Men may be the consumers and drivers, but women's silence, or turning away, is complicit CC0 Public domain photo from Pxhere It makes my blood boil to read of 'Jane's' testimony this week as Ghislaine Maxwell, accused groomer and sex trafficker for now-dead Jeffrey Epstein, stands trial. Jane was 14 when she met Maxwell. She and her family were groomed for abuse by both. I don't know if Jane had a father in the house but she testified she didn't tell others about her abuse because her mother 'discouraged her from speaking her mind." She and Mom met Epstein in Florida for tea in 1994 and he offered to 'mentor' Jane. Her mother allowed her to visit Epstein's home by herself after that. WHAT THE HELL WAS SHE THINKING??? My mother would have been all over Epstein like a fly on you-know-what had he offered me such a proposal. "My mom was so enamored with the idea that these wealthy, affluent people took an interest in me." I wonder if Mom was thinking was, 'If she just keeps her trap shut she can nail herself a rich husband and be set for life!" It might have helped that Jane's mentor paid for her voice lessons and school, and housing for her family. Mom was living in an Epstein-financed apartment when Jane cut off contact with him in 2002. I don't know what Mom knew about the Lolita Island escapades but she didn't need it engraved on granite tablets. She should have known a guy like that taking an interest in her pretty blonde daughter was a chicken hawk. Jane's mother was complicit in her child's horrific enslavement and abuse, as were many others. I focus on the mothers and women because there's enough discussion about patriarchy, privilege, and male entitlement to women's bodies, and how men are always 100% responsible for what they do with their dick. Agreed. But we look away and make excuses when women help, aid, and abet sexual abuse of girls and women by doing nothing. Then we ask plaintively, What will it take to make it stop? It DOES have to stop. We're accountable too even if we're not the ones teaching the child how to 'massage' Jeffrey Epstein just the way he likes it. She let him get away with it Earlier this year, I read a woman's testimony on an Internet platform about how she aided and abetted a consumer of illegal porn. That wasn't the focus of the article, of course. She centered on her initial 'Mr. Perfect's' abuse after she moved in with him. It was pretty bad. The nadir of the nightmarish relationship arrived when he tried to kill her by pushing her down a marble staircase. He drove her to the hospital and took her powerful prescription pain meds for himself after they patched up her broken arm, which she might have lost, when he drove her home. She described the sick, violent, almost certainly illegal porn with dangerously young girls she knew he watched, some of it so vile it made her physically ill in the bathroom. She never reported. Was she afraid of retribution? Maybe initially, but she's not now. She posted under her real name, and gave what she claimed was his real name, hoping other women in the San Francisco area would avoid him. She never reported his highly questionable porn use to the authorities. He stopped having sex with her after the first year because she wouldn't indulge his desire for degrading, humiliating sex (giving as well as receiving). Darwin only knows where he went when he went out. Did he seek the same sick sex he sought in his pornography? If so, how mutually consensual was any of it? What unknown abuse did she not stop with her silence? The Woman Who Abetted Child Trafficking - And no, her name wasn't Ghislaine Maxwell I've witnessed women's silence or complicity in the sexual abuse of others for decades, and the temporally farther we get from those earliest naive, clueless first years of Second Wave Feminism, the less patience I have. "Where the hell are the mothers?" I was 15 when I heard my first incest testimony from a friend in 1978. It wasn't as much of a surprise as you might think; the previous summer I'd read a Reader's Digest article about how incest was far more common than people believed and I discussed it with my mother. Ergo, I wasn't surprised when I heard other familial sexual abuse stories from girls, or heard them through others. 'Yes, Rachel said she was going to put an end to Sarah's abuse, that she'd dealt with it herself and she wasn't going to let it go on for her,' a friend, the school gossip who knew everything about everyone, told me. I privately added two new names to the list of classmates in my head who were incest victims. "Mom, I'm beginning to think I'm the only girl in town who's not having sex with her father," I said. "Where the hell are the mothers?" Mom wondered. We called the suicide hotline multiple times together, me asking advice on how to handle my often-suicidal friends and my mother on the other phone, assuring them I really was asking for a friend. What angered me about that first testimony was I encouraged Pauline to tell her mother. She did. Her mother told her she was a liar. Neither did her minister believe her. As the '70s turned into the '80s public tales of incest, rape and sexual abuse proliferated, including in the Catholic Church. Contentious divorce proceedings in the media now came with an unpleasant twist: It became almost de rigueur for mothers to include alleged sexual abuse of the children along with other grievances in a divorce. It had become more acceptable to talk about sexual abuse publicly, but sometimes I wondered why the allegations had become more common in divorces. It sounded more believable when wives cited it as the primary reason for filing, whereas I wondered if others were taking advantage of a trend to hit back harder at the soon-to-be-ex. I read books about incest and abuse and learned that sometimes the mothers knew, or suspected, what was going on but didn't want to rock the boat, instigate a divorce, or in the worst cases, were kind of grateful they didn't have to have sex with their husband. Many women had been rape or incest victims and never told anyone about it. How many of these mothers had endured either? Did they not empathize with or want to protect their own daughters? WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING??? Denial of personal power Not everyone is afraid of the perp. Not everyone fears he'll kill her if she reports him to the police. Women aren't as powerless as much as in fairly recent days of yore. What she fears, perhaps, is public shame judgment she's bound to receive, not all of it perhaps fair, if she hadn't known about the abuse for long. Or what life will be like if she has to raise the children on her own, with no financial help from the jailbird. Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels It's a tough situation, but consider this: Sexual abuse ruins a child's life and future while the pain and shame of others learning the truth will one day subside, especially if you move elsewhere where no one knows you. When will we have public conversations about how female silence and ignoring of sexual abuse and trafficking of women and children perpetuates the problem? After all, aren't we instructed that Silence = Violence? Men, however sympathetic, will never rally together to end it themselves because no one likes challenging their own tribe, no matter how worthy the cause. My conversations with Pauline happened over forty years ago, when mothers truly didn't have the financial or political power and independence we have today. So what's stopping us now? How serious are any of us, really, when we prefer to limit the plan for ending sexual abuse and trafficking to going after men, when we're unwilling to acknowledge our own contribution? We aid and abet the sexual abuse of the truly powerless by ignoring it, looking the other way, pretending we didn't know, or just wussing out about reporting the SOB to the proper authorities. Maybe they'll do something and maybe they won't, and maybe he'll get punished and maybe he won't, but let there be a record of that complaint in case anyone else decides to file one. The trail starts with the first report. Pretending this problem is only the fault of 'The Patriarchy' renders us disingenuous and unserious about ending sexual abuse. We are accomplices when we fail to report, when we let him get away with it. We have the power to end sexual abuse once and for all. The question is, have we got the labia for it? This originally appeared on Vocal in December 2021.

Or, ‘Dear God, how do I refer to — Him? Her? Them? Zed or something?’ Photo by Dom Brassey Draws Comics on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0 Who knew something once as boring as pronouns could be such a touchy subject? Several years ago I belonged to a Canadian writers group and I remember someone who’d written an entire book about pronouns. She sought helpful advice about getting it published, because even publishers specializing in writing and grammar didn’t want an entire book about them. This was a few years before a previously unknown Toronto university professor named Jordan Peterson turned pronouns into a worldwide culture war. I don’t know if she ever found a space on the Indigo’s/Chapters shelves for her brave little non-gender-concerned pronoun book, but if she didn’t, maybe it’s time to pull it out of mothballs again for a rewrite. Now, she can add useful information people need rather than — whatever it was she found so fascinating about pronouns in 2007. I left the pronouns fuss to depressed 19-year-old university snowflakes until I watched a LinkedIn training video a few years ago, conducted by a….person. I didn’t know what pronouns they used but I thought of them as ‘her’. They looked like a guy, but sounded like a woman. I liked them. They had a nice, friendly smile and an engaging way of speaking. I thought, She sounds like someone I’d like to be friends with, but what would I do if I met her? What would I call her? What if her name was something unenlightening, like Pat? The ongoing SNL sketch about ‘Pat’ from the 1990s would be considered offensive today, but it deftly illustrated the discomfort and confusion people felt about non-gender-conforming others before we had the language and knowledge to appreciate it. I hadn’t met any gender-non-conformers myself but I began to worry. I’d met some perfectly lovely transwomen who didn’t offer pronouns but my assumptions were spot-on. Thus far though, no Pats. I looked up the trainer’s LinkedIn profile and they didn’t offer their pronouns. I can’t remember their name but I think it was female. I began to notice a few Linkedin members stating their preferred pronouns. Some were diversity specialists which made sense. Few needed to, apart from the courtesy for their profession. Anyone could have guessed. Knowing how to refer to someone would go a long way in addressing some of the fear and discomfort surrounding folks who don’t conform to gender expectations. Seems a pretty small ask. Recently I visited an LGBTQ organization website and one officer was a person with a female name who looked exactly like a man. I clicked the bio. It referred to ‘she’ and ‘her’ throughout. Okay, helpful! Out of curiosity, I visited her LinkedIn profile where she looked as male as she did on the website. No pronouns. Exactly the sort of person who would make my stomach tighten with nervousness if I hadn’t seen her bio. I found other non-conformers on LinkedIn who also didn’t make it clear. These folks must know they don’t conform, unlike the blithely clueless ‘Pat’ from Saturday Night Live. Offering their pronouns would be less stressful for those of us who just want to get along with others without creating discomfort or drama for them. A few weeks ago I embarrassed myself by messing up pronouns with someone I couldn’t see. I called a customer for a client whose freelance sales campaign I was working on to reinvigorate a ‘dead customers’ list. “Hello,” said a man’s voice. “Hi, can I please speak with Johanna?” “This is Johanna.” “You’re Johanna?” I said. It sort of slipped out but my first thought was — psycho controlling husband. “Yes.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get it wrong,” I said. I flashed on that Seinfeld episode with the man who sounds like a woman. “Oh, don’t feel bad. I’m on a hormone treatment that lowers my voice.” “Oh, okay,” I said, relieved not to have screwed up after all. I’d read about women who took such hormones for female health problems who experienced that side effect. I asked her how she was doing, how was she surviving the pandemic, and in general reminding her the client still existed. That was the protocol for a customer list friendly and loyal to a company with a very high customer satisfaction rate. I got to updating the contact information. “Obviously the phone number’s still good,” I said. “And is blahblahblah still your email address, Johanna?” “Yes,” she said, “and it’s John now, not Johanna.” Oh! It hadn’t occurred to me I might be talking to a transman. She wasn’t a woman experiencing a side effect, he was a man in transition who wanted the deeper voice. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll update that too.” “Thank you so much!” he said with more gratitude than I expected. “That’s so kind of you!” As though I was doing him a huge favor instead of my job , which was also to make sure the customer information was correct. I got off the phone thinking how nice he’d been about it. No drama. No tears. No remonstrations about what an insensitive unwoke asshole I was. Just a grown-up man-in-progress who didn’t pitch a tantrum. And I thought, “I really hate social media.” What should have been a minor conundrum over the world’s most uninteresting words had become an explosive culture war thanks to unsocial members with too much time on their hands on media platforms. Was it okay to ask for pronouns? Who would be pleased, and who would be offended? Would it turn into a galaxy-wide Twitter fiasco if I guessed wrong? Last year I met an aspiring diversity trainer in a women’s professional empowerment course and I asked her: What do I do if I meet someone whose pronouns I’m not sure about? “You can always ask,” she said, “but another way to do it is to offer your pronouns first. Hi, I’m Nicole, and my pronouns are she/her. How are you?” Helpful. But still, with the potential to embarrass someone, since I don’t customarily go around introducing myself with my pronouns, and wouldn’t do it with people who clearly don’t have a pronoun identity differential. Everybody can figure them out. I can figure out everyone else’s. I haven’t had to try this yet, mostly because meeting new people doesn’t happen much for me anymore. Maybe someday. If Ontario ever gets out of stay-at-home lockdown. I’ve become more aware of gender non-conformance and why I still feel a little uncomfortable about it. It comes down to this: Snowflakery. Others, not me. I give social media waaaaaay too much of my power. I believe that when I meet someone, no matter who they are, no matter what they look like, my responsibility is a baseline courtesy. You are who you are, and my job is to treat you the way I’d like to be treated, with a default decency. It’s important to remember social media isn’t representative of the world; it’s one expression of our collective multiple biases, prejudices, fears, cognitive distortions, self-serving personal narratives, and most importantly, a way to take out our hostilities on total strangers, often behind the cowardly protection of a fake or anonymous account, because it’s less psychologically invasive than therapy. Pronouns get way too much attention, in my opinion, but in order to keep the peace for everyone I would respectfully submit that anyone who clearly non-conforms make it clear to the rest of us which pronouns you prefer. We’re not mind readers. So what do you do when you meet a non-gender-conformer for the first time and don’t know how to refer to them? Here’s something awkward: I wanted to reach out to my somewhat ambiguous-looking aforementioned aspiring diversity trainer colleague for help, and when I looked her up on LinkedIn…no pronouns. I know which she prefers but — she needs to provide them for those who don’t know her. Uh, did I mention awkward? For an article like this? I turned instead to an article on Workopolis about accommodating transgender and non-conforming folk advocating what my colleague did: Offer your pronouns first. The other person might not reciprocate, but that’s on them. Another way to handle it is to ask, How would you like to be referred to? The article points out we might meet someone whose professional name is Michael, so we ask, Is it okay to call you Mike? What’s not okay: Are you trans? However, there’s a whole website devoted to pronouns (who knew?) called MyPronouns , with some excellent advice for handling the Social Pronoun Challenge. Its first bit of advice combines the two previous bits. It offers a more proactive question: Hi, I’m So-and-So, and I like to be referred to as ‘they’. How shall I refer to you? But don’t force it. I figure, if they’ve been given an opportunity to share their pronouns and they haven’t, others will likely pick some, and it may be the wrong ones. One is always able to politely correct them. I haven’t found any firm rules yet, so I propose we make it a rule of common courtesy that when someone offers their pronouns, you offer your own in return, even if you’re as macho as Stallone or as girly as Jolie. For me, pronouns are neither interesting nor a big deal. I accept that some folks are changing or identifying as something other than what they were born with and it doesn’t much matter to me why. My goal is a drama-free social experience for everyone. Chances are you’re a far more interesting person than your pronouns, so let’s move on. This first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

What if you’re white and you just don’t know it? Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! — Scottish poet Robert Burns I may be old and slow, but at least I’m dumb and blonde. It took days before I figured out why the half-Native, half-white woman at the party got testy when I said she looked white. I forget the context under which it surfaced. We sat next to each other, chatting. She mentioned early on she was half-Ojibway, and I don’t think we were talking about race or racism. Not the kind of potential conversational IED you open with when you’ve just met someone, unless you’re at a Black Lives Matter protest. I said something to the effect of, “Oh? I couldn’t tell.” She replied, “Really? Everyone else says they can see it!” I looked at her. Older woman, about my age, a little wrinkled, as we usually are, long straight white or grey hair. Nope, nadda clue she had Ojibway blood in her. “No,” I said. “You look white to me.” I didn’t mention a full-blooded Ojibway friend I made when I first moved to Canada who could never produce a baby that white if he impregnated Scarlett Johansson. “Really?” she asked. “I swear to God you’re like only the THIRD person ever to tell me that! Out of all the people I’ve ever met EVERYONE said they could see it except for like TWO people until now!” I found that very hard to believe. Her underlying anger genuinely mystified me. If she was half-white, what was the big deal? So was Barack Obama, and he didn’t care. We chatted awhile longer, and we didn’t argue, but we found another point of contention: She was That Kind Of Liberal. The kind who likes to be offended and thinks it’s okay to change group labels constantly. “It’s the evolution of language,” she informed me. “It’s bullying and needless hectoring of others,” I replied. “We all understand the historical reasons why the N-word for blacks and the K-word for Jews is no longer okay, but come on, it’s pretty silly when we say ‘people of color’ but we can’t say ‘colored people’, perfectly acceptable when I was growing up. Including by black people.” “It’s eliminating language that has become offensive,” she told me. “Fine, as long as there’s a rational reason,” I volleyed back. “It’s the People’s Front of Judaea versus the Judaean People’s Front. ‘People of color’ and ‘colored people’ mean exactly the same thing.” We wrapped up the conversation, clicked our wine cups together to signify a polite end, and she got up to sit next to someone else. Thank Goddess. I wondered for days: Why had she been upset at hearing she looked white? Finally, Old and Slow, Dumb and Blonde figured it out. She didn’t want to be accused of having white privilege. White privilege is like pink slime: It’s plentiful, but no one wants any. I read the occasional article on race, racism, or white privilege, if it doesn’t look too right-wing denial or lefty-progressive-racist, and I’ve noticed some writers provide up-front racial identity labels the way academics offer their education credentials. Sometimes, I look at the photo and think, “Are they really black/mixed race/Southeast Asian/whatever?” I click their profile for a larger look at the pinky fingernail photo. I take off my glasses, press close and squint. “That’s weird. She doesn’t look black.” They begin with the racial pedigree: “Proud black Southeast Asian Native American Cajun…” and add several more non-racial labels so you know exactly where they fall on the gender/autism/sexual preference/sexual identity/preferred sexual fetishes spectrums. (They’re almost always wome — fema — er, people born with a vagina.) And I scrutinize the photo and think, She looks white to me. A few times I’ve even looked for the person elsewhere, like LinkedIn or Facebook, for a better photo. Uh, no, sorry, girlfriend. You still look white. But what do I know? I don’t doubt them. I know what you look like isn’t what you are. I met a guy many years ago who claimed he was a quarter black, a quarter Native American, and half white. He looked black. No way he could have ‘passed’, as they said in my mother’s day, signifying a black person who was white-enough looking that s/he could enter white society and enjoy all the benefits of white privilege, as long as they kept their mouth closed about their family. I worked with a guy from Jamaica who looked white. I was surprised to learn he’s mixed race — so mixed even he couldn’t provide the ‘proper’ blood fractions. His sister looked black, he said, from the same parents. Go figger. What you look like doesn’t define what you are — to you. But here’s the dirty little secret the color-obsessed label-makers already know: White privilege isn’t conferred by how you see yourself, it’s by how others see you. The half-Ojibway lady understood this. She informed me early on of her non-whiteness and I don’t remember a genuine reason for it. I suspect she did it with everyone she met. Once she established I’m not white, no one could accuse her of white privilege. She’s got it. She knows it. She denies it. Welcome to our world. The watercress sandwiches and autographed Celine Dion CDs are to the left. Help yourself! You deserve it. Barack Obama is as white as he is black, but no one calls him white. Certainly the Tea Party didn’t, which arose after his election in 2008 and disappeared, not coincidentally, with a white man’s election. They normalized calling Obama a Nazi, a more acceptable insult than the one they wanted to use. There’s no such thing as half-white privilege. No second prize, no honorable mention, no slightly less violent beating because of your Establishment-smashing hippie grandmother. Barack Obama has zero white privilege because he looks black. Hence the writers who inform you up front about their non-white blood; they want readers to be clear they’re not some virtue-signalling clueless white person. They need you to know that regardless of how they look, of how much better they get treated if they keep their mouths shut, they don’t identify as such. Rachel Dolezal’s big mistake: You’ve got to have the pedigree to claim non-whiteness. The obsession with pedigree on the left demonstrates it’s no less racially identitarian than the wannabe Aryans terrorizing the Capitol. “Race is nothing more than a social construct!” the left crows, and at the genetic level, they’re right. As more people get tested by spit-and-mail genetic analysis companies, the more we realize not only are we not as ‘pure’ as we think, but our DNA can even contain traces of extinct humans like Neanderthals and Denisovans. (Fun historical side note: Our sole surviving species, Homo Sapiens, likely genocided them both.) Now white supremacists are learning they’re slightly less white than advertised. Um, awkward! Even more awkward: Native Americans suddenly discovering their Inner Racists when it comes to sharing casino profits with people who don’t ‘look Native’ but who contain more Native DNA than the ones who fit the stereotype. What’s their racial recipe? Hell, I can’t even tell their gender from here. Image by Pexels from Pixabay Optics are everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren received much-deserved derision when others accused her of using her minimal (genuine) Native American ancestry to gain favor in her legal academia rise. Critics rightly noted she looked white, lived white, and never suffered any sort of racism. No one ever followed her around in a store or stopped her for Driving While Native. ‘White privilege’ is a conceptual football casually tossed around, correctly assigned only to those in power, white people. And since we racist (and species-ist) Homo Sapiens insist on judging each other by what we look like, white privilege is conferred upon anyone who can ‘pass’. Time for our fellow whites-in-denial to get real with themselves. Regardless of how stone-soup one’s personal recipe is, how you get treated depends on how you look. It’s stupid and toxic, but the Regressive Left’s obsession with racial labels — ‘impurity’ as a point of pride — is no less comparable than ‘white pride’. It even mirrors the racism: White supremacists hate anyone who’s not white, while the Regressive Left hates anyone who is. The benefits of identifying as non-white include no debilitating ‘white guilt’, and unquestioning obedience from those who have it. Victimhood is sacred. If you look white, you have white privilege. Your opinion doesn’t matter if you walk into a bank and don’t tell them about your black great-grandaddy and your half-Southeast Asian mama. Which I’m guessing you won’t, if you want to increase your chances of getting the loan. This article appeared first on Medium in January 2021.

Keep your eyes on the p̶r̶i̶z̶e̶ past! General Thomas F. Drayton’s slaves, 1862. Public domain photo by Henry P. Moore, Wikimedia Commons My mother spoke a lot about her ‘dialogue class’ at the church where they listed topic ideas and picked one to debate. They never picked Mom’s: Integrate the schools by first integrating the neighborhoods. I guess it was a tough sell for Christians living in the formerly Confederate state of Florida in the early 1970s. Forced school integration had come to Orlando, less than twenty years after Brown v. Board of Education and Little Rock, with the force of several court decisions and a lawsuit by the NAACP. While others debated busing black kids to white schools and vice versa, Mom argued the only way to fight racial prejudice was for people to live together in the same neighborhoods. After living in ultra-diverse Toronto for fifteen years, it’s obvious Mom had the right idea, never in doubt; Americans self-segregate as much as they redline. It’s important to remember and learn from history, but humans too often wallow, picking at ancient injustices like scabs and not allowing them to heal. It feeds the victimhood mentality which serves all our masters far too well by taking our eyes off the prize — a better future. A tale of two victimhood cultures I’ve been party to victimhood cultures preoccupied with past grievances. I’ve been a Pagan for thirty years. Wicca is a religion inspired by pre-Christian polytheistic traditions, with modern twists like a respect for life, the earth, the interconnection of all, and its unique value prop: Putting spiritual power in the hands of women. I learned about it from my new Pagan boyfriend after I moved to New England. I read books in his personal library and attended a few circles. I was drawn but resisted, put off by intense young people who I suspected were just exploring identities, and who seemed preoccupied with victimhood, going on about European witchcraft persecutions and what they did to women. Point taken, as I was already familiar with the horrific history, one I revisited after I broke down and ‘came out of the broom closet’. I grew tired of the constant emphasis, the notion that women were perpetual victims of men, and the undercurrent that fundamentalist Christians would bring back the ‘Burning Times’ if we weren’t very, very vigilant. We burn the a witch at an SCA event in 1993 at a Spanish Inquisition party. Photo from my archives. Paganism was a sub-group within a larger victim culture to which I also belonged, feminism and its obsession with ‘the patriarchy’. Patriarchy is real, more entrenched in some places than others, but it’s pretty weak in North America, even back in the ’90s. I came to identify less with feminism as a result of its growing debilitating message of relentless victimhood. Where’s the empowerment? I’m white, so I don’t have personal experience with POC victim mentality, but it’s a third distraction keeping the eyes of the oppressed focused on a past we can’t change, with inattention to the present and future we can. 2 Past, 2 Curious About ‘Reparations’ Focusing on ancient injustices keeps one crazy and triggered. Especially those already addressed, and when everyone’s ancestors are guilty of the same crimes with which they charge others. The U.S. banned slavery over 150 years ago; which is more than can be said for parts of Africa today. Yes, there’s an ugly legacy of systemic racism here, as there will be wherever systemic slavery occurred, which is to say, everywhere. Black Lives Matter focuses on the here and now, the problems facing black people today: Police brutality, poverty, lack of educational opportunities. Some ‘anti-racists’ would rather do nothing. Easier to share posts and memes about ‘slave reparations’. Because, George Floyd. Debating the idea diverts necessary attention from real problems. Who gets reparations? How do people prove they’re descended from American slave-owned ancestors? (Not all African-Americans are.) What if they’re mixed race? How ‘black’ do you have to be? What if their black ancestors owned slaves? (See: Africa) What if you look white but had slave-owning ancestors? Do you get X dollars? How much is enough? What’s the result? Does that fix everything and end the racism conversation? The most critical question: Who will pay for it, and how will you convince American taxpayers, none of whom ever owned slaves, to give free handouts to blacks, in accordance with the stereotypes, none of whom have ever been enslaved? I rolled my eyes when Pander Bear Elizabeth Warren said it was time to have a national conversation about reparations. I heard, “I’m torpedoing my chances for sitting in the White House.” Was she trying to get Donald Trump re-elected? Why are you marching if you’re not voting? It’s no secret I have little use for victimhood mentality. I recognize we’re all victimized, sometimes specifically and sometimes by The System. Victimizing someone takes their power. Identifying with victimhood and refusing to take it back allows the victimizer to keep it. It’s why I no longer identify as a feminist, even though I’m non-feminist in name only. Rip off my ‘egalitarian’ label and you’ll find a feminist underneath. Busted! But I don’t like to label myself as such. I don’t want to be seen as misandrist and victimized. I don’t identify with weakness. I don’t care anymore about The Burning Times. Or medieval tortures devised for women. Or how women were designated as property in the Bible and forced to marry their rapist. Or harems. Or Scarlet A’s. Or that American democracy wasn’t granted to women until 1920. I care about these things if they’re happening today. What I most care about is people claiming to be against injustice but can’t be arsed to vote. “My vote doesn’t count.” “The system is stacked against us.” “The corporations control everything.” “Putin decides who becomes President.” “My fave didn’t get the candidacy so screw the one who got it.” “They’re all a bunch of crooks.” “They both suck.” If you can’t be arsed to vote, I can’t be arsed to care. Voting is the fundamental Number One thing you can do to change the system, and if you don’t like the system, VOTE, GODDAMMIT! If the system is stacked against you, the corporations have outsized control of the process, foreign hostiles are allowed to hack our elections, and all the candidates suck, it’s BECAUSE YOU DON’T VOTE! Barack Obama noted voting among young people is ‘usually pitifully low’. It raises the question how useful they are putting their lives on the line in the streets if they don’t back it up with something concrete. Obama notes you can’t just vote at the federal level; who’s in charge at the state and municipal levels are just as critical. Consider this: About 70% of the states with the highest increases in COVID-19 death projections are Republican-governed. One notable exception is Ohio, whose Republican governor acted with precaution early, winning the confidence of both Republican and Democratic voters for keeping infection rates lower than in your typical Republican-governed state. Now he’s under pressure from his party to resist crackdowns and to require masks. Wanna die? In the end, it call comes down to YOU. Don’t forget school boards and “…The elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system [who] work at the state and local levels,” as Obama wrote. Do your part to keep religious fundamentalists away from the education system and lip service-paying officials who forget about reform when the elections and protests are over. Voting to change the here and now and most importantly, the future is the single most important thing any American can do to directly impact their own life. It doesn’t mean you always get who or what you want and you never get a ‘perfect’ candidate but you send a message even when your candidate loses. Donald Trump knows part of why he has so little respect is because he lost the popular vote and squeaked by on a constitutional technicality. The GOP knows it, too, and they now face a Morton’s Fork: Support Trump and potentially lose up to the entire Congress along with the White House, or not support him and watch him destroy their own chances by ruining them with his idiot supporters. But, if enough voters wallow in the past and argue for things they’re never going to get, like slave reparations, or scare each other with horror stories of the return of witch-burning and The Handmaid’s Tale, or tell themselves this has never been a worse time to be an American woman, they’ll perhaps stay at home licking their wounds and perpetuate the system they say they hate. The masters would approve. Crisis averted. This originally appeared on Medium in July 2020.

Hating others — including one’s self — for the way we’re born is the very definition of. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay As I understand it from certain quarters on the left, I suffer from original sin. By virtue (ar ar) of birth circumstances, I am by default a white supremacist and a racist. Because, white. Yet we’re no longer permitted to believe (at least out loud) that black people were ‘properly’ enslaved because of God’s birthmark of inferiority — their skin. If it’s birth privilege-reckoning time, I reckon this means black and other men of color must experience their come-to-Jesus reckoning and acknowledge their own original sin. Penis = male privilege, i.e., misogynist entitled tool of The Patriarchy. Plenty of entitled black men must think they own the whole damn world, white privilege notwithstanding, because they’re the greatest threat to the lives of black women. Murdered by men at two and a half times the rate of white women, 94% of black female victims were killed by someone they knew (similar to white women), and most weren’t committing a crime, but were instead having an argument with someone. Who? Their husbands or partners, 93% of whom were black. The domestic violence rate for women of color is considerably higher than it is for white or Asian women. Black male patriarchy: It’s a thing, too. But never mind that. This isn’t about black male misogynoir; it’s about the one thing far-left ‘progressives’ and ROCs (Racists of Color) can agree on: White people suck. We’re the worst. Ever. Bill Maher created a few waves last year with his New Rule against white shame, particularly vomit-worthy virtue signaling. “White liberals: The only people with a bias against themselves. They only want to hang out with people who are not them.” It’s the preferred sport of self-loathing white people, the easy way to pretend you’re antiracist without having to do anything. It’s got that whole confess-your-sins-before-God-for-forgiveness feel to it. Just roll around on the ground in front of a bunch of embarrassed Black Lives Matter protesters frothing at the mouth like some rabid evangelical screaming, “I’m a worm! I’m evil! I’m a sinner! I am a white supremacist!” even if the most racist thing you’ve ever done is laugh at a Lisa Lampanelli joke. Racism is judging someone by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. Some famous guy once said that. But he wasn’t thinking of white self-haters because not many existed. I can’t remember this guy’s name. It’s not important. He was nothing but a man-whore oozing with male privilege who fucked around on his wife, a lot. (He was a Christian preacher, of course! But this was back in the days when Christian men screwed around with women.) He may have fathered an illegitimate child. He allegedly laughed at, possibly even offered advice to a rapist during a rape. If he was alive today he’d be soooo cancelled. What do you expect from someone with a penis? (How’s original sin lookin’ now, ROCs?) Somehow I’m guessing the left won’t be pulling down statues of You-Know-Who anytime soon. Black lives do matter, which is why I don’t say All Lives Matter. Seven billion humans facing an entire planet of widely different challenges is too vast to contemplate versus roughly 47 million living in a specific country with a hardcore racism problem. Something we actually have the power to do something about. But we must remember: #AllHumanRightsMatter. White people can’t claim to work for equality if we’re willing to excuse in others what we’d never tolerate in our tribe. Racism is racism, whether you hate others’ race or your own. It’s not okay to hate on your own. I recently lost a black friend over this. He didn’t hate white people; he hated black people. Especially black women. I told him I couldn’t deal with his misogynoir anymore, we had an argument, and of course he blocked me. I think what really aggravated him was when I pointed out he’d been challenged on his misogynoir by four different sources. If one person says something about you, hey, it’s an opinion. If a second person does, well maybe, but who knows. If three or more sources — one of which is an entire Zoom support group — telling you something is a problem, pay attention. It’s a problem. Yours. I cut him slack for a year because I’m not black, I no longer live in America and he’d referred to a lot of trauma he’d been through. I didn’t know what was behind it. I still don’t, but now I wonder what his ex-wives and ex-friends might say about him. It’s not okay to hate black people even when you’re black. Ergo, white racial self-hatred isn’t okay either. Granted, ROC racism against whites is more often passive — white Americans overall don’t need to be afraid of black violence the way blacks need to be of whites. But we can’t tolerate self-directed racism while we claim to fight the rest. We have to fight it all, rooting the toxin from our souls. White self-hatred is toxic for a number of reasons. It encourages black racism Everyone can be racist despite deniers’ claims otherwise. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. If you hate on someone for their birth color, it’s racism. ROCs, especially certain ‘antiracists’, need to challenge their own biases and prejudices like everyone else. If whites quietly consent it’s okay to hate on white people because of historical slavery grievances, uh, do you really want to go down that path? Because the African continent was no pre-European paradise for many and some parts still won’t end slavery today. Before Europeans, much of African prehistory mirrored the rest of prehistoric cultures: Raiding, war, slavery, massacres. The continent’s men were every bit as violent as other men. As a woman, I look with a pretty damned judgemental eye on the barbaric gynocrime of Female Genital Mutilation, with historical evidence implicating Africans roughly 2,500 years ago. The inventors might also have been Arab slave traders, although many scholars think it started in Egypt. No matter which, it was likely men who came up with it, and today African women still rabidly enforce it. If historic wrongs by dead people are a reason to hate on others, African-Americans have a lot to account and atone for. White self-hatred encourages standard racism White self-loathing gives genuine white supremacists a real reason to point fingers, cry ‘Racism!’ and feed their own overblown sense of victimhood. If it’s ‘sort of’ okay to excuse racism against ‘some’ whites (the ‘bad’ ones), it becomes too easy to talk about the ‘good’ black people and the ‘bad’ black people. Or as disgraced Southern cuisine cooking maven Paula Deen more plainly put it, the good blacks, and the — you know. “You’re one of the good blacks,” means you’re not a shiftless, lazy, criminal black. Comparatively, every white progressive antiracist desires to be graced with the Holy Grail of liberal respectability: Being told by a black person they’re one of the good ones. I.e., non-racist white person. Paula Deen wants you to know she isn’t a racist. She never called ‘professional black men’ doing a ‘fabulous job’ waiting on white people the n-word. Photo from Angela on Flickr It’s still old-fashioned tribalism: Them and us. The human fruit basket contains good and bad apples. But rather than thinking of good/bad apples vs. oranges, bananas and pears, why not think more collectively starting with what we have most in common? Like, 330+ million Americans, most of whom are getting screwed over by the 1%. White self-hatred encourages damaging victim mentality I write about ‘taking back your power’ for women because it’s my life experience wheelhouse. I critique the excesses of modern feminism and its often disempowering, self-infantilizing elements. I begin with women because I am a woman and can’t be accused of not knowing what I’m talking about, even when we disagree. I look down the road toward others who make the same mistakes women make in giving up or refusing their power. I listen to a lot of ‘The Two Black Guys’ on Bloggingheads.tv, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, because their critiques of black life and victimhood sound awfully similar to my complaints about feminists. They acknowledge they live in a racist culture, as I recognize patriarchal culture, yet still point out how some tribe members prefer victimhood, finger-pointing and self-imposed stasis to claiming their own power and having to assert or apply themselves. Let’s just all agree to blame The Man. I see a lot of people of color who could stand to Take Back Their Power, but I stay out of that dogfight. For now. Here’s the thing about being a victim: You may think it absolves you of control of your own life, preferring to blame ‘white supremacy’ or ‘the patriarchy’, but the very definition of victims is weak. You can call it ‘empowerment’ if you like, but grown-ups see you for what you are: Adult children who say a lot of stuff about personal agency, but don’t believe it. White self-hatred enables human rights abusers Self-hating white people, who constitute much of but not all of what reformed Islamist Majiid Nawaz calls the Regressive Left, won’t fight hatred and abusive behavior in non-whites, to avoid ‘stigmatizing’ them, and because, cultural imperialism and slavery guilt. ‘We don’t have the right to impose our values on others.’ A convenient self-serving rationale since challenging human rights abusers can get you hurt or killed. Or worse, called a racist. It’s great for abusers. Female genital mutilation and slavery still flourish in Africa. They thank libs for their support. What’s good enough for little black and brown girls somewhere other than the U.S. would make these same progressives’ heads explode if Matt Gaetz or Josh Hawley introduced legislation to allow American parents to genitally mutilate their baby girls, to, you know, make them more faithful to their husbands and preserve their virginity until marriage. You’re gonna do WHAT to my pretty white daughter??? I don’t believe America’s biggest problem is racism. It’s climate change, but never mind that. While I’m against racism and ruining the only planet we have available to us, everyone fights the battles resonating the most with them. I fight for true female empowerment as well as, on a different level, for others. This includes level-headed white men who need language to challenge misandrist feminism and racist antiracism. It also includes POC with the courage to embrace black power from within who want a better, more equal world. They don’t see themselves as helpless victims of W*H*I*T*E S*U*P*R*E*M*A*C*Y. They know we all have a lot in common despite our skin cancer prevention differences. I read a black writer’s article recently on how challenging it is to find work as a black woman. I mentally fist-pumped “YEAH! YEAH!” as I recognized a near-exact experience trying to find a job for over a year. The only difference was her skin was black, and mine wrinkled. White privilege fades with age in the workplace. Who knew? After reading Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America I see America’s biggest challenge as not race, but income inequality. I know that will make certain heads explode but bear with me. I wasn’t kidding about what we all have in multi-colored common — getting screwed by the 1%. So what can we do about this? Equality for all, not just 47 million Americans. I’ve developed an interest in the Universal Basic Income idea or, as Manitoban Member of Parliament Leah Gazan calls it, the (GLBI) Guaranteed Living Basic Income. A UBI will equalize income, give everyone a more fair share of the pie, and help lift blacks and others out of poverty faster than and more effectively than ‘slave reparations’ ever will. The UBI is gaining traction in Canada after the federal government introduced what was essentially a UBI last year in response to COVID-related unemployment: CERB, the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit, which temporarily gave Canadians, almost no questions asked, a $2,000 a month payment (before taxes) to help take the edge off paying the bills. I was on it last year. Believe me, it helped, coming as it did a few months after my unemployment benefits ended and I lived on savings. Gazan is fighting a long slow country-wide battle. The UBI’s Canadian roots are in her own province. Manitoba’s ‘mincome’ project in the 1970s demonstrated some real success and refuted conservative fears ‘no one will want to work’ if they’re ‘being taken care of’. The mincome was structured to reward people for work by taking only some of their benefits in response to a new job, but keeping them afloat. For every dollar they earned, they lost fifty cents in mincome. At some point you lose all the mincome but who cares? You’re now making more than the mincome! Maybe that’s why a Conservative provincial government canceled it. Embarrassing to be proven wrong, eh? A UBI’s better, fairer system will address a helluva lot more people in need. Now, #AllAmericanLivesMatter. The middle class is disappearing and upward mobility is far more difficult even for white people now than it was forty years ago (read the Evil Geniuses book for details). Equalize the system, and many Americans will have a lot less to complain about and shoot each other over. I can hear several of you screaming, “But black people always get screwed! How’s a UBI going to help us? You KNOW racist politicians and government officials will find a way to shortchange us AGAIN!” Thank you, I’m glad you asked that! We can devise a system for allocating the UBI based on need and circumstances, rendered as blind as possible to personal details. In my fantasy, I’d have a special UBI number, the only label the system has for me. It’s strictly need-to-know: I’m a single human with no kids who rents and makes $X a year. Maybe it knows whether I have permanent employment with benefits (without knowing my employer’s name) or whether I’m a contract, ‘self-employed’ human. It doesn’t know my name, race, gender, where I live or anything other than the generic details the system needs to know directly related to my need. Some other human, say, has three kids they take care of on their own, one high on the autism scale (or maybe Some Unnamed Permanent Condition) and has a mortgage. They get more than I do, and the system doesn’t know what color either of us is. I’m no super-programmer, nor do I know how to design highly secure and heavily audited software platforms, but after the rock-solid secure and fair 2020 election, I’m convinced we could design a similar system for UBI allocation, with the same rock-solid security, now for blind social assistance. No, it’s not something we can turn around before the end of Biden’s term. We haven’t the spirit or the fortitude for it. Yet. We can’t eliminate racism unless we target all racism, including our own unacknowledged racism, against others and ourselves. White self-racism is toxic too, even though it’s not getting black people killed. We should always address, analyze, and dig ever-deeper into history’s many shames and grievances, but it too often discourages us from contemplating the present and thinking imaginatively about the future, by keeping eyeballs and brains focused on the one time period we can’t change. And it serves our corporate and political masters very well, thankyouverymuch. This post originally appeared on Medium in June 2021.

It felt like chopping up my baby. CC0 public domain image from Pixy.com I met Miss Snark’s words with growing dismay. Was she out of her mind? The anonymous New York literary agent’s blog offered near-sacred advice for aspiring novelists — i.e., struggling, largely crappy newbie writers. (Well, those others anyway. Not me.) I’d finished my novel, planned to check for typos, tighten up a few lines here and there, and schlep it off to New York, post haste. But here was Miss Snark telling me my magnum opus, about a Pagan woman who’s gifted a medieval book of powerful spells she views as merely a historical artifact, wasn’t anywhere close to being ready. For one thing, sez she, a debut novel mustn’t be more than 150,000 words, and better 125–130,000 words. Was she out of her New York state of mind??? Was she serious? Was 300,000 words honestly too long? Who wrote that ridiculous rule? I’d bet it wasn’t Stephen King, Master of Doorstops! (Never mind how Carrie was 60,000 words.) Anyone ever heard of Margaret Mitchell? Gone With The Wind! 418,000! (FIRST AND ONLY!) Okay, okay, that was like seventy years ago. But hey, look at this, Miss Snark! A DEBUT NOVEL about vampire librarians (yes, you read that right) just came out and it’s 240,000 words! So yeah, you can have a debut novel thicker than a grilled cheese sandwich! (It sucked. Torturous.) Yah sure, mine’s still longer — I’ll bet I could whack it down to 240,000. And it definitely doesn’t suck! Miss Snark begged to differ. She listed the literary sins of the wannabe novelist’s first effort: Too many characters; subplots that go nowhere; too many useless words; too much description (especially settings); too-long-too-graphic sex scenes; plots that sag in the middle or lack dramatic tension. Her annoying list nagged me like a persistent pet demanding attention when I had more important things to do. I pushed it away but it kept throwing its paws in my lap. Maybe 300,000 words was too long for a debut novel, today. Other, better writers got away with these crimes in the past but maybe longer novels were best left to the pros. She was right. Stephen King I ain’t. Then again, Stephen King wasn’t Stephen King, either. I felt IT could have been pared down by about a quarter to a third. Having read even heavier doorstops since then, I’m done with Stephen King until some brave editor goes Freddie Krueger on every work over 100,000 words and slashes them down to Abridged. Better writers than the King and I had committed these many sins. Too many characters: Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy. Subplots going nowhere: J.R.R. Tolkien. Plots without dramatic tension: Jules Verne Not knowing when the story ends: Tolkien again, and King’s Rose Madder. Too many useless words: Every Victorian writer. And Tolstoy. Too much description, especially of settings: Tolkien again. Tolstoy — farming. Too-long, too-graphic sex scenes: Every novel written since 1980, until, I guess, 2005. Although I happily cut my 10-page orgasm down to his slipping his hand under her halter top and ending, “I arched my back, abandoning myself.” Stories sagging in the middle: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. I’ve half-read it twice and he loses me after the aliens reveal themselves. They’d all broken Miss Snark’s One Blog Tip To Rule Them All: Kill your darlings. ‘Murder your darlings’, the original phrase, is often attributed to William Faulkner but can be traced further to the English writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Not only must you employ relentless zeal in removing all unnecessary words, but you must be ready to axe whole sections, scenes, or chapters if they drag the story down or otherwise don’t advance the plot. First and foremost, Padawan: Get over the delusion every first-draft word you wrote is farking gold. You ain’t Hemingway, and neither am I. Even Hemingway wasn’t Hemingway on the first draft. We beginners don’t know what we don’t know. We learn our style from the novelists we’ve read, not always the best examples for how to write today. (Especially the ‘great’s!) Not even from a few decades ago. Styles change. Often, for the better. Once over the shock of Miss Snark’s bitter diktat, I locked my ego in the closet and drew out my Freddie Krueger gloves. I pulled up my beautiful darling first draft and saved it as a second, in case I needed to restore anything (I never did). I locked my ego in the closet, whacking and slashing like the deranged leathery pedophile. Creative Commons 3.0 image by Quintenense on Wikimedia Commons That scene had to go. That one too. The confrontation with the ex-husband contributed nothing to the plot. Slashed! Bye, pointless subplot!. Sayonara, lengthy conversation! (Damn, did my characters love to talk!) I whacked a bad guy like Tony Soprano and offloaded his evil duties to his remaining Norwegian black metal band buddies. And why the hell did the main character escape her captors twice? Like, they caught her again? And her rescuers could even get near her after that little stunt? What was the point? I couldn’t remember. Cue the high-pitched shower violins. It took around two hours. The first hour I got halfway through but the grief was too heavy. I forced myself to go back with my chop-chops a few days later. I felt like I’d cut the limbs off my own baby. How could you? I could hear the first draft wail from the bowels of my hard drive. I must have lost at least 100,000 words, I consoled myself. I just needed to tighten it up and get it down to under 200,000, my new goal. 254,000 words. Motherf — . I bought a book called Self-Editing For Fiction Writers. I took notes of all the sins I’d not yet identified. I hadn’t guessed how much of a doorstop I’d written, and with the advice alone on how to tighten up the language, I figured I could suck the excess verbiage out like a meth-crazed Dementor! Maybe down to the neighborhood of 150,000-ish words. If not, I could argue it’s still shorter than The Historian, the vampire librarian thing, and way less confusing. I discovered an enthusiasm for methodical paring absent during the hack ’n’ slash. I recognized draggy and redundant prose. Like, too much character eye-rolling when the love interest said something stupid or pretentious, which he did frequently. The scene where the main character gives a lecture on European witchcraft mania versus Paganism today? TMI. ‘Information dump’ as the self-editing book called it. (The Historian: Guilty as charged.) It wasn’t the only place I’d taken an info-dump. I’d researched Native American culture and history, along with white ‘New Age’ pretenders for the love interest, an Irish-American author pretending to be a Native who appropriated and haphazardly mixed spiritual traditions. TMI about Native Americans had to go. Along with the one actual Native character who appeared in one pointless scene. Writers conducting research for a character or plot sometimes can’t resist sharing all the fascinating factoids they learned, except it may not be as compelling for the reader. (I’m looking at you, Herman Melville!) I got addicted to my ruthlessness. I jonesed to waste wasted words like a top video game player blasts alien orc-wizard Nazi thingies. I wanted every sentence as tight as your maiden aunt’s hospital corners, and I reviewed my notes to make sure I atoned for all my first-draft sins. Third draft: 213,000 words! DAMN!!! I was on a roll! I began putting the novel aside for a month, then returning to it. Each draft got shorter and shorter. The final final final draft was 175,000 words. I decided it was close enough to 150 thou, knowing some literary agents considered longer debut novels if they were really good, and I schlepped it off, fingers crossed. Four years in the making, over a year after I’d finished the first draft. How could they not love it? Hearts of stone, I tell you. Soulless bitches! (Most literary agents are women.) A few things had changed since I’d typed ‘Chapter 1’ across Page 1. The Great Financial Collapse ignited panic and chaos. Publishers circled the wagons and sought only Sure Things. Novels on established, popular themes enticed them. Vampires were huge. (“But — but!” I stammered. “I have something different! I have a wannabe vampire! One of those loser Anne Rice über-fans who thinks he’s a LeStat-style vampire!”) Nobody cared. Real vampires were better, along with phenomenally original ideas like taking a public domain novel or historical literary figure and giving them a fantasy twist. (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.) Worse, my wannabe vampire didn’t sparkle. Just a few years later, literary agents would have preferred a Red Room Of Pain rather than a white supremacist Odinist temple of black magic. My novel featured near-torture involving someone’s dick with more metal in it than his music, but no one cared about that, either. Anyway, long story self-edited, no one picked it up and I self-published. I cut it down a bit more, but not much. I felt the story possessed all the necessary words. My beta readers got through it easily. But attention spans had shortened some more, and now a ‘doorstop’ was 150,000 words, and the New Normal more of a novella, from 40–60,000 words. In other words, about the length of a Harlequin romance. Sorry, I don’t write for gnats. My novels are for people with attention spans, not those who download bite-sized chunks from Wattpad for a ten-minute bus trip. Editing your first novel is always the hardest. Before I published Tales From The Anonymous Divorced Witchbabe, I decided to do a test run. Tales wasn’t actually my first novel; I’d written years prior about four 1980s college students transported into an alternative medieval universe with strange modern trappings. I pulled it up for the first time in years. 300,000 words. I licked my lips and reached for my Freddie Kruegers. 135,000 words. Here’s the thing: Once you know what you didn’t know before, and your skills improve, not only is editing fun (I think), but it makes your future first drafts way less torturous. You’re less married to your characters or your plotlines and you don’t worry about klutzy phrasing, cliches, the wrong word, or boring characters. You barf it all out on your computer and resolve to fix it later. And you do. Kill your darlings! It’s for the best. Die, you overwrought chunk of purple prose! Die! Die!!! Image by 4657743 from Pixabay

When I researched Native American ‘plastic shamans’, I made sure the authors didn’t get paid Image by Adina Voicu from Pixabay He was a self-styled New Age Native American religion ‘shaman’ and a big-name author. Adored by thousands, his charms were many to his loyal fans and groupies: Learned, spiritual, and drop-dead gorgeous with those high Native American cheekbones. The heroine in my planned novel would fall hard for him, only to discover his fallibility and phoniness. How many things are wrong with thee? Let me count the ways, you con artist. Native American religions are plural, not singular; you can’t treat them all as though they’re alike; Native American traditions aren’t ‘New Age’, they’re about as Old Age as you can can get; and Native Americans don’t have ‘shamans’. Those emerged out of northern Europe in Paleolithic times; they never reached the Americas. Oh yeah, and also, Mr. Famous Author wasn’t Native American in any appreciable sense. His only native ancestor was four generations back, making him one-sixteenth Native. The rest was Irish-American, about as common as whiskey in the United States. He’d grown up white and became obsessed with his shred of Native blood during the New Age heyday when claiming Native lineage became fashionable for white people, with a heavy push from the new Disney movie Pocahontas. The problem with compromised content My character research presented an ethical problem: How to read books by similar real-world authors whose work hurt genuine Native Americans in many ways. Spurious white claims to Native ancestry always made me squirm. The idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ caught my attention when I read about it from Pagan author Zsuzsanna Budapest. She described a Native American elder who complained about white people, and particularly New Agers, misappropriating their religions, syncretizing them and adding modern never-Native elements. Worst of all, profiting from them. We don’t mind white people learning from our religions, he said, but don’t misrepresent them; honor their origins; and never, ever make money from them. One of the worst offenders was ‘Beverly Hills Shaman’ Lynn V. Andrews. She wrote books about discovering ‘Native’ religious secrets and traditions from three alleged Canadian First Nations women, whose existence has always been under question. It was a staple, I’d find, of wannabe Native books: Finding receptive Native Americans willing to teach some over-privileged white dork all their secrets, because, you know, this white person is trustworthy! Another staple included the obligatory rant about white people’s treatment of Natives (but then the teachers went right back to teaching this good white person.) The genre arguably originates from popular hippie author Carlos Castaneda in the 1960s, who also ‘learned’ ‘traditional’ ‘Mexican’ ‘magical’ secrets from an alleged Yaqui nagual named Don Juan, another teacher whose existence no one could confirm. I based my ‘plastic shaman’ character primarily on Lynn V. Andrews, but several other fake ‘medicine people’, not all of who claim to be ‘shamans’, contributed too. The New Age is filled with ‘plastic medicine people’. Some of them are even genuine Native Americans abusing their own traditions for profit. Image by Adina Voicu from Pixabay How to research responsibly I count three ways one can legitimately read another’s work without financially benefiting them: Borrow books from the library (remember those?) Borrow books from a friend, if you have one who reads them Buy from a used bookstore As a Connecticut Pagan, I knew plenty of New Age and Pagan folk, several claiming Native ancestry and practicing Native spiritual traditions. How accurate or faithful to the originals I didn’t know, but I always felt a touch uncomfortable when some introduced the practices to our white otherwise Eurocentric Pagan circles. European-based Wiccans mixing and syncretizing European Indigenous traditions weren’t problematic. They were our own. But there’s a world of difference between growing up genuinely Native versus white and privileged. Bloodline doesn’t change that. ‘Iron Eyes’ Cody, né Espera Oscar de Corti, with Roy Rogers in 1950. You might remember the second-generation Italian-American actor best as the ‘crying Indian’ in a 1970s anti-littering commercial. He falsely claimed Native American ancestry from several different tribes. Public domain photo from Republic Pictures on Wikimedia Commons. One friend I knew to be a treasure trove of wannabe literature, but I didn’t dare ask to borrow her books. She might get really mad if she read my novel one day and realized she’d contributed to it (and by extension, recognized herself). I found a book or two in the library but I needed more. I bought the rest from used book stores. A fourth riskier option is the shadier corners of the Darkweb, one I wouldn’t recommend unless you really really REALLY want the content and can’t find it anywhere else. I didn’t need to do this for wannabe Native literature, but had my characters been Nazis or Islamist terrorists I might have had to consider where to access ‘forbidden’ work. Why some authors shouldn’t be compensated Compromised authors don’t always understand they’re hurting others, but Lynn V. Andrews did. Lakota Natives confronted her and asked her to stop misrepresenting and profiting from Native religious traditions. She refused. It’s important not to reward authors who hurt others, intentionally or not. Hardly a problem most of the time; one doesn’t read morally abhorrent Nazi content unless one supports the worldview but what if you’re writing Nazi characters and need the source material? Do you know any Nazis you can borrow Mein Kampf from? (Yeah yeah, ha ha!) How about Protocols of the Elders of Zion? I suspect you can find both for free on the Darkweb or in any forum featuring the Pepe the Frog icon, but I’m not about to confirm it. I don’t need the Biden administration stopping me at the border for my Google searches. Some of the ‘hucksters’ were genuine Native Americans also unworthy of compensation. Sun Bear’s Native bloodline is well-established, as he was born and raised on a reservation. Sternly criticized by others, denounced and picketed by the American Indian Movement, Sun Bear raised ire for the same reasons as non-Native ‘plastic medicine people’: Misrepresenting Native traditions, making stuff up and of course, a quick buck. Wallace Black Elk and Grace Spotted Eagle are other real-Native examples who ran afoul of the elders. I found used book stores the best way to source books I needed without compensating the authors. There’s a lot more variety. As I recall, my first crap-gathering voyage netted two Andrews books, a ‘kahuna’ (Hawaiian Indigenous sorcery) student, and another nagual pupil (not Castaneda, although I read him too). I don’t like encouraging genuine cultural misappropriation, and buying new books by compromised authors does exactly that. Other research tools include Google, of course. For fact-checking your sources consult Media Bias Fact Check, although it won’t likely report on the far more niche-y sites where I found information on Native Americans (real ones) and fake Natives containing more plastic than Halle Berry’s boobs. I did buy and read several respectable books on Native American history and cultures for a better-rounded understanding of the people my fictional romantic interest overidentified with. This can be applied to many other morally compromised authors, you know. I want to read Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal to get a sense for how his mind works (at least, before suspected dementia set in), so I keep an eye peeled for it in used bookstores. He’ll never miss the $20. This first appeared on Medium in 2021.

Even when they're acquitted they get punished Image by Snap_It on Pixabay It's a worse outrage than the Brock Turner verdict three years ago. Christopher Belter, 20, over-privileged and requisitely entitled affluent white man, was convicted in November of raping four teenage girls in Lewiston, NY. He and his victims were all under eighteen at the time. Conviction is good, right? Since so many accused rapists get acquitted, if they're even reported at all? Belter won't see any jail time. The judge, a 'Christian' man who 'prayed' about what sort of punishment to levy, decided prison would be 'inappropriate' for the defendant and gave him eight years of probation, and he must register as a sex offender. Maybe Jesus is a white supremacist because historically, he never seemed to instruct Christian judges to go easy on black men accused of raping white women, especially with near-to-zero evidence it occurred. Or to push Hizzoner to acknowledge that the man or men are pretty likely innocent. Worse, there will be no recall for prayerful Judge Matthew Murphy as there was for Brock Turner's judge Aaron Persky. Murphy is set to retire in a few weeks. How convenient. The punishment we don't consider It was a light sentence for sure, but did Belter get off as easy as we thought? An encouraging note to this story: Belter 'threw up' in the ladies' room after receiving the sentence, according to his attorney, who reports the defendant was 'deeply disappointed' by the ruling. Never mind why he was in the ladies' room. He clearly doesn't think he got away with anything and was hoping to be held accountability-free. The key takeaway: Belter was punished for what he did. It may not be what his victims wanted, or what rape rights activists and armchair judges wanted, but he'll suffer more than just the indignity of probation and the public humiliation of being a registered sex offender. Let's not discount the stress, depression, anxiety and outright fear of going through a rape trial, particularly one this high-profile. Just imagine what his nightmares must have been like as he contemplated hard time where he might have experienced rape from the other side. Brock Turner, the prettyboy California swimmer who got six months in jail for getting caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman and didn't even explain or defend himself to the two men who stopped him, had to register as a sex offender for life. Let's recognize two carriages of justice that happened in both cases: They got convicted. They didn't get off with acquittal by sympathetic judges who might identify a little too closely with a guy they think maybe 'went a bit too far'. Trials even for acquitted rapists--however undeserved the acquittal--bring their own punishment. The victim isn't the only one, now, who endures a terrible ordeal. So, too, does the accused, although pretty arguably a more justified and deserved one. I reserve zero sympathy for their 'ordeals'. We don't think about that. We don't talk about that. We debate and decry the injustice meted to the victims who deserve to see their sexual abuser put away for a long time to ponder his actions. We don't think about what it's like to go through a rape trial, wondering what your immediate future holds, especially if you're convicted. Worrying about rape of your own pretty ass in prison. Your whole life has changed, and you'll never be the same again. Prison is unpleasant but finite. Sex offender registry can last for ten years or until you die. Unlike their victims, they asked for it. Is prison really the best punishment? We still delude ourselves that prison teaches men like Belter and Turner a lesson, when in fact we already know that it can as easily turn out hardened, better-trained criminals as it can men who learn from their experience. If you think Belter is a misogynist now, consider how much sympathy he'd have gotten from his fellow inmates, especially the ones themselves accused of rape and other sex crimes. They'd have assured him he got screwed by those bitches, although their language would be less printable. Maybe some would even help him identify his 'mistakes' so he didn't get caught next time. Belter's statement in court sounds exactly like the flagrantly dishonest B.S. you'd expect from a man who'd say whatever it takes for a light sentence. Did he even write it himself? "Through treatment and reflection, I've come to feel deep shame and regret for my actions. None of you deserved to be in this situation...I hope each of you could close that wound I gashed. I know though, that a scar will remain that will serve as a reminder of the evil of that night." Uh-huh. Cry me a river. They don't get away with it when we report them Here's an ugly rape statistic women don't want to contemplate: Research shows that 100% of unreported rapes and sexual assaults result in zero convictions. Okay, I made up the part about the research. You can't convict a rapist without a trial, and you can't have a trial for an unreported crime. I'm going to say out loud what we especially don't want to acknowledge: Women let men get away with rape when they don't pursue charges. There are many good reasons why they wouldn't, including enduring a rape trial where they themselves might be put on trial by the defense ("What were you wearing that night? Were you intoxicated or high? Had you had consensual sex with the accused before?"). But five rape victims in two trials came forward and told their stories. Their perpetrator didn't get the prison time they'd hoped for but they did get something many other rape victims never do: A conviction! If you think 'getting off easy' albeit with a conviction doesn't send a message to others, consider this: Promising competitive swimmer Brock Turner, 'outstanding student' and Stanford swimming scholarship winner, was banned from Stanford and competitive swimming, which put the kibosh on his Olympics dreams. Today, in 2021, he's working a $12/hour job at a cooling technology company in Ohio. He's described as quiet and reserved, he drives a 2008 Chrysler, and he still lives with his parents. Yes, Brock Turner got soundly punished for his deed, and I'm not shedding any tears. How did his victim fare? Chanel Miller self-identified as the trial's 'Emily Doe' and wrote a memoir of her experience, Know My Name. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019 and she appeared on 60 Minutes. The New York Times selected it as one of '100 Notable Books of 2019'. Chanel Miller is living much better than her rapist, thankyouverymuch. CC0 3.0 image from Room For Discussion on Wikimedia Commons Her art has appeared in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and she sparked a renewed national discussion on campus rape. Miller, most certainly, is still dealing with the consequences of that horrible night but she's doing much better than her rapist. Two high-profile convictions are heartening. It's not everything those of us who want justice for rape and sexual assault victims want, but it's encouraging. It's more than we've been getting. They didn't get away with it. They were convicted. And while we have to talk about the need for greater jail time, we need also to ponder that alternate universe where both these young men served time in prison for years. Who would have emerged from that ordeal? Older, wiser, chastened men, or hardened misogynists armed with greater sexual assault knowledge? The fact that we can even ask that question is a sign of progress. They're not 'getting away with it' as much as they did before, and every time a woman or women come forward - like, say, 70 accusers of a certain ex-popular comedian - they hold these men accountable, and send a strong message to others: This could happen to you. I wonder what Brock Turner tells any young man, if they ask, about what prison life was like. I wonder if he wishes for a 'do-over' of his '20 minutes of action' as his father described it. I wonder if he ever sends anyone away thinking twice about raping a woman, unconscious or not. Is the risk worth it? When women report, men get punished. Let's keep up the momentum! This article originally appeared on Vocal in December 2021.

The rich spread disease, breed like rabbits and are bad for the environment. We’ll test them for COVID, and eat the uninfected ones. Lunch in The Hamptons. Try it, you’ll like him! Photo by Evan Wise on Unsplash I think we can all agree: The global economy is a wreck, the world is forever hungry and we can’t count on Washington, the European Union, or any other governmental entity to fix anything. No matter which party challenges the other in the U.S. courts next week over an alleged fixed election, raging economic inequality will reign, and it’s time to rethink what we must do to fix it. I offer a tweaked iteration of an earlier thinker’s idea. Let’s eat the rich! I want to make it perfectly clear I’m not suggesting anything truly barbaric, not like the nasty-ass dude who once suggested we eat the poor. And not just any poor, but children! What an appalling suggestion. I hope that man is dead! Poor people are neglected, undiscovered resources who’ve never had a chance to thrive and be productive members of society. Rich people are born with all the advantages and they use them to create stupid shit like trickle-down economics, credit default swaps, oxygen bars and Facebook. I’m suggesting, like those who support eating insects to feed a hungry world, that we feast on other plentiful, near-useless life forms. Feeding others might be the only useful thing these wankers ever did for humanity. My Top Ten Reasons Why We Should Eat The Rich #1 The rich ruined the global economy ten years ago with bullshit financial shell games they created lest they have to do anything productive for society, then blamed the nouveau pauvre for being lazy and unemployed. This year they’re pulling Part Deux: Angling mightily to reopen the markets in the face of a devastating pandemic because profits are more important than nearly 250,000 (dead) people (and counting). In an era in which air travel is severely restricted for everyone else, the rich eschew offices, public schools and universities and escape the rising infections by conducting their business-as-usual by flying in and out of the Caribbean on their private jets. Funerals are for the little people. #2 The rich are more plentiful than ever. There are nearly fifty million millionaires in the world owning roughly half the world’s wealth, and billionaires are as common as whiny-baby Trump tweets. We wouldn’t even have to restrict bagging the rich to a season. We’ll have to test each one for COVID-19 first, of course, but rich people with a positive result will feed millions of nouveau pauvre whose livelihoods were destroyed first by a pandemic and then by a famously rich guy’s gross mishandling of said pandemic and unwillingness to support them. #3 The rich are filthy, germy, and spread horrible diseases. Could you guys, like, not breathe until this is over? Photo taken on June 5, 2020. Public domain photo by The White House. #4 The rich breed like rabbits and create overconsuming assholes, all of whom feel entitled to do no work and instead suckle at the government teat, living off taxpayer-funded corporate welfare. The rich never have any money for taxes, but there’s always money for drugs and alcohol. Without rich people, useless South American cocaine kings, assuming they were good at jungle camouflage when the poor are feeling a mite peckish, would have to get real jobs. Photo by Walt Disney Television on Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0) #5 Thinning the rich is good for the environment. Rich people famously hate to travel anywhere farther than the corner Cartier’s in anything other than a private jet. The biggest yachts burn 200 gallons of fossil fuel an hour. A Canadian study found that the 1% generated three times more greenhouse gas emissions than us mortals. It’s estimated that just by eating Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Paris Hilton and Emma Watson that greenhouse gases would immediately drop 31.9 percent. #6 It’s important to cull the rich population from time to time or they get bored and start wars, particularly when they realize their neighbor owns a bigger missile, which means he has a bigger penis, which means you have to buy a bigger penis, and that can get expensive. And dangerous. The War in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, and the War on Freedom/Terror came down to a size argument between two rich guys: Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. Later, Donald Trump, a/k/a Cadet Bone Spurs, bombed Syria merely to prove (mostly to himself) what a he-man he is. Eating the rich would reduce toxic masculinity and the psychopath population. Fair use #7 The rich are healthy to eat. They’re low in fat because, as Tom Wolfe ever-so-hilariously pointed out in Bonfire of the Vanities, rich women are ‘social X-rays’ and rich men tend to look like this. #8 Good juju. The rich are better at surviving COVID-19 than the rest of us as they have access to the world’s best doctors and medical facilities. Eating a rich COVID-19 survivor will make you forever immune to the ravages of the virus and any future virus to emerge from the wet markets of China. Or it might be just five to seven months. Immunology geeks aren’t quite certain.*** #9 Eating the rich will raise the collective IQ of America by enabling everyone remaining to afford higher education again. Colleges and universities will have to lower their tuition and fees to meet the budgets of mere mortals. It’s far more likely that the nouveau pauvre will use their college educations better than the rich ever will — the rich will probably just invent more stupid shit like another fake money financial instrument of destruction or a lame-o Facebook ripoff. #10 What if someone had eaten Jeffrey Epstein right before he bought his pedo island? Think about it. Before you leap up to announce, “But the rich have guns and security guards and really high electronic fences!” I would say pshaw! If nineteen religion-addled culturally illiterate goat-herders in caves could pull off the most impressively brutal terrorist attack of the modern age against the world’s only remaining superpower, and a nuclear one at that, then I tell you this: A bunch of really hungry pissed-off nouveau pauvre who, until quite recently, sent humans into outer space and invented the Internet will figure out how to breach that overpriced firepower and storm the mansions of Midtown Manhattan, the towers of Dubai and the entire country of Luxembourg. Photo by Alec Perkins on Wikimedia Commons. Creative CommonsAttribution 2.0 Generic ***I feel compelled to add that I made that stuff up about the COVID juju. It’s a sad commentary on the state of the world when I have to make certain that people realize I’m joking because pseudo-scientific claptrap about a very serious virus and its alleged cures and preventive inoculations (zero so far) are so prevalent social media moguls are pressured to remove such nonsense to protect the hopelessly gullible from themselves. Please note I AM KIDDING ABOUT EATING PEOPLE FOR THEIR MOJO! Please don't blame me if someone eats Madonna. This appeared on my old blog about 10 or 12 years ago, then on Medium in 2021, and now it's here. Like its author and the Beach Boys, it gets around!

I Game, you Game, we all Game for sex, love, and everything else “What do you REALLY want, baby?” “To crush Elon Musk!” Photo by Анна Хазова on Pexels Can you imagine all the effort they’re putting into that? If they took that effort and put it toward something constructive, who knows what they could accomplish. — Tom Cruise, in Neil Strauss’s The Game Who knew that couch-jumping, Scientology-worshipping Tom Cruise would be the nearly sole Voice of Reason in Neil Strauss’s The Game, the notorious exposé about the lives, lifestyles, and trade tools of Pickup Artists (PUAs)? He voiced what I’d been thinking. I theorized there were few better at comprehending the female mind than PUAs determined to get laid, so I read The Game to better understand how men exploit female commonalities for manipulation, control, and abuse. We have to identify our own unconscious vulnerabilities, as it’s our job to protect ourselves better by eliminating them. We’re not rank ingénues anymore. I’ve explored a few of these vulnerabilities already, and likened our personal fixes to a psychological cybersecurity patch job. I have to hand it to PUAs: They do know women better than many of us know ourselves. Condemn them all you want, but they’ve nailed us. (Ar ar.) PUAs exploit female brains like grand chess masters. Author Neil Strauss went from nerdy, underlaid AFC (Average Frustrated Chump) to mPUA (Master PUA), codename Style, in just two years. His expose, The Game, gifted his fellow AFCs the Unholy Grail: The secrets to persuading women to spread their legs or lips (more recently, we could add butt cheeks) almost on command. Without courtship, drama, or barely even getting a name. Rail all you want about the sheer misogyny, rank control and abuse of female psychology in the PUA community, but two truths emerged from this deep-dive into pickup artistry. One, they’re impressively focused on a goal, and everyone has much we can learn from them, regardless of our life’s mission. Two, not all the women were naive, helpless pawns in modern Casanovas’ webs of deception. Even for those who were, none were mindless programmed computer networks. We’re creatures with agency and free will. We can arm and fortify ourselves against such psychic assaults. And we have much to answer for as well. The Game vs The Rules I’m embarrassed to admit several years ago I actually read the notorious Game-equivalent manual for women — The Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. Not for research, not ironically and not for the larfs. I’d concluded perhaps honesty wasn’t the best policy, after all, in nailing a man. Three years after getting dumped at 37, what did I have to lose? Treating single men with respect, decency and consideration had gotten me nothing but a pool of underachievers who I got the strong feeling were ‘settling’ for me because they had neither the looks nor the riches to get the younger, hotter chicks. The ones I wanted to meet never wanted to meet me. The ones who did were several years older. La plus ça change. Maybe games-playing was what all men really wanted after all. Every accusation you can fling at The Game you can hurl with equal force at The Rules. Misogynist manipulation? Misandrist manipulation. Rank dishonesty pretending you don’t want sex when you do? Pretend, equally, you aren’t interested in a monogamous relationship or marriage. ‘Freezing’ a woman out to make her think you just lost interest? Always wait a day or two to respond to his emails (in the years before texting), don’t seem too eager, then just dash off a few quick lines as though you’re all dolled up to go out and do something terribly exciting, and you only have a few minutes before your ride picks you up. Don’t you wish you were with me? Tricking dumbass women to have sex? Tricking dumbass men to give it all up for you. The Rules are The Game for women. And vice versa. Image by Cottonbro on Pexels Not all the advice in The Rules is bad. Useful: Cutting to the chase on singles sites. If after three rounds of messages he hasn’t asked you out, cut it off. He’s not serious. You’re there to nab a man, not a pen pal. Also useful: Advice for cutting through the carrot-sticking or ‘breadcrumbing’ many men use to string women along. Still, there should be at least a few email rounds. Too many men think any messaging beyond, ‘Hi. You’re cute. Let’s meet for coffee and see if there’s chemistry; yes or no?’ is ‘endless messaging’. Not only is it a clear sign he thinks with his Little Dicktator, but he still doesn’t understand we need to make sure he’s not, at the very least, a serial killer or something before we agree to meet. Where The Game trumps The Rules many times over is in its granular dig-down into the psychology of both ‘targets’ or ‘sets’ (the dehumanizing words for women) as well as the PUAs themselves. Strauss was a writer and interviewer B.S. (Before Style), so he was already experienced in emotional ditch-digging. Why your Grand Vision needs The Game Tom Cruise nailed it. The Game is like The Force; it can be used for good as well as evil. Where I had to respect PUAs was in their single-minded devotion to their cause, however worthy or unjust. It wasn’t always the latter. One badly-dressed Australian wannabe was more interested in finding a wife; others merely sought girlfriends rather than harems. The Game encapsulates the focused devotion to accomplishment that lies at the core of any successful endeavor. Whatever your Grand Vision is, whether it’s seduction or finding a spouse/partner, running your own business, writing a novel or becoming a brain surgeon, it remains a mere fantasy until you up your Game to: Engage in extensive ground-level research; Create a plan with concrete steps to achieve your objective; Practice ‘in the field’ prepared to face many failures and rejection as a rank noob; ABL (Always Be Learning), but also practicing. A common early exit ramp from accomplishment is using ‘research’ as an excuse not to implement. Confidence comes not from your vast body of knowledge but your vast body of experience. Go back to #3 and #4 and don’t skip them this time. You will not succeed without practice, failure, rejection, and improvement. I‘d read about seduction failures who railed angrily that PUA tactics and strategies don’t work and the workshops and seminars were just ripoffs for gullible males. Some most assuredly are, but I wonder how many would-be Casanovas were derailed, rather, by their own inner Terminator. How many didn’t push themselves enough? How many blew past uncomfortable effective advice likely to result in initial levels of female rejection? What if they secretly believed deep down, as so many of us do, that they’re unworthy of achieving their goal? That they’re not good enough, that they’ll never accomplish X, that success is for their betters? The Terminator is a vicious Destroyer of Dreams. It’s Resistance, our inner demon which exists to keep each and every one of us from reaching our full potential, and has waylaid the best of men and women, regardless of their endeavors. Just witness all the insanely talented people who joined the ’27 Club’ or who melt down and publicly destroy their lives when they seemingly had it all: Charlie Sheen, Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, Mel Gibson, and now Kanye West. Why, when they live the cliche ‘have it all’? Inner demons drive them to destroy it. I’m not worthy. Somewhere in the back of some geeky wannabe brains, their own personal Terminator whispers, “Women will never find you attractive. Who do you think you are? Getting laid easily isn’t for you.” Imitation is the sincerest form of lacklustery I also wonder how many would-be Casanovas failed because they were robots. Startup tech culture, which chases and venerates the Next Big Thing, offers a fair warning to those who imitate because they can’t innovate. Strauss wrote about the ‘robots’ who simply tried to replicate what others did, wondering why what worked for one didn’t work for them, or why another’s reply to a common rejection got their own ass kicked instead of laid. They never innovated what worked uniquely for them, just as many entrepreneurs fail because even if their Killer App or Idea is unique, they still have to find their own Magic Sauce for Success. There’s no rote road map or algorithm to your personal success. You can study The Masters all you want: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey and even Gwyneth Paltrow have much to teach everyone, but no one can replicate any one of their successes just by doing what they did. They all lived unique lives, growing up in their own unique circumstances, in their unique time periods, with their unique brains, experiences and insights. You can’t be them, ever. The grand irony of life is the one commonality everyone shares: You are as unique as they are. The Game is nothing more than sales and marketing. The winning tactics and strategies change constantly; what worked last year, or before the pandemic, or even last month doesn’t anymore. Consistent effective sales and marketing is ABE: Always Be Evolving. Imitators might meet with some limited success, but they’ll never be Masters. The Masters are the ones who use road maps to start, but then forge their own unique path. The Game’s greatest takeaway If you want to get some real shit done, you need to quit fucking around. When Strauss decided to stop dabbling and to master the art of seduction, he threw himself all-in. Once fully committed, he immersed himself in learning. He began by shutting himself away for a week and studying ‘seduction theory’, with tapes, books, studying posts in his best friend’s on-line discussion forum, and making a conscious decision to ‘rewire’ himself, learning to become more confident, more graceful, more decisive and ‘the alpha male I was never raised to be’. He read books about women’s sexual fantasies and internalized the realization that women wanted sex as much as men do, but they didn’t want to be treated or made to feel like a slut. He ordered books on marketing, watched a friend’s videos, and threw himself into NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, which teaches that experiential ‘programming’ creates connections between neurological processes, language, and behavioral patterns and can be changed to achieve particular life goals. It’s considered pseudoscience by academia, based on now-outdated brain science understandings, but it’s a key component in the serious PUA knowledge base. Strauss developed his ability to play party and magic tricks as ice-breakers with women, playing on what he calls ‘chick crack’, their eager response ‘to routines involving tests, psychological games, fortune-telling, and cold-reading like addicts respond to free drugs.’ Touché. Then he worked on body language, posture, clothes, and image. When he felt he had enough learning he faced #3: Learning by doing, including the inevitable rejections and failures. Then one day he picked up a super-hot chick he’d have never have had the balls to approach for directions, much less a pre-Style date, and he got it. When he Googled her he discovered he’d just seduced ‘the reigning Playmate of the Year.’ As much as I disliked Strauss, his friends, the how-to he wrote, and Tom Cruise, I find myself in total agreement with the star, who himself had learned some of The Game — which he applied to his life and career rather than seduction — from Scientology. If PUAs took that effort and put it toward something constructive, who knows what they could accomplish? I thought of my own nascent vision of helping women, and eventually others, reclaim their personal power, and wondered what would happen if I committed the same passion and determination as Neil Strauss gave to his own vision. What could any of us accomplish if we learned The Game? It’s nothing more than a tool. What we do with it is entirely up to us. This article first appeared on Medium.

It’s time to stop asking for it nicely. Just seize it, dammit. And stop voting for The Patriarchy. Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash I typed this and paused for the subtitle. The gentle throaty throbbing of pigeons reached my ears and I hurried out to the balcony to chase off any poopmonsters. The morning was early October-cool rather than put-on-a-damn-coat-it’s-November and I stopped to admire the sun rising behind a condo. A red-tailed hawk soared into view a few floors higher than I. With a flurry of wings several pigeons took flight en masse and chased the predator. I’ve observed this behavior many times. Before the daycare in my backyard removed the tall pole on the roof last year, I sometimes watched a hawk perch, ducking as the locals dive-bombed his head. Not just the larger pigeons, his favorite meal, but smaller songbirds too. Creatures one-tenth his size, all working together to eliminate the threat. No one likes a Hell’s Angel in the ‘hood. It seemed the perfect visual metaphor for an article on the pervasive female fear of personal power. There’s strength in numbers. Did you know that, ladies? Er, no you don’t. Pigeons and songbirds are smaller and weaker than a mighty hawk but banded together, they can chase his ass halfway across Ontario. When there’s a threat to another woman, too often we react by telling her to back down because ‘You could get hurt!’ Standing up to a larger and more powerful enemy is something best left to men, it seems. How supremely Patriarchal, mesdames. I’m toying with the idea of calling myself a feminist again, for the second time in twenty-five years. The first time was a couple of years ago, when I decided feminism wasn’t just for whiny victims. I thought it was time to put the power back in empowerment, but it just felt weird. Calling myself a ‘feminist’ still feels embarrassing, even though, as Caitlin Moran puts it, “Do you have a vagina? Do you think you should be in control of it? Then you’re a feminist!” Well, YES. But to say the F-word out loud, as a noun to describe me — it’s still cringe-inducing. I feel like I should add, “But I don’t hate men!” Maybe it’s time to Take Back My Power and reclaim feminism from what too often feels like a bunch of misandrist little girls in grown-up bodies playing dress-up. They’re feminist and empowered when they want to be but run back to the security of victimhood when it’s inconvenient. I struggle with it myself. The relentless North American culture of victimhood encourages us not to reflect too much, not to analyze ourselves, not to question the veracity of our feelings, lest we be led to uncomfortable self-truths we prefer not to acknowledge. The ‘dressup’ mentality is why I don’t do feminist rallies or protest marches and Goddess help me, you will never see me wearing a pink ‘pussy hat’. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the labia to affect a change. I suppose it’s all good for ‘sisterhood’ but if you then go home and vote for a guy like Trump, or don’t vote at all, or don’t pay attention to the people politicians appoint with power over us all, then frankly, you’re not doing shit. It looks good, it sounds good, but how comfortable are any of us, really, in exercising our much-vaunted power? Pigeons get eaten around here but when there’s a predator in the neighborhood they band together and chase the mofo off. Can you imagine a bunch of women at a bar standing up for a woman getting harassed? Forcing the guy to back off with a pack o’ p**sy way scarier than a few hundred thousand women in a park wearing adorable little caps? If pigeons were people, this is what would happen. This is *my* idea of empowerment. Are pigeons too far removed from your DNA to consider them a metaphor for one possible feminist future? Then ponder our much closer cousins, the bonobos, a/k/a ‘pygmy chimpanzees’. They and the chimps diverged from us about two million years ago. Human and chimp females evolved to accept passivity and victimhood from a patriarchal structure of male dominance either formed or formed out of women’s passivity. Bonobo females, on the other hand, evolved to band together against and therefore limit male aggression. Male bonobos are stronger than females, but they’re no match for a girl posse. What a bonobo female wants, she gets. Bonobos are horny little devils and the females do as they please, and whom they please. Their mates have learned to deal. It includes wild les-bonobo action as well as multiple males. Female bonobos are the retro-misogynist male’s very worst nightmare — females in complete control of their sexuality, without a damn thing the boys can do about it. Once in awhile some asshole acts up and tries to push around a female bonobo. It almost never works out well for him. Female bonobos band together like the women in the Pat Benatar video and chase the predator off. They will assault any males with the notion in their silly little heads that they should dominate females and when The Girls bring down a forest antelope guess who eats first? Not the males, that’s for damn sure. (Take note, Indian men!) They throw temper tantrums in the trees while the girls feast first. Scientists assumed that patriarchy was only natural. Bonobos proved them wrong I don’t believe switching from patriarchy to matriarchy is the answer for humans, but I offer these examples of safety in numbers to point out that if women bond together and take a few risks, how much could we move society forward instead of backward? After watching the way the American election went down last week, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. When over 50% of American white women voted for an accused rapist and established sexual predator again, don’t tell me I’m ‘blaming the victim’ to suggest not enough women want violence against women to stop. It will stop when women want it to stop, and legitimating the rule of a sexual predator is a clear signal to The Boys it’s business as usual. This ain’t your bonobo United States. I’ll also point out Trump only suffered a slight decline in support from white men. He received a tad increased support from every other racial demographic, and women overall. They may have voted far more for Biden as a bloc, but we have non-white voters, including women, to thank for the edge-of-your-seat fingernail-biting cliffhanger. How exit polls shifted in 2016 and 2020 So I wonder. It doesn’t say much for women’s sense of personal responsibility. Why are so many women still afraid of personal power? Too many pay lip service and then turn around and vote or work against their own interests. Or re-arrange deck chairs on the Titanic. Guaranteed next week’s big Twitter pile-on will be over some guy referring to a woman’s ‘rack’ or fat-shaming Melissa McCarthy, when the big story for the new decade (virii aside) is Women Who Aid And Abet The Patriarchy. I have a few theories as to why female power-phobia persists, why many women leave power on the table rather than seize the day. It may challenge their identity if they relate more to victimhood than power. Recognizing their complicity in their own oppression could be psychologically damaging and reveal an intolerable possibility: Were they wrong all along? Following a weaker path than they might? Propping up The Patriarchy? If other women take charge and seize their power, taking more risks and progressing more, will the fearful ones be left behind? Watching other women accomplish what they themselves don’t have the courage to reach for could force the reticent to confront the ways they hold themselves back, rather than a male power structure. They may be in denial of how in thrall to ‘The Patriarchy’ they are. When women believe they must keep asking The Patriarchy to stop violence against women, they accept powerlessness and keep it where it’s resided for centuries, with men. Looking for sexism and misogyny in all the wrong places, or making minor annoyances with males into giant kerfuffles, is another example of feminism re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Girlfriend, the new president-elect you couldn’t support because he was sometimes a little handsy with women doesn’t compare to the unqualified woman from a creepy Christian cult now sitting on the Supreme Court thanks to a sexual predator The Sisters keep voting for. Challenging ‘The Patriarchy’ between female ears may prove a far bigger task than challenging toxic masculinity. If they acknowledge they can change, then they’ll beat themselves up over why they didn’t do it sooner. I’m convinced it lies behind a lot of the subconscious female resistance to power. It’s not female-specific. Achieving one’s full potential is one few ever pull off, and recognizing what we’ve done (or not) can send us spiralling into an endless cycle of self-blame and self-abuse. “Why didn’t I do/learn/realize this sooner?” White women have a lot to answer for, but we can’t let off women of color, either. The numbers for women voting for Trump in 2020 should have gone down, rather than up. Maybe conservatives aren’t the only ones with a deep suspicion of qualified candidates. It’s time for some serious soul-searching, girlfriends. What are you really afraid of? Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash This originally appeared on Medium in November 2020.

Roy Den Hollander shows just how utterly silly and irrelevant ‘men’s rights’ has always been. The movement needs a reboot. Graphic by Philip Taylor on Flickr Ladies Night? THAT’S what this moron had a problem with? I visited dead emasculated male Roy Den Hollander’s website to learn more about the so-called ‘men’s rights activist’ who gunned down a Hispanic judge’s husband and son and has been connected to the murder of a fellow MRA. I figured there must be a woman behind this whole thing and sure enough, he was obsessed with his ex-wife who he claims screwed him by marrying him for a green card. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s just his take, which is pretty massive. She claimed he abused her. Maybe that’s true, too. We haven’t heard from Angelina Shipilina, wherever she is. She may be this actress here and/or this model here. Roy Den Hollander was, by all accounts, another MRA raving nutbag, driven by hatred for women before he ever married, rendered all the more dangerous with terminal cancer. He had nothing to lose. Best to go out in a blaze of vainglory, perhaps he supposed, than to waste away in a hospital bed, unloved and unmourned. He’s right about one thing only: We need men’s rights activism. But the movement is so beyond salvaging men need to FDISK and reformat, as us computer geeks said in the olden days. And for fark’s sake, guys, focus on the right issues! His name sounded familiar. I riffled through my library and found Den Hollander profiled in Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men: American Masculinity At The End Of An Era. Kimmel outlined his silly-ass crusades against Ladies’ Nights as well as Columbia University’s women’s studies classes. Den Hollander was the god of unsuccessful lawsuits, interviewed on The Colbert Report. Reading his petty, fatuous complaints about the justice system’s alleged lopsided favor for women’s grievances irritated me because I’d just read earlier that day about genuine, serious, life-and-death ways the justice system does favor women. The book is When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence by Canadian writer and journalist Patricia Pearson. The book’s focus on anthropological, psychiatric and criminological research ‘smashes the matriarchy’, as it were, the notion that women are mostly non-violent and non-aggressive towards men and children. She builds a strong case that infant deaths diagnosed as SIDS may actually be infanticides. Undetected and un-investigated by legal, justice, and medical professionals, they can’t fathom that, apart from so-called ‘outliers’ like Susan Smith, women might murder their own children. She explores female domestic violence against men, destroying the notion that women usually only hit defensively, when in fact they often hit without physical provocation. Clearly the case in the ugly Johnny Depp-Amber Heard divorce. Amber & Johnny: A Violent Tale With No Innocent Victims Female domestic violence also victimizes women, as lesbian relationships, Pearson documents, are no stranger to physical abuse. Women are, literally, getting away with mayhem and murder, and a lawyer like Roy Den Hollander wasted his entire life tilting at windmills when he could have tackled critical inequality and injustice. He could have saved lives. The Men’s Rights movement, which originated in the early ’80s largely as a backlash to feminism, was poisoned from the beginning with hatred for women and male resentment of women’s ‘encroachment’ into their traditional realms. It also contained genuine male grievances: Frustration with a family law system that did and still continues to favor women over men for the same traditionalist reasonings that also can’t conceive of common female violence. As Kimmel points out, the ‘father’s rights’ movement’ points to legitimate discrimination against fathers, but is more about generating rage against women’s control, rather than a sense of responsibility to be a good father. That energy that would best serve gaining better custody, joint custody, or satisfactory visitation rights. Instead it’s funneled into vengeful rage directed at ex-wives. It’s always all about the women. Den Hollander raged against the Violence Against Women Act, coupling them with immigration laws he also didn’t like, alleging “the process can also grant permanent residency to alien husbands of U.S. citizen wives, it is intended, geared toward, and overwhelmingly used by alien wives — aided by private feminist advocacy organizations — against U.S. citizen husbands,” and that “The laws creating the process are bills of attainder meant to punish American men for going overseas to find wives and to deter them from doing so.” No, not too much the vengeful ex-husband. I can’t figure out if he’s for or against marrying foreign women. He raged against Columbia University’s women’s studies programs, alleging feminism was a ‘religion’ and that the program violated Title IX legislation, which states: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. — Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute (20 U.S. Code § 1681 — Sex) (1972) While I’ve a lot of suspicion for ‘women’s studies’ programs myself, and a growing suspicion of ‘race studies’ for indoctrinating students with a chronic victimhood mentality, I wish Den Hollander had sought to protect adults’ and childrens’ physical safety. Even convicted baby killers and female serial killers, Pearson points out, often get lighter sentences from judges and juries, with prior claims of abuse taken into account as partial justification for their violence, when no one accepts similar excuses from male murderers or abusers. I get male anger against feminism. In many ways, it needs a reboot, too. I’ll admit: As much as I publicly proclaim I’m ‘not a feminist’, preferring the label ‘egalitarian’ who stands for equal rights instead, I also admit I’m a non-feminist in name only. Rip my label off and there’s a feminist underneath. Just the kind not afraid of personal power, or female responsibility and accountability. I can support #MeToo, recognizing real tales of abuse and harassment, even as I cringe when Alyssa Milano shows up. I try to understand the psychological dynamics of those on the receiving end of domestic violence, as I explore how victims might take charge of their lives and bodies and make better partner choices. The bennies are, as Louise Sawyer 2.0 points out, Life Is More Fun Because I’m Not A Victim. I can’t imagine anyone beating the snot out of her. And living to tell about it, without his penis dangling from a chain around her neck as an example to the others. Feminism brings unpleasant, uncomfortable conversations to men, making them squirm the way Black Lives Matter grievances makes white people squirm. Women want equality just as people of color do, and their message won’t make male POC happy just as white women shut down on BLM. Feminism requires all males, even fellow victims of Da Man, to confront their own internal misogyny, however deeply buried it might be, even as they challenge us to do the same with our own Inner Racists. The men’s rights set today are the most virulent examples of men who simply refuse to evolve and grow the hell up. What would the world look like if feminists acknowledged some of the men’s-righters’ genuine grievances, and if the men’s righters also engaged in similar genuine soul-searching? What if feminists and men’s righters also talked about what they admired about the other, rather than what’s wrong with them and how they’re running and ruining everything. Identity politics equally divide us, and victim feminists, casting women into the traditional, patriarchal role of helpless, weak, forever damsel-in-distress, fuel the 911-addicted ‘Karens’ of America as ‘anti-feminists’ like Den Hollander fuel the violent fantasies of incels, MGTOWs, and other emasculated-feeling guys who feel like losers in our brave new world. Lurk in a few of their forums, particularly the incels, and you find the same cognitive distortions, emotional neuroses and self-hatred regularly exhibited by women, who think their experience is uniquely female. If we fight with each other, we can’t effectively fight The System. Past Imperfect: Wallowing in Ancient Grievances Serves The Oppressors Feminists, like anti-racists, need to stop driving our (male) allies away with divisive rhetoric casting us as chronically besieged with a list of endlessly pettier grievances about ‘manspreading’ or the alleged sexism of Thomas the Tank Engine, a silly complaint reminiscent of Jerry Falwell’s campaign against a ‘gay’ Teletubby back in the ‘90s. The unpleasant fact is that even nutbags like Roy Den Hollander have some core genuine grievances against feminism. I see the demonization of men because I resist the demonization of white skin in today’s civil rights protests. This is why I support the idea of Men’s Rights Activism, but not MRAs as they stand today. Men, especially those not involved in the various movements, need to FDISK and reformat. Wipe it clean and start over again. Pick new battles, and ones that address real problems, rather than nonsense like ‘Ladies Night.’ If buying overpriced drinks for women is your biggest problem, you are privileged indeed. The focus shouldn’t be on what’s wrong with women, but on how men can be better men, more mature, as willing to accept personal responsibility and accountability as I try to be as a feminist-in-denial. I love the The Good Men Project. Men’s Rights 2.0 can start here. I encourage it. Feminists, we need to do the same. We need to stop blaming men and ‘The Patriarchy’ so much and do a little soul-searching ourselves. If we can point to how the Roy Den Hollanders of the world hold themselves back, we must acknowledge how we do it, too. Take back your power! Those men who haven’t been driven to today’s failed toxic ‘men’s rights’ narrative by entitled male privilege, or man-hating feminists, are our potential allies, and they need language to resist the victim feminist ideology just as white liberals and lefties must resist the divisive and racist language of some on the black left. ‘Men’s rights’ is a forty-year-old mess but with a real place in the world. Time for a new label, a new membership, and a new vocabulary for men who are in favor of equal rights as long as female oppression comes with certain recognition: Women must take some responsibility for our own lives, safety and decisions, and at some point the oppression we experience stops with the man on the street and picks up with the woman in the mirror. It’s a joint effort, folks. If you liked this article you might also enjoy these: Mama Didn’t Raise No Victim Feminist Men, We Need You To Tell Your Truths Too How Can Men Tell Their Stories & Challenge Toxic Feminism? This originally appeared on Medium in July 2020.