, like when women reward abusive behavior. What If Women Refused To Fuck Abusive Men? Would they die with their bike grip-shaped dick in their hand? Here’s another infuriating one: Why do we not hold women to the same high standards to which we hold men? We ask why Donald Trump and Bill Clinton rode Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, but not why Trump’s baby mamas or Hillary Clinton tolerated their husbands’ friendship with the monster. We’re forty years past The Battered Woman and The Burning Bed . We’re graduating more from higher education than men. We’re earning more money, we’re more independent, we’re showing up more at the head of the boardroom table. I get tired of reciting this. Yadda yadda yadda. If there’s any woman who’s not a helpless little victim, it’s Hillary Clinton. We’ve got more power, we’re not as reliant on men, we more often have the financial ability to walk away. But many don’t. For the same old talking points as days of yore. Yadda yadda yadda. The problem clearly isn’t only men. Women allow this. Feminists don’t challenge it, nearly enough. Not when it comes to holding women accountable. We’ve got to do a better job than we’ve been doing. We’ve got to raise the standards for ourselves, and other women. We need to talk more about the way tolerating abuse affects others. Like the friends and family whose lives she might put in danger if she leaves Mr. Perfect, especially if she moves back in with them. Like the co-workers whose lives she might be endangering if Mr. Perfect shows up at the office with a gun. (This almost happened to a former employer before I began working there. The guy didn’t show up, but the office went into lockdown when their employee reported he was looking for her and considered dangerous. And this was in Canada .) Like the children she has, since the best way to hurt a woman is to harm or kill her children. Whether Mr. Perfect contributed his seed or not. Or, you know, the children and young women he’s been indirectly victimizing (maybe directly too, depending on what he does outside the home), by not allowing the police to arrest him for trying to kill her and then mentioning, ‘Oh, by the way, take a gander at the shit on his computer.’ I’m tired of the excuses. The writer left Mr. Perfect to continue feeding the international sex trafficking/child pornography industry and, I suspect, possibly rape/sexually abuse adults and children of legal or illegal age. If Jeffrey Epstein were still alive, he’d thank her for her support. Maybe Donald Trump and Bill Clinton can do that for him. Even though she named Mr. Perfect in her article, he still owes her a huge debt of gratitude for protecting him from the law and for enabling him to continue victimizing the utterly powerless. We can make all the excuses we like, and people can excoriate me for saying this but this woman will die knowing one thing. She aided and abetted child pornography. She let him get away with it. But, maybe she can still be proud of herself for, you know, ‘finally leaving him’. What a hero. This story first appeared on Medium in February 2021.

Why is there a dearth of research on the psychology of female victimhood? Photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels A high school friend took decades to learn how to not be abused. I’m not sure she’s yet worked it all out, but her Facebook posts are a helluva lot more take-no-shit than I remember her at seventeen. She was a year younger than I, and I saw her life laid out after my first semester in college. We shared an invisible coat of Boy Repellent. Neither of us had dates, fantasizing about guys who’d never notice us. What I didn’t share was her firmly entrenched low self-esteem. She married it. I never understood where it came from. She appeared to come from a genuinely Christian household — the good, decent kind, not what passes for it today. Of course, you never know what goes on behind closed doors. I graduated high school, then stepped onto a college campus in the fall. Total reset! I made new friends, stat. I turned out to be attractive to guys (who knew?). My life turned around in one semester. It was a new world. With dates! It’ll be different for Caroline too, I realized. Way, way different. With lots more abuse. Caroline wouldn’t go to college. She would likely stay in our insular, socially constipated small town, meet new people who didn’t know or remember her from high school. She’d discover she, too, was attractive to guys. But — the wrong ones. Nailed it. There’s a wall in many feminist brains when it comes to taking the next step toward eliminating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV): The holy mantra Don’t Blame The Victim. It served its purpose years ago when we began truly addressing IPV. Women possessed a lot less personal and political power, less money, less education. It was easier to fall into and get stuck in a bad relationship with nowhere to go, surrounded by people who didn’t understand what it was like. A woman was especially vulnerable to IPV if she suffered from, as many women did back then, the pre-feminist hangover solution to all her problems, I want to marry a rich man. Many asked, Why did it take you so long to leave? It was an unconsciously cruel question at the time. A lot of women didn’t know any better. I might have been one, but I was blessed with a mother who was feminist before it was cool. She taught me at a young age never to tolerate an abusive man. I get a lot of flak for scaling the Feminist Wall. I know why. What most women really mean when they recite the mantra Don’t blame the victim is don’t unintentionally cause the victim to blame herself. When women learn from their mistakes, many engage in a common but unhealthy side response — intentional, avoidable, or otherwise. They start blaming and beating themselves up. Why didn’t I do/leave/learn this sooner? Why did I put up with this for so long? What if I’d learned this when I was [earlier age]? Why did I let him treat me like that? Idiot! Moron! Shit-For-Brains! I get it. I do it too. Not regarding abusive relationships, since I’ve never walked down that staircase. I do it as I review my life and ask myself why I never went farther than I did professionally. Woulda-shoulda-coulda destroys one’s spirit. This is why women stubbornly resist re-examining Don’t Blame The Victim. I acknowledge the dirty little secret they’d rather not. Women have more power than they admit, or even know. Including the ability to Just Say No to abusive men. Nicole Chardenet focuses more on women’s contribution to patriarchy. She’s got some truly blistering pieces. She could grow more into pieces from a problem solving perspective too, maybe she will rather than only screaming into the void that women need to grow some labia. — SC on Medium SC made a killer point, although I’d been questioning it myself for several months. When will I stop shouting, “Grow some labia!” and offer solutions? There’s a dearth of knowledge of the female sense of victimhood and in particular the role of victims in abusive relationships. This particular field of research appears lacking. I investigate female resistance to personal power. I’ve explored it for awhile already on Medium, a motherlode of information on abusive men, but fairly anorexic on the subject of female victimhood psychology. Not surprisingly, it seems fairly scant off Medium, too. Public domain photo from Piqsels Feminism has gone as far as it can go dissecting and blaming men and ‘patriarchy’ for its ills. I watch too many women hold themselves back, yet blame it on ‘the patriarchy’. We don’t speak up; we’re afraid of what others will think. We don’t push ourselves. We don’t try harder. We don’t challenge ‘patriarchy’ so much as complain about it. I’m more curious about the dense patriarchy between our ears than I am about the Big P in the world at large. My interest in preventing IPV, despite never being a victim myself, is wondering, as my forward-thinking mother wondered many decades ago, Why doesn’t she leave? It was an uncompassionate view grounded in an era of ignorance about the female experience, but it’s a question we need to ask our sisters as well as ourselves, and a helluva lot sooner. Why do I (or you) put up with it? Because 2021, sisters. I’ve searched Amazon, the library, and the Internet for research on female IPV psychology. The only real source of information I’ve found is this article by Dr. Ofer Zur, writer and psychotherapist at the Zur Institute : Psychology of Victimhood, Don't Blame the Victim - Article by Ofer Zur, Ph.D. Victimhood psychology, on the individual and collective group level, are one of his multiple fields of study. He breaks down the stages of victim complicity in negative experiences spanning zero to 100% accountability, measured by the power to control, prevent, or affect situations: Non-guilty/innocent victim — There’s no way they could have foreseen or stopped the abuse — children, the mentally disabled, surprise attacks by complete strangers (rape, rampage shootings, corporate greed, etc.) Victims with minor guilt — Those who ‘could or should have known better’ with a little forethought, planning and consideration of their actions. Like getting raped after passing out in a drunken stupor at a party or repeated domestic violence after a few incidents. Sharing equal responsibility with the perpetrator — A man who gets an STD from a prostitute or instigates a fight in a bar. Playing chicken or Russian roulette. Victims who share more guilt than the offender — Being an active participant in an event in which one is likely to get hurt. Like drunks who harass others, people who voluntarily join cults, or an abusive husband killed by his battered wife. Or partaking in government insurrection. Those who are 100% responsible for their outcome — Assaulters killed by their complete stranger victims in self-defense, people who get lung cancer from smoking, mercenaries wounded or killed. I have issues with a few of his examples — he includes under #2 Jews who suffered under the Holocaust, castigating them for ‘not fighting back enough’, and under #5, ‘Citizens who collude by passivity in their country’s atrocious acts and get hurt by other countries’ armies (i.e. politically inactive German civilians who did not fight the Nazi regime and got killed by the Allied army attacks).’ The Jews were far outnumbered by the anti-Semitic Germans, along with the ‘politically inactive’ Germans. I’m not sure what they truly could have done. As Dr. Zur points out, “Do not blame the victim has been translated into: do not explore the role of the victim.” Women make choices; the descent to the Seventh Level of Relationship Hell isn’t a fall down a rabbit hole, it’s a slow descent down a spiral staircase. Those who say, “But not all women CAN leave!” are describing only the smaller subset who’ve descended to the bottom, and forget the many women who can. Those who believe abused women lack choice at every step are refuted every time an abused woman ‘finally’ leaves her batterer. It’s best, of course, to do it sooner rather than later, as the earlier you get out the less risky it is. Victims have choice unless they’ve been kidnapped at gunpoint. Why women stay is a highly complex issue. Some resist acknowledging their own power. My high school friend clung tenaciously to her low self-image, rejecting with a snarky remark any suggestion she was attractive or worthy of consideration. My parents commented on how she always slouched, embarrassed by her height. I believe we, as human beings , collude heavily in holding ourselves back, and often we oppress ourselves better than any third party or parties can. Sometimes they truly can’t leave, and sometimes it’s simply that they won’t . I want to make something clear to anyone who’s made it this far without leaving in a fury after dropping an angry comment bomb: And I want feminists to stop lying to women by teaching them they have no accountability — power! — after enough shit has dropped. I want women to stop and consider what they’re doing, and who they’re doing it with. I want to stop them before they step too far down that nasty staircase. I want them to educate themselves before they ever get into an ugly relationship, or after they get out of their first (hopefully last) one. I want them to stop blaming themselves , and to know the difference between making an empowered decision to no longer tolerate crappy humans in their lives. I want them to stop beating themselves up for woulda-shoulda-coulda. My ideas are highly controversial ideal for some women, even though the crux is I DON’T WANT ANYONE TO BE ABUSED. Life is a long journey with no user’s manual. We have to make a lot of mistakes along the way. Learning from them makes us better humans and inoculates us against future mistakes. We may still make all-new mistakes but the more we learn the smarter we’ll be. When ‘feminists’ teach women not to learn from their mistakes, they harm women. They teach them to stay victimized. Worst of all, they enable abusers. I want women to take back their power and decide to no longer allow others to abuse them. Working on the solutions, as SC wished. Beginning with growing some labia, as I put it. I don’t have the answers, but I’m looking for them. Have you got the labia to listen? This first appeared on Medium in 2020.

Sometimes it works when he has something to lose, too Image by Martha M/Feminism India , Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 on Wikimedia Commons We drove toward the lot where I’d parked my for an early-morning pickup by John, my boss. I felt no trepidation as we approached; we’d enjoyed a perfectly great day together at a tech expo in New York City. John didn’t mind driving in Manhattan like I did. As we pulled up to the curb he put his arm around my neck. “How about a kiss goodbye?” I pulled away. It wasn’t the WTF moment you might imagine. “No, no, that’s not appropriate!” I stammered. “We need to keep it professional.” “Oh, come on!” he said. “Just a little kiss!” “No, no, John, that’s going too far. Thanks for the ride, I’ll see you Monday.” I scrambled out. I drove back to my Connecticut apartment in emotional dishevelment. Goddamn him! He’d now crossed a boundary I’d be forced to address. John and I had a boomerang employer relationship. I met him through a temp agency as I’d begun contemplating a career in computer sales. After a few months, pleased with my work prospecting new business, he hired me. A few months later, he let me go when business took a downturn. A few months after he called me back. He’d needed time to revamp business efficiency. It went well, until I became dissatisfied with the way he’d managed sales. I left. I held other jobs for a few years; then got laid off and threw the boomerang. We met for lunch. I spoke plainly about the problems with his sales management before. He responded to all of them and described the changes he’d made. I came on board a few weeks later. I fell right back into the groove, and my old co-workers were used to seeing me show up periodically by now. At some point, things got weird. John and I knew each other well. We’d gone on sales prospecting jaunts together in the car, and once or twice a year we went to New York City together for big technology shows at the Javits Center. Of course, you talk in the car. Back then, office relations were more fluid than in larger, more button-down corporations, with a lot of jokes and laughter and teasing. By today’s standards, any IT office I’ve worked in would give HR the vapors; back then it forged a sense of camaraderie and teamwork when you could be comfortable with your co-workers; some even grew close. I don’t remember exactly when or how John launched the first trial balloon, but I think the harassment started with little comments here and there. A bit inappropriate, perhaps, but I let them slide. Once he put his hand on my thigh in the car. I don’t think I said anything, but it made me uncomfortable. Like any woman, I didn’t want to rock the boat or create an uncomfortable silence in an enclosed space. I made excuses in my head: He was just being overly-familiar. He didn’t mean anything by it. I knew he should know better, but I let it slide. In retrospect, I wish I’d spoken up but I didn’t; I was younger and in a bit of shock. Little things built up to the New York curbside moment. Sometimes he suggested we go out for dinner. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “Not as a date. I know some great restaurants I could introduce you to. You’d love them. One serves terrific dim sum. I know how much you like Chinese food.” “It’s not a good idea,” I said. “Diane [his wife] wouldn’t like the optics.” He dropped it. Once, I was in the office with him and the general manager. We were all standing, talking. John held a rolled-up paper and he lightly hit me on the rump with it. The general manager sort of chortled nervously and I said something like, “Okay, ha ha, that’s enough!” My stomach twinged uneasily. Between the thigh touch and the comments and the dinner suggestion and now this, I wondered if something was escalating. John wasn’t really trying to start an affair with me, was he? Was he insane? I’ve spent a lifetime making excuses to myself for men. Whether it’s boyfriends, partners, family, or employers, when conflict arises I try to avoid scenes. I look at things differently, make sure I’m not overreacting. Am I misinterpreting? Am I being oversensitive? Did he not call because he’s not interested, or is he busy with work? (It would be years before I figured out it was manspeak for I’m just not that into you. ) Maybe that’s why I got in the car with John again, for another two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York City. Plus I really wanted to see the tech show. The ones in the Big Apple blew the smaller New England shows out of the harbor. I don’t remember anything untoward about the day; nothing inappropriate, nor weird conversations coming back. Just his bizarre attempt to kiss me, and driving home in a state of fear and fury. Fear because I’d now be forced to deal with this, and fury he’d put me in this stressful, difficult position. I had to figure something out, because I didn’t have the usual address avenues. Too small for an HR department, there was only one person above John, and I couldn’t take this to the company president. He was married to her. I got home, got really stinking drunk, and emailed a close male friend in San Francisco. “Tell someone else at the company,” he advised. “So it’s not your word against his if he fires you and you take legal action.” The general manager. I was on good terms with him, and I’d bet John’s inappropriate rolled-up paper tap hadn’t sat well with him. Otherwise, I’d have to handle this myself. His wife couldn’t find out. We got along well, but I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t fire me. Yes, he was that dumb . He pursued someone in an office in which his wife worked, and outranked him. I spent most of the weekend, as you’d might guess, weighing my options and strategizing. I told the general manager Monday morning what happened. I outlined three things I wanted to keep the peace for everyone: I wanted the harassment to stop I wanted to keep my job I didn’t want John non-sexually harassing me to make me quit He’d been known to do that. If he wanted to be rid of someone, usually a woman he couldn’t fire legally, he’d harass her to departure. “I don’t want you to do anything for now,” I told the general manager. “I need to handle this myself. I’m going to confront John this afternoon. If he starts treating me poorly to get me to quit, I’ll need you to step in and say I’ve threatened legal action if that happens. Don’t say anything unless I tell you. I want him to save face. I want this to end and get back to normal.” Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Over the weekend, I’d realized John, too, had something to lose if he responded poorly. His wife worked down the hall. She’d find out. How ugly would things get on the homefront? Nor would he want to feed the lawyers. His wife wouldn’t appreciate it, either. He also risked something else: Losing a damn good employee, who would never again return. We’d been on and off for nearly ten years. I knew next to nothing about the computer industry when I’d started, but he’d trained me, and I’d become quite knowledgeable, from the days of Lantastic and Novell to the rise of Microsoft peer-to-peer-networking and Novell’s self-destruction, with some help from Windows NT. John and I worked together through the exciting rise of the Internet and I’d been an early adopter in the office. My role became a ‘hub’ for inside sales, customer service problems and light tech support. I handled the returns and allowances and occasionally dunned old accounts for unpaid invoices. Replacing me, especially with my level of sales experience and product knowledge, wouldn’t be easy. So, I concluded, John had some serious skin in the game too. I made a risky decision. It’s what worked for me, and Gentle Reader now understands how I arrived at my decision. Your mileage may vary. Monday morning arrived with a strategic plan. I stayed in my office to avoid John. We said good morning as he passed by en route to his own. When he stepped out in the morning, I spoke with the GM. The afternoon presented a lucky perfect confrontational opportunity. John’s sales calls were usually close to the office, but on this day he’d be driving down to the shoreline for an afternoon appointment. He wouldn’t return until evening. I wouldn’t see him until the following morning; he’d have plenty of time to think and consider his actions. Good luck with your appointment after this , I thought, heart pounding, as I entered his office about fifteen minutes before his departure. Goddammit, he deserved it. I shut the door behind me. He looked up. “Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once,” I said, speaking up strongly and firmly but not loud enough for anyone to overhear. “Don’t you EVER touch me again like you did Friday night!” I let my anger build, only enough to give me juice without going overboard and saying something unplanned. I’d put some effort into the script, reworking it and running it past my friends. “This is a PROFESSIONAL relationship and it will STAY that way!” I informed him. “You will NEVER touch my thigh like you did once in the car. You will NEVER try to hug or kiss me. You will not make any more inappropriate suggestions about dinner. This is between you and I and no one else needs to know. I expect you and I will NEVER need to have this conversation again. Understand?” He did. He didn’t have much response. The entire rant lasted twenty, thirty seconds. No threats, nothing about my job, no mention of feeding the lawyers. Just a tacit suggestion that if he keeps his mouth shut and goes back to being a good boy no one gets hurt. I turned and went back to my office. I shook as I sat down to my computer, relieved when he left a few minutes later. The happy ending is, “And the lawyers all starved to death.” He met my unspoken demands. The sexual harassment stopped, and no new fresh hell began. John and I never spoke of it again. I didn’t lose my job until John laid me off again a year later, with the country in recession and a dramatic drop in business. We’d all done too good a job prepping everyone for the Year 2000 Techpocalypse, because no one wanted to upgrade. When John let me go again, we both knew it wasn’t forever. I started a new job but it was high-pressure and I’d sunk deep into a years-long personal depression. I caught the boomerang when it returned. “I’m ready to take you back,” John said. “Business has picked up and I’ve made some more changes. This time, Nicole, it can be forever. I have a place for you to grow and move into different roles if you want. You can retire here. There will be no more breaks.” I agreed to return, although I privately knew it might not be forever. I’d begun making plans to immigrate to Canada, but I didn’t mention it. We spent our last two years together drama-free. We even took occasional car trips together, but only to the big tech shows. He never stepped out of line again. There are many different ways to handle workplace harassment, few of them really good ones. Even the official advice to take it up with HR or the offender’s boss can backfire badly, even when he’s not married to her. I was forced to deal with John myself. Hardly an unusual situation for women. But I am, as I’ve stated in an earlier article, a proponent of taking up an offense — any one, really, not only workplace harassment — with the offender first, if possible. It’s not always doable. Like with Andrew Cuomo. He possesses all the power and his hapless female employees — and bullied male employees — have none. Photo by cottonbro from Pexels But some harassers have skin in the game . This is the tale of one such. I believe it’s why I ‘won’ this one. John put his marriage, a good employee, and the company coffers at risk, via a needless lawsuit. He wasn’t a monster; but a great boss in other ways — one of the most creative problem-solvers I’ve ever worked with. He helped launch my IT sales career when I was thirty and still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Computer sales, trust me, was the last thing I’d have ever selected, but it caught my fire and I ran with it. My backup was the general manager. If John began acting aggressively to make me quit, perhaps a conversation with the general manager and the threat of lawyers might have ended it. I offer my story as one way to handle this . I don’t suggest others should do what I did. In fact, I offer only one universal takeaway: Each situation is unique. Analyze it, talk to friends, including trusted male friends. Consider all the ways you can handle this and choose the one least likely to get you fired. Especially consider what he has to lose if you make a fuss. Consider whether you’re ready to drag lawyers into it. All these elements will play into your ultimate decision, which may be not to confront him at all. Maybe you’ll stay away from him when possible. Or find another job. You have to decide for yourself. I wish I could offer a magic recipe for my happy ending, but I can’t. Your boss isn’t John. I gambled and I won. I took a risk. I don’t know how else I could have handled it. I didn’t want to continue working in a stressful environment wondering what he’d do next. I didn’t stop the thigh touching. I didn’t stopped the rump-swatting. I stopped his behavior when I felt he’d forced my hand. I did, however, enjoy a jolt of new confidence, knowing I’d stood up to a male harasser and beaten him. I knew I didn’t have to tolerate it, that the outcome didn’t always end badly for the woman. It’s one way to handle it; perhaps not the best. What would you have done? This originally appeared on Medium in March 2021.

When people are jerks, do we increase our own suffering with our own layered mis/interpretations? “If you put that picture of me on the Internet I’ll call my lawyer!” So of course that’s exactly where it wound up. Read the funny story behind this photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr I read many of stories about crappy male and/or white behavior, some threatening, some anger-provoking, some seemingly banal like the woman who was stopped by a creepy guy who wanted her to see his cute puppy. I guess it would have made more impact if she’d been, like, twelve, but she was a grown-up in no danger. Some days you just don’t have much to write about! Another pedestrian story detailed a woman accosted in a largely non-threatening manner by middle-aged drunk guys on a subway. They got off at her stop and followed her for a bit, catcalling and in general being obnoxious boors as drunk people are wont to do. She shut down the comments for being vile and hateful, as you might expect, although it looked as though at least a few of her critics simply called her out for overreacting and overgeneralizing, which is what I wanted to comment, with less snark. Not because she felt unsafe and took precautions to ward off what might turn violent, but I did wonder why she wouldn’t ever wear that same dress again (they never touched her), or why she interpreted it as a personal assault on herself and everything she’d accomplished in life, how it meant nothing now. Seriously? A few drunken assholes on a subway sitting opposite a pretty woman showing a little cleavage acted thoughtlessly in the moment, not mounting a full-on patriarchal assault on female workplace success and progress. She’s thinking, “Everything I’ve ever worked for means nothing. They’ve reduced me down to a mere object and completely dehumanized me. They’re threatened by everything I stand for and they clearly hate women. It’s just another example of how entitled male privilege works together to keep women oppressed and in their place as convenient sperm receptacles.” And they’re thinking, “Yeah! Tits!” Incidents like this happen to women all the time, and sometimes they sound genuinely threatening. Other times it reads like a slow morning on Medium. They’ve happened to me too. But I can’t remember most of them. Unless they were particularly memorable or threatening, I pretty much forget about them. I’m not thinking They’re dehumanizing me! as much as The world is full of assholes seeking to make someone’s life miserable today. Hey, Nicole, here you are, you’ll do! I’m quite sure I’ve experienced a lot more street harassment than the few incidents I can recount. It’s entirely possible I missed a lot of them. I don’t pay much attention to others around me, to the point where I almost got hit by a bus when I first moved to Toronto. When I’m on the subway I read. Zen feminist koan: If a man ogles a woman and she doesn’t notice, has she been harassed? I wonder if any of my ghost harassers hoped to intimidate me and I disappointed by not even noticing their existence. Once I looked up to find a man staring directly at me. He didn’t, as many Toronto men do, look away immediately, terrified they’ll be subjected to a feminist rant. I went back to my book and gave him no further thought. Well, maybe one. Bloody immigrant! He was from one of those countries and hadn’t yet learned you can’t treat women in Canada the way you do back home. But I didn’t care enough to say anything. He wasn’t worthy of my attention. My book engrossed me. I suppose another woman would have gone home in high dudgeon and posted an angry Facebook rant or, if she felt especially like being abused by anonymous misogynists, on Twitter. Or she might have felt genuinely threatened and hurried home, heart pounding. I can’t fault her. My life, and my world aren’t as traumatized as other women’s have been. The ogler posed no threat to me, and I don’t know why he stared. Likely he was some random clueless noob who didn’t know any better, or maybe he hoped to intimidate me, or see if he could get away with more (making me wonder what he might have done had I acted scared or nervous under his gaze — i.e., a potential victim). Last summer someone told me they’d seen me walk down the street many times and men’s heads turned to watch. I never noticed. I’m usually staring at the sidewalk, lost in thought or, more pointlessly, worrying about silly crap. Now that I know it happens — I still don’t look around to see who might be ogling me, as I have a lot of pointless worrying to do. Or I might be laser-focused on feeding the ducks in the park. Is it harassment if you don’t notice? Sometimes we find ways to make incidents worse. We layer our own interpretations and narratives on top of it. We especially do this when we mentally impugn someone’s character or imagine we can read their minds and intentions, like with subway drunks. How did mildly lecherous assholes turn into a Patriarchal Hit Squad? What would I have done? Depending on my mood, I might have engaged with them a bit. “So, you boys look like you were out having fun tonight. Where did you go?” I’d have had my nose in the book. Might have looked up, said, “Hey, I’ve had a long night too, I want to read my book, ‘kay, guys?” Maybe they would have continued being unpleasant and I too would have hurried off the car and done my best to disappear into the night. But, I would have arrived home mildly annoyed and I might, at most, post a funny Facebook rant about drunken idjits on the subway. I’d have forgotten about it by the weekend. Here’s the thing: The world really is full of assholes and you only think you know why they’re being an asshole to you: They hate wo/men They hate your race They hate your (obvious) religious affiliation You look like their ex-spouse/evil mother/father/asshole boss They’re having a really bad day but their response is to give some random passing schmuck (hey, it’s your unlucky day!) some extraneous crap rather than go home and watch funny YouTube videos They suffer from genuine mental health problems They’re up to their ass in pandemic-related unemployment, depression and stress and their brains aren’t functioning properly. Assholes come in many varieties. Photo by cottonbro from Pexels None of these are good reasons to give an innocent stranger crap, but their mysterious reason for harassing you could be any of these things, and utterly unrelated to you, your life, or whatever you’ve interpreted it to mean. There’s uncalled-for suffering, and then there’s cranking up your response worse with cognitive distortions and misinterpretations. We aren’t mind-readers. We need to remember this. The writer on the subway was white, as were, I assume, her inebriated fan club. What if she’d been black and they hadn’t said anything specifically racial? She might interpret it as racist nevertheless, which she might not have done if her harassers were black. It’s why I dislike debates about ‘microaggressions’. Sure, they’re real and they happen — but perhaps not as much as we think. Another Zen koan: If the other person didn’t intend to ‘microaggress’ against you, and didn’t even know they upset you, were you truly microaggressed? We take a bad, or a mildly annoying situation, and make it worse speculating what the other person was doing/thinking/believing/seeing. I wonder if the ‘offense’ we think we incurred is against ourselves. Our thoughts are real, but our beliefs aren’t. — Tara Brach, Buddhist teacher I’ve been creating stress and drama for myself obsessing over how much I think I’m screwing up on the job. I work with various clients for a freelance sales agency and I’m forever convinced I’m screwing up, I’m a pain in the ass to everyone, I’m not doing right by the clients, they hate me and think I’m doing an awful job and will ask I be removed forthwith so someone who knows what the hell they’re doing can get some real shit done. And every damn time I’m in a meeting with the folks who run the business, without my asking like a neurotic insecure mess, they tell me how much the clients love me and how they wish they had more freelancers like me. How they stick me on campaigns someone else got removed from at the client’s request. Why do I think everyone thinks I do a lousy job? I asked myself. It didn’t take too long to identify the culprit. There’s only one person who really thinks I’m an idiot. Imposter Syndrome, big-time. I create a lot of my own suffering. I tell myself toxic stories and I believe them. I’ve been at war with myself for at least twenty years, and even before, I was my own worst frenemy. Often I felt good about myself but never too good. Some nasty person in the back of my head told me I suck. I’m an idiot. I’m not worthy. I call the bitch ‘The Terminator’. I tell myself toxic stories about others, too, but less about random strangers. If some guy gives me crap on the street, I shrug it off and throw him in the Asshole container in my brain. It doesn’t do me any good to take it personally. I can choose not to. I can choose not to add to some uncalled-for drama by telling myself the person was misogynist, or racist, or jealous of me. I sure as shit don’t need to be telling myself they’ve negated everything I’ve ever worked for. It’s bullshit. It’s oppression I created by myself, for myself. Even if they do say something misogynist, or racist, or otherwise nasty, I can choose to say The hell with him or her, s/he’s just a stupid misogynist/racist/hater, etc. The best revenge can be to totally not give a fuck. I don’t always do it, of course. Sometimes assholes strike a nerve and I react. I get mad. I obsess about it, nagging it like a dog with a bone — and it’s how I make it worse. S/he accomplished their goal, to make my life worse, with my help. What I should have said. What I should have done. Woulda-shoulda-coulda. Sometimes I have to consciously put it behind me and think, “Nicole, you have more important things to do than worry what some jerk said or did. What do you care what s/he thinks?” Buddhism teacher Tara Brach says, “Our thoughts are real, but our beliefs aren’t.” Put this on when you’re doing mindless chores. Tara Brach rocks!!! The lady on the subway’s experience with drunks was real, along with her fearful reaction. What wasn’t was the interpretation she layered over it, increasing her suffering. Really, how did this become a patriarchal commentary on everything she’s accomplished in life? She made that shit up. Maybe it’s what those guys thought, but I doubt it, and I’m quite certain she’s not a mindreader. We want to make sense of our environment and why things happen to us. The human brain forever looks for meaning in patterns — in clouds, onion buns, personal interactions. The ancients believed the gods gave them messages via animal entrails, tea dregs, the way the birds flew. More often than not, it means far less than we think. The grill accidentally created an image of Jesus. The serpent cloud isn’t an evil omen. I’m reading the leaves at the bottom of your cup and prophesying you’re ready for a refill. The clients don’t think I’m an idiot. My friends don’t think I’m a loser. My family doesn’t think I’m not good enough. Only one person thinks all those toxic thoughts about me, and she’s a real superbitch. I’ve begun challenging her. I’ve begun stopping her from her favorite thought, “Nicole, you idiot…” The problem is she’s said it so often, and for so long, I believe her. Often, the stories we tell in our heads are more indicative of the storyteller than the person who caused our grief. Who’s the real microaggressor in our lives? This first appeared on Medium in March 2021.