The foxy fauxminist has gone missing in recent years. No movies. No fauxminist outbursts. Not even any trans love tweeted. I investigated. And then she trended. I got to wondering what happened to British actress Emma Watson with the new explosion of JK Rowling hate after the Harry Potter author gave a giant middle finger to the Scottish government by daring them to arrest her for properly gendering cross-dressing men, and especially fake-ass rapists. A new Scottish ‘hate crime’ law gives men carte blanche to hate on, threaten, and abuse women while threatening with imprisonment any woman who fights back or protests. Or calls a man a man. It doesn’t mention any repercussions for trans-misogyny against real women. Carry on, boys. Fake or real. It’s kind of reminiscent of that Pakistani law that jails women for adultery if they report a rape to the police. Women should be fucked and not heard. As always, when the transmisogyny hit Rowling full steam, Ms. Fauxminist had fuck all to say about it. But then I got to thinking: Watson’s had fuck all to say about anything, recently, and is she still even making movies? The last one I saw was Beauty and the Beast. So I checked her out on X. She’s there, but she doesn’t tweet much and when she does, it’s about her family’s hooch business. They run a French Chablis winery and Watson has debuted her own Chablis-flavored gin, Renais. That got my attention! I like wine! I like gin! I like anything that distracts her from defending misogynist cross-dressers! I have never seen Renais gin where I buy good hooch, probably because I live in Canada rather than the U.K. But I would totally try it. It’s gotta be better than ‘Success Distilled’ Trump Vodka, which folded after six years because apparently it was, like many other Trump brands, distilled with less success than advertised. I never tried it, or even heard of it until recently. I imagine it tasted like failure and criminal tears. I remembered that Watson had been appointed, in 2014, as the UN Women Ambassador. Was she still in that role? I couldn’t find much about it. The UN posted something in March sounding like she still was, but didn’t mention any recent work. She worked quietly on a few non-UN feminist projects just before the pandemic, but after that she goes silent in the media. If there’s one thing Emmy-poo isn’t tweeting or talking about much anymore, it seems, it’s feminism. Which is a good thing, since she abandoned it several years ago to become a men’s rights activist for clever fetishists. Her last personally embarrassing scandal was in 2017 when she declared women shouldn’t sexualize themselves right around the time a Vanity photo emerged of her with her naked but (almost) nipple-obstructed breasts. It was a silly dust-up, fairly anemic potatoes in a world where transactivist cross-dressers sexualize and fetishize women and threaten to physically shut the fucking mouth of any ‘TERF’ who dares to challenge them. And they can get away with it now in Scotland. And next, as I fear, in Canada. Watson has fuck all to say about her fauxminist support for her pseudoscientific ‘Transwomen are women’ nonsense, too. And then, hours after I scheduled this article for publication, Emma Watson was trending on X. Why isn’t she speaking out on feminist issues anymore? The trans-misogyny was at full-blown OJ-New-Year’s-Eve level. That Rowling bitch was standing up for women’s rights again. Emma Watson trended, not Daniel Radcliffe, I assume because of her public fauxminism. I watched, waiting to see if she would respond. So far, she hasn’t. Nadda word. One must wonder why. Watson used to be such a promising feminist. I always loved her as mouthy, assertive Hermione Grainger, but when she first became a global face of feminism— real feminism, not the trans-pandering she turned to a few years later—I loved how she condemned feminist ‘man-hating’. “Thank you! Thank for saying that!” I said, because I was sick of the misandry too. Social and political movements always have their haters , and unless there’s someone exercising some sort of messaging control, the movement gets quickly hijacked by extremists, as happened to feminism somewhere in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. At least the early ‘90s is when I stopped identifying as a ‘feminist’ and began calling myself a ‘humanist’, sort of an ‘All sexes matter’. It was just too embarrassing to associate myself with those women . Then Watson got woke, checked her brain at the door and began catering, witlessly, to the Holy Sacred Boner that lurks underneath transactivist dresses. She lost me. I still love the actress, but couldn’t stand the person. The thing that really aggravated me about her was that if she’s going to call herself a feminist, if she’s going to purport to speak for so many of us, if not all, she needs to address the biggest threat to women today: Trans-identified males so far doing a very good job of rolling women’s rights back. To zero. Frankly, they’re frighteningly more effective than the far right. Allow me to digress for a moment: Trump scares me less than the Transmafia. His biggest crime against women—and it’s a big one—is appointing three conservative Supreme Court Justices who finally gave the right’s misogynists their wank dream. Otherwise, he’s accused but never convicted of rape, of unsuccessfully paying off a porn star to shut up about an affair, and of confessed but consensual pussy-grabbing. He has not, to my knowledge, for all his famously offensive and often misogynist tweets, ever sent out anything like the following: But check it out: He’s against trans-identified men in women’s private changing rooms, bathrooms, and sports teams. And I ask semi-seriously: How much will the Zoomers need abortions anyway? Progressives have been sterilizing them for ten years with ‘transitioning’, and now they’re sterilizing themselves with tubal ligations and vasectomies because they don’t ever want to be faced with enforced pregnancy. Donald Trump is an utter failure with women in just about any way you can think of, including two failed marriages, relentless philandering, daughter-lusting, and I’m not blowing off the rape accusations, especially E. Jean Carroll’s . I suspect he’s got plenty of ugly misogynist policy up his sleeve which only the traddiest wives would approve of if he wins, and I won’t vote for him, but I won’t be voting for Biden either. In the Bizarro States of America, Donald Trump is the more feminist candidate. It seems pretty obvious why Watson wouldn’t want to change her tune and stand up for women like Rowling under attack. It would mean professional death. The Transmafia would silence her in a heartbeat. They could and would destroy her career. She doesn’t dare, and I am sympathetic to, her desire to preserve her career and not be subjected to far more credible threats to her life that already come packaged with fame, beauty, talent, and a prominent role as a women’s rights advocate. She received frightening threats after her famous UN speech. And that was when she was asking for something reasonable. My Emma hate comes from her horrendous hypocrisy: Feigning feminism while refusing to call out the Western misogynist backlash led by men who get stiffies in dresses. Watson was in a bad place: Speaking out against misogyny, but only when it didn’t offend the entitled who could afford the luxury of alternative pronouns. And so, I hope and pray, she may finally have realized she had become the very worst sort of hypocrite. Maybe defending her boobies are as feminist as she cares to get. It’s lowball. It’s safe. It’s old-school. Second wave feminists, who are more inclined to go after her newer fauxminism, can at least get on board with her sexualization-is-bad message. It was one of the first memos sent out during the ‘Women’s Libber’ era. “My eyes are up here!” I don’t think you can be a successful careerist and speak out on real feminist issues unless you’re ridiculously wealthy, like Rowling, or are ready to retire, which is what you’ll do as soon as your first pro-women tweet includes the #TranswomenAreMen hashtag. I’m speculating, of course, because I can’t ask Watson myself and because she’s keeping mum about transgender rights. And JK Rowling’s latest shot. I’d thought maybe I’m missed something since I don’t live in the U.K. or follow celebrity news, but I don’t think I have. I’m okay with her not speaking out against transactivism if she shuts up about feminism overall. It’s a matched set. Speak out against the most critical issue facing women’s rights, or clap that pretty little trap shut. Maybe she finally had a come-to-Jesus moment. Just how feminist am I, anyway? And how much did she value her career? I wonder (hope!) that’s she’s taken a cue from her mentor and realized that money is power , the very definition of ‘power feminist’ in Naomi Wolf’s classic Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century. Power, and wealth privilege, can be used for good as well as evil, as Wolf points out. That’s where salvation lies for women. Hey, it’s always worked for men! The future of feminism What’s Emma up to when she’s no longer mouthing platitudes directed by her (perhaps former) transactivist masters? When I first Googled her name and ‘2024’, I found she was doing a lot of modeling work. She’s also engaging in some quiet feminist personal empowerment that makes Grow Some Labia smile and wonder whether perhaps we might welcome her back to the feminist fold one day. Watson hasn’t made a movie since 2019 (Greta Gerwig’s Little Women ) because she became uncomfortable with not having any say, power, or control about the projects she was in. She felt ‘caged’. She took what she claims is a break from acting and intends to return to it eventually. In the meantime, she’s done a perfume commercial for Prada and directs her own projects. I found one quote which suggests she began experiencing cognitive dissonance over what she was promoting and what she believed in. She doesn’t offer an example of what made her feel inauthentic, but she told Variety magazine she took ‘flak’ from journalists as she promoted this or that who asked, “How does this align with your viewpoint?” She didn’t like having no say in the process that created something she now had to promote. “I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a say. And I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better.’” I don’t know if she was challenged on, or thinks about now, her past public genderwoo. The questions were directed toward her projects. But if her answers were making her ‘hate herself’, did she also question whether, as she famously alleged on then-Twitter, that “Transwomen are women”? She’s directing. She’s producing. She’s fixing what she complained about years ago: The lack of female directors and producers in the movies. Well done, Ms. Watson! She’s also taking creative writing classes, as of the fall of 2023. She’s taking charge of her life and producing things on her own, including her own brand of gin. She’s become an entrepreneur. I like lady entrepreneurs. My niece is thinking of becoming one. Don’t depend on Da Man (or Da Woman), be the mistress of your own fate! She’s still promoting liberal, progressive causes. Emma Watson is still alive. Her feminist evolution appears to be more self-directed now, as she reclaims her power, or perhaps truly seizes it for the first time. I dislike her less than I did when I wrote an angry polemic about her abrogation of feminism in the face of a clear and distinct Woke War On Women. She’s doing now what I advocate for her: Shutting up about feminism, if she can’t defend trans-misogynists anymore, and especially if she’s figured out that human sex is biologically immutable. I’ll wait to see what she does or says next. In the meantime, Ms. Watson, we’re working on the current feminist challenge: The right to be a public, challenging feminist without rape and death threats or career suicide. You’re welcome. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

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

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

Don't BE The Victim Take back your power and get off (or avoid) what relationship counselor, TED talker and author Dina McMillan calls 'the hamster wheel' of abusive relationships. Recognize you now have choices, and resolve to make more informed ones. If more women stood up to toxic masculinity and refused them entry into their lives, or booted them out early, abusive men would be forced to shape up or jack off. Every abuser an incel! Dina McMillan's book "But He Says He Loves Me: How to Avoid Being Trapped in a Manipulative Relationship" offers rock-solid advice on how abusive men think and strategize, and how to avoid them. If you read no other book your entire life on abuse and men, read THIS one. McMillan claims she can teach women and young girls to avoid a lifetime of abuse in two hours, and she's not kidding. Dina McMillan's Book Review How To Not Get Abused It really is a lot simpler than most women think. Don't allow these guys into your life in the first place. Don't let them back. The first time he hits you must be the last. Click here to see my advice and education think pieces. May 21 Bitch: When I Was The Abuser (Part II) It takes two for an abusive relationship. Because an abuser can't abuse a person who isn't there. This is Part II. Bitch: When I Was The... May 18 Bitch: When I Was The Abuser (Part I) When I say, 'Don't LET anyone treat you like that,' or 'Don't BE the victim,' I speak from personal experience. As a temporary ex-abuser.... May 8 "Don't Be Like Me"--One Man's Escape From Abuse (Guest Post by Jim McCoy) Acceptance of reality means understanding you were abused. It can happen to men too. It's not funny or cute. And God help us all, it is... Apr 29 What Both Women & Men Can Learn From The Sordid Andrew Huberman Affair(s) He was good at playing women, but he offers further lessons on red flag recognition, as well as a helpful lesson for single men who don't... Apr 13 Some Rape Victims Emerge Stronger, Not Permanently Debilitated There, rape activists. We said it. Some decide NOT to let this ugly event define them. Too bad feminist theory teaches women little of... Apr 6 How I Grew a Pair (Of Labia) And Left An Abusive Marriage: Guest Post Part I Persephone Phoenix shares how women need to follow their own hero cycle. 'You go through hell and you triumph in the end. No one will... How To Not Get Abused BOOKS I RECOMMEND FOR Avoiding Abusive Relationships I've found five stellar resources to help women identify their psychological weaknesses and inoculate themselves against the sort of toxic man who manipulates and abuses, but also to better understand men and thereby become better partners themselves. After all, she may be no walk in the park either. Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair This is the antidote to Generation Snowflake and everything 'woke'! Schulman dives into the modern-day confliation of conflict or disagreement with abuse and explores the way misstating conflict and overstating harm hurts the individuals involved and further divides the society. Read this before you venture onto Facebook or Twitter! More Info Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men A male therapist who works with couples in abusive marriages details the roots and core of entrenched male misogyny and exactly how these men's minds work. Read this and you'll have a far more informed understanding of how you're not likely to ever change him, and how these manipulators can fool even trained psychologists and therapists to believe they've changed when they haven't. I can't recommend this book enough to women in abusive relationships or who want to avoid them. More Info The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society Of Pickup Artists - Neil Strauss (My Review) The best psychological analysis of the female mind and its many weaknesses was written, believe it or not, by a former Pickup Artist. The short bald average-looking author became a pickup artists of southern California's hottest women and details the secrets of his success--not to brag but to show women how easy they are to 'play'. Controversial when it was published in 2004, feminists condemned it for the PUAs' poor treatment of women, but Strauss came to regret his life and shows us the uglier aspects from the men's side too--including a friend who suffered an emotional breakdown and men unprepared for adult, functional relationships once they outgrew the desire to sleep around. There are no better experts in exploiting women's psychology for their advantage than the men in this book, and it's inadvertantly a handbook for women to avoid manipulative sexual predators. Strauss has since given up the PUA lifestyle and is married with children. More Info What Was He Thinking?: The Woman's Guide to a Man's Mind Another great book on how men's mind's work, but in general, not from an abuse standpoint. Sometimes bad relationships happen because the woman is dysfunctional too, or simply doesn't understand that while men's minds work differently, that doesn't necessarily mean wrongly or manipulatively. We just don't process information the same way, and this book teaches women what's good about men's minds. Bechtle is a Christian writer and doctor but I only learned that many years later. You can't tell from this book. More Info Emotional Intelligence 2.0 This is a book for all of us! Did you know only 15% of us are actually emotionally intelligent? Oh, don't look so smug, almost everyone overestimates how EI they actually are! It's also a bit of a workbook too. More Info Substack Subscribe to my FREE SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER for all my latest on power feminism, reclaiming your power, and the ongoing culture wars. Visit Substack >> Subscribe to my FREE SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER

DROP ME A LINE Contact Me Questions, comments, offers to write for your blog or website, or blistering, computer-melting flames may all be sent here! ​Toronto, Ontario​​ ​ growsomelabia@gmail.com First Name Last Name Email Your message Send Thanks for submitting! Substack Subscribe to my FREE SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER for all my latest on power feminism, reclaiming your power, and the ongoing culture wars. Visit Substack >> Subscribe to my FREE SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER

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