The Republic of Gilead's threat isn't only from the right. The 'woke' left hates women every bit as much. It's a War On Women no matter which side you're on. I remember a Persian Gulf War veteran in an Internet forum damning the Saudis after 9/11. Stationed in Riyadh, he had little respect for their misogynist, authoritarian, terrorist-supportive culture. He resented having to 'protect' them from Saddam, describing how weak and lazy they'd grown from luxurious overindulgence. Why couldn't they protect themselves? Why did they need the Americans? American women grew lazy too, steeped in the luxury of living in a rich, democratic, First World country where women made breathtaking gains in equality, most especially marked with the 1973 Roe decision liberating them from unwanted pregnancies. Women, who were expected to hand Clinton the 2016 win, didn't value what they had and in a joint, mostly white effort they allowed a guy like Trump to stack an aging Court, having been warned repeatedly they might kiss Roe goodbye. They didn't listen. Trump promised he'd end Roe, and for once, he didn't lie. But the right's War On Women isn't the only one. On the left, it stems from two main branches. 2016 Chicks For Hillary Breakdown White girls liked the racist pussy-grabber more. Source: National Election Pool The first arm of the left's War On Women comes from women who don't vote against their own interests, but won't vote for them, either. Like the voters not included in the above graphic. Opinion poll analysis and political blog FiveThirtyEight suggested that progressive voters who stayed home might have swung the election toward Clinton. Why didn't they vote? FiveThirtyEight's data showed 44% of self-identified registered Democrat voters didn't vote, compared to 46% Republican voters, and 13% who were neither. "The biggest reason given by [all] non-voters for staying home was that they didn’t like the candidates." Black, Asian and Hispanic voters stayed home by 42%, although voter disinformation campaigns and Republican vote blocking efforts may have contributed. What was it about Hillary Clinton otherwise impotent white 'progressives' found so appalling they simply couldn't bring themselves to vote for her? She wasn't good enough for them, either. She knew Washington politics well. She was an 'insider'. Quel horreur! Not voting when one's own self-determination rights are on the line looks an awful lot like not caring about those rights, or those of others. Some progressives may have voted for misogyny more for their pocketbooks with the candidate who favors higher-income households since they can get an abortion whether it's permitted or not. One progressive woman from an upper-middle-class neighborhood told me she and her husband are 'almost making enough to make it worth voting for Trump.' "I won't do it," she added, understanding she's still responsible for those who can't afford a seat at their table. Other progressive homebodies may suffer from internalized misogyny's doubt that women can truly be effective leaders. Naomi Wolf chronicled certain feminists' fear of power and female leadership years ago, and Trump performed well with college-educated women. I wonder who might have been 'good enough' for those SAH voters to get their butts to the polls. Or who might have been toxic masculine enough to motivate them. Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-Un? Harvey Weinstein? Darth Vader? Does a man have to destroy an entire planet before milquetoast Millennials can pull a lever? Seriously, how much worse must the Republicans dredge up before non-voting chickie-boos whining about Roe get thee to a voting booth? If Trump couldn't do it, who can? Maybe misogynist Hillary-hating 'Bernie Bros' spoke for more liberal women than they realized. The left's obsessive need for 'political purity' hurts women, and everyone else, by rendering every political candidate completely unacceptable. How many feminists obsessed over Joe Biden's 'handsiness' and ancient personal space violations in 2020 when he was up against a confirmed sexual predator? Are those lazy ladies happy now with the world they've wrought for themselves and others? When one gets too steeped in First World luxury (everyone, not just white women) and consequently lackadaisical, this is what happens. Misogyny, dick service and the trans movement The left's misogyny has always been more subtle, easier to hide when the right's misogyny perches like a MAGA-breasted robin on the tallest tree in the park. Progressive men have a higher tolerance for women's rights only when it doesn't immediately threaten their dominance birthright, but the rise of Hillary Clinton thirty years ago began teasing it into the open. Clinton was arguably the first in modern times to step beyond the traditional First Lady role of sticking with a pet cause, like others before her. As First Lady, Clinton had the audacity to chair a task force on healthcare reform, in which she publicly challenged many male Republican conservatives and critics. She lost that battle, but received kudos from many, including a few, grudgingly, from a few of the victors. When she ran for President she unleashed misogyny on both sides, especially the Bernie Bros. Men and their sexual fetishes bring us to the second arm of the left's War on Women. On a less visible level, so-called progressive men's feminism stops at their dick, when the subject is the high rate of sex trafficked women and children in porn and prostitution. Feminism is great as long as it doesn't interfere with every man's entitlement to get off. Traditional, dick-focused misogyny has found a safe haven, at least for now, in the trans movement, where many transwomen - no one knows how many - are autogynephilic. They're erotically aroused by dressing as a woman, pretending to be one, and now, with medical science, becoming as female as a biological man can possibly get. Autogynephilia (AGP) is a remarkably taboo subject in the rise of the male-dominated trans movement. Pre-Internet research on transitioners indicated it was mostly powered by gay men and heterosexual autogynephiles. Activist transwomen's War On Women includes its increasingly censorious silencing of women, often with the help of natal female supporters, erasing the word 'woman', and silencing women with bans and restrictions on social media if those feminist bitches don't shut the eff up and do as they're told. The trans left's War On Women might lead to a 'woke' dictatorship that doesn't look any better for women than Trump Part Deux does. How do you feel about a Republic of Gilead featuring TransCommanders and collaborative Regressive Left 'aunties'? Feminism's War On Women warriors Some feminists never shut up about how much they're silenced. The left's War On Women includes women who de-platform other women for expressing opinions that don't meet their ideological purity test. Speak truth to male power at your professional and personal risk: It's not all abusive misogynists threatening women for speaking out against male violence and abuse. The left's misogynists shout down, threaten, assault, and Twitter-ban women for defending the right of women to remain women and not 'people who menstruate,' 'people with wombs', and the other silly-ass euphemisms the world has adopted to cater to those who are still defending their traditional male dominance, now in wigs and with better makeup than their critics. The difference is that when women are threatened for speaking truth to men who identify as men, feminists are less likely to defend the accused. Women speaking up against 'people with penises' in women's-only spaces and lesbians calling out 'transwomen' pressuring them to have sex with male genitalia are shut down by far too many women, defined as people who were born into it, i.e., those who should know better. Social activism now allies with cyberbullying and violence against women. Often by women. 'Woke' feminists ignore the silencing of women by misogynist men in dresses and their lady lackeys. They tolerate a self-absorbed, largely male movement defining women and dictating to women what 'real women' are as men have done for thousands of years. They support those who disrespect and challenge women who challenge them. The trans left's War On Women has infiltrated Twitter's 'hateful conduct' policy, amended to support trans misogyny over natal women's right not to be harassed, abused, or threatened online. Twitter barely had any fucks to give when the harassers were honest cis-het cybertrolls. One easily violates their so-called 'hateful conduct policy' by stating the glaringly obvious: Transwomen aren't the same as women, or, as happened to Jordan Peterson recently, by using the 'wrong' pronouns when he pointed out Elliott Page cut off 'her' breasts, leading to the usual world-class Twitter hand-wringing freakout. Why did 'he' have to cut 'his' big round breasts off if he's a dude? What is Elliott Page, underneath the chest scars and short hair? Calling Elliott Page 'she', which he was for more than thirty years, is verboten. Where is this silencing of female voices leading us? Silence of the Libs When women can't speak their minds freely, we're back to the dark days when women really were silenced, upon threat of violence or death. Modern feminism is a blink of Darwin's eye on the human timetable. It only began a few seconds ago at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention where the first gentle statements that women should have the right to vote were immediately condemned as 'unladylike'. Feminism from a position of greater female agency only dates, arguably, from the '60s and early '70s when women began marching and agitating and eventually getting what they wanted. What we're still not good at though, because honestly, we're still infants in our own feminist r/evolution, is challenging male authority. It's ingrained in all of us, no matter how feminist we think we are. It's why I encourage feminists to always seek to root out the misogyny and patriarchy between their ears first. We still unconsciously respond to male direction, especially if accompanied with strength and confidence and a deep voice. This goes a long way in explaining how gaslit by the trans movement many alleged progressive feminists have become, and why they're so submissive to obviously misogynist men who act more like men than women. These guys know how to handle, dominate and manipulate unconsciously receptive women. The other feminist challenge is cleaning up our culture of too-embrasive 'tolerance', or 'idiot compassion' as one Buddhist teacher might call it. 'Idiot compassion' is when one shows so much compassion for others, you let them walk all over you, or willfully ignore their transgressions against others. Modern leftism, including feminism, has devolved toward an unfortunate regressive 'tolerance' in which traditionally, universally marginalized women ignore women's rights if some other male-dominated marginalized group complains loudly enough. Like with fundamentalist Islam's abuses against women, which Christian-critical feminists conveniently ignore, and Female Genital Mutilation, against which Western feminism's white, post-colonial guilt prohibits them from standing up for their darker sisters, because 'marginalized' misogynists citing 'cultural traditions' can shut them up on command. It's why and how misogynist men have weaponized female submission so politically. Toxic masculine men have figured out a way to hate, threaten, abuse, and harass women with feminists' blessings. We've witnessed the most brilliant feminist hornswoggling in history by the trans movement's greatest victory in its War On Women: Getting women to misgender boys and men so they can compete on women's sports teams while everyone nods like good little Stepford Wives and parrots the party malarkey: "Transwomen are the same as women." Non-misgoynist transwomen may be too scared to speak out. These other transchicks can seriously kick their asses. When late-blooming transwomen rip the mantle of victimhood from female shoulders, malleable feminists put their critical thinking faculties on hold and accept the mind-blowing premise there's no difference. They harm those many transfolk who don't hate women and live just fine with anyone who can treat them like normal human beings without requiring kid glove treatment, thankyouverymuch. Radical trans-activists won't entertain the notion of compromise because they don't want it, they want total female subjugation, and when women haven't cleared out the patriarchy between their ears, the boys will get what they want. As always. However crazy might be the right's insane conspiracy theories, at least they're not demanding we deny the evidence of our own eyes of the simple difference between boys and girls. Like it or not, we do live in a sexually dimorphic world but we can carve out a place for those who don't feel like they don't quite fit either side. Let's sit down and talk about it, and figure out how we can live and work together happily enough. We'll even make room for you 'wokies' too, if you promise not to shout down, talk over, or wokesplain to women you disagree with. You know, like men do. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. 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Squash negative demands and action, however minor, fast. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Honestly, it really wasn't a big deal. I knew it at the time, but I still didn't like it. My parents had gone off on a weekend trip. They'd had an argument in the motel room about something minor. Dad rapped Mom lightly on the thigh. She was clear on that. He hadn't 'hit' her, just rapped her on the thigh as he passed by to make a point. "Still, I don't like what he did," Mom said. "He hit me, and that's not okay!" I questioned her. How hard, did she feel he might do it again? No, she wasn't fearful, didn't think she was in any danger. But she was really mad. So was I. This is the woman who drilled an important lesson into my head I never forgot. My Mother Taught Me Never To Tolerate Abuse I wanted to make sure Dad was as clear as a virgin brook on the unacceptability of what he did. I called him, probably at work, and read him the riot act. I told him I understood it wasn't a hit or a punch or a slap, it was light, but under no circumstances was he ever to do it again. A united front against male anger works wonders with many men. My father was not nor was he ever physically abusive, but sometimes people change as they get older. To live an abuse-free life, you start with zero tolerance for abuse. The connection between abuse and entitlement I'm not convinced all physically abusive men are, at their core, violent. Abuse also includes emotional, verbal and psychological, and pretty arguably everyone is guilty, even the nicest, most even-tempered people at some point. When we get angry or triggered we lash out at others - a partner, a friend, a family member, or some poor schmoe who happened to cross our path on a bad day. I suspect at least some men become abusive because they're allowed. I speak from experience. I used to be verbally and emotionally abusive to men during a dark time in my life about twenty years ago. I'm ashamed of the way I treated some men and their biggest 'fault' was not being the men I wanted them to be. I was That Crazy Chick many of them talk about. Not the 'crazy chick' who won't take their shit, the unacknowledged core of abusive men's complaints about women, but the Crazy Chick on dating apps who turned into a bitch in a heartbeat if someone rubbed me the wrong way or reached out and failed to meet my ridiculous standards. I learned what it feels like to be in the abuser's brain. Not OJ abusive, just everyday abusers who lash out at others because they loathe themselves. I wasn't raised to be abusive, as, I suspect, many men aren't. Some learn it growing up, others from mass media, later generations from social media, others from porn and other toxic content, but especially hanging around with negative, abusive people. For some men, it stems from sexual entitlement. For me, it stemmed from romantic entitlement. I found I had something in common with incels, not because I sympathized with them but because we shared entitlement. Incels want sex with women 'out of their league'; I wanted a man out of my own. Incels refuse to recognize the problem resides in them; as did I. I don't blame 'the right sort of man' for running away from me. I had an emotional breakdown over someone I fell too hard too soon for and he fled. It took me a few years of going over and over it and asking "What did I do wrong?" and more life experience to realize I was too needy and clingy. I had no life of my own and depended too much on seeing him. I smothered him. He was the last straw in a string of romantic disappointments, and the poor schmucks who came after him paid for it. I emotionally abused any who gave me tacit permission. They tolerated it. They let me abuse them. They kept coming back for more. I'm not blaming them. Their willingness to be abused doesn't exonerate my behavior in the slightest. But it did make them complicit, the way women are complicit, which shares a very fuzzy boundary with 'blame'. I hammer home the message no one can abuse you without your consent, unless you're not yet a legal adult, because you otherwise always have the power to set limits or walk away, even if you don't yet realize it. 'No Test' to identify early red flags According to Rob Andrews, a domestic violence counselor in Australia, male abusers 'boil the frog' by introducing control slowly and gradually. He offers a 'No Test' for women to apply early in a relationship, before a controlling personality does too much damage. "The No Test is basically to watch out for the way your partner responds the first time you change your mind or say no. While expressing disappointment is OK, it's not the same as annoyed. Annoyed is 'how dare you,' a sign of ownership or entitlement." He identifies ownership, entitlement and control as the early 'red flags' of a new relationship. He notes it happens far more often for women, but it's important to remember controlling, abusive, women resemble abusive men in many ways. Look at Amber Heard. I know, because I've refused to allow abusers into my life, and because, for an ugly time in my life, a few men allowed me into theirs. They didn't have zero tolerance for abuse. This may be a weakness for men today because when we talk about toxic relationships and abuse, we're almost always talking about male-on-female. We often won't even acknowledge how abusive women can be, even physically, when the man permits it. When I called my father decades ago, I demonstrated a united effort by the women in the family to make sure he understood his small rap on the thigh was unacceptable. They'd been married over twenty years, and it was a silly argument. But striking another person is never acceptable. He was angry. We all get angry. We have more control over ourselves than we acknowledge when we're triggered. When the abuser wears lipstick Anyone who thinks women can't be abusive has never known any women, or was home-schooled. We're masters at psychological manipulation and abuse. We're even more violent than acknowledged, mostly because we have to be more underhanded about it. We'll rarely confront a man physically, unless he's in bed like former Saturday Night Live comedian and actor Phil Hartman, shot to death in 1998 in his sleep by his alcohol and drug-fuelled abusive wife. Female serial killers like Aileen Wournos who murdered her johns up close are still rare, but experts have come to believe they may be more common than suspected. In her book When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, Patricia Pearson details how law enforcement often fails to identify female serial killers because of the erroneous belief that a woman couldn't possibly commit muliple acts of violence. Men and their more public violent crimes negate, in many brains, the notion that women, too, are violent. One expert quoted by Pearson notes that "Female serial killers actually average a greater number of victims than their male counterparts, even though the deaths occur right under their communities' noses." Who ever suspects the girlie? Mostly violent women have to operate under the radar. Certainly the list of historical poisoners is distinctly female. Today, babies and old people in the care of female less-than-caring givers are often targeted. Pearson explores whether SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) deaths are always tragic inexplicable accidents along with women who murdered their babies in the throes of postpartum depression, or just driven mad by a difficult, incessantly crying infant. She also explores caregivers with high body counts in the healthcare profession and mothers diagnosed with Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, in which they injure, sicken, or even kill their children for the attention and sympathy they receive from others. They're almost exclusively, Pearson notes, "the province of women who find themselves in maternal roles, either as biological or adoptive mothers or as babysitters or caretakers....They have an expert grasp of medicine and a keen sense of medicine's power." Women don't have the physical strength to murder like men. We have to be more cunning and subtle. Public domain image from Wallpaperflare Men are the most common physical abusers, including against transpeople who are at higher risk for partner violence. It doesn't mean we should ignore women's less common, less popular victims. Men injured or murdered by women are still victims. And lesbian domestic violence gets a lot less public attention than it deserves. Violence and abuse comes in all shapes, sizes, ages, colors, and sexes. If we were less tolerant of abuse we'd recognize this. It was a silly thing, Dad's little rap on the thigh. I knew it, Mom knew it, but she had never been struck by a man before. I knew he'd probably never do it again, but I called him because I was quite sure he'd never do it again if he had to endure another riot act. We have to resolve we will tolerate no control or abuse in our lives, and remove the parties responsible, or get out early. More importantly, we need to present a united front for others. It wouldn't have spiraled with my father, but with other men it might have. Controlling controllers "You're not going to do that," a boyfriend in my early twenties once told me. I forget what it was about. I looked up. "You're not going to tell me what to do," I told him. "You are NEVER going to tell me what to do, do you understand?" You gotta squash that shit like a bug. Anyone can do it. Early on, from the first sign of trouble, you come down hard on controlling behavior. Whether it's a man or a woman or anyone else doing it. Early is better than later. You set your boundaries and the other knows where they stand. If the other person's response to boundary-setting is to insult or hit you, that's your sign it's time to go. No matter how pretty or handsome they are, not to mention, of course, wealthy. Controlling, abusive people are never worth it. Never. If you liked this article you might like these: What If Human Women Challenged Male Aggression Like Bonobos? What Abuse Victims Can Learn From Prison Groupies I Think I Was Groomed For Abuse Once Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Mass shooter normalization demonstrates domestic abusers are no longer just a threat to their families Public domain photo from Rawpixel Warning: Brief mentions of animal and child abuse. Canada's worst mass shooter, the late Gabriel Wortman, returned to the news as police release information about his extremely violent genealogical history. Wortman's father Paul was highly abusive as was George, Paul's father. In April 2020 denturist gone bad Gabe killed 18 people and probably himself in Portapique, Nova Scotia. A new report based on police interviews of his surviving wife, family members, friends and acquaintances details family violence going back at least four generations. Not only was young Gabe subjected to horrific violence, he was forced to commit it himself. His father Paul made Gabe shoot his own dog when he felt he wasn't taking care of him well enough. Paul and his brothers (Gabe's uncles) were subjected to so much of George's violent abuse that they each considered killing him. One uncle thought about it after being gifted a rifle when he was 12, but didn't have the courage. Another stabbed George as a child during a family fight. As an adult, Paul once smashed his father's head into the concrete after George denied any of the vicious abuse he'd committed when the boys were growing up. Daddy Paul is still alive and admits to nothing more re Gabe and his brothers than 'having a hell of a temper' and 'screaming'. Image by Alexa from Pixabay In a 12-hour ordeal of terror for the small Portapique community, on April 18-19, 2020, domestic violence perp Gabe went on a rampage, setting multiple fires, killing 22 people, and injuring three. He set a new record for Canadian mass killing previously held by 1989 Montreal misogynist Marc Lepine, who killed 14 female engineering students, screaming how feminists had ruined everything, blaming them for his failure to get into engineering school that year. Guys who hit girls With the United States as the decades-long case study in mass shootings, a common thread that's emerged is shooters' personal histories of domestic violence. A recent peer-reviewed research study in Injury Epidemiology analyzed five years of Gun Violence Archive data, finding that two-thirds of mass shooters (defined as four or more fatalities, not including the gunman) killed family members, intimate partners or had a history of domestic violence. It's why President Joe Biden's new gun law, passed last month, closes the 'boyfriend loophole', meaning dating partners convicted of domestic abuse can no longer buy guns. How effective this new law will be remains to be seen in a nation awash with guns. It's like fighting cockroaches by no longer allowing them to eat garbage. The closed loophole only applies to dating partners who have been convicted of prior abuse. And how many abuse victims are willing to report it, let alone push it into court? Good luck with that. Canada doesn't have the gun violence problem America does, but it's growing, since like every other country on the planet, we've got an unhealthy share of toxic masculine men who can't be trusted with plastic picnic knives, much less shooty things. The profile of the violent mass shooter is 'male', big surprise there since the historical, universal profile of the violent anything starts with 'male', and now, to put a finer point on mass shootings which in the U.S. are no longer a 'rare occurrence', we can now add 'domestic abuser'. This means that a woman's private hell is no longer her own business. The rise of the mass shooter and his clear connection to domestic violence demonstrate that the next Gabriel Wortman will likely have a history of intimate partner abuse, and many will be quietly aware of it. Not all shooters fit that profile. Younger mass killers like teen Uvalde shooter Salvatore Ramos, the aforementioned Marc Lepine, 'killer incel' Elliott Rodgers, and Seung-Hui Cho, the University of Virginia's first mass shooter (there was a second a few years later), were unmarried, social reject loners who'd never had girlfriends. But a fair chunk of them, too, had a history of violence, if not necessarily against women. What do mass shootings mean for the tough guy's social circle? Protecting one's own family and colleagues may mean having to take a highly uncomfortable, more proactive awareness in handling a highly volatile neighbor, co-worker, or friend's spouse, especially if one suspects or knows there are guns in the house. Sometimes angry men go after the wife and kids, sometimes everyone but the wife, so she can live without her nearest and dearest as 'punishment' for whatever transgressions against him he thinks she's committed. Becoming a mass shooting victim increases for one who knows the shooter, especially if close to his partner. One might make the list of people he's out to 'get', especially if he thinks she cares about them or that they helped her. The work colleagues of an abused partner may be at risk as well. With multiple mass shootings a literal daily reality for Americans, far more people will discover the ugly emotional legacy once the domain of comparatively few: The guilt of realizing you might have been able to stop a massacre. CC0 2.0 image by 2happy from Stockvault How might you feel if someone you knew or suspected to be violent, some man you never liked, maybe you didn't even know him that well, committed a mass killing in a church, supermarket, parade, rock concert, school, or public park? Maybe he had a reputation in his neighborhood. Maybe you didn't know his partner, or didn't know her well, but you suspected something weird going on at home. Maybe she always wore sunglasses, even inside. Maybe she explained away her bruises as 'klutziness', but not with that funny ha-ha attitude genuinely clumsy people express. Maybe people half-joked, "He's going to be the next mass shooter!" They won't be laughing if it happens. Especially if they know or love any of the victims. Domestic violence is no longer a private matter. It's now everyone's business. The role of the abused partner It won't do much good to talk to her. She'll likely be afraid of what he'll do if he finds out. He may have isolated her enough that she'll reject any offers of help. It may put her safety in danger if he even sees her talking to someone. But taking the 'It's none of my business' attitude when we hear something going on could be more deadly than just for her. I became more vigilant at the start of the pandemic, realizing that so much togetherness would create increased family friction, especially if there was pre-existing dysfunction. One morning I heard a man's raised, angry voice in the apartment next door and I went on full alert. The moment I heard anything sounding like violence I was ready to call 911. I don't know the family, but I've seen them. He screamed at the kids a little but made no threats and I heard no violence, so I let it be. I have called the police on a prior neighbor, putting myself a bit at risk. However, I'm much older than she and we live in Canada where guns aren't nearly as easy to acquire as they are in the States. If I was still living there, I'd be far more worried about any guy I knew to have an anger management problem. What would it be like in the States, when there are more potentially dangerous nutbags who might turn the gun on me, a stranger or near-stranger? What can we do? One of the worst moral dilemmas is deciding whether to report someone you suspect might be a potential mass killer, but hasn't created enough suspicion yet. I've had to grapple with it in the past year. I'll write about it shortly. 8 warning signs of a mass shooter, according to experts (USA Today) One thing to do is call the police if you hear something going down. Couples fight, and I only call when I hear what sounds like violence or threats. I don't file spurious complaints, but I've often thought about what a formerly-abused friend said: "Call the police. You don't know how many times J had me backed against a wall and I was praying to God someone was calling the police." It will at least start a police record on the guy, and serve him notice that others are paying attention, especially if it happens multiple times. Then there's a record detailing a history for this guy. But don't call the police without real reason. Arguably, it could put the partner's life in danger, but consider also any children in the home. It's not just her life at stake; he might harm the kids too. We might be afraid the abuser will find out or figure out who did it. The list of suspects is small in a neighborhood, or a hallway. What if you know there are guns in his domicile? What if he decides to shoot everyone he sees one day? And one of those people is you, your spouse, or your kids? An article about the red flags for a potential shooter, and what to do, notes that the police aren't always the first go-to. Sometimes a counselor, mental health advocate, community leader, school administrator, or family member is the best place to start. I called my property manager several years ago when I shared an elevator with a deliveryman carting a rifle storage locker. I noted the floor number he punched. It's not an illegal item here, but whoever ordered it pretty arguably had guns, and the paranoid American in me wanted the property manager to know just in case something went down. The person who ordered it may have been a perfectly level-headed gun owner. No reason to call the police. Just let someone know. In case. The red flags aren't race, religion, political party or even one's views and opinions. One can be racist, sexist, homophobic or a member of that political party you can't stand and not be a potential mass shooter. They cross the line when they start talking about it, hinting about it, posting disquieting photos and expressions on social media, or even making a direct threat about 'those who have it coming'. He might have owned guns for years but now he seems to be buying a lot of them, along with ammo and protective gear. You start with the police if you think it's an urgent enough threat, and with others if there's not. When they're expressing empathy with mass shooters, that may be an early warning sign but not for police involvement. Last year I filed a report on an acquaintance I'd defriended and blocked on Facebook over a political dispute. She took it much harder than I'd have guessed, and she made harassing, threatening calls. She disguised her voice but I knew who it was. I struggled with calling the police over this stupid little cat fight. I didn't think she was dangerous, and doubted she had guns. But, I didn't want to worry my friends about this, and if something did happen to me, the police would focus on my close male friends. No one would even know who Jamie is since I barely knew her and never talked about her. I created a record in the extremely unlikely case she pulled anything. I gave the police Jamie's name, phone number, email address and Facebook page address and made it clear I didn't want them to intervene right now, just know she's their primary suspect if I disappear or turn up in a gully somewhere. We're only now coming to realize that domestic violence is a public health issue, especially in a country drowning in guns like the United States. I think about it even here in Canada, where mass shootings have historically been rare, but they're growing, especially in the pandemic. The other day I Googled 'the most recent mass shootings', thinking of America and found---the most recent one was in Langley, BC. It's time to open discussion about how we can better protect our communities from mass shooters, knowing what we do about their violent histories, whether they abused their partners and families, or whether they were disturbed young people who never should have been allowed to purchase guns. We must also address how to do this without putting the man's immediate family in danger. Let's serve notice to abusers and the next wannabe CNN superstars everywhere: We're watching you, and we're reporting you. This will also serve notice to women in abusive situations who may be unwilling for whatever reason to handle it: Don't tell us to stay out of your business. This isn't just your business anymore. It's a public health crisis. It's everyone's business. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Three options for American women to, um, *empower* men to bring Roe v. Wade back CC0 public domain from Pxhere A few years ago actress and feminist activist Alyssa Milano suggested a Lysistrata-style protest by women after the latest round of Republican-backed abortion rights limits. She was pooh-poohed, including by myself for suggesting a sex strike, but now, with Roe gone, maybe she had a point...? Not wanting to have sexual intercourse just got more attractive for any woman unfortunate enough to live in a bass-ackward state. That sucks, when you're a healthy, red-blooded young American woman with carbonating hormones. We can be sure of one thing: Abortion rights aren't coming back soon, unless everyone votes Democrat in the fall. Yeah, that'll happen. Here's the thing: It benefits men mightily when women fear pregnancy. I'm not sure today's outraged progressive 'feminist' men have yet worked out just how much a Roe-less world benefits them as much as conservative men. If you pay attention, you'll note that male feminism usually stops at the penis. When women's rights interfere with male sexual pleasure, one encounters resistance, pushback, and justification. Don't believe me? Test your 'feminist' male friends by talking about how we need to crack down on sex trafficking of girls and women in porn and prostitution and see how 'feminist' they are on the subject. I discovered this by accident last year when I told a man I'd started dating how I'd read a book that discussed the sex trafficking problem in porn. Boy, did he get triggered! He hotly denied there was a trafficking problem and demanded I provide evidence. "Just Google 'sex trafficking in porn'," I replied. "The first page of search results contain articles from high-quality, factual sources about the problems at YouPorn and Pornhub," the two most popular sites. I hadn't known him long enough to realize he watched a lot of porn. No wonder he got so angry. I'd just inadvertently made him feel like a dirtball. I hadn't known how popular porn had become. I never date anyone long enough to find out. Most men make me want to rip my brain out of my head before I'm half-finished with my coffee. An article I read elsewhere described how men talk about 'sex work' as 'empowering' for women, using a new term to pretty up 'prostitution' so they don't have to feel ashamed at degrading women who suck stranger dick to feed their families, not because they like to. To be fair, so-called female feminists have made these arguments too, including 'sex workers' I'm not convinced are feeling all that empowered. I can think of three ways we can protest Roe in the bedroom and provide impetus for all men to hurry up and bring Roe back. Protest Option #1: Shut your mouth Let's consider this: A less intercourse-y world for men means something wondrous and beautiful: BLOWJOBS! BLOWJOBS! BLOWJOBS! BLOWJOBS!!! This works out fabulously for men, many of whom may not be that much into sexual intercourse anyway. Intercourse is more intimate, and usually involves facing your partner, being much closer physically, and, God help them, looking into her eyes. That's where connection happens. That's where feelings happen. The emotionally stunted man wants to look anywhere but. Blowjobs, on the other hand, require nothing more than laying back and enjoying it. For some, it's being 'serviced', even if she's not a prostitute. For others, like rapper DJ Khaled, oral sex is exclusively the 'right' of the male to receive, because he is 'king' and there are 'different rules' for men and women. I'd like to know who set those 'rules' and why he thinks he's 'king' when it was a woman who carried his heavy ass for nine months in her belly and pushed him out from between her legs. Can you imagine DJ, or any other man, having the courage, commitment, or fortitude to do that? So yeah, there's a power element to getting women to give blowjobs, although to be fair many men are happy to reciprocate, and may even claim to like doing that the most. But man, do men love blowjobs. If we can't get what we want, they can't get what they want. Men decided what women will do with their bodies. We'll decide what they won't. Free SVG Protest Option #2: Require men to get better in the sack. Particularly with oral. If you can't live without sex at all, Option #2 will require men to get better in bed. This will be painful for the ones who delude themselves into thinking they're better lovers than they are. Which is to say, nearly all of them. And that means absolutely no blowjobs for men who don't reciprocate. That's right, DJ Khaled, go ask Lila Nas X or Saucy Santana for one. Learn to love the beard scratch! No more faked orgasms, ladies! Men only get rewarded with loud screams if they produce it. No trophy just for sticking your tongue out! While we're waiting for Roe's return men will have to make their partner's pleasure of primary importance, which means getting to know their bodies much, much better. Pay attention, Ted Cruz! You MUST learn where the clitoris is located. (No, it's not in the medicine cabinet!) How many men, really, are good at oral sex? I've been with a lot of men and I can only remember one who possessed the one critical skill for giving good ladyhead: He listened and followed instructions. Most men, I've found, have one way of going down and simply can't be taught anything else. A friend I recently discussed this with agreed. Most men learned how to go down from an early girlfriend and they either suffer from the delusion that all women are alike down there or they just don't care. Several years ago I was with a man who only knew what could be described as the 'hummingbird' technique. His tongue moved so fast it had to have been a blur. "Slower, slower!" I said. "And gentler. You need a much lighter touch." "Okay," he said, and he slowed it down, for about thirty seconds. Then the hummingbird returned. "No, no, slower and gentler!" I said. "You're killing the feeling." "Oh, okay," he said and slowed it down. Thirty seconds later--"Please! Stop doing that!" Ten seconds later--"Okay, let's forget it. This isn't working." What part of 'slow' and 'gentle' did he not understand? Unfortunately, I find this is fairly typical. They don't listen. You can't teach them. But in a Roe-less world, they will have to learn, or go back to Rosy Palm. Option #3: The double condom protest If you prefer intercourse, and many of us do, insist on two condoms. He should be using birth control anyway since men don't want to pay for unwanted children any more than unwilling mothers want to carry or raise them. We all know how much men hate using condoms, right? "I don't feeeeel as much!" "You're not going to feel anything if you don't put it on." "How about a blowjob instead?" "Hang on, let me check something." She pulls out her mobile, scrolls and taps. "No, we still have no abortion rights. How do you feel about a condom now?" "How do you feel about anal? You can't get pregnant that way." "Gross. I don't do that porny shit. I want intercourse, and now that I have no abortion rights, you have to use two condoms." "TWO CONDOMS? Are you out of your mind, woman?" "In case the first one breaks." "Screw this. I'll go find Camellia. She'll do it bareback!" Fine, let her raise the dumb-ass's baby. Or contend with monkeypox. Really, how pleasurable will sex be for women now that forced pregnancy is a possible consequence? As sardonic as I'm being - Lysistrata was an utter fantasy even back in classical Athens - it's something to think about. I really do see the popularity of blowjobs and anal sex exploding with men as they have for many years with teenage boys, many of whom never reciprocate on the oral. It's how girls cement early the misogynist idea that women exist to service men with their bodies, and that female sexual pleasure isn't important. The pain must be evenly spread. It's not every American man's fault Roe is gone and it's plenty of American women's fault that it is. The bottom line is sex just got more dangerous for everyone, but especially women. Sexual intercourse in a restricted or no-abortion state needs two condoms to be safer. If intercourse is out, then men need to up their game in the sack and earn their partner's screams of pleasure. Alyssa Milano and a fictional married war protester may be tongue-in-cheek, but there's a method to their madness. We need to spread the pain. Okay, Kavanaugh's doe-eyed poor-poor-baby wife won't refuse her wifely duties for her overprivileged frat boy, but what if his friends began griping to him at country club parties that this was all his fault? Nothing will motivate American men to correct an injustice quite like limiting or cutting off male sexual pleasure. Start with the blowjobs. Trust me, they'll turn into Gloria-freaking-Steinim before you even get to the condom thing, and we'll have Roe back by Thanksgiving. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Same old cis-het sexual predator, different wardrobe and 'identity'. I'm not a lesbian, so correct me if I'm wrong, since definitions change faster than Donald Trump's excuses for stashing classified documents, but as I understand it, traditional lesbians are girls who are attracted to girls and not boys. They like girls with girl-parts, not boy parts, and most especially not a penis and testicles. They like women with women's bodies, not jawlines with a five o'clock shadow or bodies that can win the men's decathlon. Lesbians like girls. The 'cotton ceiling' idea, coined by a porn actress in 2015 , has been popularized by a small segment of the trans movement along with certain 'allies' who aren't trans themselves, who I'll guess are almost certainly male. The 'cotton ceiling' describes lesbians who don't want to date transwomen, especially those who still retain their original equipment. With 'cotton ceiling' complaints come the invented word 'ladydick', to gaslight people into believing some women have a penis, the way we're supposed to believe some men menstruate. Biology speaks truth to identity about who and what is under the appropriated clothing, wigs, chest scars and close-cropped haircuts. But whatever. As J.K. Rowling famously got flamed for, "Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security..." But don't act like a sexual predator. The wolf in she's clothing 'Cotton ceiling' complainers tend to be transwomen who 'identify' as lesbians. But calling their penis a 'ladydick' doesn't make it any more attractive, or female. A transwoman who pressures women to have sex with him isn't a lesbian, he's an entitled, abusive, privilege-entrenched cis-heteronormative man and a sexual predator. Lesbian ladies, we cis-het females all know this guy! He doesn't care if we're not ready for sex, maybe not yet ready to lose our virginity. He doesn't care if we're not attracted to him. His dick needs service and he's chosen one of us as the unlucky recipient to service it with one of our orifices. He will say and do whatever it takes to get us to spread our legs and if we still resist, he will pull out the big guns. "You must be a lesbian!" No, we protest, no we're not. "I think you're a lesbian! Prove it! Prove you're not really into bush!" So now, that same cis-het dude has donned a dress and inverted his hoary old line to pressure lesbians who won't ride his hot rod, either. "You're not really a lesbian! If you are, prove it!" Maybe lesbians should ask: If you're a transwoman identifying as a 'lesbian', why don't you hook up with other 'lesbian' transwomen? Avail yourselves of the 'mangina' in the back! Lesbian transwomen who won't date or have sex with other lesbian transwomen are, therefore, transphobic TERFs! 'Cotton ceiling' sexual predators are the same-old same-old. It's NOT OKAY. It's abusive, entitled male privilege dressed up and with a repurposed line. You don't have to defend yourself People dig who they do, and are entitled to reject anyone. Not wanting to have sex with someone is the only reason you need to not have sex with that person. After all, lesbians don't want to sleep with every woman they meet. When's the last time a female lesbian accused another of not being a real lesbian because she wouldn't sleep with her? Pressuring people to have sex: It's primarily a guy thing. The original 'cotton ceiling' proposal posited that maybe we should challenge what we think constitutes an acceptable romantic or sex partner. That's fair, especially in these Tinder-challenging times. People can enlarge their dating pool if they open up more to others they automatically rejected - people from other cultures and religions, other races, the disabled, the age-distant, and larger people. But only if they want to. No one should force themselves to sleep with people they don't find attractive because of some 'unprogressive' or 'transphobic' B.S. guilt trip. Especially lesbians not the slightest bit interested in a penis. And an estimated 80% of transwomen (no one knows for sure) still have one. An unfortunate reality for anyone who switches gender is they dramatically reduce their dating prospects. It may not be fair, and fat people can relate, but transgenders defy what most people find attractive in a sexually dimorphic species. 'The norm' is to find the opposite sex attractive, or the same sex if one is gay, which is thrown off kilter when someone blends sex and gender presentation. We're wired a certain way and while we're not slaves to our cavecritter legacy, you don't overcome it after only a decade of 'wokeness'. While it's fair to challenge any of us to question our sexual preferences, sex with someone who doesn't want you is not a human right. Sexual attraction has served the human race for millions of years, since its recursive purpose of life is its perpetuation. No god or human decreed this; mindless evolutionary biology did. We've evolved the way we have to perpetuate life, whether we individually choose to or not. It does no good to compare us to other species who aren't sexually dimorphic. We ain't clownfish, frogs or bearded dragon lizards. I've found no mammals - our kind - who are. Maybe we'll evolve away from sexual dimorphism in the future; but don't hold your breath for this lifetime, because evolution takes a looooong time. In the meantime, we can work around biology's limitations. Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Emily Walker in New Zealand The role of the AGP transgender male The dirty little not-so-secret about a fair number of transwomen is that they're autogynephilic, in which a man is aroused by looking like, dressing as, and fantasizing about being a woman. Trans-activists succeeded for awhile in making it 'taboo' or 'offensive' to mention it since people feel greater sympathy for gender dysphorics than for cis-het male sexual fetishists. AGPs have constituted a large part of the transgender population since long before gender-switching became popularized by social media. Gay males constitute the other large chunk of traditional transgenders. Since the latter is uninterested in vagina, and in fact may have transitioned to female to make themselves more attractive to straight men, it's some of the AGPs - cis-het men - who are now preying on vulnerable and naive young lesbians. Abusive cis-het males are calling the shots now, having successfully penetrated the trans and LGB movements and gaslit enough of them to think that transwomen are the same as women and that 'some women have penises' and that it's 'transphobic' to not want to have sex with the dick under the dress. The well-meaning desire to be 'inclusive' is the Achilles heel of the left. It lends itself too easily to abuse via tolerance of intolerance - condemning the Christian religion, for example, for its historical poor treatment of women and religious minorities like Jews, while turning a blind eye to those same abuses in modern Islam. Or fighting for the 'right' for people with penises - i.e, men - to invade women's safe spaces like spas, prisons, rape crisis and domestic violence shelters. 'Idiot compassion' Another word for this over-inclusiveness is 'idiot compassion', coined by the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and describes how compassion taken too far, enables some to walk all over others and perpetuate abuse. The left's overemphasis on inclusivity and non-offense is the idiot compassion that makes those who rail against 'misogyny' and 'patriarchy' the most easily gaslit to ignore the blatant misogyny, patriarchy, and traditional male entitlement expressed by abusers in Transworld. Some feminists - cis and lesbian - are beginning to connect and call out classic abusive male tactics and public misogyny in dresses. I want lesbians to know they're not alone. We straight chicks see through these opportunistic men attempting to manipulate, pressure, guilt-trip and control lesbians into giving them what they've always wanted from women and were likely unable to get when they 'identified' as men. The backlash has begun, fueled not by 'transphobia' but by traditional feminist hostility to male abuse. You are what you are and you're attracted to who you're attracted to. You're not 'transphobic' or a 'TERF' if you don't want to ride a penis, or date someone who simply looks like a guy inside or outside of a dress. When he pressures you to have sex with him, he's not a she or a her. He's demonstrating he's as all-man as he always was. He's neither a woman nor a lesbian. He's a sexual predator. Same-old same-old. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Like Brett Kavanaugh did? And you just didn’t know it? I recently sent an apology to someone for nasty shit I did forty years ago. Better late than never, n'est-ce pas? I was digitizing my life, scanning journals, stories, and photographs, reminding me of silly crap like my first boyfriend, playing 'beerhunter' with friends, the uber-drama of who likes who and who just broke up with who, and dumb private in-jokes whose humor is lost to the annals of time. One afternoon I read a forgotten movie script I'd written for a college class, very thinly based on an uber-drama in my life at the time, and my words reached out from 1984 to gob-smack me in the face with the evidence, in fading black on white with smudgy typos and clumsy ballpoint pen corrections, of what a serious bitch I could be when I was a college student. Okay, I won't mince words, I can be a bitch even today but damn, did I really do that? I laid it down on the coffee table and walked away, so appalled was I at how my friends and I had acted. I had help, but I was the Lead Asshole. I never read the rest. I threw it away without scanning it. What I'd done to Alice gnawed at me. Our inner Brett Kavanaugh This occurred during the Ford/Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings. I half-listened, half-watched a proposed Justice who was a way worse asshole than I had ever been deny everything. At least I never pretended to rape someone and then laughed my ass off when they ran away crying. I listened as the Senate Committee slowly pried Kavanaugh's ancient memories apart. I became convinced that: Ford was telling the absolute truth about what happened that fateful Maryland night thirty-six years previously Kavanaugh was lying through his #$%ing teeth about not remembering--now--but… He really had forgotten about it until Ford came forward, and probably needed to rack his brain, because he clearly had a serious alcohol problem then He #$%ing remembered by the time he sat down to give testimony. Brett Kavanaugh had a moment few of us ever do: He faced consequences for something he’d done a loooooong time ago he’d completely forgotten about, hadn’t thought was a big deal at the time, and now, decades later, it came back to bite a giant chunk out of his ass. He literally had no idea how he’d impacted someone for an entire lifetime. He didn’t get it, and he didn’t want to, because admitting the truth to himself was too soul-shattering for an older, wiser, soberer man. What did it say about him as a person that he ruined a teenage girl’s life with what sounds like a cruel, thoughtless prank? The fact that he and his buddy laughed hysterically when Christine Blasey tore out of the room indicates they really thought it was a big joke. Well. He wasn’t laughing at his hearing. He was Sniffle-upagus, a petulant man-child, the nasty adolescent boy’s face transparent behind the tissue-thin middle-aged man-mask. This wasn’t fair. This happened like a thousand years ago. Why was she trying to screw up his biggest career move? Why was she bringing this up now? It was just a big joke, ya dumb broad! But before you judge the Judge and write him off with ‘he deserved it’, and he did… …What’s your secret Brett Kavanaugh moment? What should you be judged for? Do you even know? Brett Kavanaugh moments are universal, and usually not nearly as serious as a semi-rape attempt. Most of us will never find out about our moment, something we said or did we didn't think was a big deal, except it was. To someone else. We may never find out unless they decide to confront us - via an email, a Facebook post, a snail mail card, maybe a voice mail message. The risk is greater if you become a public figure. We say and do stuff throughout our lives. When we’re teenagers we’re particularly vicious little bastards, half-formed adults and half-baked savages. My worst bully in high school, the only person I ever felt like I could kill, had finally grown up five years after graduation and later got married and had a child at some point. I don’t know if he’s still married as he hasn’t updated his Facebook profile since the early Obama years (yes, I accepted his friend request) but the little boy in the photo must be in college by now. The First Guy To Hit Me Was The Last And here’s why it never happened again I haven’t gone through life cursing Dan, but he still left a lifelong imprint on me. Do you think it was a good one? I could bring him his own minor Brett Kavanaugh moment, if he ever publicly stated he’s never hit a woman. Which will probably never happen, because he’s not a public figure. And… …I wonder if there's my own Christine Blasey Ford out there somewhere, who could tell a story of something perhaps far more thoughtless and cruel than the shit I pulled on Alice in college. Something I've completely forgotten about. The aggrieved have far longer memories than the perpetrators. I'm not worried about Alice, my Ford. She could, at worst, embarrass me a little but not cancel me on Twitter. She'd never do it because she wasn't blameless herself. It doesn't excuse the way I treated her, or the climactic Biff Thing. I don't know if Kavanaugh ever felt remorse for what he discovered he'd done. Maybe you resist more when you've been globally shamed, rather than privately contacted. What struck me was the similarity in our experiences: We both traumatized others and forgot about it, because it didn't happen to us. Brett Kavanaugh had forgotten about Christine Blasey until she smacked him in the face with a giant, thirty-six-year-old wet mackerel of a misdeed and he learned how abominably he’d changed someone’s entire life. She became a psychology professor to better understand her long-term trauma, and explained why she could be certain it was Brett Kavanaugh, and not someone else, to California senator Dianne Feinstein. Without missing a beat. "The way that I'm sure I'm talking to you right now, it's just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain. That neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus so that trauma-related experience is locked there, so other memories just drift." It wasn't a 'big deal' from Kavanaugh's perspective. But it was to her. Alice in Blunderland Alice created dissension for our college crowd by going after everyone's boyfriend, but deciding mine was the one she was destined to marry. It was comical at first as she had commonplace looks and was somewhat unsocialized. She was, however, relentless. She'd fallen madly in love with James and the only thing standing between her and him was me. And the fact that he wasn't into her. But still. When he didn't fend her off sufficiently I felt insecure and threatened. Between the script and my old college journal, I shook my head disparagingly at my mean-girl bullying, how I gossiped about Alice, wouldn't shut up to anyone who would listen as to how much I couldn't stand her, and the childish pranks I instigated. Like wearing a dead aunt's engagement ring my mother had given me on my left hand, whenever Alice was around, to make her think James and I were engaged. My stunt worked, it hurt her, as a friend confirmed, describing the look on her face whenever I flashed it around. Mission accomplished. I joke-formed a fictional 'hit squad' with a few friends, with fictional stories about getting back at the people who'd done us wrong, always starting with Alice. I'm sure at least some of it got back to her sometimes. Alice had been easy enough to get along with until she started chasing James, and then everyone else's boyfriends. She created bad feeling, especially for James and myself, and started fights between couples. She told my roommate she was waiting for me to instigate some 'precipitating event' that would break James and I up, and that she'd 'wait me out forever'. She shares the blame for her troubles. We all had good reason to put an end to her crap. But the way we ultimately handled it was horrible. The way I handled her leading up to it was horrible. I was her worst bully. One of our number - I'll call him Biff - got everyone's agreement on a scheme to rid ourselves of the troublesome Alice once and for all. The plan was to meet up at the weekly gathering of a social group we were all in that met at the university. We'd get her alone, and in front of us - because, Biff emphasized, she needed to see everyone was behind him on this, especially James - he'd yell at her and tell her in no unclear terms she was to leave us all alone, as we didn't want her around anymore. What really makes me cringe is how it didn't go down that way. What was a terrible idea turned out far more humiliating for Alice than we'd intended. We waited in a secluded area while Biff tried to get her to leave the meeting room, where there were many more people. Alice knew he hated her, she must have figured something was up, and when she wouldn't leave he spoke his mind and humiliated her in front of the entire chapter. Until I dug up the old movie script, I'd almost forgotten about this. I'm quite certain Alice hasn't. A bottle of the house poison, please I remember wondering how I or other girls might have reacted to Kavanaugh's and his friend's 'joke'. You never know what negatively impacts another's life forever. Getting raped, for example, ruins some women's lives, and strengthens others. Some emerged from the Holocaust saying, "I won't give the Nazis one more damn minute of my life," while others descended into survivor's guilt-driven madness or committed suicide. I don't know if Alice ever made her own private peace with us over our groupthinked Biff bomb. As I re-read my forty-year-old journal I was struck not just by how abominably I treated her, but genuine anger I held which I revisited dispassionately; I didn't get angry all over again or re-traumatize myself, but I felt some empathy and compassion for the faulty young woman who had begun to fear Alice might really take her boyfriend. Buddhists say anger is a poison we willingly consume. You can't always control how people treat you but you can control how you react, and how much power you're willing to give them, long after the offense. Had Kavanaugh and his buddy picked a different teenage girl, one who brushed things off more easily, his Supreme Court nomination might have gone more smoothly. He could have moved through the rest of his life blissfully ignorant of Ford's and several more black marks against him, as others stepped forward to tell their own Gross Encounters of the Brett Kavanaugh Kind, including one who accused him of actual rape, albeit outside of the statute of limitations. I'm over Alice's malice; I can honestly say I bear no ill will toward her. She's not an unresolved memory popping up when I'm stressed or angry like a bottle of poison I willingly drink so I can mentally upchuck all over myself again. I don't know whether she can say the same for me. James and I broke up a year or so after The Biff Thing and Alice moved to another city where she married a nice guy, although they divorced later. A few years after college I moved to southern New England, she to the north. We ran into each other sometimes at our social organization events and got along well. She'd left an unsuitable religion and adopted Paganism, a far better choice for someone way too intelligent and progressive for the earlier religion. I gave her a ride once at a large annual gathering and we chatted about our lives in New England, never mentioning the past. I looked for her for years. I reached out to her recently on Facebook. I wanted to connect so I could apologize to her and I thought she might accept since we had been cordial with each other in New England. She didn't accept. So I sent her a direct message, unsure if she'd see it or not since I wasn't a connection. I feel like I've done what I can. Brett Kavanaugh's Christine Blasey Ford moment When we women think of Brett Kavanaugh we think ‘man who sexually abused someone and got away with it.’ Except he didn't. Kavanaugh didn't rape teenage Christine Blasey, he only pretended to. There's a gap between a 'joke' and a real rape. Some women would have shrugged it off, perhaps even laughed it off. Not all women react the same way to rape, or ha-ha-jokey-not-rape. But some are heavily traumatized even when no actual rape occurs. You never know how the victim of your 'joke', your bullying, your cruelty, will be impacted. For Blasey Ford, it impelled her toward a psychology career, to better understand what happened. Kavanaugh impacted her life that much. I don't know how much I impacted Alice's life. While The Biff Thing was a group effort, I think I was the ringleader in a nasty longer-term campaign to personally humiliate her. Christine Blasey Ford failed in her attempt to stop Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination, but she returned his favor by traumatizing him - and make no mistake, it's pretty damn traumatizing to be globally shamed. She wasn't the only one whose life and family were threatened during the 2018 hearings; Kavanaugh and his family were subjected to the same anonymous abuse. It's rare for someone with an ancient grievance to return the favor, although social media has made it easier. Kavanaugh didn't get off scot-free; his life will never be as hunky-dory as his critics imagine, and with the recent loss of Roe he may find himself especially in danger. His family will never be the same either. He has two school-age daughters. A controversial 2018 political cartoon depicted a child saying her bedtime prayers…. “Dear God, forgive my angry, lying, alcoholic father for sexually assaulting Dr. Ford.” It was in poor taste and generated the customary backlash. An understandably sympathetic Chelsea Clinton issued a plea to leave Kavanaugh’s daughters alone. But this illustrates how his family will live with his legacy for the rest of their lives. His daughters will forever be tarred as ‘the rapist’s daughters.’ Kids of both genders can be vicious little rhymes-with-runts. Enough has come out about Kavanaugh that they know or suspect the truth about their father, however much they might publicly defend him or privately deny it. While most women, especially Kavanaugh’s critics, don’t think of themselves as bad people and have probably never driven anyone to suicide, or Ford-years of therapy, they don’t know. The bullies rarely remember. The victims do. A few years ago I reconnected with an old boyfriend on Facebook and he mentioned some thoughtless remarks I'd made that clearly stuck with him decades later. I have no memory of them, but I can't say I didn't say them. I defer to his memory, because they stuck in his craw, not mine, and I imagine it's the sort of semi-raw wound that emerges when he's angry, depressed or upset just like everyone else and myself has. We may die not knowing who our Christine Blasey Ford was. Along with Alice, I learned of someone else I hurt as I scanned my so-called life; and like Alice, he wasn't blameless. But I still think I was a real bitch to him, and I wonder: As petty as it all actually is, is there anyone who has a real *bitch* of a story to tell about me? I doubt I ever drove a fragile mind to suicide like the Mean Girls of South Hadley, Massachusetts, but I wonder who may still be drinking a bottle of poison with my face on the label. Before you dismiss your inner Kavanaugh protesting, “I’ve never done anything that bad!”…maybe you didn’t. Or maybe you don’t remember it. Or maybe it was, to you, 'no big deal'. We are all blind Brett Kavanaughs, walking around and living our lives blithely unaware of our personal Christine Blasey Ford. Until maybe one day she emerges and explodes like an IED to tell her truth. Or his. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

#NotAllWomen dislike being objectified. Some encourage it, and then complain about male attention WTF? Was she out of her mind dressing like that? For a website’s trade conference speaker bio? Her tiger-striped too-tight tube top drooped so low on her generous chest, had it slipped another millimeter she would have displayed what a friend of mine called ‘clams on the half-shell’. She had the rack for that outfit, for sure. But as a speaker at a business conference, well — even the extremely casual nature of the cannabis industry made me look askance. Shouldn’t she try to be a tiny bit more business-like? Even if Business Casual might be considered overdressing for this particular event? A woman can dress any damn way she pleases, right? But what if we’re sending mixed messages? In this era of aggressive, in-your-face #MeToo and #TimesUp, maybe we need to think about those messages. And by ‘we’, I mean everyone, not just women. Just imagine if a man, especially one in power, strutted around the office with his shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal his manly chest, his rock-hard gym thighs encased in tight trousers or perhaps the bike pants he didn’t bother to change out of when he got to work. Would anyone complain? Would anyone feel intimidated? Would they feel brave enough to report to the HR manager the guy who signs her paychecks needs to cover up more and stop sexualizing the office? There’d be private grumbling and maybe a few blog posts deep within the bowels of Da Internetz complaining anonymously about Mr. I’m-Too-Sexy-For-This-Office. But the ones who sexualize the workplace and complain about it the most are women. Maybe the day will come when office workers can dress however sexually they want without making anyone feel uncomfortable, but I don’t think we’re there yet. Not in 2021. Dress for excess Perhaps the most venerable message harking back to the very early days of mammalian pair bonding is I’m sexually available for mating purposes. The best-looking life forms get the cream of the mating picks, whether it’s a more brightly-colored mandrill butt, or supremely rockin’ bird of paradise mating dance moves, or perhaps less hairy cleavage, as was the case for Homo Erectus, who lost their body hair when they moved to the super-hot savannah. Looking babelicious is a literally timeless message meaning, first and foremost, I’m available, Gorgeous! The message is murkier today. A woman can look good without wanting men to attempt pickups. Men shouldn’t assume it’s what she wants, but she shouldn’t assume it won’t happen. The self-objectifying pair-bonding message mixes with the one telling men Treat women in the workplace as colleagues, not sex objects, even as we wander around the office wearing self-sexualizing high skirts and near-illegal cleavage. If the workplace is the place where work gets done, then why dress like you’re going out with your girlfriends? It’s a tetchy, murky subject, with workplace harassment in the spotlight and a woman’s unquestioned right to not be sexually harassed regardless of how she’s dressed. It remains remarkable that some men still have to be reminded constantly not to pursue romantic attachments in the office, particularly with anyone who reports to them. I’m not arguing women ‘bring it on themselves’, but I ask women to consider: If you want to be taken seriously at work, how are you presenting yourself? How you dress sends a message. How seriously would a male colleague be taken if he wore what Wil Ferrell wore in a famous Saturday Night Live sketch? It’s exaggerated but he’s only showing a bit more leg than a mini-skirted woman. Let’s be honest: Some women enjoy being objectified, like the aforementioned Toni the Tiger. They work hard to look really, really good. Great clothes. Great hair. Great makeup. A woman spending that much time on her face and body wants to be looked at and admired. Don’t deny it, Hot Stuff! I don’t fault her for that. The ancient Greeks and Romans got gorgeous. The ancient Egyptians dolled up. Hell, they may have invented makeup. Men self-sexualize too, to send many messages, only one of them being I’m sexually available. It can also mean I’m the alpha male here. I’m the dominant one. I’m the one you have to fight if that don’t sit right with you. I get the desire to look good. But I kept it business casual when I worked in offices, because, well, the workplace isn’t the place for my red-hot sizzling menopausal mow-mow-mow. Now I work from home, and when I wear sexy summer clothes, I throw a wrap on for a Zoom meeting. Neither The Girls nor my bare shoulders belong. The message I want to send is to take me seriously. Workplaces are for work, not sexual advertising. I dare you to not look at these A woman I worked with many years ago sent a hugely contradictory message with the way she dressed at our small IT firm. She had a highly confrontational attitude, in-your-face aggressive defense with male colleagues. I understood why: She’d previously worked in American law firms and auto dealerships, two of the most notoriously misogynist professions. She had to be a badass to survive in traditionally female-sparse offices. Like ours. Except ours wasn’t particularly misogynist. It blew my mind how she dressed every damned day. I don’t know if it’s how she dressed at her previous jobs but every morning I was greeted with her ample chest’s décolletage. The very last thing I would ever wear if I worked in a toxic masculine environment (which our office wasn’t) is something shoving The Girls in everyone’s faces. Then there’s LinkedIn, another professional setting where self-sexualization needs to be downplayed. People, I’d like to remind you Linkedin is NOT Facebook! It’s a PROFESSIONAL networking group and romantic gestures, comments and messages have NO PLACE here!!! Women have a hard enough time being taken seriously in the yaddayaddayadda RANK MISOGYNY of yaddayaddayadda EQUALS TO MEN yaddayaddayadda BAD BEHAVIOR yaddayaddayadda… LinkedIn Himbos—men looking for love in just the wrong place—happen even to old farts like me on occasion. I shrug and message back, “LinkedIn is a business networking site, it’s not a dating service, I’m not interested.” End of story. It’s a minor male faux pas, at worst. Unworthy of the overprivileged First World posting tantrums they customarily spark from outraged Cleavage Queens of Babelonia. It stands to reason someone might mistake a really good-looking social media profile picture for a potential availability signal, especially if a woman puts a lot more effort into looking good than I put into crafting the perfect snarky comment response. A self-sexualizing photo sends a mixed message. No need to publicly eviscerate the miscreant on social media. Save your outrage for stuff like Weinstein’s casting couch or Cosbying someone’s drink. Or, to be fair and non-sexist, being accused by over a dozen men of raping, fondling, and sexually harassing them. Everyone sends messages the way they dress, whether it’s Everyone look at me, I’m God’s gift to wo/men or My mother still dresses me. When I watch a female CEO spend an entire day responding to her LinkedIn himbo tantrum commenters, getting mad at those who don’t support her or tell her to chill, and her photo indicates she spends more money on her hair than I spend on a month of groceries, I think, Oh, enough already! You want to be looked at! Just tell him to eff off and move along! Don’t you have important CEO shit to do? Dressing sexy creates the potential for workplace drama and could be mistaken for sexual overtones. Which happens on both sides of the romantic divide, despite #MeToo. Sometimes women are the sexual predators. I'm-Too-Sexy-For-This-Office With growing educational and economic power comes responsibility. Today’s office ain’t yer grandma’s Mad Men office. There’s still plenty of inequality and sexual harassment, and the power imbalance still skews heavily toward men, but, and this is critical, not as much as it used to. At this particular trade conference, for the infant legal cannabis industry, I saw a fair number of woman-founded and woman-owned businesses. The cannabis industry boasts a higher percentage of women in senior positions (37%), 21% higher than the national average. Yay for….oh, man, I forget! People can dress however they want. But we need to consider the message we send. Men are slowly ceding power to women but we’re nowhere near parity. The woman in the tight dress and best boobs money can buy is not perhaps the best image fighting the ongoing sexualization of women in the #MeToo era. Workplaces are for work, not your cleavage, and that goes for men too. The more we can focus on our jobs and not Ms. Sexpot or Mr. I’m-Too-Sexy-For-This-Office, the more productive we’ll all be. As public debate increasingly puts the ‘coarse’ in ‘discourse’ and humans divide up into their own little More-victimized-than-thou tribes, it’s time to take stock of how much we ourselves contribute to our problems. Not to assign blame and beat ourselves up, but to take responsibility like big boys and girls and resolve to do better. This includes the misunderstandings coming from mixed messages. Mean what you say, and say what you mean, however you communicate it. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

A bunch of chickie-boos registering post-Roe to vote for the very first time points to how we Americans sleepwalk through elections, until we're like, "Whahappentoourdemocracy?" I raised a bit of debate earlier this month on LinkedIn when someone posted a supportive article on Iranian women’s protests against wearing the hijab. Commented I, It's a critical example of an unpleasant fact of life: In order for things to change, the *oppressed* are the ones who will drive it, no one else. Not the ruling class/party, not the government, *the oppressed*. When they've had enough they say the hell with it and *fight back*. It doesn't matter who they are or where they live. It's a universal fact of life. Something to think about in our own highly privileged, victimhood-obsessed cultures. A few pushed back and one inevitably dragged slavery into it (because you can never talk about oppression without bringing up slavery, since we only got rid of it, like, the other day), sarcastically suggesting “..those slaves should have rose up collectively and vanquished their oppressor(s).” To which I noted there were numerous slave rebellions over the centuries and it remained a primary concern for slave owners everywhere. Rebellions fed the narrative along with escaped or freed slaves telling their stories to sympathetic abolitionists, their allies. There are always allies, I pointed out. Humans can’t collectively agree on anything. You may not know who your allies are and they may be afraid to speak up, but eventually a tipping point occurs and the tide turns against the oppressors. Otherwise, many sleepwalk through their lives accepting the status quo, especially when they tolerate the slow, gradual erosion of their rights until one day they wake up and… The girls finally got ‘woke’—up America’s mid-term Congressional election isn’t nearly as sexy as the quadrennial presidential election, but nothing is collectively making women’s hearts go pitter-patter—with fear—as much as the forthcoming mid-term elections next month, four months after the official loss of Roe v. Wade. Absentee Voting Information for citizens living abroad - U.S. State Department Democrats Abroad All reports indicate that women are registering to vote, many for the first time in their lives, in record numbers, and primarily Democrat. Seems many finally woke up from their deep sleep of, like, the last fifty years and realized that oh, hey, OMG I can’t believe Republicans actually pulled it off! They got rid of Roe! WTF are we going to do now? I didn’t think they’d REALLY do it! But they did, and no one can say they didn’t see it coming if they were paying attention. Feminists and women’s rights activists warned about it for decades. The long slow death of Roe began at its birth in 1973 when foes began looking for ways to restrict abortions, beginning with the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976 which prohibited any government funds to be spent on any abortion that didn’t result from rape, incest, or when a pregnancy posed a threat to the woman’s life. It was the first real shot back across the bow and continued throughout the country as Republicans, conservatives, and the religious right worked hard at the federal, state, and local levels to roll back the hard-won right to make choices about one’s own body. “This will result in the loss of Roe if you don’t stop them now!” feminists kept yammering. America’s women weren’t listening. They had shit to do. Like jobs, and families, and keeping up on Dallas and Dynasty. Later, they distracted themselves with social media and Netflix, ironically with The Handmaid’s Tale. “Wouldn’t that suck if it happened here?” some asked while others gave them the side-eye and thought, “WTF do you think is happening under Trump, you dizzy broads?” Three Supreme Court justice picks later and - a total of five liars under oath who said they’d preserve Roe - the joke’s on you, chickie-boos! Ha ha ha! Gaslit ya, bitches! If this November turns into another Blue Wave, like the last mid-terms which saw a record number of women elected to Congress, the next two years could be interesting, if President Biden and the other Democrats have the balls and labia to get some real shit done, damn what the Red Caps want. Don’t count on it, but women can dream. Not all the new voters are motivated by fear of the new Republican lordship over their wombs. Some will be driven by fear that women who value agency will chip away the right’s hard-won victory over female autonomy. The blue wave may be lighter or darker than the last, but it will likely be purple in some places, or simply a lighter shade of red. The question after the election is: Will women learn their lesson? Democracy is like a marriage. You can’t slip the ring on - or sign the Constitution - and then go back to sleep. “I don’t have to try anymore. I don’t have to vote to keep this alive.” Too many women sleptwalked through the latter part of the twentieth century thinking all was well with abortion rights, even as its enemies patiently turned up the heat. You could always get an abortion somewhere, even though it might be more of an inconvenience. Mostly middle-class and white women could afford to think this way, not the poor who might barely scrape up the money for the abortion, let alone the bus or train ticket to elsewhere. Now a woman can, will, and is going to jail if she has an abortion, even if she travels to a legal state. Unless she’s fucking Herschel Walker, who will find a clinic somewhere on the Q.T. You want to be a resident of this Jesus-stan state? You keep your damn legs closed until marriage or menopause and if someone rapes you and you get pregnant, deal with it, you filthy whore! You made him do it with your slutty, womanly ways! This is how Gilead starts for women: Not with the highly improbable sudden American coup d’état of the book, but by incrementally boiling the pretty little froggies. We let it happen. We allowed Republicans to do this. We permitted them to erode away our right to make decisions about our own bodies. Women have power, and sometimes we choose to give that power back to the original holders. So we will turn out to vote in Roevember, but what’s not on the ballot is the return of Roe v. Wade. Whether that takes another constitutional amendment or perhaps some new federal laws that survive Supreme Court challenges, we will likely see a slow, gradual return to eventual abortion rights. What’s the timeline? I don’t know, but it took 49 years to drive a stake through Roe’s heart. Some have called for the impeachment of the five Supreme Court justices who lied under oath about preserving Roe, but that’s not likely to happen, for good reasons. As justified as it would be, we’re already facing a much bigger crisis of state if Donald Trump and his cohorts-in-coup d’état get indicted. There’s hell to pay if he is, and hell to pay if he isn’t. And the side who will bring holy hell if he is is much better armed and more inclined to use violence. Eliminating over half the Court would be truly unprecedented and terrible, terrible optics for any sitting President. Remember, progressives, these things work both ways. What does this mean for the rest of America? Women who paid attention and cared about preserving their rights voted Democrat, or for any Republican or other candidate who declared their commitment to abortion rights. Those who sleptwalked through the end of Roe weren’t registered or didn’t vote and we can thank them as much for Roe’s demise as we can the Handmaids and their Commanders who actively fought and voted against abortion rights. ‘T’warn’t all just the Republicans, after all. What has happened to women is a lesson for the rest of our nation of zombies. Since the ascent of Ronald Reagan in 1981, we sleptwalked as a nation as he destroyed unions beginning with the PATCO air traffic controllers strike the same year he was inaugurated. We snoozed while he nationally deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and created a homelessness crisis, and subsequent crime spike, which continues to this day. The C-average college student granted ill-thought-out tax breaks to everyone, increasing the national debt and destroying budgets. When the nation’s unemployment rate was over 10% in 1982, Reagan’s primary objective was to promote school prayer. It was the kind of silly-ass culture war we have today, and illustrates how a largely overstated grievance underlines a sinister agenda by one political wing to impose a particular way of life on everyone else. We woke up in 1984 to re-elect The Great Obfuscator in a landslide and snored as he undermined civil rights, escalated the Cold War and drove the Doomsday Clock three minutes to midnight, pushing it back to six minutes in December 1987 with the INF Treaty with the then-Soviet Union. We shut our ears to warnings during the Bush II era that income inequality was a serious problem and the middle class was disappearing. We had more important things to think about, like how the hell we were going to find another good-paying job in the latest recession and whether we were going to get murdered in workplace mass shootings. Now here we are in 2022 and we can’t agree on what’s a secure, honest election or even collectively condemn a violent attempted overthrow of a democratic government. At least in 1974, Republicans grudgingly came to agree that Richard Nixon had to go. We still point our fingers at ‘shithole countries’ and tell each other, Yeah, we’re not like that. Not even close! Those damn libtards just hate ‘Murica! Sleeping beauties and their new transfer of body autonomy to male control are the canary in the coal mine for American voters. I won’t even quote Pastor Neimoller, we all know what he said. We don’t care. We have shit to do. Gotta catch the Jeffrey Dahmer series on Netflix tonight! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

The latest 'No news here' study on men's undateability ignores the problems with women, and how we continue to raise boys In more nothing-news-here from the 'Water Is Wet' department, a recent study on dating determined that the number of chronically single men continues to grow as women say "Nuh-uh," to any who have consistently failed to meet what they've been saying they want for literally several decades: Emotional connection, ability to communicate, shared similar values. The yeah-duh conclusion that women are now pickier and not 'settling' for men also notes that marriage/partnership often benefits men more than women, and that women, especially single, childless ones, are leading happier lives without men or children. Having vowed never again to set foot in the online dating world, which has been an utter 21-year waste of time, I decided to never-say-never earlier this year and give Facebook Dating a try. It's the I'm-already-on-Facebook lazy lady's choice. I can report nothing has changed since 2001. Men remain consistently clueless about women and regularly put their most snooze-inducing foot forward. With the exception of one slightly weird guy, the rest still couldn't make conversation, and still don't grasp the concept of basic common courtesy. Were they just lazy? Makes it easy to filter the time-wasters down to two or three who weren't egregiously mediocre. Even the scammers couldn't be arsed to ask for money. Sometimes I gave the suspects some rope in case they were truly some English-challenged guy living in Toronto. Many wanted to move to WhatsApp where I figured they'd start the scam but they never did. The only person who acted like a scammer wasn't--the weird guy effusive with compliments, even when I told him they made me uncomfortable. He kept talking about how much he was thinking of me and wanted me to text him photos of myself in summer clothes (No, find your wank material on YouPorn). He was classically flakey, like failing to confirm a text asking if we were still on for our first meeting (so I didn't go) and that was the end of that. Later he resurfaced and denied having having blow me off and I said, "Review the text thread." Google proved he was real, though, living in the area. He was different, at least. It's not all 'toxic masculinity', although that's where it starts - the masculine notion that what defines a 'real man' is being as unlike women as you can possibly be. The women's movement has propelled women's autonomy and independence to the point where we no longer rely on men anymore to survive, at least until we all vote for Gilead. Men haven't evolved nearly as fast, and it's not all their fault, either. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not just in men, but in women, too, that we are as remarkably un-self-aware. Dazed and confused by divorce Many men, after decades of marriage, get blindsided by divorce, especially as they inch closer toward retirement. They eagerly anticipate the end of their desolate office drone days and can stay home with the gal who's been bitching for years about his lack of availability. She's finally getting her wish! But What's-Her-Name's had enough of the last forty years' drudgery too. The kids are gone and she's done with the whole marriage thing. Guess what departing wives cite as their reasons for wanting The Big Split? Emotional unavailability and lack of communication. Which they've been providing as the good supportive wife for all their marriage. Traditional masculinity dictates men should depend solely on women for it. One writer called it ‘emotional gold-digging.’ The deal, as men understood it in the '70s and '80s and '90s when they got married, was that their responsibility was to provide for the family and be a good father. The diff was that men have never been, and still aren't, much concerned with equality of work at home. The old Enjoli perfume ad from the 1970s lied like Donald Trump to the National Archives about how women can 'have it all', with a job and a family. The biggest lie is the man's off-camera voice volunteering to cook for the kids. The problem of clueless masculinity doesn't reside solely with males. Female Problem #1: Many men want to be more emotionally available and communicative, but don't know how or women won't let them Women sometimes react to emotionally vulnerable men by shaming or rejecting them. Research shows that boys are about the same as girls at expressing their emotions until about age four, when they begin to learn to shut down their emotions and not be so 'girly'. They come to rely on logic and 'rationalism' while girls are left free to be as emotional as they want. The result is men become too reliant on skills that aren't always applicable to human, emotional problems, and women fail to develop their logic and rationalism skills which would serve them better rather than reacting to everything emotionally and 'irrationally' - one of men's top (valid!) complaints about women. I can certainly see the disconnect between what women say they want and what they really want. I had a friend when I was a young hedonistic clubber who said she wanted a man who wouldn't hit her, and who would treat her well, but--she found the 'nice guys' too boring. She liked macho he-men who thought women were their personal property. It's an evolutionary trade-off: Hercules was great for protecting you from harm, but today he's more likely to be the source of the harm. Women who want emotionally available men might need to consider who they find attractive. 'Alpha' males may be incredibly hot but should you take them home to Mother? Many crave power and control and that includes over her. Is she willing to make that trade-off? Case study #1: Nicole Simpson. Case study #2: Rachel Evan Wood. Men who can communicate and be more emotionally supportive are what angry incels call 'beta males', if said males aren't angry incels. When I watched hypermasculine action hero movies, the heroine rode (never drove) or walked hand in hand with the hero into the sunrise or sunset, and if Stallone was the star it was clear communications skills would never manifest in their relationship. I pondered the real 'happily ever after' in which she was miserable with him after the relationship luster wore off. When she's struggling with her demons late at night, where is he? Can he hold her and tell her it's all right? Can he sympathize with her? Or does he pull away because he's tired and there she goes again... There are men who are up for the task, but women don't always notice them, or appreciate them. Granted, these men may be hiding themselves well behind an ill-considered dating profile of mediocrity. Many could use a crash course in self-marketing/self-promotion. Women who are tired of emotional islands must change their value system to appreciate and find attractive men who exhibit more self-awareness than your average rock, or clueless, toxic feminist. Men need gentle, supportive help in getting in touch with their emotional life more. We owe it to them. Women have escaped the bondage of toxic femininity since First Wave feminism, much of which has been accomplished with the help of numerous male allies who've mentored us, recognized the challenges we faced, and if they didn't always 'get it', they got it a lot more than the ones who bitch on social media that 'feminism ruined everything'. The modern world demands a lot of everyone. Men are trying to adjust to a world in which women share the jobs, financial management, and political power. Women are trying to adjust to a new world of female agency and power. Not all are ready for it, including many on the left who pay it lip service, but would rather do anything except manage their own life as though they had agency. Thousands of years of patriarchy doesn't change overnight, and women still have a long way to go before we eliminate it between our own ears. Male allies have mentored us, pushed us, prodded us to become the best person we can be, and we have to do the same for them. Men are really, really good at seeking and receiving power. Which, let's face it, women are still quite uncomfortable with. We're really, really good at communication and emotional vulnerability. And men will play catchup for awhile. We've proven we can learn. So can they. Neither of us is smarter than the other. Female Problem #2: We are still raising misogynist boys Women, as a whole, continue to unconsciously collaborate with misogyny and 'the patriarchy'. I've written about the woman who aided and abetted sex trafficking (who wasn't Ghislaine Maxwell), the women who enable rapists, perpetuate rape culture, who make it harder to believe women, who make excuses for abuse, and worst of all, continue to raise misogynist boys. Collaboration with The Patriarchy (dun-dun-DUUUNNNN!!!) starts when they're babies, when we don't crush the budding misogyny that's probably at least a little wired into their brains after thousands of years of it being the norm, and what they learn from mass culture. We don't challenge four-year-olds expressing hostility to femininity and saying they don't like girls. Even as a small child, I wondered why mothers weren't more offended by their baby misogynists' attitudes. "I'm a girl," I'd have reminded my son if I had one. "You got a problem with that?" When he was old enough I'd remind him he's here because of a girl, and that no male enters this world without one - the parent who does the most work in conceiving a baby, since she gestates it and pushes it out between her legs, then feeds it with her body. If I had been my aunt when my male cousin prohibited me from joining him in his treehouse because, 'No girls allowed,' I would have told him - even a small child - that the laws of this country dictate no discrimination on the basis of sex, and if his treehouse doesn't allow girls, then it doesn't allow boys either, and to get down RIGHT NOW until he's rethought his policy - and if he doesn't, his father and I will dismantle the treehouse. You'd be surprised how fast you can crush misogyny when there are real consequences. Nothing has changed since I was growing up. New parents can find plenty of advice on dealing with misogyny in boys - and how to raise non-misogynist boys - on Google. But when I Googled 'How to raise a non-misandrist daughter' and 'How to raise a daughter who doesn't hate men' I found nothing about how to raise girls without toxic feminism. A certain prominent feminist, author of several books and returning talking head on the news with the loss of Roe v. Wade, was someone I found on the blogging platform Medium and who I quickly muted. Almost everything she wrote was whiny victimist crap, and she said she was raising her young daughter to be a 'feminist'. I rolled my eyes thinking how much this kid would grow up hating men like her mother who never met a woman who was responsible for her actions, or a man who wasn't. Women aid and abet misogyny by feeding it with misandry, the way some antiracist and transgender activists chase off their allies with their own bigotry and hatred. As we challenge men to be better men and to support women more, we need to become better at supporting those men who genuinely want to ally with women - not just against sexism but against the very real threats we face together - climate change, economic inequality, the outsized power of billionaires to dictate and fund toxic government policies, and most of all...freedom from male violence. Toxic masculinity fuels unhealthy emotional denial in men, and toxic feminism encourages an enduring false feeling of powerlessness and victimhood. We'd do well to ask ourselves how much we are the problem with undateable men, too. Because I'd call most of these guys 'clueless' masculine rather than 'toxic' masculine. Trying to escape your own prison can feel like getting lost in a video game where you can't find your way out to the next level. If we're so sure we want emotionally available, communicative men, maybe we'd better start considering whether we want them as much as we say, or perhaps not like my old friend. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Getting shamed, flamed, and filleted on Twitter ten years ago reshaped the actress's view on hate. Then she rejected it. Ann Hathaway is so over being your bitch. The Oscar winner for her 2012 role as Fantine in Les Miserables reflected recently on the social media hate she began to receive after her big win. Although I've never been a Hathaway fan I've always liked her, and I missed all the social media hate a decade ago. I guess I had shit to do or something. Really, people hated on the woman with the Carly Simon-wide smile and big brown eyes that seem to go halfway around her face? Who charmed me in The Devil Wore Prada, a movie I'd made my friend Vik attend with me because he'd talked me into seeing Nacho Libre the week before and I told him this was the only way I could ever forgive him? So why Ann and not, I don't know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who makes it a point to believe six implausible things before breakfast, or Gwyneth Paltrow, who's turned vapid celebritydumb into a billion-dollar business and consciously-ironically sells a candle called This Smells Like My Vagina? (The killer cooch almost set fire to someone's house!) I guess people didn't like Hathaway's Oscars speech, or her Golden Globes award speech (okay, that one did run on for about a week and a half) and okay I guess she likes to say, "This is actually happening!" the way Mia Farrow did when she wakes up and realizes she's getting it on with Satan. I mean, Hathaway's an actress. She's on stage a lot. Being so surprised, every time, to find herself on yet another one in front of a whack of people is like that woman with pretty eyes you see on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook who's always posting pictures of herself looking surprised, as though she just beamed down from some planet with no cameras. So yeah all right, I get why Annie's annoying, but still...hate? "It's a thing" Not surprisingly, it did quite a number on Hathaway. Strangers all across the world expressed their hatred for no other reason than, as she put it recently at Elle Magazine's Women of the World gathering, 'simply for existing'. She wasn't cancelled, she hadn't made a joke in 1986 that fell flat in 2013, she hadn't done blackface, she hadn't gone DefCon 3 on the Jews. Critics picked apart her Prada dress, her ten million dollar necklace, her rehearsed-sounding Oscar speech. Some have noted her Oscar arrived just as she'd hit peak popularity, the point at which the audience begins to take you down. One critic called her a 'classic theatre kid'. She talks like a little girl. Maybe she was just overexposed. And probably there was at least a little jealousy involved. But listening to her October speech at ELLE’s 29th annual Women in Hollywood event, Hathaway had decided not to let the 'HathaHate' destroy her. She described how she relied on her husband and friends for support and looked at the online hate with a new perspective. She realized the hate wasn't so much directed at her as reflected back to her. That the very first person to engage in HathaHate was herself, long before she became a star. “When your self-inflicted pain is suddenly somehow amplified back at you at, say, the full volume of the Internet--it’s a thing.” You don't have to do anything wrong to offend the social media hate mobs; they're looking for anyone, anything to pick apart. Twitter has become Gotham City: A social media metropolis of uncontrolled toxic personalities and anonymous psychopathy, where mental illness and derangement is amplified by insular bubbles and, for Americans, a daily reminder that the American dream is a big lie. The 'supervillains' are mostly ordinary people subjected to relentless witch hunts for overblown, catastrophized minor faux pas's since there aren't enough real villains - Weinstein, Cosby, R. Kelly the Proud Boys - to satisfy the woke mob's intellectually dishonest bloodlust. Or as Hunter S. Thompson put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "We can't stop here, this is bat country!" Hearing out the haters Ann Hathaway had the labia to confront the hate. Although she had learned not to type her own name into Google, she did when she decided to hear out her critics. How much courage did that take? We mortals can do it and probably not find much; when you're a celebrity, it's a far different experience. Hathaway isn't 'problematic' the way many celebrities are. She doesn't regularly have to walk back tweets like Amy Schumer or address jokes she made in a different decade that don't wear so well today. She's not terribly political, she hasn't raped multiple women in Hollywood and Goddess knows she's no Ye. Like everyone else, she has quirks and expressions and a manner that sometimes get on others' nerves. Before the Internet, she would merely be occasionally annoying; in the social media age, with two generations - Millennials and Gen Z - raised to eschew childhood to workworkwork for an eventual high-paying job which never materialized, they vent their fury at Ann Hathaway or Dave Chappelle, who at least courted their wrath by speaking truth to power with 'transphobic' jokes that made fun of the entitled, privileged masculine personalities masquerading as women. In such a toxic soup, hate goes from DEFCON 5 to 1 overnight, or even in a matter of hours. Hathaway confronted the hate, then went within and explored why these comments hurt so much. She emerged more self-aware, realizing she'd been a HathaHater herself, "since I was 7." "When it happened to me, I realized that this wasn't it. This wasn't the spot," she said. "When what happened, happened, I realized I had no desire to have anything to do with this line of energy. On any level. I would no longer create art from this place. I would no longer hold space for it, live in fear of it, nor speak its language for any reason. To anyone. Including myself." She rejected the hatred she saw. The ugliness she encountered online, the dark corners of the human psyche, she understood expressed the haters themselves. She called it out as "a culture of misplaced hate, unhealed hurt, and the toxicity that is the byproduct of both." She rejected it, and vowed not to let it tarnish her art anymore. The positive lessons she drew from her experience was that if we can learn to hate, we can unlearn the hate, and we can learn to love, or love again, if we make that choice. Hathaway displayed courage her haters don't: She looked within and addressed the unhealed hurt that drives all our lives. She came to recognize her haters were nevertheless fallible humans like herself, that "There is a brain there. I hope they give themselves a chance to relearn love." There's one learning she drew that we've all heard a million times, which we almost uniformly ignore because it sounds so trite and cliche: That you have to learn to love yourself in order to take back your power from those whose ugly statements you believe. We say we love ourselves when in fact we don't. We can take joy from our accomplishments or our relationships or whatever makes our life meaningful, but still be destroyed by an anonymous online hate mob, or even just one nasty comment, who'd rather ruin others' lives than to have the balls or the labia to address their own ancient hurts and grievances, as Hathaway has. Our reluctance may be attempting to avoid the rampant narcissism that has come to define two generations who were raised to believe everything they did was trophy-worthy and that their own feelings about anything outweigh anyone else's. If nothing else, we may ask, don't we suffer from too much self-love? It's not self-love so much as self-delusion. With suicide rates skyrocketing in all demographics since the early 1990s and Millennials described as the most depressed generation in history ever, maybe the alleged self-lovers simply deny to themselves what they know deep down is true. “We don’t have enough time to discuss all the myriad causes of the violent language of hatred, and the imperative need to end it," Hathaway said in her speech. "Because there is a difference between existence and behavior. You can judge behavior. You can forgive behavior or not. But you do not have the right to judge — and especially not hate — someone for existing. And if you do, you’re not where it’s at.” This is what's especially noteworthy about Hathaway's experience: It had less to do with her behavior than her very existence. I wish her language was more direct and less Hollywood-fluffy, and I hope she'll develop more confident, direct speech if she chooses to evolve and express herself in the direction she's begun. What I noticed about Hathaway's old awards speeches as I watched them on YouTube is that she might have been annoying, but she was highly supportive of her fellow actresses. She regularly named, praised and looked at them while she spoke. Her Oscar speech sounded 'rehearsed', I believe, because she'd thought carefully about all the people she wanted to thank and had memorized a long list so she didn't accidentally leave anyone out. Celebrity hate-offs, especially for women, are a regular 'thing' on the Internet and often start with slags and slough-offs from speeches or quotes in gossip magazines. Paris hated Nicole; Kim hates Sarah Jessica; Miley hates Nicki. In the olden days, Joan hated Bette, William Randolph hated Orson, Sophia hated Jayne. Maybe what the HathaHaters hate most about Hathaway is she refuses to hate back. There's nothing more irritating than a target who refuses to be triggered. Maybe Hathaway has learned to truly love herself, and not let the haters who merely pay lip service to self-love, who run like scared children from spiders from their own imperfect, injured souls, rule her own soul anymore. Along the way, she's taken a hard look at how women are treated in Hollywood, and how they treat each other, and rejected that negative energy, too. "Be happy for women. Period. Especially be happy for high-achieving women. Like, it's not that hard," she told the Elle conference. Ann Hathaway no longer cares. She's taken back her power. Deal with it, haters. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

What if we acknowledged genetic diversity with friendlier (and delicious!) labels? Oh no! Not another 'Race is a social construct' debate! Yet there I was once again, this time on Substack, debating with my fellow writer SteveQJ whether 'race' is a social construct or not. Scientists, for sure, don't talk about 'race' anymore, they speak of 'ancestry', like 'Sub-Saharan African' or 'Northern European'. But still. It's a thing. "So," sez I, since no one can ever answer this question, "What's undeniable is that our skin colors are different. We've customarily called it 'race', but if not that, then what?" Since most of us don't parse genetic hairs like scientists. Steve, a really reasonable, rational, middle-of-the-road black writer on race issues, was the most recent in a long line of others who couldn't offer any better labels. Do we even need any? Of course we do. In a neutral sense, we discriminate between differences. It's not 'speciesist', for example, to point out penguins are different from ostriches and canaries, yet they're all birds. Chances are, if I say the word 'bird', the first image that pops into your mind is a generic small flying critter, since that's what's customarily flying around our 'hoods. That's quite stereotypical, you speciesist! Penguins, ostriches, kiwis, and flamingoes are canceling you on Twitter right now! There may truly be no such thing as 'race', but there are clear superficial evolutionary human differences. You know this by the questions of small children, who often ask, as I did as a little kid in a park, why 'those children over there have slanty eyes', leading my mother to talk to me on the ride home about 'Oriental' people as we called them back then and how you must never say 'slanty' eyes and why. World War II, Japan, 'slant-eyes', etc. A kinder, tastier vocabulary Leave it to a sugar hound like me to suggest 'flavors' as a replacement for 'race' or 'color'. I submit dessert flavors as a friendlier, gentler way to refer to clearly different humans. 'Flavor' is such a friendly word, rarely used in a pejorative sense. Maybe in Harry Potter, where Bettie Botts All-Flavour Beans occasionally come in Vomit, Dirt, Ear Wax, Booger and Rotten Egg. When we speak of flavors we're thinking positively: "7-Eleven Slurpees: Now featuring Tutti-Frutti, Tangerine and Pina Colada!" When I think of human varieties I think of ice cream: Chocolate, vanilla, caramel and butterscotch! What's the diff between caramel and butterscotch? Thank you for asking. Butterscotch is Asians, Caramel is those between Butterscotch and Chocolate. And Rocky Road for those who are brown and white and a little nutty! Or Neapolitan for the more-than-two-flavors multiracial. We can't forget Jews, who feature heavily in fevered white supremacist nightmares but whose skin color defies categorization. So I've assigned them Honey, since honey cakes are a big Rosh Hashanah staple. Stupidifying racism Racist language sounds a lot sillier when the labels sound friendlier. "If we do not stand now and perform our god given duty to keep OUR country clean of all the ̶B̶l̶a̶c̶k̶s̶, Chocolates, ̶J̶e̶w̶s̶ Honeys, and ̶Y̶e̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ Butterscotch scum from Asia, WE are just as bad as the enemy, if not worse. We are trading our race for that of an inferior form of trash." - Protocols of the Elders of Zing Vanilla supremacy? Trust, me no one wants vanilla to rule the world. It's just too boring. And butterscotch 'scum'? I don't know if there's any such thing, but I'll bet it's delicious, just like the chocolate scum at the bottom of a Bosco's bottle. "Slowly fear and the Marxist weapon of ̶J̶e̶w̶r̶y̶ Honeyists descend like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent vanillas." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampfeecake Mmmm, waffles with honey and ice cream! Now let's hear from racism's Ground Zero, Twitter: "Obama only won because he's ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ chocolate. Romney would have made a much better president as he actually has morals unlike ̶n̶-̶-̶-̶-̶r̶ nutter Obama." - Madonna "It's a Friday, it's raining, almost a perfect combination. I'm staying away from ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ butterscotch drivers." - Plastic Jesus on Twitter "Who's the more annoying #Raptors fan? Drake, or the fat ̶I̶n̶d̶i̶a̶n̶ caramel guy with the underwear on his head?" - KB58 on Twitter "I'm a bit sleepy but when I wake up I'm going DefCon 3 on ̶J̶E̶W̶I̶S̶H̶ ̶P̶E̶O̶P̶L̶E̶ HONEY PEOPLE. The funny thing is I can't actually be anti- ̶S̶e̶m̶i̶t̶i̶c̶ schmendrick because ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ chocolate people are actually ̶J̶e̶w̶ Honey also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to chocolateball anyone who opposes your agenda." - Kanye West And now, from butterscotch San Francisco police officer Jason Lai, busted in 2016 for being a flavorist asshole: “I hate that ̶b̶e̶a̶n̶e̶r̶ caramel, but I think the ̶n̶i̶g̶ choc is worse.... [Indian] ̶p̶p̶l̶ caramels are disgusting....F--k that ̶n̶i̶g̶ choc." Lai didn't like gay officers either, describing them as 'flames' or 'flaming'. So, while we're assigning flavors, let's go off-color for a moment and suggest Rainbow, since LGBTs get about as much hate as non-vanillas. Humans: We're magically delicious! I'll admit my association with flavors to humanity may be rooted in an early childhood experience. I was maybe three or four years old and my parents and I were at the beach. I saw a black lady on a lounge chair, slathered in oil and stretched out to catch the rays. She reminded me of a chocolate Easter bunny. My mother had talked to me about race and racism, or 'prejudice' as we called it back then, and I understood color differences and why black people should be treated the same as others. (In Orlando at the time, there were almost no caramel or butterscotch people). I thought of her for the rest of the day as the 'chocolate lady'. As an adult, I used to be friendly with a guy who, I admit, made me hungry for devil's food cake. And others who made my mouth water for Bit O' Honey, Kraft caramels and butterscotch toffee ice cream. Look, sorry, I'm from a French family, and everything reminds us of food. Most of you eat to live, we live to eat! I'll admit I've never met a white person who made me long for vanilla ice cream, but does anyone ever long for that? Maybe Howard Johnson's vanilla, which was actually worth eating on its own in my childhood, without toppings to jazz it up. Don't know if it's still around, or still as good. Anyway, there are very, very few genuinely white people. Maybe South Africans. Or Michael Jackson, shortly before he died. But they never made me think, "Mmmmm, Howard Johnson's!" I do have a fondness for French Vanilla, which is less ethnocentric than it sounds. French vanilla is close to my HoJo memories of yore, pretty damn good on its own. I occasionally call myself French Vanilla. That's definitely ethnocentric. Our conversations about ̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ flavor are schizophrenic. We used to strive to be 'flavor-blind', but Critical Flavor Theorists decided that's impossible because of 'implicit biases' and 'vanilla privilege', which is like original sin or something. Claiming you're 'flavor-blind' is usually found on every far-left chocolate 'antiflavorist's list of annoying things vanilla people say. 'Identity politics', once the purview of vanilla supremacists, has now been adopted and reconstituted on the left and is fine as long as you discriminate against vanillas only. I'm reminded of that famous chocolate leader who wanted his kids to be judged not by the flavor of their skin but by their ooey-gooey goodness inside. True colors It's disingenuous to expect people to not talk about color because it's not 'politically correct' anymore. There's too much baggage in everyone's past, and not just slavery legacies (although that's one almost certainly everyone's family shares, so pervasive is one of the earliest human rights abuses). People suck, and always have. We've found countless ways to abuse and hate on each other as a convenient excuse to destroy others. The earliest known murder victim is some poor Neanderthal schmuck who suffered 'deliberately inflicted blunt force trauma' to the head in a Spanish cave 430,000 years ago. I wonder if he called someone a bad name, or suggested his mama was from the 'wrong side' of the Atapuerca Mountains. While it's paramount to acknowledge the mistakes of the past we need to focus on the present and the future which we still have the power to change. Instead of pretending The Social Construct Formerly Known As Race (or Color) doesn't exist, because the differences are there regardless of what you call it, let's create a friendlier language that unites rather than divides us. Pretty much everyone can agree that things that taste good are, well, good things. Even if you don't like sweets, perhaps you've got your own set of fave tastes--potato chips or smoothies or deep-dish pizzas. Our color differences exist, and if we use friendlier terms, the natural good feelings we harbor for tasty flavors create positive associations in our brains for our fellow humans. No one much cares if you prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla or rainbow sherbet over everything else. With friendlier labels, we may find ourselves reacting less negatively to implicit biases. Instead of reacting on some subconscious level with fear at a 'black' guy [night, darkness, predators, fear], we can speak of color differences without setting Twitter aflame (that's now Elon Musk's new job until Trump returns). No one will ever believe again that 'vanilla' should be supreme. I just Googled it: Howard Johnson's vanilla ice cream, which really was superlative on its own, is gone, along with the other 27 flavors of my birthday celebrations. Case closed on vanilla supremacy. It's harder to believe that 15 million Honeys actually rule the world clandestinely or that Caramels are all rapists. And ye shall know the homophobes among you by those who refuse do oral with multicolored sherbet. Flavor differences are as plain as the cone, cup or bowl under which they rest, regardless of whether you call it 'race', 'color,' or 'flavor'. The wokenati think they can erase discrimination by pretending clear biological differences don't exist and it's flavorist to say otherwise; yet people are undeniably different and instead of denying reality like a MAGA on January 6th, it's time to drag the 'woke' kicking and screaming back to Reality World to confront the evidence of their own denying eyes. Buddhists say the only way to rid yourself of your harmful mental constructs is to confront them, see them, label them and challenge them. Then throw them away because they're useless now. Or better yet, embrace flavorism as the most awesome social construct ever! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Joking about differences knit us into tight, supportive teams. We need to bring that back before the left’s Fragile Flowers destroy us. Oh, you can’t do this today. Before the tyranny of oh-so-politically-correct social media run amok, I worked at two highly politically incorrect companies. Now you can lose your job over something you said and did before anyone even heard of the Internet, but back then the world wasn’t yet ruled by unemployed, mentally unstable fragile flowers. In a past article I weighed in on the Dave Chappelle The Closer controversy and analyzed a dying type of humor Chappelle employed. I don’t know if there’s a commonly-used label for it, but I call it ‘humorous bigotry appropriation’, for lack of a better term. We employed it at both companies. Before the humophobic ‘woke’ replaced Christian fundamentalists as the world’s leading judgmental sourpusses, humorists like Dave Chappelle — or people working in an office that wasn’t on TV every week — helped us bond by making fun of differences. It’s dicey to do it with strangers, but once you get to know, like, and accept your colleagues, you can make jokes outsiders might find offensive but which unite rather than divide. Not a good idea today given everyone’s growing hostility to everybody — declining civility, COVID Brain, police brutality, growing inequality, precarious living, and the moral degeneracy of Trumpism and the Republican Party. That last blossoming like a corpse flower on the left now, too. Chappelle sarcastically employed it when he joked about pushing his transwoman friend away from a hug ‘because I’m transphobic’, and feminists needed him to be their leader and all they needed to do in return is ‘suck my dick,’ and blithely dismissed his dogmatic trans-extremist critics by announcing proudly, ‘I’m Team TERF,’ for stating inconvenient biological trans truths. Humor making fun of bigotry, delivered with a winking sardonicism, by humorously appropriating those bigotries is what I call ‘humorous bigotry appropriation’. It’s only for those with strong, healthy egos, and it unites rather than divides. Its mortal enemy is the Fragile Flower. Years ago I worked at a Canadian IT company with a diverse team. It was startup-small and tight. Everyone had a great sense of humor and confidence and we joked about everything. Including race and culture and all the other now-taboo topics. (Oh hell, they were taboo even then!) Making fun of ideas, people, or things that scare us is a time-honored way of dealing with them. Humor can defuse a tense situation. It can be employed self-deprecatingly to show others you’re not scary and can take a joke. I call myself the ‘middle-aged dumb blonde’ when I make a mistake. In our office, the Jamaican guy was the ja-mon weedhead, even though he didn’t smoke weed and had lived so long in Canada he had no accent. The Pakistani guy was ‘the terrorist’. He also claimed Jewish and black heritage and occasionally called himself ‘the colored guy’. His Jewish and black heritage were debatable. I pressed him on his alleged blackness once and concluded, “Essentially, your African ancestors and mine are so far back in time they hunted together in Olduvai Gorge!” The Jamaican guy didn’t even look black. He was so mixed-race even he wasn’t sure how much he was of anything. I was the violent sarcastic American gun crazy, despite never owning a gun in my life. One guy was a genuine privileged white guy, but self-aware about it, another was the horny European. Later, a visible black guy joined us, and I taunted the Pakistani — “Ha ha, you’re not the staff black guy anymore! We have a REAL black guy now!” The new guy fit in perfectly, jests and jokes flying all day long. No one got offended. No one complained to their manager. (We were too small for HR). One day something went missing and the black guy joked, “Yeah, I bet everyone thinks it was me!” I responded, “We don’t think you’re a thief because you’re black. We think you’re a thief because you steal stuff!” “Okay,” he said, “that’s fine, as long as you’re not being racist!” Double whammy — dissing the stereotype by pretending to meet it and poking fun at the progressive view that there’s no worse crime than being a racist. The Pakistani guy was the most outrageous. I’ll never forget the day he freaked out the Xerox lady, before the black guy joined us. She visited to demonstrate the office’s new multifunctional printer. We gathered around while she conducted the demo and noted as part of her spiel that you can’t use it to counterfeit money. It was simply impossible with this printer. “Oh yeah, everyone thinks the colored guy is going to do it!” the Pakistani guy exclaimed and everyone burst out laughing. Except for the Xerox lady. She froze in absolute horror, rigid, eyes wide. “Daniel, stop freaking out the Xerox lady!” I said and we laughed again. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “He promised to be good if we let him out of his cage!” I turned to Daniel. “You can’t behave yourself for even one minute!” and everyone laughed again. We explained we were a tight team who made jokes like this all the time and she relaxed and allowed herself a cautious smile. The other IT office was homogenously white and American. It was pre-9/11's less divided era. We didn’t talk about social -phobias and divisions the way we do today. We were a small tight office with a great supportive culture encouraging office-wide teamwork. None of us were hyper-sensitive. I was a Pagan, so my Catholic co-worker called me the Satanist and the baby-eater and I called him the Demon Papist, in the style of historical Protestant critics, a remnant of my days in a medieval re-creation organization, the Society for Creative Anachronism. One guy got hammered for being a pervert, even though there was nothing perverted about him. We didn’t stop teasing him about being a perv even after he became our boss. His wife, one of our technicians, was half-French Canadian and got teased about being a ‘Frog’, although, as someone half European French, I claimed she wasn’t a real Frog, she was that fake Canadian crap, who couldn’t even speak real French, but that silly-ass Quebecois gibberish. I was the real Frog around here, and don’t anyone forget it! We hammered each other all day long and the very few times anyone crossed the line we handled it with each other rather than telling a manager (we had no HR department here either). We made lasting friendships, so tight we attended en masse the funeral of one co-worker’s grandmother which greatly surprised and touched his family. We attended after-office functions together at local bars and our Christmas parties were lawsuit-free. Our headquarters in another state wished their office was as much fun as ours. They loved visiting us for special projects. The Canadian office’s camaraderie was the same. It was more hard-drinking than any American one but both were the most fun ever because of the tightness of our team. The bonding we experienced with humor making fun of bigotry was racism vs racist humor, sexism vs sexist humor, religious bigotry vs bigotry against religion. The first kind unites and makes fun of bigotry, the second divides and reinforces it. That’s why ‘the woke’ don’t understand Dave Chappelle. There’s a thick cloud of censorship hanging over any attempts at humor today. Maybe we’re less in the mood for jokes with a never-ending pandemic and its conveyor belt of viral variant hits (“Are you ready for the new Delta? Coming soon to a mouth near you — bigger, badder, more transmissible, possibly featuring the long-anticipated Zombie Mutation!”), not to mention on ongoing War on Democracy launched by a treasonous former President with an attempted coup d’état by a violent terrorist mob. Then again, the far left had been growing increasingly humorless long before either. Dave Chappelle commented in The Closer that he didn’t like the modern gays — they’re too ‘sensitive and brittle’ — which I thought applied to far more than only LGBTQ. The far left, or the ‘woke’ (which means what? We woke up and realized someone somewhere was having a good time and we vowed to crush it?), have declared a War On Humor. Humor targets something. It could be a person, a group, a place, a thing, an idea, a concept — or, in the edgiest humor, hypocrisy. The left’s initially well-intentioned drive to become more tolerant, more sensitive to the feelings of others, more civil and more inclusive in an ever more divided society has inverted itself and become the enemy. A growing portion of the left has lost its self-awareness for knowing when it’s going too far. Gen Y is the ‘Self-Esteem Generation’ raised to believe everything revolves around them and only their feelings matter. Their anti-apotheosis is Joe Rogan and “Fuck your feelings!”. Love or hate Rogan, even progressives still in possession of rational thought occasionally wonder whether there’s too much emphasis on feelings and not enough on facts. It’s why we urge the Fragile Flowers to lighten up a bit. Learn to laugh at yourself as well as the foibles of others. We’re human beings; we’re hilarious! Collective personal fragility is a genuine obstacle in an increasingly critical battle against growing aggression, ‘acceptable’ xenophobia, and a willingness to tolerate lunatic theories and delusional thinking on the right. Fragility is moral and spiritual weakness, and you can’t fight an enemy armed to the teeth with real weaponry when you fall apart at a simple joke. I’m serious about this. Left-wing fragility is in no condition to fight the far right. It’s too busy destroying its own side. The enemy thanks them. Humor about race, culture, religion, sex, gender, politics and anything else related to the human condition can, for sure, be mean-spirited and hurtful. But it depends on the context and the company you’re with. It also depends on the time period. What’s offensive today wasn’t twenty or thirty years ago. Keep that in mind the next time you open your mouth to say something that will offend an as-yet-unborn generation. Today, people take offense under the pretense of looking out for others (taking, ironically, a fairly patronizing view of them) when in fact they object to the poke at that group’s hypocrisies. Hypocrisy is always fair game for humor. When everyone is in on the joke, when everyone genuinely accepts others and all their imperfections, we can all laugh together. It’s why my favorite comedian is the Canadian Russell Peters, who grew up in Toronto in an Indian immigrant family. They moved to middle-class Brampton, a nearby suburb commonly known as ‘Bramladesh’ for its large Indian and Middle Eastern population. The Greater Toronto Area is one of the most multicultural and diverse cities in the world, with over 140 different languages. He’s had plenty of time to mix and mingle with a lot of different people, and he knows everyone hands-down. My favorite Peters routines are the ones making fun of white people. Why? Because he freaking nails us! As he does everyone else. I don’t get mad because he’s part of my tribe — a humorist. Someone who can laugh at everything. A friend tells me how her husband laughed uproariously when Peters joked about the Chinese, including the way they spoke English (he’s great with accents) and their mannerisms. “That’s exactly what we’re like!” her husband guffawed. Peters’s audiences are diverse too. He singles people out and jokes with them, employing humorous bigotry appropriation with stereotypes. We laugh not because he’s reinforcing racism, or ethnicism, or sexism, but because he’s making fun of all of it. The ‘brittle’ don’t get this. I don’t feel more hatred for people who aren’t like me when I listen to Peters, I feel a kinship with them. We’re all funny. We’ve all got quirks, mannerisms, values, judgments and actions that don’t always make sense to others, but we can laugh about them. Together. When you can laugh at stereotypes, they cease to hold power over you. There’s vicious, ugly bigotry disguised as humor, but there’s a great case to be made for the Fragile Flowers of all generations to lighten the fuck up. Removing the ability to laugh together and bond, with a constant threat of ‘cancellation’ hanging over everyone’s heads, divides the world as effectively as a MAGA rally. It’s silencing when you become afraid to speak your mind or debate ideas the same way you can’t in Communist or Islamic-dominated countries or the Fascist regimes of World War II. Proponents can call it a defense against offense all they want, but we can also call it something else: Censorship. And it stinks as much from the left as it does from the right. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!