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

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

Too many preach misogyny and teach victimhood. Tolerance for religious toxicity ENDS NOW. Image by Pilar Molina from Pixabay A sexually twisted white Atlanta churchgoer murdered Asian employees at spas targeted repeatedly by police for prostitution stings. The accused, claiming to have a sex addiction, frequented two of the places before his deadly attack. Racism may well have played a role, but largely overlooked is the Christian evangelical obsession with unauthorized sexual pleasure. It’s about the worst sin anyone can commit, and the one evangelicals struggle with the most. The shooter was a Baptist , a notoriously misogynist and sexually repressed religious ‘brand’, and himself a member of a particular church so lacking in Christian compassion they’ve expelled him. Because nothing says ‘Christian’ like hating the sinner, right? Which bothers them more? That he killed alleged prostitutes, or that he may have fornicated with some of them? Women: Can’t live with ’em, but you can kill ‘em. Especially if you can’t keep your dick out of them. After all, it’s our fault for tempting them with our faces and bodies. Men have been passing the buck to women since Adam blamed Eve. Why do we tolerate these toxic human constructs? If we condemn what incels and men’s-righters spew in their frustrated forums, why do we fall silent and look the other way when some guy in a collar or a funny cap spews similar dehumanizing nonsense against women? It’s not just certain Christian faiths. Many other religions could do with less tolerance from us unwashed, heathen, apostate and feminist masses. Especially from us Jezebels, Rahabs, Liliths and Magdalenes. If we’re serious about wanting to end patriarchy’s female abuse and victimization, we’ve got to woman up and call out the source: Patriarchy’s religions. And now we name names. Growing up spiritual…and rational I’ve written much about women’s empowerment, encouraging us to claim our power, take it back, not give it away in the first place. I encourage women to be more, stand up more, speak out more, no matter what they say about or to us. It’s hard; I know. Me too. I took an online assertiveness class last fall even though I’m no shrinking violet. I give away my power too, for a multiplicity of reasons. Fortunately, I can’t blame childhood toxic religious indoctrination. I might have suffered the horror of a repressed, misogynist Catholic upbringing but my future Pépé left the Church in nineteenth-century France after witnessing ‘things’ as an altarboy. You can guess. Dad and his siblings grew up non-religious. When he married my mother, they agreed she could raise the children Lutheran but not to look down on or judge Dad for not going to church. So, my mainstream religious upbringing was boring, in fine staid German Lutheran tradition, but it didn’t teach me to ‘know my proper place’ and prime me for abuse . After the last four years of Trumpy hell and his fake Christian supporters, it’s time to cap tolerance for toxic faith-based constructs. Everyone has a right to their beliefs, but we needn’t tolerate those which denigrate and degrade our tribe and others’. The problem with bad ideas is they spread and mutate, like a killer virus. Creative Commons 2.0 image by Mark Dixon on Wikimedia Commons Politics and religion: Where anti-intellectualism meets and metastasizes Unchallenged religious anti-intellectualism has allowed secular agenda-oriented groups to adopt, consciously or not, the Christian evangelical framework . QAnon’s complex crazy-sounding Satanism and pedophilia conspiracy theories borrow older evangelical hysterics about alleged networks of child-abusing Satanists in late 20th-century America. The mental framework remains the same: Apocalyptic thinking, for predicting the ‘end times’ seeded by ‘drops’ (‘Q’s’ anonymous posts) for the faithful with clues. Secular believers can ‘connect the dots’ the way evangelicals have long combed the Bible looking for prophecies connected to current events. ‘Q’ is presumed to be closer to The Truth, like a religious leader, and followers must put their faith in him (it must be a him). The human mind finds patterns anywhere, from clouds and sacred grilled cheese sandwiches to pizza pedophiles. Anti-intellectual religion trains human brains to ignore facts and the evidence, or lack thereof, of their own lying eyes. How hard is it, then, to train these primed gullibles to believe increasingly outrageous, unverifiable ‘data’? Similarities to the Christian evangelical model have been observed by others in the current antiracism movement. Black intellectual John McWhorter finds a religious element in some corners of ‘Third Wave’ civil rights. It includes ‘original sin’ (white skin = white supremacy), a hazy futuristic ‘Judgment Day’ (‘Coming to terms about race’), ‘witch hunts’ against ‘heretics’, and excommunication thereof (‘Cancel culture’), including the medieval vicious mob and no court of appeal nor any forgiveness for sincere repentance. Not to mention religion’s most cherished requirement: Suspension of disbelief. Or as the Queen of Hearts said to Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” McWhorter lists ten impossible, or at least highly contradictory things one is required to believe in some quarters of antiracism. Not unlike a certain highly contradictory holy book. One finds almost exactly McWhorter’s same list in critical gender theory feminism, beginning with penile ‘original sin’. The bad ideas in traditionalist religions spawned a new bad idea — QAnon — and infected two good ideas — antiracism and feminism. Now some activists sound every bit as bigoted as the racial and gender bigots they claim to fight. Not exactly conducive to encouraging allyship. Is it any surprise, then, that Americans of all faiths, secular or not, find it increasingly difficult to differentiate between fantasy and reality, especially when the fantasy serves their own interests? Gender and politics Religion’s greatest crime against women has been to lay down the foundations of ‘patriarchy’ by enshrining men’s rights, wants, and needs as primary, with women to serve as the implementers based on their lordly commands — a useful mentality extended to other slaves too. The Agricultural Revolution birthed income inequality, social hierarchy and slavery, but religion ensured its unquestioned acceptance and dominance because ‘God(s) decreed it, we believe it, and heretics will be dealt with accordingly and painfully lest they cause the slaves to question their leaders too much. Especially our wives.’ How and why women came to be so dominated by men is a matter of debate but our brains are primed for it and we may never resolve the question, Were we this submissive 12,000 years ago or did we de/evolve that way because of the new hierarchies? Here we are, twelve millennia later, raised in spiritual and religious belief systems still designed by men, for men, to suit men. Photo by Chester Ho on Unsplash Unquestioned religious constructs and an overcompensating modern desire to honor freedom of belief after a history of horrible cruelties inflicted on those who didn’t share official opinion preserves a dangerous ability to conflate and mistake belief for reality. We need to demand more adherence to reality than religious constructs in our political candidates. Sixty years ago it was considered ‘anti-Catholic’ to question whether presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s primary loyalty would be to his country or his Pope. I want to know a wannabe’s religion, if any. Is s/he a member of a progressive, liberal-minded faith (a ‘heretic’ even) or do they adhere to a more traditionalist brand? Does the Christian or Jewish candidate still hew to archaic Biblical beliefs about a woman’s place ‘in the home’? How seriously do they take rape, domestic violence and sexual assault, and, given the level of rabid anti-intellectualism among ‘Christian’ Republicans, do they actually understand female physiology, and do they agree she has agency over whatever that thing is she’s living in? Does the Muslim candidate respect women’s equality, both within their family and without? Some women from ‘progressive’ Muslim families claim women’s equality often stops at their front door. Muslim candidates get extra scrutiny from me because of the religion’s traditional hostility to women’s rights, however uncharacteristically female-positive The Prophet was (and he was) for his time. What does the Mormon candidate think about women’s rights? About child marriage? Is s/he willing to go after their fundamentalist brethren in their cult-y compounds and rescue illegal brides from child rapists ? Speaking of child rapists, the Pope and the Catholic Church’s influence have waned mightily, but I demand to know: Does the Catholic candidate support a woman’s right to choose abortion? Are they against domestic violence, and are they willing to support stronger laws against abusers? How much are they willing to fight child abuse, particularly their own you-know-whos? And what do any of them think about gay rights? Homophobia, juiced by ancient holy texts from old men living in deserts, is closely linked to misogyny. Ergo, a homophobic candidate will likely fear women and equality. Photo by Steve Damron on Flickr Leash your dogma It’s no wonder the world is drowning in secular conspiracy theories and fantasy-based belief systems, considering their enshrined, sacred roots in traditional religions. Who are we to preach science to a QAnon cultist that flu vaccines don’t increase your risk of getting COVID-19, if we believe a religious founder made water flow from his hands or another turned water into wine ? How can we argue there’s no ‘plandemic’ when we believe a dying child is somehow ‘God’s plan’? The ‘plandemic’ virologist has been thoroughly discredited by responsible adults, but too many, and especially many Americans, lack critical thinking skills and don’t understand the importance of checking one’s sources, comparing them for factualism and bias. Media Bias Fact Check Snopes The age-old problem for women is unquestioned, unchallenged male-created religious belief systems, attributed to deities no one can see but others are entirely certain are there, teaching women to be and remain submissive to authority and to keep their pretty little mouths shut when that (male) authority abuses their body or mind. Legion are the tales of women escaping abusive religious systems, who then speak out about what happened and why. We need to critically and publicly dissect the toxic fact-free religious beliefs training them — and us — to be patriarchal tools from birth. It’s time to put toxic masculinist religion back in its place. Religion belongs at home and in their holy places, and it needs to respect human rights. Enforced if required. Questions for challenging religious women today Does your religious organization allow female leaders? Are there female elders? How supportive are your members for women escaping domestic abuse? Do they blame the woman rather than the childishly impulsive man? Are victims told to go back and tolerate it for some damn reason? God says no divorce, this is God’s test for you, you need to submit to your husband and be a better wife and mother? What’s your response for the male abuser in your religious body? Does anyone have a hard discussion or several about the importance of applying the Golden Rule to one’s partner? What if the accused is your clergyman? Does your religion insist on sexual purity for women but wink and look the other way for men? Do they fetishize female virginity? Was your husband a virgin when he married you? Does your religion mandate the mutilation of female genitals to prevent future enjoyment of sex and/or to keep a girl ‘pure’ until her wedding day? Is your religious tribe unnaturally preoccupied with women’s bodies and dictate what she must wear with special micromanagement for a woman’s most ‘problematic’ body parts? Are women’s presence or behavior curtailed because it might give men unholy thoughts or ‘ideas’? Is there a tacit ‘understanding’ men are little boys who can’t control their thoughts and actions? Have they sanctified old men’s lust for teenage or pre-teenage brides? Do they have ugly words for women who act sexually like men? Women must stop tolerating toxic, patriarchal masculinity masquerading as some god’s word. Even Buddhism is less misogyny-free than advertised. If the women within can’t or won’t do anything to stop it, it’s our job as heretics, apostates, and freethinkers to publicly condemn women who defend religiously sanctioned misogyny and unequal treatment and to pressure not just religious leaders, but also the faithful themselves. Pressuring Catholic followers to do something about their priests hobbled the Church’s influence. The Believers always hold the real power : To diminish the flock by leaving and even worse, taking their money with them. Lawyers are expensive, you know. And a leader without followers is just some asshole shouting into the wind. Time to call the believers to account I believe, still, in religion, spirituality and ‘faith’. We all have faith in something . You know where I have a LOT of faith? Quantum physics. I don’t understand that shit. I trust the physicists who say they can’t prove what they theorize, but everyone agrees the math supports it. And you know what, Pastor, Rabbi, or Imam, if you want to waggle your finger at me and laugh like a banshee because I naively believe physics leaders on their bugshit crazy theories like quantum entanglement — I don’t blame you. Quantum entanglement is some seriously fucked up shit. Look, I understand why saviours born of virgins and burning bushes and talking snakes are more appealing. Frankly, they make more sense than this. A call to action for more female-friendly religions Facts must come first. We shall know them by their verifiable evidence. Here’s what we need to make religion safe for women again: ‘My god’ or ‘my holy book says so’ can no longer be an acceptable reason for religious bigotry against women. If we can all agree holy books were wrong about the acceptability of human slavery, we can agree they’re wrong about women’s rights, too. Abuses against women and children in religious compounds and groups must be taken seriously by authorities. No looking the other way for fear of being called a religious bigot. Freedom of religion does NOT include physical, mental, emotional, or sexual abuse of adults or children. End tax breaks for religious organizations. Or, they MUST adhere to secular equality laws for tax breaks. A return to and healthy respect for secularism and logical thinking overall. Various gods’ opinions are irrelevant. DON’T VOTE FOR PATRIARCHY. Every woman, regardless of color, who voted for Donald Trump or other candidates with previously established sexual misconduct allegations against them or anti-women policy support needs to be challenged, and now. Intolerance for misogynist politicians starts with their female lapdogs. More women in STEM, fewer in religious study. Photo by Chester Ho on Unsplash The hell with the ‘offense’ to the faithful. If we can call out Donald Trump and Congressional misogynists, we can call out the toxic culprits in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Shintoism, Hinduism and Sikkhism , not to mention weirdo cults like NXIVM . There’s nothing wrong with religion, religious belief, or even in believing six impossible things before breakfast. But religion should make the world a better place — for everybody . If others have to suffer, it’s useless. Creative Commons 3 — CC BY-SA 3.0 by Nick Youngson This first appeared on Medium in April 2021

How much better would Twitter be without the Toxic Left? Scenes from next week: Twitter prepares to punish J.K. Rowling for tweeting ‘Women suckle babies with their breasts’. Photo by Den on Unsplash If you’re even a little active on Twitter, the sudden toxicity drop last year after the platform removed right-wing QAnon-connected accounts following the Trump-fuelled terrorist attack on Washington was nothing short of breathtaking. One day, you saw the usual trending hashtags from trolls, cyberbullies, and bots from both ideological sides: #TrumpIsNotWell #TrumpSavesAmerica #TrumpForever #TrumpTrainWreck #Trump2020 #DestroyTrump #TrumpsMyBabyDaddy. (Okay I made that last one up. Ha ha! No one has sex with Donald Trump anymore!) The next day, you clicked your Twitter button, and trending topics spanned the sublime to the ridiculous: The latest news on the pandemic and public vaccines progress; politics involving people not named Trump; the never-ending British Royals; vacuous celebrity gossip; some musician’s or band’s latest album or video. And of course, who’s getting cancelled for petty stupid crap, blown out of proportion mostly by younger generations riddled with depression, stress, anxiety, and dim prospects for their future; and that was before the pandemic. Now they’re forced to stay home, with even more time to take out their hostilities on anyone and anything. With real villains like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Derek Chauvin, and Jake Angeli in jail, and Donald Trump cowering in Mar-A-Lago, Generation Self-Esteem consoles itself for its unfortunate unspecial averageness by attacking others over perceived slights and insults, desperately seeking a holier-than-thou narcissism supply fix. As Rowan Atkinson famously described cancel culture, it’s a ‘medieval mob looking for someone to burn.’ After enduring years of criticism for allowing too much fake news, conspiracy theories, disinformation and extremist views, not to mention having enabled the 2016 election to swing to a narcissistic manchild with troubling signs of dementia, social media responded by banning the right’s Great Orange God. Or now, officially, their Golden God. Moses is about to lose his shit all over again. Photo screenshotted from video by News 360 TV on Wikimedia Commons , Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Twitter banned over 70,000 QAnon-connected accounts, and the next morning, you could almost hear the birds singing and feel the sun shining down on Twitter. Almost. Then Gina Carano and Chris Harrison got ‘cancelled’ for saying things that upset unemployed children. The grand irony about Carano is she got cancelled for making a ridiculous overblown comparison, of Republicans to Jews in Nazi Germany, by people who committed the same error, with an overblown comparison to Nazis, leaving actual Nazis to wonder, “Which side is ours?” Harrison’s unforgivable crime? To defend someone whose old photos of her attending an Antebellum South party surfaced. In the court of self-righteous, ‘social justice’ warriors’ opinion, the fifty shades of grey harm don’t exist. It’s Pass/Fail, and the punishment for failure is career and reputation execution. For those of us in the Murky Middle, the Toxic Left reminds us that with the worst of the Orange God’s cult banished to the underground, now they were Masters of the Twitterverse. Twitter makes me feel like a pre-9/11 Afghan caught between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. No matter who’s in charge, it’s going not going to be good. The good, the bad and the ugly of cancel culture Cancel culture isn’t all evil. It plays an important role — sometimes — in addressing important grievances like sexual assault and racism. When people are guilty of genuine crimes or put others’ lives in danger, like ‘Karens’ with itchy 911 fingers, cancel culture serves the public interest by removing dangerous people from the public sphere and giving them something else to worry about than black birdwatchers. Digging up someone’s hidden past is fair game for the same reasons, like with now-notorious celebrity sexual predators. Not so much for ancient grievances not quite on the same level as Bill Cosby. Like going to an Antebellum South party fifteen minutes before white people got ‘woke’ about slavery or being an un-woke mid-twentieth-century movie star like John Wayne. Wayne was a product of his time; we all are. Many of us will find our views, values, and practices quite ‘unwoke’ for 2071. As for minor grievances like antebellum parties or blackface, sure, they’re offensive and we can call them out but no one needs to lose their job over it. Not even if they do it today. Not everyone who offends the Toxic Left gets ‘cancelled’. They may get called out and shamed a bit but still keep their job and career. Sometimes, even, public shaming reveals ‘good to know’ information. Like Armie Hammer’s violent and cannibalistic sexual fantasies. He hasn’t, to anyone’s knowledge, committed any actual crimes but it’s valuable for women to know this about a guy if the information’s available. Not many of us mortals are likely to get asked out by Hammer, but if I was a female celebrity with a brain and concern for my personal safety, I’d want to know. Female celebrities don’t always draw warnings from important celebrity public service announcements, but whatever. Ya makes yer choices. When does cancel culture cross the line? Is cancel culture censorship? Was banning QAnon-addled Trumpers associated with the January 6th terrorist attack censorship? I won’t address that debate here. Mostly because the Trump era pushed my lifelong support for the First Amendment to acknowledging we may need more limits on free speech than public safety and treason. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but part of why I waver is this: Twitter is more delightfully boring than before the terrorist attack. It’s less triggering to check in without 70,000 deplorable ‘conservatives’ and their bots pushing the most execrable views on the rest of us in a forum without the filters and controls of Facebook and Instagram. Now, I find myself wishing, if only we could get rid of the thousands of deplorable ‘progressives’ and their bots looking for ever-stupider excuses to destroy other peoples’ lives over hyper-exaggerated harms. Today, all you have to do is be seen at an anti-Black Lives Matter protest listening , not participating, to lose your job. Sorry, but if it’s lawful and legal to stage a protest, however unpopular, you shouldn’t lose your job for attending. Forbes Magazine: Cancel Culture Is Only Getting Worse Imagine if those professors lost their jobs for ‘being seen’ at a pro-choice rally by students from their conservative Christian school. Which would the über-lefty torches ’n’ pitchforks set cancel? The onlookers or their school? Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported image from Topher Harless Let’s remember: You can still voice unpopular opinions on Twitter. Trump’s fanboys and fangirls are still there, tweeting hateful comments and opinions, but that’s perfectly fair when the Toxic Left’s misogynist deplorables call J.K. Rowling a ‘transphobic cunt’ for daring to stand for women’s rights. If destroying lives and property during a physical terrorist attack is good enough reason to ‘censor’ someone, then maybe it’s okay to do the same for those who would destroy lives and careers for middling reasons. Us Murky Middlers are as tired of the Toxic Left’s moral Purity Police as we are of the sexually-repressed Christian Right’s crusades against female orgasms. Where do we set cancel culture’s limits? How about ‘truth’ over ‘opinions’? After the last four years and its inevitable conclusion at the Capitol, it’s become clear to rational minds that we need to return to ancient standards of journalism, factualism and truth-telling. (You know, like, the 1960s and ‘70s). Nearly 600,000 Americans have died in the past fourteen months because a dangerously incompetent ‘President’ daily tweeted lies, dis/misinformation, conspiracy theories, and insanely credulous faith in medical quackery while discrediting genuine experts with real science to distract from the fact that he had no idea what to do in the middle of a global public health crisis, nor did he care. Not only is the Orange God responsible for this travesty of compassion, but so are every single supporter and voter, including the ones with ‘voter’s remorse.’ Cancel culture’s limits should be at how factual something is (Harvey Weinstein is a dangerous sexual predator) versus opinions (JK Rowling is a horrible person even though her claims about gender are supported with research and hard science). We need to hold mainstream journalists, bloggers, social media and its users to a higher standard of factualism and truth-telling. And not just for the Right. Can Twitter cancel toxic cancel culture? Genuine social justice is still alive in cancel culture; it’s not all cyberbullies and morally narcissistic trolls, the online equivalent of losers walking into a bar spoiling for a fight. Twitter temporarily suspends problematic accounts and labels or removes false or misleading information about COVID-19 or the 2020 election. It implements ‘hash technology’ to remove content like child porn, ISIS recruitment, and white nationalist propaganda. It’s outright banned notorious personalities like Alex Jones, Trump fanboys Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself before he left the White House, but after the terrorist attack. And of course, QAnon is now QA-Gone. What can Twitter do to remove cancel culture cancer without killing the body politic? There needs to be a greater public will for starters. Twitter’s policy on hate speech is this: You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories. Shouldn’t trying to get someone fired or their contract cancelled fall under the ‘direct attack’ proviso? It’s a fuzzy area, but the last four years have illustrated we may need to implement more controls on ‘free speech’ than we’re used to. After all, the Founding Fathers couldn’t have conceived of Twitter or other social media platforms, and even if we could ask them, I’d not trust their 18th-century opinions anyway. This rolls outside the First Amendment’s wheelhouse. I don’t have any of the answers but I want to start the conversation. If we’re serious about eliminating ‘hate speech’, we’ve got to go after all of it, and no one has yet ‘cleaned house’ with the Toxic Left. What would Twitter look like without the Toxic Left? Canceling the Toxic Left can’t happen overnight. Here’s why: ‘Acceptable trade-offs’. Let’s return to the Toxic Right for a moment. Twitter has been slower to ban white nationalists for a sticky-wicket reason: It might disproportionately affect Republicans. Some may accept the inconvenience for some accounts accidentally swept into the fight against ISIS terrorists as a small enough price to pay, but Twitter believes banning politicians may not be regarded by the public as an acceptable trade-off to rid the platform of white supremacy content. They may have a point. Trump critics called for him to be permanently banned in 2017 and Twitter held off, fearing the repercussions of banning a sitting President at least until he pushed it too far inciting violence. What’s an acceptable trade-off for innocent, or somewhat more innocent accounts caught in a cancel culture dragnet? It would likely affect mostly private citizens. What would the public’s appetite be if Twitter banned 70,000 hateful ‘wokies’? A more judicious response might be to put a set of policy limits in place and temporarily suspend accounts who attack others and encourage tweeters to get them fired. Later, flat-out ban them, as they did to QAnon, which resulted in a 70% drop in election misinformation on the platform. In conclusion We need cancel culture. Like many well-meaning social justice practices, it’s been used and abused, arguably by millions. I can’t argue we should cancel it entirely when it’s brought down piggy-eyed Harvey Weinstein and mass rapist Bill Cosby and made it harder for Andrew Cuomo to get a date. I favor reforming rather than eliminating it, forcing the Left to confront its own toxic elements as we now force men, white people, religious evangelicals and Trumpers themselves to confront their own toxic beliefs and practices. I’d like to see cancel culture take itself seriously and view itself more like Black Lives Matter: A serious force for justice addressing critical systemic issues that will demonstrably improve the world for everybody, rather than what it is today: A movement more akin to an egomaniacal National Enquirer on steroids, destroying careers and even lives. More George Floyd and less Meghan Markle, kids. You know it’s true. This first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

How can we be sure she was raped if she doesn’t understand the difference between ‘consent’ and ‘rape’? Victim feminists. They’re so cute when they play at being grownups, less so when they’re infantilizing women. CC0 image from Pxhere Have you seen the movie where George Clooney’s character gets raped by a woman? Up In The Air (2009) is the story of a corporate ‘downsizer’ (Clooney) hired to fire people by companies too wussy to do it themselves. His character begins an affair with a fellow uber-traveler and later learns she’s married. She rejects him, calling what they had merely ‘an escape’. Some feminist intellectuals now argue that if a man lies to a woman to get sex, he’s committing ‘sexual fraud’ and that it may constitute rape; can she truly consent if he lies to her? Well… That means Clooney’s character, and his real-world counterparts, were raped, since women also lie about marital status and other ‘sexual fraud’ details to get what they want out of men. Do we agree these women are, therefore, rapists? How badly do we want these ‘rapists’ punished? “It’s not really rape!” I read an article here by a woman considering the opinions of these feminist intellectuals, musing that perhaps she’d been ‘raped’ by a guy who lied about not having a girlfriend. She gave sexual consent believing he was fully single. She fell for him, and got hurt. In the olden days we recognized you had to be careful because sometimes men lie to get laid. In certain legal eagle minds, I guess, it now constitutes ‘rape’. To be fair, the writer wrote from the perspective of not having made up her mind, and she considered alternative views offered in some of the comments she received. I was gratified to see a woman willing to consider challenges to her opinion without getting defensive, by agreeing that this or that response was food for thought. Yay for rational feminism! But the idea that ‘rape by deception’ ( a genuine legal issue ) can now include minor lies is troubling. The justice system handles ‘rape by deception’ where real lasting damage occurs — an STD, an unwanted pregnancy, or what happened to a very close friend of mine — death by AIDS, when his partner ‘stealthed’ him by removing the condom. But ‘rape by deception’ because s/he lied about their singlehood status? I find it deeply troubling. The damage was she got hurt. Not her fault but part of growing up romantically and equal risk for all. I thought, “Every incel, MRA, Trumper, and sexual predator can point to this and say, “See? Women don’t even know the difference between consent and rape! How many women are calling what’s nothing more than a bad sexual experience rape?” That’s exactly how it looks. To me, too. Why it’s still so hard to ‘believe the woman’ I must wonder where all those high ‘rape statistics’ come from. I’m serious. This is how feminist intellectual abrogation of female responsibility casts doubt on rape claims. We make almost glacial progress attempting to treat rape and sexual assault as seriously as they merit, and certain feminists aren’t helping. In fact, they’re hurting the effort. Holding it back. Historically, women subjected to rape or sexual assault haven’t been believed, or worse, blamed. Twentieth-century feminism challenged this, beginning with Susan Brownmiller’s seminal work Against Our Will, which dragged rape out of the back alley and into our dinner party conversations. At some point in the late ’80s and early ’90s, overeager feminists, working to remove the ‘blame the victim’ stigma, began treating women as though they had little agency and were never responsible for their decisions. Some explicitly said activist efforts needed to keep the focus completely on men, the gender overwhelmingly responsible for rape. The unfortunate consequence has been to ignore the woman’s role, assuming near-helplessness, and work toward a feminist fantasy utopia where somehow, magically, men stop raping. Some good came out of it: We debate consent, and how it’s given, and whether it’s given. An unconscious woman didn’t consent just because she didn’t struggle or say no. Even if fully conscious, she didn’t necessarily consent if a man was pushing himself on her, and she feared what would happen if she did say no (‘grey rape’). Consent debate resulted in a more fine-tuned legal environment and clearer restrictions for loophole-seeking sexual predators. Women’s perceived helplessness accelerated when some suggested there should be regular ‘check-ins’ even throughout whatever act participants engage in. Although the conversation regularly framed around ‘partners’, without specifying who should be asking who, one wonders for whom these sexual Best Practices were for. It’s hard to imagine they were meant for men who might change their mind in the middle of a blowjob, afraid to tell the woman to stop. It suggested women were so prone to changing their mind, so easily intimidated while a man is pumping above them in an originally 100% consensual act, that she can’t speak up and say stop if she’s really feeling uncomfortable. Which kind of makes you wonder whether a man can suddenly turn into a ‘rapist’ because the woman changed her mind and didn’t say so. Or explicitly. That said, men have abused the consent concept, without question. A friend once told me his brother bragged he’d anally raped two separate women and gotten away with it. It started out with consensual vaginal sex and turned into something else. He did it knowing how it would sound in court. Arguing a new level of consent, where the woman can claim she was ‘raped’ because the guy lied about something, may discourage women from becoming sexually responsible adults. If women have ‘agency’, they also have responsibility, including being quite clear before the clothes come off what they want, who they want, when they want, and how they want it. Denying this infantilizes women and their choices far more effectively than any ‘patriarchy’. Muddying the consent waters with frivolous ever-broadened rape definitions make it more difficult to ‘believe women’ when they ‘tell their truths’. Rape is about real force or threat , not a woman who got played by a guy, or who made a simple mistake. Instead of beating herself up over it, she can learn from it. She can date more wisely. “Nuh-uh. I’ve seen this movie before, I know how it ends.” Photo by Keira Burton from Pexels Did he force her or did she just get played? We pay a lot of lip service to ‘female agency’ but don’t like it so much when it backfires. A woman’s agency is sacred when she decides what to do about her accidental pregnancy, but flies from certain feminist minds when she exhibits poor judgment in sexual partners, perhaps due understandably to youth and inexperience. We’ve come to a point in our First World privileged lives where we believe every wrong done to us must be legally addressed. The legal definition of consent broadens as victim feminists, perhaps in denial of their own fear of female power , self-determination, and sexual responsibility, not to mention that much vaunted personal agency , play directly into traditional patriarchal notions that women are just silly little dears who don’t know their own heads. It plays right into misogynist legislators’ hands who seek to return control of female sexuality back to men, like it was back in the good old days. ‘Sexual fraud’ by lying paints women as somehow mentally deficient, incapable of making conscious, informed decisions about their sexuality. Both sexes make plenty of mistakes and bad decisions early in their romantic experience: Discovering you can’t always trust others, particularly when hormones are bubbling like a shaken can of beer. It’s harder to ‘believe women’ when REAL rape is diluted by denying women’s inconvenient choices . Did he force her or did she just get played? The law is NOT there to address hurt feelings, which is the real consequence. You can argue about the many shades of legal consent, but what it comes down to is this: You got played. You got hurt. You learn your lesson and move on, hopefully wiser and better-armed against the next player. Women afraid of their agency It’s easier to tell yourself you got raped than that you got duped. We beat ourselves up over our decisions and victimhood-centered feminism rides to the rescue, encouraging us to point fingers at the man, or men, or ‘patriarchy’. They tell us it’s not our fault and anyone who says otherwise is ‘blaming the victim’. It’s not in their interests to note that big girls old enough to have sex are old enough to learn from their mistakes and not blame only others. Photo by Misha Voguel from Pexels When it comes to sex, victim feminists don’t do self-actualization. They don’t do self-awareness. They don’t spend nearly as much time examining themselves and women’s psychological and emotional weaknesses as they do ‘the patriarchy’s’. They don’t, on some level, want other women to claim their agency and power either. It raises too many doubts about their own complicity in past mistakes. Too many questions about what they might have learned earlier if only . They’d rather not consider women’s psychological vulnerabilities because then they might have to address their own. And take ownership. And change. When we examine ourselves, when we honestly question our contributions, we often have to face personal truths we don’t like. Like that we ignored warning flags or an underlying feeling something wasn’t right with his story. But we went ahead and shagged him anyway because we listened to our vagina rather than our brain. And we got hurt. It’s his fault he lied, and yes, I can see how it’s ‘sexual fraud’, but it’s a buzzword, not a legal definition unless a real crime has occurred, and more importantly a real rape. If you fear the words ‘real rape’ (versus, say, ‘false rape’), you should. Because victim feminism encourages the distinction. Not outright rape lies, which occur far less than men think, but ‘false rape’ when she thinks she was raped even though she fully consented , even if without all the data. ‘I’m on something’ Just imagine what the notion of ‘sexual fraud as rape’ will do to the most time-honored words for the following: ‘I love you’. Or, ‘I want to marry you.’ Or, ‘I’m a very rich man.’ Now let’s turn around what ‘sexual fraud’ looks when the man is the recipient: She said, ‘I love you/want to marry you.’ Or, ‘I’m still a virgin.’ Or, ‘You’re the only man I’m sleeping with.’ Once again — hurt feelings, and sexual fraud , but how is it the justice system’s responsibility to avenge someone’s poorly-considered consent? So, she believed him when he said he intended to marry her. And he believed her when she said there was only one other man before him and that was her ex-fiance. Throw them both in jail! Now, consider this, legal eagles: Does a man now have a legal right to charge a woman with ‘sexual fraud’ if she claims (not he assumes ) she’s using birth control, and gets pregnant? Lots and lots of women have done this. I’ve watched it unfold. I’ve watched a friend walk blithely into a pregnancy trap with a girlfriend who’d heavily pressured him to marry her. It was so predictable. The world’s most common sexual fraud whine: “She said she was oooonnnnn something!” I didn’t feel the slightest bit sorry for him, he got down on his knees and begged for it. How stupid could he have been? (Nicole! Don’t blame the victim! ) Lucky for him she miscarried shortly after. She might have said she was on something when she wasn’t. Who knew women could lie? Some ‘men’s rights’ activists argue they shouldn’t have to pay for abortions or support babies ‘fraudulently’ conceived. ‘Sexual fraud’ as a legal defense just got a helluva lot less attractive, I’m guessing. ‘Patriarchy’ is real and has infantilized women for millennia. Feminists obsessed with women’s victimhood, who can’t let go of historical grievances, ignore the very real power and agency women have today we didn’t have even fifty years ago. They aid and abet the very ‘patriarchy’ they rail against. Image by Alexander Krivitskiy from Pixabay How can we be trusted with the right to vote when we can’t even be trusted to know what we want sexually? When we’re so easily duped by sweet-talkin’ lyin’ cheaters and scam artists? When we go running, ironically, to the ‘patriarchal government and justice system’ to salve our hurt feelings and avenge us like men were expected to do in days of yore? “Roger delivering Angelica”, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Note the hairless little-girl pubic area. Public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons Some feminists are afraid of female power and genuine empowerment, but the rest of us don’t have to be. We can choose to be grownups, to self-actualize, to take responsibility for our role in the romantic/sexual dance. Sometimes, even, we should blame ourselves for really stupid decisions. Like my male buddy who blithely allowed a woman to ‘play him’. Women still face real obstacles and challenges to ‘being believed’ and it’s to many men’s benefit to cast doubt on rape and sexual assault claims. The baby-girl feminist set doesn’t help when they make women sound like easily-played little featherbrains. How supremely patriarchal, mesdames. This story first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

No violence required: ‘ Every Republican An Incel!’ This is how God intended Republicans to be: Subject to women’s sexual decisions. And that decision should be: Never to have sex with, or even date, Republicans. Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay Another platform reader was onto something. Seems she wrote an article some years ago about why she won’t date Republicans and, big surprise, she got a lot of flack from Trump fanboys. Seems they took it a leeeeetle personally and she got to wondering why. She Googled and discovered no one wants to date a Trump voter, except his fangirls, and without the rallies — the OKStupid for horny double-digit IQ Nazis I guess, it’s harder to meet them. Otherwise, once dating app strangers Google your name and find you wearing a MAGAt hat and a Guns Don’t Kill People, Abortions Do T-shirt in a selfie with Rudy Giuliani, it’s game over. A lovelorn Trumper might be better off admitting they used to bar brawl or be a crack whore. You know, something less embarrassing. According to a Pew Research report, around 70% of Democrats of either gender overall are far less likely to date Republicans, and especially Trump voters than vice versa. Around half of Republicans would date a Clinton voter and almost three-quarters would date a Democrat. Why is this? Is it because Republicans are actually more open-minded than Democrats? Or is it that some guys will shag anything that consents? Like, for example, Queen Amina of Zazzua, the human Praying Mantis of African conquerors, famous for killing her partners after having sex with them — which they knew would happen. The unwillingness of ‘libtardettes’ to date Trump fanboys might be because being partnered with these guys ain’t exactly easy. Considering how pig-bitin’ mad these guys get at the name ‘Hillary Clinton’, it must not take long for the romance bloom to wilt and the misogyny to set up shop as soon as she gets a promotion at the office. It must be easier for Trump fangirls with Democrat men, who merely have to adjust to a life without non-consensual genital groping. When I Googled, ‘Did Donald Trump ruin marriages?’ the first several results were about exactly that, including a Time magazine headline urging one to ‘dump that Trump supporter’. When I Googled ‘Did Joe Biden ruin marriages?’ the results were about Joe and Jill Biden’s happy marriage and lives. So it seems Donald Trump is bad for wedded bliss. Go figger, considering he’s on his third baby mama and I’m not sure there’s not another one in his future before he either dies or descends fully into dementia. I mean, Melania’s trophy wife expiry date is so ancient I’m beginning to wonder if she smells of sour milk. So here’s the thing, Luscious Libtards: We have the power! We have the power to truly MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! We can kill off the Republican Party with our Mighty Muffs. (No no no! I don’t mean like Queen Amina of Zazzua! EWWWW! What we’d have to do BEFORE we killed them! I promised no violence, and I meant it. We don’t need to go to jail for this.) Public domain photo by Marc Nozell on Wikimedia Commons: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. We need to convince the 30% of Democrats who are willing to date a Trump voter and the nearly 40% who’ll date Republicans to STOP. We need to convince these Democrats to Just Say No to Republican sex. Our motto should be, ‘Every Republican an incel!’ Think of all the energy saved not having to explain to them what a clitoris is! Like the Brontosaur, these people need to die out. It’s the best thing they can do for their country. When you date and shag Republicans you run the risk of creating baby Republicans. The kid could take after you but it’s a 50/50 chance — are you willing to potentially sell out your country just because he looks like a young hot Scott Baio? Oh wait, that *is* a young Scott Baio…no, wait, that’s old and conservaturd Scott Baio with a LOT of plastic surgery because he can’t get a date. Incelibacy: It’s coming for you. Public domain image from Pixabay Image by 12222786 from Pixabay Having sex with Republicans gives them no incentive to grow up and care about something other than their investment asset allocation and Georgian ballots. No more action until they watch a few science documentaries, or read a book not written by Ann Coulter. Republican ladies will have to make do with their Trump dildoes and butt plugs. I’m not making this up. You can buy them. (Although I’m guessing it’s not the Republican ladies who buy the butt plugs.) I don’t believe we need to trawl out all conservatives. There’s more nuance to the folks who didn’t vote for Trump and no longer support the Republican Party. I wouldn’t hold their unseemly past against them. We all have times in our lives when, frankly, we sucked as human beings. Shouldn’t we give these folks credit for wising up, wo/manning up, and growing up? Think of it like an addiction. I have loads of respect for people who kick a lifelong street drugs/alcohol/food/ shopping or whatever addiction. Think of being Feh, already incel. Public domain by The Unseen 011101 on Flickr a Republican as a bad habit they’ve finally kicked. Give her a one-year medallion! And like some addictions, the practices were okay at one time but now they’re out of control. I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party but when I was younger I wouldn’t call them evil. Mostly hopelessly square and out of touch with the modern world. Many former Republicans have had their come-to-Jesus moment about the party, whether they believe in Jesus or not. It’s especially laudable if they do believe in Jesus and looked around and said, “Dude, that’s just not Christian. I’m outta here.” #NotAllConservatives are selfish, toxic masculine, white supremacist assholes. Trump voters and a lot of Republicans are, and this description includes Trumpgirls since any chick who votes for a sexual predator has some internalized misogyny she needs to address before she walks blithely into a potentially future Handmaid’s Tale. Trump voters, Republicans, and their Canadian fanboys are completely off the menu for me. Support Trump, and you’re too toxic and stupid for my attention. Once, there were many shades of Republican. Now, Republican = Nazis, misogynists, homophobes, racists, and other assorted bigots, not to mention science deniers, conspiracy theorists, and Faux News cultists. The Wrong Side Of History. The Good Little Germans. #YesAllRepublicans. The Far Left’s extremists fight their blanket villains (white people, male people, white male people) and embrace their own science-denying ideologies (anti-vaxx, gender genetics). Political beliefs span a wide spectrum; not every liberal melts down over some word Twitter decided fifteen minutes ago is bad, and not every conservative is immune to compassion. When you’ve moved closer to the Murky Middle like I have in recent years thanks to mutual pushing from both sides, men just t’other side of center aren’t much different. I had an on-again-off-again relationship with a conservative years ago. In the early ’90s, it was still permissible in the Republican Party to have a brain, as long as you didn’t use it too much. He was a good egg, back then. Today he’s mired in conspiracy theories and has swung far more to the right, but doesn’t post racist or misogynist content. Childhood-rooted psychological problems he had begun to manifest decades ago have clearly gotten worse, so I cut him some slack. He’s always been challenged differentiating between fantasy and reality. Still, he’s also posted a lot less about Trump in recent months, as have some of my other few conservative Facebook friends. Trump is slowly bleeding identified Republicans. It remains to be seen whether there are enough undecideds yet to relegate the party to fringie wackadoo status. Democrats and liberals willing to cross the political divide, you need to stop at ‘Republican’ and ‘Trump voter’. These people need to die out. We don’t want to hurt them. We won’t hunt them like The Most Dangerous Game. (Besides, unlike endangered animals, Republicans can shoot back.) Let’s all agree to vote with our crotches. Lips that kiss Trump’s ring (or something else) shall never touch ours. The United States will become ‘minority white’ by 2045; we can make it markedly more BLUE by agreeing to Just Say No To Sex With Republicans! Joe Biden has gotten more shit done in his first hundred days than the Orange Menace pulled off in four years. Say what you like about him being a pre-Boomer Another Old White Man, but seriously, would you like the other guy back? If you said yes, please raise your hand so the rest of us can remember what you look like. This first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

If I was inclined toward victimhood rather than personal power I could have made myself suffer more than ‘The Patriarchy’ Image by PourquoiPas from Pixabay Life isn’t perfect, and neither are people. If you spend enough time in some quarters you learn the most imperfect people of all are men. White men are the worst, but really, all men are, like, phallocentric devils incarnate. Or something. As women in a world set up by men and for men, it’s inevitable we’re going to have some run-ins. How bad it is depends not only on the intention of the actor (usually a man) but how we interpret it. For all the suffering some women complain about from bad male behavior, they sure do seem to work hard to increase their own suffering by layering on some fairly narcissist narratives. You can blow off minor incidents and forget about them, or you can detonate nuclear blasts of oppression. Why be annoyed for only three minutes when you can engineer an eyebrow lift on the street to ruin your entire weekend? Obviously we’re not talking about serious incidents like overt sexual assault. But, to paraphrase Matt Damon, there’s a world of difference between a rape and a butt grab. After reading so many overblown victim-centered narratives of alleged bad male behavior, I considered minor incidents that had happened to me over the years. How could I have made them worse than they actually were? Scenario 1: John Revolta I’m out with some gal pals at a notorious pickup bar. A man asks me to dance, mostly by gesturing. He doesn’t speak English. Suspiciously from one of those countries where access to women is far more restricted, he proceeds to pull me close on the dance floor and jam one of his thighs between mine. I keep pushing him away and shaking my head No. He keeps doing it and I eventually give up, grab my purse, and head for the ladies’ room where I take like ten minutes to fix my face and comb my hair. The victim feminist narrative: It’s disgusting how in this day and age men STILL think we are nothing more than SPERM RECEPTACLES! That we’re good for nothing more than jacking off into, forcing us to hide from sexual aggression as women have done for thousands of years! His toxic masculine male entitlement depersonalized me as he violated my body and made me feel like nothing I’ve accomplished in my life matters, I’m nothing but a TOY!!! What I did: “Hey, did you see that bozo I was dancing with?” I laughed. “Speaks no English, fresh off the boat and hopes to bed a Canadian He looked like this, too, except shorter, stouter, darker, balder, and more poorly dressed, and with less smooth dance moves. Photo by Thank You on Flickr slut tonight. You know how those Canadian girls are!” “He waited for you by the bathroom for several minutes before he gave up,” one of my friends giggled. “What’s the first thing you do when you move to a foreign country?” I said. “Do you apply for a Social Insurance Number? A bank account? A mobile phone? Learn to speak English? Get a job? No, you try to GET LAID!!” We proceeded to laugh at him behind his back for the rest of the evening as he struck out with every woman at the bar. Scenario 2: I’ve fallen in love with you Shortly after I move to Canada I meet a guy in a shopping mall. He’s cute and I’ll admit his come-on line was unusual — he did a double take and claimed I looked like his dead friend. Okay, that’s original, at least. Takes me to lunch, love-bombs me and tells me after two hours he’s in love with me. (I wrote the full story awhile back.) The victim feminist narrative: He was a narcissist trying to charm and groom me for future abuse, mind games and gaslighting with early false promises of romantic love. He marginalized my need for emotional safety by flat-out lying to me to get what he wants. He had no respect for me as a person, he saw me as an object to be won by any means necessary, mostly to feed his overblown ego and excessive need for validation supply. What I did: I told him he was full of shit and that no one falls in love in two hours. “I did,” he says. His answers are so pat. I sit back, thinking to myself, This isn’t off to a good start and I tell him honesty is very important to me and that bullshit artists get nowhere. Scenario 3: Giving ‘puppies’ the slip Some men just don’t know when to give up. When I was much younger I was a belly dancer in the medieval re-creation group The Society for Creative Anachronism. I was highly flirtatious at any time but during the summer, at campout events, medievalist standards slipped and many of us wore American-style ‘cabaret’ outfits. I.e., body-revealing. It wasn’t uncommon for a ‘puppy’ to attach himself and follow me around, even after I gave off signals that the conversation has moved on. Puppies were harmless, and we called them that because, like baby doggos, they nagged you for attention. The victim feminist narrative: It is NOT acceptable to stalk a woman. It illustrates just how many entitled men delegitimize women’s agency with a pre-existing societal power paradigm that prioritizes their obsessive need for attention over a woman’s right to feel safe. They think they can use their ‘natural-born’ dominance to harass a woman until she agrees to whatever he wants. The fact that we were always in a huge crowd of people with a near-zero chance of my getting murdered DOESN’T REDUCE THE OPPRESSIVE SUBORDINATION OF THE FEMALE PERSON! This is rape culture at its most reductionist! What I did: I learned to give them the slip at events, melting into the crowd or behind a door until they found something to distract them. We laughed about them later and giggled as we warned other women that the new guy, Sir William von Wagsalot, is a ‘puppy’. Scenario 4: Subway Casanovas I can’t fault a guy for trying. Sometimes I think women should have their own ‘Handkerchief Code’ similar to gay men’s. One color could mean, “I’m okay with meeting strange guys,” and another could mean, “I don’t give dates to strangers.” I probably miss a lot because I always have my nose in a book, but a few times I’ve caught Subway Casanovas staring at me in a manner that would make some women uncomfortable. And I understand that. I don’t frighten as easily as some but I also live in a relatively safe city (Toronto) and I’ve never been seriously sexually assaulted or stalked. I’m also older and less inclined to put up with male persistence. The victim feminist narrative: This patriarchal penis monster completely objectified me, subjecting me to his male gaze, How dare you stare at my breasts, you patriarchal monster! Image by Claudio_Scott from Pixabay manspreading and taking up like three subway seats to show me his big ol’ entitled phallus so that I can, I guess, hop aboard as soon as I’d like, as though I was there merely for him to fantasize about and later wank off over. He had zero respect for me as a human being, thinking he had every right to just stare at me as though I was the Mona Lisa! What I do: Look up, meet his eyes, and dismissively return to my book. Or, in one case, just as I was about to get off the subway some guy caught my eye and lifted his eyebrows meaningfully as if to say, I like you. I shook my head a little and got off the stop. So did he. I was alert for being followed but he didn’t. That just doesn’t happen to me. Not even when I was younger. Except at medieval events. Scenario 5: Drive-by compliments So I’m in the grocery store last year and this guy walks up to me and says, “I just want to tell you you are a very beautiful woman,” and walks away. Drive-by compliment. My friend Thom said he’s done this. He tells a strange woman she looks outstanding and then turns around and walks away, making it clear he’s not hitting on her or wants anything from her. It’s perhaps the purest compliment you can get from a man. But some women, I know, are horrendously offended to be told they look beautiful, especially if they put a consummate amount of time into looking like they just stepped off the carpet at the Golden Globes. The victim feminist narrative: This was illocutionary silencing of my right to shop the frozen foods section without confronting the encoded male worldview that a man possesses the hegemonic right to devalue a strange woman by commenting on her appearance. Did he really think it was ‘okay’ just because he walked away? He merely refused to confront the consequences of his boorish, entitled behavior. He invalidated my life and that of every woman who ever existed to remind me that we exist inauthentically as nothing more than eye candy. What I did: I smiled under my mask, said, “Thank you, you’re very kind,” and went back to the truly important work of my life at that moment, finding the chicken burgers. Not everything is all about making you feel like crap because you were born with a vagina. But with a little extra effort and a lot of critical gender theory crapola, you can make every interaction with a man all about you you you and your obsessive need for a steady narcissistic supply for male oppression. Victimhood becomes you. Because otherwise, if you can’t blame The Patriarchy for every failure in life, who can you blame? Stop shaming me with your objectifying male gaze, you penis-preoccupied, testosterone-poisoned patriarchal piece of poop! Photo by Jernej Graj on Unsplash This post first appeared on Medium in June 2021.

Don’t like how you’re treated? Don’t like the racism and misandry? Feel abused? Tell us why. Yes, I’m serious. Photo by Christian Erfurt on Unsplash Women must know more than men about how to be a real man because it seems like 910% of advice articles written about How To Be A Better Man are written by women. It’s embarrassingly sexist. Remember the days when almost exclusively men wrote articles and whole books teaching women how to be better wives, mothers, human beings? The kind men approved of? And we didn’t get to say much about it? Our job was to listen, nod, and take notes to Improve Ourselves To Please Men More? No, me neither. It was the ’50s and ’60s. I was either waiting to be born or to become functionally literate. Before second wave feminism, wimmins’ mags were replete with what you must do to find, attract, please, nail, and keep your man (happy) so he doesn’t leave you, because if he does, it’s all your fault. If you miss all that stupid shit today, no worries! You can still subscribe to Cosmopolitan. Now the tables have turned, feminism has given women a lot more personal power, and men feel like they’re under constant siege. Payback sucks. Today women profess to know everything about men and they’re happy to share, whether you asked or not. And no one finds this the slightest bit inappropriate or presumptive! I understand why men don’t want to speak up. Victimhood-addled ‘feminists’ can be brutal if you don’t acknowledge their narcissistic worldview that men are the architects of all their pain. Cosmo still makes it clear: If you’re not sexy and man-pleasing, you’re worthless. And feminists say *men* are patriarchal…! Photo by Darren Barefoot on Flickr Worse, they can be cruel and dismissive when men try to point out how being a man in a man’s world isn’t exactly skybox seating at the Superbowl. This is all about me me me and MY suffering! Shut up with your narcissistic whiny-ass white male keening! We undermine our own cause and give lie to our profession of a desire for equality when we treat men the way they have historically treated women. We complain about male trolls who swoop in on a woman ‘telling her truth’ they don’t want to hear: How she’s been victimized, assaulted, talked over, overlooked, written off. How vicious emasculated-feeling little wannabe insurrectionists can be when women speak up with their stories. I’m so glad we’re not like that with men. So fuck the other 20%. Unless they’re women now. THEN you can feel and acknowledge their pain. “Next man-hating bitch who says something misandrist gets a week’s worth of my feminist-hating.” Hilarious. Celebrate bigotry while claiming to be ‘woke’. Yes, she really said that to Johnny Depp. Irony abounds. Feminists get a few things right — actually, a lot of things right, if you listen to the ones Christina Hoff Sommers calls ‘equity’ feminists — those who are interested in genuine equality — versus ‘gender’ feminists, those who see the world through a chronic victimhood lens. I prefer Naomi Wolf’s distinction, ‘power’ feminists versus ‘victim’ feminists. Technically, we’re all gender feminists since feminism is, primarily, about the historical patriarchal social structure and men’s domination over women. That said, two wrongs don’t make a right, and women didn’t have a voice at the table on Howtuhbeabetterwoman until they spoke the fuck up and told their stories. Some were great, some were, well, imperfect. Man-hating. An early iteration of second wave feminist man-hating was Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto in which she argued men had ruined the world and women needed to create a Society for Cutting Up Men to fix it, and called for the elimination of all men. (I believe the word she was looking for was genocide. ) She later tried to murder Andy Warhol, turning it into an early example of a mass shooting. She came for Warhol, and shot two other men besides. Other truth-tellers were less extreme, made perfect sense, hit men where it hurts, and received a lot of backlash for their trouble. Who do you remember now — Valerie Solanas or Gloria Steinem? Men, it’s time for you to tell your stories. Don’t let women write your scripts for you. Women can talk about toxic masculinity but we don’t get complete say in defining how that changes (and it must change). I know, it’s scary. Especially on platforms dominated by hard left or far left social justice warriors. The kind who think equality only applies to them, not the people they dislike. Similar to right-wingers who think equality is only for white people and men (born ones). Right now, some perceptions about men, women, and female victimization may or may not be true. Here are a few: Four out of five abuse victims are women. Women almost never lie about rape Males are a lot more narcissist; women less so Female psychopaths are less common than male ones If men are sexually abused, it usually isn’t by a woman Only men objectify Women don’t lie, cheat, manipulate, gaslight, psychologically/emotionally/physically abuse men nearly as much as men do to women The numbers for victimhood may ultimately turn out to be skewed toward women as genuine victims, but I wonder if the discrepancy is as wide as some women think. How common is female sexual abuse of boys or men? I don’t know. I don’t even think I know. I’m asking. I’ve disagreed with and occasionally gotten into fights with certain writers who would prefer never to turn the critical analysis spotlight on themselves (“Pay no attention to that woman behind the curtain!”) but I still respect their willingness and labia to tell their truths, however imperfect and one-sided. The ones who genuinely want to learn and grow will be open to at least honest criticism, male or female. Some don’t want to learn, only vent; you learn to let them go. Remember this about trolls: If they have a gray head and near-zero following, they’re trolls, and yes, this includes women. Anonymity isn’t always about ‘protecting themselves’ from ‘male backlash’ — it’s to act like an asshole with impunity. You ain’t got time for ‘feminist’ trolls. They’re unworthy of your attention. When I call for men to tell their stories, their truths, we can expect a fair amount of perpetual, overblown and often self-inflicted victimhood tales, same as women. Men who prefer to tell us everything wrong with women while never questioning their own lordly selves. La plus ça change. Others will mightily piss off chronically aggrieved women by telling truths and pointing out hypocrisies that hit a little too close to home. I might be one of them. For my power/equity feminist sisters, we need you to support our men in telling their truths and standing up for themselves in the face of often overwhelming misandry and overstated victimhood. We need to stand up more against the man-haters and call out their misandry. We call for men to do this to help women; well, working towards equality means adopting ever-increasing levels of responsibility for others. Including owning our own words, faults, and behaviors. “I had to go and ask him to talk about his feelings.” Photo by vystekimages on Vecteezy We’re always asking sympathetic men to support us fighting ‘patriarchy’, now it’s time for US to support THEM and their truths. Are you ready to hear men’s side with an open mind? Have you got the labia? Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash This story first appeared on Medium in June 2021.

Certain trans-activists exhibit a traditional, narcissist male hostility to J.K. Rowling we see in abusive cis-men Public domain photo courtesy of the Executive Office of the White House, 2010 Feminist epic success story J.K. Rowling is a former abuse victim who escaped and never let it happen again, and is now a not-so-fantastic beast to a small tranche of the trans community. Rowling is the most visible face in the list of people attacked or cancel-bullied by extremist transgender activists — a case study in how vicious a certain segment of the trans community is, aided by natal women lacking basic common sense, or perhaps still fundamentally afraid to challenge anything that is or used to be a man, as too many women are wont to do. Every time trans-activists try to bully Rowling into silence, she proves she’s more man than they ever were and more woman then they’ll ever be. She’s got the money, the power, and the courage to stand up to male aggression, however it identifies. The Harry Potter author and now Public Enemy #1 again for writing a grown-up novel featuring a cross-dressing serial killer originally rose to infamy for stating basic incontrovertible facts about a subject with which she has lifelong experience: Being a woman. Unlike many of her detractors. Rational-thinking feminists and abuse victims will recognize in Rowling’s haters the privileged narcissistic certainty that the world was designed for and must be maintained to please those born with XY chromosomes. Ex-men who hate women and the women who love them Anyone who thinks the far-right has cornered the market on misogyny, science denial, and ‘fake news’ has never visited the more extreme corners of trans-activism, where (mostly) men-turned-women do what men have done for thousands of years: Lecture women on what being a woman means, and defining who is a ‘real woman’. Biological, scientific reality be damned. Rowling has run afoul of trans-extremists and their loyal lapgirls many times, including this summer after she posted her response for speaking out on sex and gender issues . They were already incensed over her biologically impeccable point: Here’s an inconvenient biological truth: People born with XY chromosomes can’t menstruate. Ever. Score one for J.K. Rowling‘s acknowledgement of a scientific reality that hasn’t changed for millions of years. Then there was this Rowling pearl: The Twitstorm vitriol strongly resembled what you see at Donald Trump’s organized hatefests. Having just finished Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft, I see a strong similarity between abusive cis-heteronormative men and trans-activist extremists. The extremists share that same sense of entrenched entitlement stemming from being born male into a world designed for them. They may want to be women, but psychologically they’re unwilling to give up their birthright in a world ordered to suit them, and the hell with what anyone else wants. Too often, their allies on the Regressive Left, as Sam Harris likes to call them, are willing to go along. The Regressive Left’s feminism often capitulates to patriarchal dictates originating in a twisted idea of ‘progressivism’. Meaning an overabundance of tolerance, even for toxic behavior and values they’d never condone from their adversaries on the right. On some fundamental level, Regressive Left feminists cringe from challenging any XY who can make them feel guilty. Easy enough to do: Just claim victimhood, Regressive Left catnip. Regressive Left feminists won’t challenge female genital mutilation in service to ‘cultural relativism’; are less inclined to condemn ‘honor killings’; and in the U.K., they ignored young female sexual abuse victims because the perpetrators weren’t white enough or Christian enough for them. They are, therefore, willing to throw their natal sisters under the bus in service to proving how ‘woke’ or progressive they think they are. They’ll ignore the same abuses against women they’d never tolerate from cis-heteronormative males. Regressive Left feminists repeat what extremist trans-activists have trained them to say — that any man who declares himself a woman is a woman. No backtalk, young lady! Willing to erase, as Rowling put it, natal women’s lived reality, all to please women who act an awful lot like abusive men. #IStandWithJKRowling If you think Greta Thunberg-haters and COVIDiots are out of their minds, or that QAnon’s belief in a Democratic cult of baby-eaters is insane, consider extremist trans-activist reactions to Rowling’s entirely reasonable explanation for why she criticizes the excesses of trans-activism, and why she doesn’t accept a man as a woman on his say-so. Rowling is hardly ‘transphobic’ or a TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) for pointing out there should be considerations and perhaps limits to trans women’s rights to women’s safe spaces. At least while we work to define and understand what transitioning means, including questioning whether someone still with a penis is a woman, and how it affects natal women who’ve been badly treated by penis-owners in the past. It’s created moral dilemmas for which there are no easy answers, and you can’t say, ‘Everyone is allowed to define themselves,’ while expecting everyone else to accept their definition. No one’s obligated to validate another’s self-perception. Rowling also observes medical professionals and scientists are afraid to speak out for children who may be harmed by unquestioned non-medical dogma. Trans-activists have shut down important conversations on medical treatments for confused children and adolescents who think they’re trans. Medical history shows around 80% of them will outgrow their temporary gender dysphoria and the rest, when it’s clear they’re genuinely trans, can then be treated medically as they see fit. Intelligent questions have been raised, in the meantime, on whether children and young people are pushed into it by well-meaning adults or perhaps even from their peer groups. The latter syndrome is called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and the very idea incenses trans-activist extremists. For those of us who favor critical thinking and debate, it’s troubling to think we can’t even talk about it without being labeled haters and bigots. The more I delve into the way so-called ‘trans’ children are being treated medically, before their bodies develop on their own, and the more I read of kids wanting to transform for dysfunctional reasons — like they’re gay and they fear homophobia, or they think males have easier lives than women — the more I believe altering children’s bodies before they’re mature enough to make these decisions themselves amounts to unconscious child abuse. What trans-extremists don’t care to understand — since when have entitled (ex) men ever listened to women anyway? — is you can critique excesses, especially the ignorance and ignoring of science and informed medical opinion, without denying there’s real gender dysphoria, that a certain number won’t ‘outgrow it’, and when people are old enough to make their own decisions, they can then move forward with whatever they deem they need or want, as adults. Until then, nothing stops them from ‘social transitioning’, so they can try on their new identity, or several, and see how it fits. We don’t allow children to make certain decisions for themselves because we realize they don’t have the experience or maturity yet: They can’t vote, drink alcohol, buy tobacco products, join the military, get married, get tattoos or body piercings, or engage in consensual sexual relations until they reach a certain age. Yet some believe impressionable children and youth can make informed decisions about altering their bodies in ways they can’t reverse if they do in fact ‘outgrow’ their trans identification. We now understand how the brain doesn’t stop developing until around age 25, so it seems foolhardy and downright cruel to push often irreversible surgical procedures on the very young, as we now recognize arbitrarily assigning and surgically ‘fixing’ an infant born with intersex characteristics is unintentionally harmful. Teenage girls are ‘binding’ their breasts and even exploring removing them . How many adults would support cutting off breasts to prevent cancer if it ran in a girl’s family? Feminist outrage would be justified. But it’s okay when she’s not comfortable with being a girl and no one wants to ask whether there are psychological reasons, before she loses her ability to ever feed her own child? Rational-minded feminists want to know: Is this how you ‘smash the patriarchy’, by becoming a man? Why is it the female body, once again, is held responsible and not an overly-sexualized view of women in a patriarchal culture? Similar practices abound in some African countries where female relatives ‘iron’ or flatten a developing girl’s breasts to make her less attractive to men, rather than questioning why the men in their culture think they’re entitled to have sex with her. J.K. Rowling’s questions about ‘trans’ kids and adolescents shut down brains still entrenched in male privilege. Trans-activist extremists react as any abusive man would when challenged, with threats, vitriol and holy crusades. Running with the Trumpies Is there any difference between Trumpoplectic far-right language fits vs. trans-extremists’ and their allies’ colorful responses to Rowling on Twitter? Them’s fightin’ words we’ve seen aimed at Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren and any other women who dare to challenge male authority, traditionally from red-capped men with Twitter handles like @ProudBoy_Michigan whose profile promises he will fight the libtards and snowflakes for Jesus. Words do matter, and words can kill, indirectly. Hate speech can drive the anger and passions to incline (not compel ) those with little impulse control to commit terrible acts of violence. There’s no question genuine hate speech against trans-people puts them in a lot of danger, and no reasonable human being is against addressing genuine hate speech, or violence against anybody. We debate whether Donald Trump should be allowed to keep his personal Twitter account after he’s no longer President for the demonstrable hate speech (bile) he’s spewed for four years. Yet confused Regressive Lefties aim the very same foul verbiage at Rowling and other natal women who express real concerns about extremist trans-activist misogyny. It ignores the realities of women like Rowling who’ve survived pretty horrific abuse and who can’t be faulted for not trusting ‘a woman with a penis’, especially when her ‘woke’-addled sisters don’t challenge, and even abet, victimizing women. Like in what’s supposed to be the ultimate ‘safe space’ for battered women. Protecting men at the women's shelter Regressive Left feminists, who otherwise defend women against abusive men, turn on the victims, like Rowling, if they don’t fall into line like good girls. ‘Not all trans-women!’ I’m quite sure most trans-women only want to live their lives peaceably with their natal sisters. Trans or not, those of us who stand with J.K. Rowling understand gender identity doesn’t always align with genitals and everybody should be allowed to live as they want. We’re at a turning point. The trans movement only gained traction about a dozen years ago, asking us to redefine what we understand about gender identity and lived realities, and to realize some people don’t and perhaps never have felt comfortable in their natal bodies. They’re trying to figure out how far they want to go with their transition, and we need to accommodate them, even if it’s not perfect and not as much as they’d like. Many trans-women understand it’s a new reality for natal women too, not all of whom are comfortable with XYs for very good reasons — and natal women’s rights and comfort levels need to be respected. Our lived experience is men for countless generations telling us how to think, act, talk, dress and be. Now we’ve got a small percentage of new women telling us the same, and acting very much like abusive, entitled, overprivileged men when they don’t get their way. La plus ça change. Non-whites reacted with rage when the parents of a natal white woman revealed their daughter had faked being a black woman for years. It ignited a furious debate about race and how she chose to be black, which natal black people didn’t, and how she could never understand what it was like to be black because she hadn’t grown up black in a racist society. A similar observation must be made: It’s different when you’re born female. XXs and XYs are physically distinct, evolved as we did to reproduce, as all biological life is driven to do. Blame evolution for giving XYs a penis capable of fertilizing the womb of an XX, and ensuring the perpetuation of the human species by making us, for the most part, attracted to the genetic creature with which we can make more genetic creatures like ourselves. Today, after a few million years we’ve evolved in about as many different ways. Survival of the human species isn’t in question and not everyone feels quite like others in a binary-gender world. It shouldn’t matter who they’re attracted to, who they love or don’t love, whether they want to reproduce or how they present themselves to the world. What matters is our reality is still deeply sexist, and an XY who feels he was born in the wrong body can still never know what it’s like to be born and grow up female in a sexist society. However much he was bullied or abused for not being ‘man enough’, he still grew up in a world designed by XYs for XYs, and he benefited in the same involuntary way natal white people benefit by a society set up by people like them, for them, a long time ago. Just as many non-whites argue it’s not their job to make white people — the dominant race — feel comfortable, it’s not natal women’s job to make former men feel comfortable either, especially when some so-called women behave far more like abusive, entitled men than women who want to live their lives in peace. Young transgender woman Creative Commons image courtesy of Zackary Drucker and the Gender Spectrum Collection We all have to work this out. No one can mandate our beliefs or values. We do need to recognize everyone’s fundamental human right to live as they want, as long as none are forcing their will on others. Or calling dissenters filthy names for raising important questions. It’s misogynist to deny natal women’s lived realities, and it’s time we call out the misogyny and entitlement in the more insane corners of trans-activism. #IStandWithJKRowling. This article originally appeared on Medium in November 2020.

‘The Closer’ is imperfect but his humophobic targets are neither stainless nor steel CC0 2.0 image by John Bauld on Flickr What amazes me after my boyfriend and I watched Dave Chappelle’s The Closer is how un-transphobic he comes across. The science is squarely on Chappelle’s side when he speaks of biological sex being real, although he calls it gender, which some argue isn’t the same as biological sex, but that’s what happens when the left constantly monkeys around with vocabulary that used to mean actual specifics. Now no one knows what the fuck you’re talking about. “I’m Team TERF [Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist],” he says proudly and I smiled. I’ve also been called that for asserting one’s natal biology is what one dies with. The only men or genderfluids who can have babies are the ones who still have their original girl parts. As Chappelle points out, every single person entered this world from between the legs of a woman, which pretty much seals the case for vaginas and wombs as evidence of femaleness, regardless of how you identify or whether you can menstruate or not. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be treated as you identify, or worse, murdered, but don’t try to gaslight us about Biology 101. Biological sex denial stoops to the same level of scientific insanity as those who deny there’s a pandemic. “Man, last year’s flu season was brutal!” The transgender movement suffers from the same problem as other social justice movements: The loudest, most in-your-face humophobic lunatics get the lioness's share of the press because extremism sells. Sacred Holy Writ Donald Trump got to be President with many thanks to the American mass/social media’s Trump obsession above and beyond his eminently more talented, experienced, intellectually superior, and moderate challenger. The reaction coverage of The Closer is every bit as slanted as for the 2016 campaign. If you come to virtue signal and bash Chappelle, someone will stick a mic in your face or share your Instagram hate thousands of times. If you dare to praise him, a veritable medieval-style Transquisition will rake you over the fires of social media hell and destroy your life every bit as effectively as a mass shooter with a grudge. The problem isn’t the trans community overall, but the narcissistic hyper-sensitive pearls-clutchers. #NotAllTrans, not by a long shot. Just the Trump-level self-obsessed ones. Chappelle’s humor is problematic, for sure, but his critical targets themselves are neither morally stainless nor steel, when they overreact and overstate harm because he dared to challenge their Sacred Holy Writ. Whether a woman born as a man is exactly the same as a born woman (she’s not; she’s still biologically XY, historically called man or male) Whether Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria among young people, particularly teenagers, is real (it is) Why transgender and particularly transmen were fairly rare until the rise of social media Whether women who haven’t been women for very long get to define what womanhood and being a woman is and means (And why aren’t we arguing about the meaning of the word man ?) Whether it’s a wise idea to give young children and teenagers permanently body-altering hormone blockers and surgery when ample evidence indicates most will ‘outgrow’ their gender dysphoria Whether not allowing children/teens to transition drives up the suicide rate when youth suicides increased for years before transitioning and social media exploded Whether people are transitioning for good reasons. Some girls cite not wanting to be a woman in a misogynist society, and some gays say they don’t want to live in a homophobic society. Is there anything less feminist or more homophobic than accepting severe body alteration over living authentically and forcing misogynist homophobes to control themselves? Now I have to ask: Is it even possible to ‘punch down’ on the trans community and its fawning sycophants when they say things like this? A Toronto Star columnist defends Margaret Atwood for asking a perfectly reasonable question. Yes, nothing makes you sound more like a ‘real woman’ or a supporter than old-school misogyny. #CancelTransMisogyny! Dictating to women what is a ‘real woman’ and a ‘real man’ as men have been doing for millennia. So glad we have Lewis to define feminism for us now that Simone de Beauvoir is dead! True, but biological girl parts are at play in all of this. Anyone born with man parts…can’t. Ideology trumps reality I recognize how genuinely victimized transfolk are. I know about the skyrocketing murders, assaults, sexual assaults, difficulty getting housing, getting proper healthcare, always looking over your shoulder. But the extremists are plenty experienced at victimizing. Can one truly ‘punch down’ at critics who behave more like angry men’s-righters than aggrieved women? I wonder how many level-headed transfolk and genderfluids are sitting at home wincing at progressive websites and muttering, “Please, just STFU! You’re making us all look bad!” I have to remind myself that what I see on social media and Da Internetz is a world of difference between the transfolk who just want to live their lives in peace versus the loudmouths, misogynists, cis-het haters and downright psychopaths who hog the spotlight and run down or ruin others who disagree with them. The Transquisition demonstrates how utterly disrespectful to women, hostile to established facts and uncommitted to free speech they are — except for themselves, of course — when they shut down honest debate and squelch anyone who challenges their Holy Sacred Writ. Who crush natal women with the hostility of an anti-masking parent at a school board meeting for daring to challenge the notion that ‘woman’ is whatever an ex-man says she is. Comedians and authors aren’t murdering trans, non-gender-conforming, and gay people in record numbers in 2021 . Neither Chappelle nor J.K. Rowling nor many others unfairly maligned as TERFs have advocated harming other people; they’re asserting indisputable biological facts that are unacceptable only to extremists whose ideology matters more than reality. Maybe it’s time for embarrassed transfolk and genderfluids to take back their power from their lousy self-appointed ambassadors. One must ask: If Dave Chappelle is so heretical, Why is it The Closer gets a 95% general audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes? Nut-kicks to the ol’ hypocrisies The best humor is the edgiest: That which takes on the hypocrisies of others and, if we’re brave and honest enough, with our own. Chappelle didn’t just take on his humophobic critics, he called out black hypocrisy when he spoke of the pain he felt reading of black people beating up Asians, and mentioned a nineteenth-century ex-slave who built up a thriving business as a cotton gin repairman and eventual plantation farmer who owned dozens of slaves and was an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. Chappelle is imperfect and his jokes are often angry, and The Closer isn’t always LOL, although several times we paused it to talk about something insightful he’d said. Yes, I think Chappelle deserves criticism for being a bit misogynist — I’m not okay with him regularly referring to women as ‘bitches’ — but I give him a pass because I agree with him more than I don’t and I respect him as an artist. I don’t expect moral purity the way secular fundamentalists on the far left do. Your mileage may vary. The Atlantic offered a great take on how The Closer is a Rorschach Test. We all hear something different, just as we all see something different when we look at an inkblot or a cloud. I can love what someone says without loving everything they say. It’s a question of how much I can accept. I agree with some of Donald Trump’s opening statements — “We need to control immigration more,” or “This country has gotten too politically correct,” yet my agreement stops with his first period. Everything he says after that I find repugnant. That’s why I didn’t vote for Trump, and why I laugh with Chappelle. The ‘woke’, and especially the Transquisition, don’t understand nuance or that disagreement isn’t abuse or violence. Here’s the thing about hypocrisy: It’s always a punch-up, not a punch-down, no matter who you are, if you do it right and aim only for the hypocrisy itself. Conservative comedians like Dennis Miller don’t understand this which is why they come across as mean-spirited. Nobody likes a nut-kick to their hypocrisies, perhaps especially the complicated trans community with its tangled vulnerabilities and strengths, still in its warp speeding modern infancy, with a lot of tetchy problems arising from being dominated by women’s voices who used to be men, who may not be ready to give up their male entitlement. J.K. Rowling Can't Be Cancelled Fellow comedian Damon Wayans called Chappelle a ‘freedom fighter’ and remarked, “I feel like Dave freed the slaves. Yeah, the comedians. We were slaves to PC culture and he just, you know — as an artist he’s Van Gogh. He cut his ear off. He’s trying to tell us it’s OK.” Jon Stewart’s take: Subversive, indeed. This is why I love Chappelle. He punches hypocrisies no matter where he finds them. Hypocrisy is always fair game for the best humorists. I love other un-PC comics like Fluffy, Chris Rock and Russell Peters. No surprise all are POC — Mexican, black and Indian-Canadian. All can punch up to white people, but if there’s a good white comedian who can make fun of white hypocrisy and not sound like an awkward virtue-signaller I haven’t found them yet. Chappelle made a bastard of a point about canceled rapper DaBaby, who once shot and killed a man in a Wal-Mart. “In our country, you can shoot and kill a n***a, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.” Good food for thought. You can’t get canceled for killing a human being under disputable circumstances, but oh no no, you can’t joke about men sucking dick or getting AIDS, however homophobically, because that’s going too far? Humorous bigotry appropriation Chappelle exhibited the best of a dying old-school humor that humophobes don’t understand: Making fun of ugly stereotypes by appropriating them. He jokes how his transwoman friend Daphne Dorman tried to hug him and his being repulsed and shooing her away “because I’m transphobic.” My boyfriend and I both laughed. It was funny. We knew damn well he didn’t do that. He skewered his critics with that one. They probably thought he was serious. Chappelle came after feminists and we laughed. He said feminism needs a leader and he volunteered. He knows how ludicrous that sounds to those who understand bigotry appropriation humor. He said all women need to do in response— I’d already guessed the punchline — is to “Suck my dick.” I laughed. He’s not serious. He’s making fun of humorless feminists and he knows their heads will explode. I wish he wouldn’t call us all ‘bitches’ but I don’t think he hates women. As a power feminist — one who identifies with personal power rather than feminine weakness — I laughed because, for myself anyway, he’s right more often than he’s wrong. I wouldn’t give Dave Chappelle the Feminist of the Year Award, but I also agree with him that Caitlyn Jenner didn’t deserve Woman of the Year after being a woman for a whole single year. While The Woman Formerly Known As Bruce appeared on cereal boxes in the 1970s as an Olympics gold medal winner, I was enduring a lot of sexist bullying in school with taunts of having tiny boobies and of being an ‘ugly dog’ and a ‘wolfwoman’. While Jenner and his family had lunch at O.J. Simpson’s, women dealt with workplace sexism, and female sports teams fought Title IX battles to get the same treatment as male teams. So yeah, I LOL’ed. Because frankly, I know a helluva lot more about being a woman than Jenner. CC0 2.0 image by General Mills on Flickr Maybe a smidge of homophobia Homophobia? Yeah, I think there’s some crackle to that charge in Chappelle’s tale of ‘accidentally’ assaulting a lesbian he allegedly mistook for a man in a nightclub. Male on female violence is verboten , although if the way he told it was accurate, that even after she established she was a woman she assumed a boxing stance as though she was ready to take him out, well, what sort of dynamic does that set? Should he defend himself? Do women have the right to hit men with impunity because ‘you don’t hit girls’? What if she’s a tough-ass bitch? I don’t know if this happened or not. Or if it happened the way he claimed. No one has come forward, as far as I know, to tell her side of the story, nor can I find anything on Google to corroborate it. If it’s not true, then yeah, I’d call it self-aggrandizing homophobic humor. He said he thought modern gays were too sensitive and brittle but didn’t say why. For me, he didn’t have to. Maybe it was unfair to single out brittle gays when those labels could apply to Millennials and Gen Z who I wonder may take so much delight in ‘canceling’ other peoples’ jobs and careers because they were pushed to workworkwork so hard for great jobs one day and then — there weren’t any. Dog in the manger. Who’s the real danger to the trans community? Where Chappelle punches his trans critics square in the hypocrisy is with the tragic tale of his transwoman friend Daphne Dorman. She sounded like the kind of trans friend I’d want to have. Someone who was strong and confident in herself and could laugh at her tribe. She attended all his shows and laughed uproariously at everything he said, especially his trans jokes. One day they met and became friends; she was an aspiring comedian and he helped move along her nascent career. When he got ‘canceled’ on Twitter for supposedly ‘punching down’ on the trans community, Daphne bravely challenged her tribe. Daphne herself then became the target of a brutal Twitter Transquisition and shortly after she jumped off the roof of a building. As Bill Maher has often noted, “The left, unlike the right, eats its own.” “I don’t know what was going on in her life,” Chappelle said, “… but I bet dragging her didn’t help.” When I dug a bit into Daphne’s life I found she emerged from family dysfunction and PTSD and had struggled with suicidal thoughts for years, as so many transfolk do, a close friend confirmed. [There used to be a link here but it's gone now.] So what happens when someone like that is subjected to the torches ’n’ pitchforks howlers on social media? One wonders who’s the real threat to transfolk: Dave Chappelle, or the type of fanatics who today turn on their own as they did Daphne Dorman. Does that fuel positive sentiment for the trans community? Trans protests have erupted everywhere over The Closer, including a staged Netflix walkout , yet 95% of the audience loves it. Critics, meanwhile, practically demand a Braveheart execution. Maybe we’re all transphobic, or maybe the social media Transquisition has some serious soul-searching to do. Dared to say that a person who menstruates is a woman. “A Martyr To Fanaticism” from the Library of Congress with no known copyright restrictions When I’m not hiding under my bed with my TERFy transphobia (damn, I really need to — ahCHOO! — clean under here more!) I help women and others reclaim their power on my website, Grow Some Labia. You can also subscribe to my free Substack newsletter! This post originally appeared on Medium on October 26th, 2021, but a few days later my account was suspended. Medium never explained why but I'm quite certain this was the reason. Do. Not. Question. Trans. Ideology. On. Medium.

Nancy Jo Sales’s book on addictive, toxic mobile apps reveals how women still cater to men and blame it all on ‘misogyny’ Photo by Mad Mags on Flickr Creative Commons CC0 2.0 It amazes me that award-winning journalist Nancy Jo Sales even wants to have sex anymore. I’m further amazed she ever found dating apps addictive, which she discovered in 2015. She articulately presents how dating app companies engineer them to keep you swiping, swiping, swiping but not why she was so willing to settle for loveless, dysfunctional, often dangerous sex. The author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and The Bling Ring: How A Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped Off Hollywood and Shocked The World, which was made into a movie in 2013, dives into the dirty world of dating apps and hookup culture at the naive young age of 51. She details it in her new book Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno. My unrelatability stems from having been part of online dating since before it was cool, when I met my now ex-partner on a computer bulletin board system in the last days before the rise of the Internet. I was forced back into it eight years later and I thank Sales for explaining why my experiences have been so negative: 2001 was the year in which dating culture began to take an ugly, misogynist turn. No wonder everything went — if you’ll pardon the expression — tits-up. That was before mobile dating apps — several years down the road — redefined ‘dating’ to the point where they should no longer be called dating apps. Rather, they’re ‘fucking apps’, in accordance with the very most cynical, emotionally absent and abusive toxic masculine ideals. And we, ladies, let them get away with it. Old habits die hard, and twelve thousand years of patriarchy won’t be undone in a few generations. We’ve been victims for so long we’re not really sure what genuine empowerment looks like. Take the cosmetic surgery industry, whose websites I visited this year as I conducted a client sales campaign. They marketed patriarchal beauty ideals wrapped up in cheap ‘empowerment’ crapola to women who buy it (literally). Just add that boob job and Botox poison injections to your shopping cart! They offered Mother’s Day gift certificates, because nothing says I love you, Mom, quite like a gift suggesting she should banish those ugly wrinkles around her eyes. One site even promoted ‘pre-rejuvenation treatments’ for Millennials, because they’re never too young to persuade them to shovel over obscene amounts of cash making young, beautiful women feel insanely insecure about their looks. They can’t get those choking aficionados on Tinder to swipe right on them if they look like they’re already falling apart. So it’s not surprising fucking apps market their toxic dreams of ‘twoo wuv’ to women, when Millennial men are interested in anything but, and suggest it’s ‘empowering’ for women to have greatly expanded sexual choices even as they do nothing to keep women safe. Fucking app companies resist screening for sexual predators or users with criminal records. Women have been stalked, raped, and murdered through fucking apps and Sales finds their executives don’t want to talk about it, fuzz over what’s happening, and quickly change the subject. And that’s the female execs. Still, how can we blame only the app company C-suite, or even toxic males and The Patriarchy? It’s hard to ignore Sales’s descriptions of how much man-pleasing is as alive and kicking as ever, although today it’s more likely you’ll get slapped, punched, or choked in bed by GTAV389, thanks to the rise of violent online porn and its influence on former young boys (later men) who should never have had access to it, but somehow always did. Hard to imagine, but the right, particularly the Christian right, was actually right about something. If for the wrong reasons. We laughed during the Reagan years as studies drew correlations between porn and sexual abuse crimes against women, and for awhile there was little consistency. Today it’s become unavoidable to acknowledge how much violent online porn has influenced second-half Gen X’ers and Millennials and is now working its dark magic on Gen Z. Women on fucking apps report often non-consensual violence during hookup sex: Slapping, punching, choking, and other dangerous or degrading actions. When Sales interviewed young men about why they thought young women enjoyed being punched, slapped, kicked, or even choked during sex out of the blue, they said they’d seen it in porn. They believed the ‘actresses’ liked it. “You can tell they do,” one of her own hookups told her, who she’d launched across the room via her feet on his chest after an unexpected choking. “You can see they’re enjoying it.” She pulled up a choking Pornhub video and pointed out the tears in the woman’s eyes. She wasn’t enjoying it. She was paid to do this, and having a hard time faking liking it. “But they say they like it on Tinder,” he protested, and he proved it. He swiped through and showed her profiles where the women claimed they liked violent sex and dug being choked. “They’re telling you that because they know it’s what you want to hear,” Sales told him. Women say what they have to to get men. Men, Hot hookup last night. Photo by Monstera from Pexels of course, do the same. Yeah, sure, honey, I love you and only you. You’re the only woman in my life. I like it rough! I love it when you choke me! “And you call yourself a feminist?” he asks. “The girls I know are really strong and know exactly what they want. Are you denying them their agency?” Touché. I agree with both of them. Women aren’t blind, helpless victims of The Patriarchy, but creatures with agency, although they’re more vulnerable when they’re young and inexperienced. That’s when they’re most likely to tolerate abusive treatment because they haven’t figured out what they want yet. What they want is a man, or men, to pay attention to them. Their hormones are exploding too. They do what they must to get laid, even if it means having to put their own needs and desires on hold. Like the desire to not get the stuffing punched out of you during sex. Or being utterly objectified as just another sexual release delivery order. Skip The Orgasms! La plus ça change. If you want to get a guy to ‘like’ you, if even only for an hour, you absolutely mustn’t can’t under no circumstances let’s be very clear on this act like you care. Sales describes the pervasive attitude on fucking apps as a competition to see who can care less. She falls in love with a guy half her age who doesn’t know she did, nor did she tell him. When people asked how he was and she hadn’t seen him in months and it was killing her, she’d shrug and say, “I don’t know, he’s around somewhere.” Dating historian Zoe Strimpel told Sales, “What is at the root of the content to see ‘who can care less’ is the horror of seeming needy. Women are so afraid of seeming needy, because the ‘needy woman’ taps into something very deep in misogyny: this idea that women are this sort of bottomless pit of need and dependency and maybe even lunacy...” And Darwin knows most young men on fucking apps don’t want to deal with neediness, unless it’s their own. Sales notes fucking apps have equalized sex somewhat. Women may get slut-shamed but not all of them are and not all of them care. I had a friend awhile back who was arguably the most promiscuous woman I’d ever met, and she couldn’t give a flying rat’s patoot what anyone thought about it. Not caring what men think: Now THERE’S a feminist lesson for all of us! If fucking apps are a massive backlash against feminism — and Sales makes a great case for it — they also give men a taste of their own medicine when they get treated by women the way they’ve historically treated them. These men assume that if they matched, it was automatic agreement to have sex, and they got angry if she ghosted them. Why’d she swipe right if she wasn’t going to put out? Who cares what he wants? I can fuck whomever I wish. Or not. Fucking apps idealize the most loveless, abusive toxic masculine environment you can imagine. One in which some young women pretend to like violent sex while a few, I assume, truly dig it and the rest hope he’s not one of those. Sales claims studies show Millennial women associate sex more with fear than pleasure or enjoyment. She notes only 40% of Millennial women report having orgasms with hookup males (it’s 80% for males) and one complains she only gets orgasms from her vibrator. In addition to women claiming they ‘like it rough’, some cater to porn-fueled male rape desires by claiming they’d like to be raped, or at least pretend to be. With the rape rate rising, how much of it comes from men thinking women like it because of porn, and women don’t challenge them on it? Even claim they want it? We can’t blame only The Patriarchy when we’re going along with it. Time to start Just Saying No to ‘dating’ as defined by men who haven’t a clue how the female body works because porn only teaches them to beat off to violent, degrading, dehumanizing content and tell themselves if the women in the videos don’t actually enjoy it, they’re at least getting paid for it. Women have agency. We need to own our needs and personal safety, however repugnant the idea is to victim feminism, which teaches women they’re never ever expected to hold themselves accountable, like making sure they don’t put themselves in dangerous hookup situations. ‘Rape culture’ is a joint effort. Always has been. Consider how ‘rapey’ popular novels written by women, for women are, like Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty quartet along with Fifty Shades of Grey. When Is Rape Culture Totally Hot? When women write misogynist kink for women. Because, like, pirate rape empowerment or something We’re still catering to men’s very worst misogyny. We still say what they want to hear or at least don’t specify ‘Absolutely no choking, hitting, punching, spitting, kicking, or other violence. I’m not into BDSM, and if I were, there’d definitely be rules.” No wonder dating is dead, Millennials aren’t marrying, and many women are deciding it’s not worth it to have babies. Not only aren’t they affordable, but look at what you have to got through to get pregnant! Sales speculates whether the rise in alcoholism in Millennial women is connected to hookup culture and theorizes it might make it easier to have loveless, possibly violent sex with a guy you don’t even know in a Tinder culture one man describes as ‘the most efficient pussy delivery system’ ever devised. And we call this sexual empowerment. Sales is a feminist, but she tends to damn men for actions of which she herself is at least somewhat guilty. (Like perpetuating hookup culture.) She’s certainly guilty of creating many of her problems by doing the sort of seriously dumb shit I castigate women (including myself) of doing. I Did Dumb Shit I didn't get raped, but I sure made it easy for them She snarks about her daughter’s sperm donor who wanted nothing to do with raising their child. Yet she went condomless and I strongly suspect she was hoping to get knocked up, because one marriage failed, the relationship she left her husband for turned abusive and failed, and she wanted a child. She even claims she sometimes forgot about condoms. The woman came of sexual age in the 1980s. Who the hell ‘forgot’ condoms at the dawn of the AIDS crisis? If one wasn’t available women might argue, “Oh, it won’t hurt this one time,” or they didn’t insist upon them since men whined about how ‘they didn’t feel as much’. Gen X put men’s needs ahead of its own as Millennials and Gen Z do today. We must share responsibility with The Patriarchy for the state of modern f̶u̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ dating. Patriarchy is the primary offender, but let’s be clear on women’s role: We carry a lot of misogyny between our ears, and victim feminism discourages us from examining that. Twelve-thousand-year-old habits die Trust me, he’ll still fuck you. Photo by Monstera from Pexels hard, but it shouldn’t have to take another 12,000 to convince women we need to start holding out once again for what we want rather than what he wants. I don’t castigate anyone of any age for man-pleasing. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. I’m asking us all to wake the fuck up and start setting new rules. Yes, I know, a 360 right back to 1950s dating rules. La plus ça change. But now we don’t hold out for a ring and a baby, or to ‘punish’ men. We hold out for what we want too, respect, kindness, empathy, and getting to know us first. Most of all, not having sex until we’re ready to have sex. If he can’t wait he’s not good enough. He can go back to Tinder. Good sex should exclude sexual choking or hitting unless that honestly is your thang. And there must always be consent and rules if it is. The question is, What are we going to do about it? Are we going to do anything about it? Sales’s book is heavily sympathetic to women, without questioning nearly enough — most of all herself — why so many allow toxic masculine behavior to dehumanize them. Like why the hell did she continue hooking up with Millennial ‘train wrecks’ when her first started with fears the guy was going to murder her when he arrived? Feminists like Sales pay plenty of lip service to female agency but deny it when it’s convenient, as Sales did with the notion that all women who claim to like violent sex are doing it to please men, whether they realize it or not. I say this not to defend male violence, but to defend female agency. No one forces women to robotically swipe even almost in the middle of fucking the hookup de l’heure, to keep the conveyor belt of man-pleasing ‘feminist’-identifying pussy moving. Sales states, and I agree, dating apps are designed by men, for men, to please men, and ultimately to dehumanize women, who are very very good at pleasing men. La plus ça …oh never mind. What I found most compelling was the connection between feminine man-pleasing, often personified by Sales herself, and how it perpetuates and rewards violent, misogynist, dehumanizing sex. I ask: What would happen if women stopped playing by these manchildren’s rules? What would dating look like if women refused to have sex until they were ready? Who insisted on getting to know the guy before she decides to have sex with him? And felt entitled to her sexual and emotional needs being 100% as important as the man’s? I’ve only just come around to this myself in the last few years. Online porn isn’t within our control, but Just Saying No to hookup culture and the violent shit sandwich it serves women is. If we can make Trumpers feel ignored in the dating world — and we do — we can make misogyny and violence a liability for getting laid. Delete the damn apps and force them to meet you in the Real World, virtually or face to face, if he wants your attention. Every Misogynist An Incel! Let them watch porn. Stay tuned. This originally appeared on Medium in August 2021.

What your mother may not have told you, because she didn’t know herself Photo by Ali Tareq on Unsplash Within weeks of moving to Toronto from Connecticut, I met a guy named Sam at the mall. His pickup line was so unusual I didn’t recognize it for what it was. He did a double-take and when I looked at him, he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, it was so weird, you look like my dead friend.” We talked, he said let’s get some coffee. I was en route to apply for my new Canuck healthcare card, so I said sure, I’ll meet you after I’m done. He said he’d rather join me and we talked in the waiting room. Long story short, there was something not quite right with him. He was was ‘love-bombing’ me. Trying to make me fall in love with him way too soon. Like, the first day. Lots of compliments, telling me how successful he was, trying to make plans with me. I told him I was going to New York in September for a family wedding; he said he was going with me. I said oh no you’re not, I’m going by myself. He asked why and I said I just met you today and already you’re making plans for September? ‘Making plans for the future’? It was like he’d read a script somewhere of how to make a woman think he was serious about her. And I’d known him for only two hours. “You’re not going to New York with me.” “I want to go with you.” “We’ll see. Your job right now is to get to the weekend with me, you don’t need to worry about three months from now.” Other things didn't jive. He'd call and want me to meet him right now. If I said I had plans he said, “Cancel them.” A few times I did, since they were errands, not something that involved anyone else, but he had no respect for my time. Early on, I sensed he was a phony. He claimed he was in love with me, that he wanted us to spend our lives together. (Did the pickup manual say that’s catnip for chicks or something?) While I waited to apply for my healthcare card in the Service Ontario waiting room, I’d said I didn’t want children. He said that was great because he didn’t either. A few weeks later, as my suspicions grew, I tested him by saying, “I think I might want to have children after all,” and of course he acquiesced, Oh that’s a great idea. Then Mr. I’m-So-In-Love-With-You didn’t call for a month. I blew the whole thing off. Then I accidentally dialed him as I’d forgotten to remove his number from my mobile (I hadn’t bothered to put it in the directory) and hung up immediately, but he called right back, claiming he’d lost my phone number and couldn’t call me. He probably did…since he hadn’t put it in the directory either. Or written it down anywhere. Because he was so besotted with love or something. Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash “Let’s get together and have dinner,” he said, naming an evening, because I was mad. “Sorry, I have plans tonight,” I lied, testing him. “Cancel them,” he said. “Fuck you,” I replied. “Thursday evening works better for me.” “I have plans that night,” he said. “Cancel them.” “I can’t.” “Yes you can. Tell her you’re going out with me instead.” “It’s not another woman.” I wasn’t sure it was at all true, but I didn’t care. “Thursday night is convenient for me, if you can’t go out to dinner that night then let’s forget the whole thing.” He insisted he couldn’t and tried to talk me into tonight, so I told him to fuck off. I’ve always wondered what the deal was with Sam. He was a ‘type’ of some sort. I’ve considered whether he might be a narcissist, but nowadays everyone gets slapped with that label, and I never got to know him very well. Maybe he was a psychopath. Maybe he was a player, or a pickup artist, or just some random manipulative dick. I’ve often wondered if he found someone else and if he was making her miserable. I suspect he has. Unfortunately for Sam, no one ‘love bombs’ me effectively. He complained about the ‘walls’ around my heart. Point taken, but in his case they were there for good reason. He wasn’t in love with me, and he was trying too hard to try and make me fall in love with him. He was playing me somehow, and I’ll never know what his mad plan was. He picked someone too old, too wise and far too jaded to pull that shit with. I imagine, though, that if he found someone much younger and less experienced, that premature I-love-you-let’s-make-plans-for-forever crap worked just dandy. Recognizing bad men and other potential abusers Other women don’t have the radar for bad men that I have, and I want to fix that. I read a lot of stories of women who were done wrong by men, or worse, sexually assaulted. Abuse, whether it’s emotional, psychological, physical, or sexual, is always traumatic, and many women, but younger women especially, don’t often have the experience or understanding of romantic and social dynamics to recognize ‘red flag men’ when they meet them. It may be even more challenging for Millennials. I’m not sure how socialized any of them are, so pressured are they to succeed, succeed, succeed at all costs. Young boys and men have access to pornography in a way us early Gen-Xers didn’t — you had to steal your dad’s stash or hope to find one in a dumpster back in the day. I used to scoff at Christian and feminist claims that porn damages men’s views of women and sexuality, but now I’m beginning to think they were onto something besides their own sexual repression (and many Christians and feminists are sexually repressed). I read stories of abuse by men and I wonder —  intellectually, not judgmentally… How did she not recognize early on that he was likely a problem? This is a question we should constantly ask ourselves as well as each other, not to blame the victim but to drill down to where female psychology and romantic/sexual socialization fail us all. My mother, who was feminist before it was even a household word but denies to this day she was ever the “F” word, drilled it into my head that you NEVER tolerate physical abuse from a man. She warned me about control techniques, how if they hit once they’ll hit again, how you should never listen to their pleas and entreaties that it’ll never happen again, and that he’ll try to win you over with treats and gifts to ‘prove’ to you he’s serious. I’m not really sure where my WWII-era mother got it from, raised in a generation to be true to your man no matter what and to tolerate whatever abuse he gives you and be grateful for his very presence in your life, because she was married twice and abused by neither her ex-husband nor my father. My uncle, her brother, confirms that #1 was never abusive, just a manchild. She left him, which women of her generation almost never did. Maybe it was my grandmother's example, who defied her own generation by going out and working to help support the family since my grandfather was unable to provide properly himself. Mom’s ‘never tolerate abuse’ entrenched itself in my brain. She conveyed to me the message that I had the power to decide how I was treated . No one had the right to treat me badly, and the sooner I got out of a bad relationship, the better. I’ve never been involved with an abusive man. I believe to this day that women have the power to avoid toxic men, and that if they assert their power to leave early when things go pear-shaped, they stand a much better chance of surviving, hopefully wiser and smarter about their choices. I believe many women truly don’t understand they have this power. I don’t judge them. I'm sympathetic and want to see all women make great choices. (And to any men reading this, I want to see you make better choices too. Plenty of men are just as blind to women’s red warning flags.) As a teenager, I became quite observant as to which boys/men seemed like they might be trouble. This is where my own reading and observation came in…Mom never told me how to avoid the wrong men, just what to do if I found myself with one. The Girl’s Guide to recognizing potential Danger Boys Here’s a quick list I came up with. Men who fall into these categories should raise red warning flags for women but, I want to emphasize, does not mean he is necessarily an abuser or otherwise bad guy. Proceed slowly and with caution. These are risk signs, but do not, by any stretch, encompass all the men who fall into each category: Affluent white guys. As we entered the ’80s I noticed that young, good-looking Yuppie men had a certain attitude. Today we call it ‘entitlement’ but we didn’t use that label as much back then. They clearly felt entitled to whatever they wanted, particularly women. The misogyny wasn’t much below the surface. Homophobes . I noticed the correlation between how homophobic a man was and how disdainful he was of women. A guy who didn’t like the idea of homosexual sex and didn’t want to know anything about it but didn’t mind being around gay guys was far different from the guy I knew in high school who ‘hated fags’. Today, I see that real homophobia is actually a symptom of deep-seated misogyny. A man who ‘hates fags’ is a guy who hates you. Because ‘real men’ don’t let themselves be treated like a woman, which is ‘weak’ and therefore contemptuous. Avoid him. Men in hypermasculine professions. This includes the military, sports, police, firefighters, construction workers, and, at least in the U.S., lawyers. Any profession that’s ‘macho’ or encourages aggression in men, either verbal or physical, is a red flag. That said, I have a friend married to a construction worker who is a wonderful, caring man and a very good father. Men espousing right-wing/conservative values. This is a bit problematic as misogynist assholes hide in progressive politics as well, but they’re better at hiding their misogyny or denying it even exists, because after all, “I’m a liberal!” The hidden misogyny of, say, the ‘Bernie bros’ is a topic for another day. But…traditionalist, right-wing values often include a more patriarchal view of women’s place, which may or may not be in the home but which damn well mean she’d better know her place and that means not competing with men, and especially not earning more money than her partner. Being a ‘traditional man’ means hiding your feelings and never questioning that violence and aggression resolve many problems. Self-awareness is for pussies. Men from misogynist religions and cultures. This is a big one. When they grow up in an environment where the culture teaches, or even worse, ‘God teaches’ that women should be submissive and subservient and that you have the right to whack her right back into place if she falls out of it, they may well bring these toxic values with them even if they don’t show it initially. That said, I have a friend from one of these cultures who completely turned his back on his misogynist birth religion and became an atheist. He is one of the kindest, sweetest guys I know and I’m sorry we couldn’t get together as he wanted to do back in the day. I didn’t because of his background. Turned out it was a good call on my part for an entirely different and non-toxic reason — later, he decided he was bisexual and poly. Fair enough, and I’m happy he’s still my friend, because he’s a great guy. Men who fetishize other races. When I first moved to Toronto I was targeted — racially profiled even — by men from those same toxic religions and cultures who, it turns out, had a real thing for white women — and when I dyed my hair blonde it got even worse. I have nothing against interracial couples and in fact am more open to it in Canada where the racial situation isn’t nearly as farked up as it is in the U.S. (and this was many years before Trumpistan). Men who racially profile romantic targets usually expect them to be stereotypical in some way. Asian women are often expected to be submissive and compliant. White women, for those profiling me, were expected to be sluts. Muscleheads . Guys who spend more time at the gym than they do in a bookstore can absolutely beat the crap out of you. Calling out gym rats can be a bit problematic as some of them are just very fitness- or goal-oriented. But really watch out for the ones with a hypermasculine attitude. These guys need to get to know you better, in public places, before you go home with him to check out that hot bod in private. “Let me show you my biggest muscle, heh heh heh!” Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash Control freaks. He could be an ‘alpha male’, and if he’s telling you what to do or criticizing you too much up front, run like the wind. My sister-in-law told me of a friend who got involved with one of those aforementioned men from a misogynist culture dominated by a misogynist religion. At first he was a ‘normal’ wonderful guy, but as time went on he started dictating who she could spend time with and how she should dress. He wanted more ‘covering up’ now that she was ‘his’. As in, his property. The way he treats others. Last summer in Aruba I got friendly (but not too friendly) with an American who’d helped me out of a jam the night before. We agreed to go out for dinner and some drinks but I was the only one who ate dinner. He said he wanted to leave plenty of room for alcohol. [See: Next bullet point]. I didn’t like how he treated the waitresses who served him. He called them ‘sweetheart’ in a deprecating manner and complained rudely about the strength of his drinks. I’d had no plans to see him beyond this point but had I been, he would have ruined it right there. And speaking of alcohol, that brings me to my last point… Alcoholic/drug abuser. I don’t have any relationship with the latter but I’ve run into several alcoholics. One was my long-term ex-partner but he also wasn’t an active alcoholic when we met and later moved in together. Once I realized him for what he was (it took awhile, he was never abusive or it would have taken less time), I should have gotten rid of him earlier. But I didn’t, and he caused me a lot of stress and sturm und drang before it was all over. And I was dumb enough to take him back a few years later, but that ended badly for reasons that had nothing to do with alcohol. Or abuse. I think it’s misguided at best and a huge, dangerous mistake at worst for feminists to ignore how to teach/help women make better choices. Maybe they don’t know, themselves. A lot of feminists are coming from a history of abuse and violence. It’s possible they haven’t learned a few key lessons or maybe they’re too traumatized to look too deeply. We need to help them, too. I wish young girls could grow up with someone like my mother, because she was one particularly smart cookie for her generation. That said, she still asked judgmentally when we talked about women in abusive relationships, “Why doesn’t she leave?” Back then, we as a society had little information or understanding of the dynamics, economics and psychology of the abused and the abuser. Mom couldn’t stand the author of The Burning Bed when she saw her on a TV talk show because she felt she should have left the guy instead of burning him alive. She was even more incensed when the audience cheered the wife. Many years later, I read the book, well after ‘the battered wife syndrome’ became a household phrase and more research had been done on abusive relationships, and I understood why she didn’t leave. We are all products of our time, and today’s oh-so-woke feminists may well find themselves in the critical crosshairs of tomorrow’s feminists for not being woke enough to realize just how much they refused to recognize how they enabled women to become and remain victims. Many feminists have a pipe dream in which one day, with enough lessons and sensitivity training, men simply stop raping. harassing and abusing women. I have my own pipe dream: That one day, the only men who ever find love, affection, and sex are the good guys, because no woman will have anything to do with an abuser. Misogynists will die with their bicycle grip-shaped dick in their sticky calloused palms. There are LOTS of good men. We have got to value ourselves enough to not ‘settle’ for abusive assholes like O.J. Simpson or suspiciously phony Sams who may be up to no good. We have got to gently challenge ourselves, and each other, when we or our friends and loved ones get involved with toxic, abusive men. Women have choices. We decide. Let’s decide to not allow abuse into our lives. And then let’s teach it to our daughters, as we teach our sons to respect women (as does your partner, because he respects women too, right? Right? That’s why you allowed him into your life.)