Trevor Noah's tribal whataboutism sparks my own. Whatabout your own moral blindness, Trevor? Ukrainian refugees crossing into Poland. CC0 4.0 image by Міністерство внутрішніх справ України on Wikimedia Commons I'll call what Trevor Noah expressed at the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine 'tribalism'. He accused both journalists and news consumers of racism for viewing the war differently from wars in other parts of the world. He isn't wrong, but he blithely ignores other important reasons why the West is more het up about an illegal invasion by a fading superpower of a prosperous, democratic, and yes Trevor, civilized country like Ukraine. Gas prices didn't shoot up when Rwanda broke out in massacre. Maybe we paid more for coffee for awhile. We're about to pay a lot more for wheat-based food since Russia is the world's largest wheat exporter and Ukraine, until the war, was the sixth-largest global and a top producer of rye, sunflower seeds and barley. Rwanda wasn't producing much of anything except drought and internal tribalism. More critically, cultural differences help explain the concern disparity. "And beyond the war itself ... there's a really interesting thing that I learned. And that is: A lot of people on TV didn't expect a war like this to happen in, let's say, certain neighborhoods." You're right, Trevor, we didn't. To put it into perspective for a New Yorker like you, this is like a crack gang war in the Hamptons. "You do realize that, until very recently, fighting crazy wars was Europe's thing? That was Europe's entire thing. That's all of European history." Yes, it was, and it's why the United Nations was created. One of its primary raisons d'être was to prevent another world war, as the last two had been exceedingly brutal, and the next would be nuclear. Today, less than a century after the end of the last world war, western Europeans have conspicuously been not killing their countryfolk for many decades. (Eastern Europe is another story.) The Middle East and Africa, on the other hand.... Noah played clips in his viral rant in which various reporters and commentators said things like, "...Ukraine is not a place—with all due respect—like Iraq or Afghanistan," and "This is not a developing third world nation—this is Europe." That didn't play too well with our man. "What were you going to say if you weren't choosing your words carefully? 'I just hope the next time this happens, it happens back in the Middle East where it belongs.' No, more like, we hope one day they'll decide to stop murdering each other over political and religious ideologies. You know, the way Europe once did. Maybe the Middle East could form their own United Nations, or something. "Now people are going to be like, 'Ugh, to see this in Europe!' To see this, I don't know about you, but I was shocked to see how many reporters—around the world, by the way—seem to think that it's more of a tragedy when white people have to flee their countries. Because, I guess, what? The 'darkies' were built for it?" No, because...that's how certain non-First World cultures do, in the 21st century. Like mass shootings is how Americans do. Like blowing things up with your body is how Middle Easterners do. Like gang rape is how Indians do. Like mutilating baby girls' genitals is how Africans do. FGM (Female Genital Mutilation FCC0 3.0 image by Nederlandse Leeuw on Wikimedia Commons Whatabout everyone's misogyny? I agree with Noah's racism charge. Racism is one of many tribalisms: My people before yours. Black Lives Matter formed in response to high-profile killings by white police officers of often unarmed, sometimes innocent black men. Of course, who knew back then that cops kill unarmed, sometimes innocent white men more than black men? Noah watches the West rally behind the uber-white Ukrainians with a tribalist eye as the conflict re-engages old Cold War enmity, making the left blush and wonder whether ol' semi-senile Ronald Reagan was right about that whole 'Evil Empire' thing. After all, thirty years ago we had better things to do when one set of Rwandans began hacking up another set of Rwandans and the latter fled the country in droves. I don't think we'd have been quite as sanguine had it been, rather, the French filleting Germans, but that's because frankly, we expect better from them now. France and Germany haven't gotten along since at least ol' Caesar's day, back when they were known as the Gauls and the Germanic tribes. This ain't the first century BCE, mes amis! Public domain cartoon by John Tenniel, Punch magazine, August 6, 1881 from Wikipedia. On the other hand, I don't know how sanguine I'd have been had Kim Jong-Un invaded South Korea, for the same reasons I'm outraged by Russia's naked attack on Ukrainians: South Korea is a prosperous, civilized country, dammit, and they're total technology geeks! And the North Korean government is a totalitarian nightmare run by a fat psychopathic dictator who starves his own people! That is NOT how the South Koreans do. Social media critics, drunk on critical theory about racism, oppression, and Western ethnocentrism kick-started directly into whatabout mode: "Where was your concern for the Palestinians? The Rohingyans? The Chechnyans? The Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenians?" Yeah, let's--talk about those folks. When I listen to Noah and his supporters whatabouting, I respond as a woman and look at the always-overlooked victims of those same conflicts: Women. Those victimized cultures are, well, problematic. I wasn't happy when my prime minister, Justin Trudeau, vowed to bring in 50,000 Syrian refugees after the shock and awe of the famous rescuer carrying drowned toddler Alan Kurdi. It wasn't that my heart wasn't moved by the photo, or the plight of Syrian refugees-- Bashar Assad, for Darwin's sake! --I just didn't want all Syrian refugees. RIP. CC0 3.0 photo by Defend International on Wikimedia Commons Most specifically, their misogynist men. Gender-based violence is rife all throughout the Middle East, where women have fewer rights and recourse to escaping male violence. Syria had a high rape rate before the Syrian conflict , and as is the case for any woman living in a truly patriarchal culture, they don't report not only for fear of not being believed, but of being murdered in an 'honour killing'. Spousal rape isn't a crime in Syria, and a rapist can escape prosecution by marrying his victim, which relieves the family of the inconvenience of murdering her. And of course you can always count on terrorist groups like ISIL to wield sexual violence as a weapon. "Can we allow in 50,000 women and children, not including boys over, say, ten or twelve?" I thought. You know, after it's probably too late to cleanse them of cultural toxic masculinity. Chechyna? Same ol' story, different part of the world. Wahabbism, an 18th-century Islamic movement to restore 'purity' to Islam and behind pretty much every extremist Islamic government today, also infected the Chechnyans leading to little bon mots like this from president Ramzan Kadyrov in 2011. "I have the right to criticize my wife. She doesn't [have the right to criticize me]. With us [in Chechen society], a wife is a housewife. A woman should know her place. A woman should give her love to us [men]... She would be [man's] property. And the man is the owner. Here, if a woman does not behave properly, her husband, father, and brother are responsible. According to our tradition, if a woman fools around, her family members kill her... That's how it happens, a brother kills his sister or a husband kills his wife... As a president, I cannot allow for them to kill. So, let women not wear shorts...". Yeah, that's the ticket. Make sure she doesn't make him kill her. Ban shorts. The Rohingyans? When mass rape by an invading army occurs , Rohingyan men do what patriarchal men do, blame the victims . My heart was hardened to the plight of Rohingyan men when I read of one who castigated his wife for 'not running away' when the soldiers came and raped her. She was eight months pregnant with a terrified toddler wrapped around one leg as her husband took off with the other children. The Palestinians? They want freedom, a country of their own? Freedom for whom, exactly? I'm guessing not their women, for whom it will be brutal business as usual. Afghanistan? Women's rights predictably slid right back into the medievalism of their pre-9/11 world. It's only because of 9/11 that they were granted a twenty-year respite. Iraq was a totalitarian mess under Saddam and remains a violent and unstable part of the world. The US's illegal invasion didn't help, most specifically because countries have to fix themselves. It's like Alcoholics Anonymous: They have to want to change. You do realize, Trevor, that even before European contact, African, Middle Eastern, and most other human societies were a patchwork of raiding, massacre, sexual violence, slavery and oppression? That was Africa's thing. That was the Middle East's thing. That was all of humanity's history, with the only exceptions a half-handful of societies so remote they didn't have anyone else to fight with. Oh, and they all demonstrated how much they hated women. Revolutions aren't for girls Revolutions are first and foremost for men, who don't give a fig about women's rights until forced. The American women's liberation movement emerged directly out of the New Left in the '60s and early '70s, once the chickie-boos realized their part in the democracy and civil rights struggle was to fetch the coffee and part their legs. I'm reminded of revolutionaries' blindness to women's lives as I read Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk To Freedom . Inspirational for his civil rights fight as well as his insights into power--over one's self and from where it derives--it also starkly highlights how obliviously he ignored African women, especially South Africa. (Listen up, Trevor!) Mandela only cursorily mentions women's rights, mostly references to how his wife Winnie fought against the system and paid for it with constant harassment, banning, arrest and occasional imprisonment. He acknowledges how his struggle, and his 28-year imprisonment, were far harder on her than it was him. But otherwise, so removed from women's concerns was Mandela that he pondered what an 'odd sensation' it must have been for his mother to show up at his sentencing at which he was expected to get the death sentence. "Try 'emotionally devastated,' you emotionally constipated twit," I thought. 'Odd sensation', indeed. Mandela divorced his wife three years after his release, citing infidelity. He was still married when he met and fell in love with her at a Soweto bus stop. Would he have remained faithful for 28 years if the roles were reversed? Nelson Mandela was utterly blind to his male privilege. CC0 2.0 image by Archives de la Ville de Montréal on Flickr South Africa has made a lot gains in equalizing women yet remains a frightening place to be a woman, regardless of color. It's no picnic for children either. Child murders have climbed by 'nearly a third' . Rape and domestic violence are up, and have been described as 'like a second pandemic' . One of the vilest rape-murders I've ever read was the horrific case of Anene Booysen in Bredasdorp on the Western Cape. ( WARNING: Extremely graphic content.) According to the African Health Organization , "Femicide is five times higher in South Africa than the global average, with South Africa having the fourth-highest female interpersonal violence death rate out of the 183 countries listed by the WHO in 2016." Noah's yardstick for measuring the civilization of a culture may be how it treats its minorities, particularly its darker-skinned ones. I accept that. It's a good yardstick, but it's not the only one. My yardstick compares one half of a so-called 'civilized' society to the half that almost always gets thrown under the bus when the cow patties goes down. Mahatma Gandhi's yardstick was how a society treats its animals. We could count many more moral progress measures, extending beyond other species to how we treat our environment. Sadly, we all fall short at some point. Whatabout what's right about whataboutism? Europe's nearly century-old commitment to end intra-continental violence is still in its infancy, and may be sorely tested in the coming years with the far right's global rise. The United States, a country coming up on its quarter-millennial birthday in 2026, is arguably flirting with a second civil war as the identitarian far left and right work to divide America further. To be honest, Trevor, I don't really think of my mother country as very much civilized anymore. And certainly not Russia. I consider Canada a civilized country. For now. First World countries fall short for the same reasons others do: Hatred against colors and ethnicities, hatred against women, an increasingly violent society. Europe has spent most of its existence fighting each other. Other parts of the world still haven't won that precarious battle. Like Africa. Like the Middle East. Like Russia. Like the United States. 'Where were you when...?" is a fair question we should ponder and discuss. Why didn't we care as much about the Rwandans? Or the Chechnyans? Or the yadda yadda yaddas? More importantly, why don't we care--or not--only when we frame it in identitarian terms of how much the victims look like us? And how much 'my' tribe is victimized by 'your' tribe? Regardless of what color they are, what part of the world their ancestors initially invaded or what's between their legs. Why do I consider Ukraine--or South Korea--more 'civilized' than South Africa or most parts of the Middle East? It's not like racism and misogyny don't exist there. Ukrainians themselves demonstrated racism trying to cross borders. I don't like how the latters treat one-half of their population. We can't move forward as a global order until we abandon our tribalisms. One reason why I don't support slave reparations for African-Americans is because they only help one small group of Americans, and it's hard to see how handouts for grievances they haven't themselves suffered will 'help'. A more balanced, just, equitable society benefits everyone , not just black Americans. It's nothing but tribalism, as has become the #MeToo movement which ignores women's grievances when they happen to men (domestic violence, abuse, custody battle child abductions, rape, sexual harassment). Whataboutism is annoying to those trying to fix a problem - like the swift destruction of Ukraine - but it forces us to think about our own biases. Trevor Noah is biased towards darker-skinned people. I am biased towards vagina'ed people. Others are biased towards marginalized groups like transfolk, religious communities, the disabled, or people in certain age groups. Our biases serve real purposes. I thank Trevor Noah for making me think a bit about my bias regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war. Revolution: It's best when it's personal I know people affected by the current war. A good friend and my neighbor's families are Ukrainian, with family members there. My cousin's children are half-Ukrainian. And, I live in Ontario, with Canada's largest Ukrainian community. We have a Ukrainian festival every summer not far from my home. We have Ukrainian banks and credit unions. Ukrainians, literally and figuratively, are my 'hood. So's everyone else. My street is a United Nations of humanity. I care more about today's war than I did when the Rwandan conflict occurred, because I hadn't yet become friendly with a Rwandan refugee I worked with years ago and with whom I maintained a friendship until we grew apart. I care more about Rwanda, I know more about it now, because of her. It's personalized. I think of South Korea as more 'civilized' than North Korea, but but forgot about my niece when I first pondered the question; I don't think of her as South Korean, she's just my niece. Racism against Asians in America seemed remote to me last year until weeks after the infamous spa killings in Atlanta. After I remembered the family Asian. Point taken, Trevor. I need to think about my own moral blindness, but I hope you and your tribe will ponder your own. African men, especially black Africans, have a lot to answer to women for, and I didn't even get into how Africans likely invented female genital mutilation (and I can't imagine it was originally a female idea). The true path to progress, like all revolutions, is a long walk to freedom, but if we can move beyond our own personal identitarianism, we can make it revolution for everybody, not just the white set or the guy set. It'll be a huge improvement for everybody. Yeah, even for white guys.

Porn created by women *for* women had to be light-years better than male-created porn, right? Right? Photo by Arianna Jadé from Pexels Feminist porn? WTF? Porn created by women for women? I jumped at the chance to attend Toronto’s Feminist Porn Awards several years ago. I knew women were making female-centered porn which I assumed, I hoped , meant it would suck less than male porn. My friend Janessa, far more a connoisseuse of sex, kink, non-cishet sex, and big dicks than I, headed eagerly to the Bloor Cinema to watch porn we expected wouldn’t involve a lot of tedious pounding of female orifices and ejaculations on faces, which has always struck me as disrespectful at best and degrading at worst. The music was far better with none of that mow-wow-wow crap and the camera work with an iPhone! —  an iPhone! —  was light-years better than I would have expected. The acting was clearly consensual , the actresses quite proud of their work, and, as one might expect from women who don’t have a male porn-manufactured objectified view of what’s attractive, they represented different body types. No cookie-cutter plastic-boobed underfed Barbie Dolls tiresomely found in male porn. No conveyor belt of gorgeous ready-to-go-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-foreplay women served up for the pleasure of guys who got the role because genetics favored their manly parts. Porn Is Intrinsically Toxic For Men (And Women Too) We watched foreplay, diversity, the female perspective and real orgasms, and a few told an actual story. This fulfilled my greatest fantasy for female porn — a plotline! Too bad it was even more boring, overall, than male porn. The WTF-ness of ‘feminist’ porn I’ve never been a porn aficionado, for all the usual reasons many women have. What’s in it for me? I saw some when I was in college. Sometimes it was hot, but usually, after ten minutes it got boring. I mostly laughed at the notoriously bad acting and the ridiculous Superfly-’70s-era music soundtrack. Git down ’n’ funkeeeeeeehhhhhh!!! The women were always raring to go, even with vintage porn’s famously ugly guys catering to male fantasies: The ugly guy always nailed the hot chick. I’d read about a female porn industry but never investigated it. Given how boring I found mainstream porn, it was hard to get arsed even about this. But I wondered: What does it look like? What would I consider exciting, erotic porn? For Janessa and me, the Feminist Porn Awards were even more disappointing than sex with Donald Trump must have been for Stormy Daniels. An hour of our lives we’re never getting back. While we agreed we didn’t find any of it erotic, we understood the movies’ appeal to others, given the contenders had been chosen to display the wide variety of female sexual fantasies and desires utterly lacking in mainstream porn. Still, some of it was so un-erotic we’d turn to each other and go, “What the fuck was that all about?” The first movie is best referred to as Trucker Chick, and ranked as the most unerotic porn flick I’d ever seen, at least until we got to the next one. Trucker Chick spoke to her lover — I’m unclear as to whether said lover was male or female — about how she’d wait on the highway for them to swing by and maybe take her somewhere for what sounded like dom-sub sex. LoverCritter didn’t show up and Our Heroine got gang-molested (not raped; this was the most sexless porn ever) by truckers emerging from the shadows. Um, ewwwww. What made me uncomfortable was how this came less than six months after a horrific gang rape and murder on a bus in India . However, the movie was too lame to be offensive. There was no sex or hot men. Just a lot of quick-cut artsy-fartsy scenes and images, interspersed with a seemingly unrelated subplot, if you can call it that, of some other chick being tied up in a pretty damn uncomfortable position from the ceiling. Not the last we’d see of that in the next hour. The next was so lame neither Janessa nor I could figure out who the hell would find it erotic. A woman in a white satin shift, in a dark, dirty-looking warehouse, hands tied behind her, jumped a rope twirled by various men who looked to be the brothers, boyfriends, and maybe husbands of the production crew rather than from a cattle call on Mandy , standing outside the spotlight. Creepily, I thought, they encircled her, watching her sweat her ass off jumping rope and bizarrely, drinking whiskey on the rocks and smacking their lips. Again I say, and Janessa was with me on this one, WTF?!?! Is there some bizarre female jump rope fetish we don’t know about? Every woman is different and many of our fantasies might be utterly mystifying to others, and I can understand one about enjoying the male gaze — I am, after all, an ex-belly dancer — but not dorky-looking guys drinking and watching me jump rope semi-bound. Chacun à son goût, as my mother likes to say. To each her own. Number Three featured full-frontal nudity and actual sex in the form of masturbation. Once again set in a dirty old building. Tight budgets, I guess. It didn’t do much for me but it was straightforward, and it wasn’t all artsy-fartsy WTF like the first two. The next was the closest any of them came to the sort of porn I might want to watch, even though it left me filled with hot raging — ennui. Its imaginative storyline appealed to my sci-fi side but still failed to fulfill my cis-heteronormative tastes. A married couple watch porn while having sex. The wife, with a click of the remote, brings the man in the video into their bedroom, where he joins them on the bed. A threesome, right? I hoped for something I hadn’t seen yet — intercourse between a man and a woman, but at no time during this hour did we see any woman’s vagina penetrated by dick. Maybe I’m too cis-het ‘vanilla’ for feminist porn. The biggest problem was the unconvincing actor playing the husband, who was clearly gay from the moment he stepped on screen. He tried to play a man attracted to his wife but it was akin to watching Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory allegedly fall slowly for Amy. Jim Parsons was too gay to convincingly pull off an asexual-turned-heterosexual geek. Not coincidentally it was a gay man who directed this entry. Big freakin’ surprise. While the wife’s vagina never came anywhere near either dick, we got to see some big body builder’s manmeat pounding the little husband in the ass — which by the way took it so easily I concluded the actor who played the husband was likely a veteran of gay porn. Is this what lesbians do for fun? The next was another masturbation piece bringing new dimension to the word ‘lame’. A gal in a latex suit lubed herself up and took a swim in a nearby pool. Oh yeah. Oh baby. It’s so hot. Another featured tying a woman into an uncomfortable position and hanging her from the ceiling. No nudity, no actual sex, just one chick doing her best to suspend my disbelief. I leaned over to Janessa and asked, “Is this what lesbians do for fun?” She’d know better than I, the little bisexual hedonist who’s done shit that would make Traci Lords turn blue. She didn’t get it either. The only film making any sense to us as eroticism was one about a physically disabled woman (Actual Porn Star name: MIA GIMP) who uses a special walking crutch that clacks down the street. She fantasizes about running and masturbating with the crutch. I guess this is what the selection committee meant when they said they chose diverse entries. We figured okay, if this is what folks with disabilities want to see, clack on, my friends! The last was the most comprehensible Not Our Sort Of Porn but it met our expectations of true porn — it had nudity, sex, and made sense rather than leaving us with the chronic WTF? feeling. The new boyfriend walks into the bedroom where his attractive girlfriend waits. They have a discussion about his family whom she’s about to meet. She confesses there’s something she hasn’t told him and starts removing her clothing. The gal is a natal man in transition. I failed to notice the penis in the underwear as it was undersized, due I assume to hormone treatments. Her body was otherwise fairly female, although she still looked a little male around the torso. The boyfriend is clearly vexed but he doesn’t say anything, he helps her finish undressing, thinks about it a bit and finally does her in the ass. We understood how this was a transgender fantasy, being accepted by the new boyfriend when he found out. Porn with a plot for boring-ass cis-het chicks ‘Feminist’ sounds like a bit of a misnomer for what I saw at the ‘Feminist’ Porn Awards. What we watched wasn’t political or ideological, just more inclusive. It lacked what I dig most: My boring-ass vanilla taste for cis-het man-penetrating-the-woman. Also, it still mostly lacked anything resembling a plotline. My experience with porn is limited; I probably haven’t seen anything produced after 1985. The few I’ve seen include the end of some sci-fi thing with a guy in a black outfit and a Woolworth’s C3PO mask getting blown by a woman who had trouble getting him to cum on her face. I haven’t seen Sylvester Stallone’s porno from like 1971, and what you see of it in this three-minute trailer shows zero nudity or ‘mature themes’, and he looks kind of silly and weird, but it’s STILL more erotic than anything I saw at the Feminist Porn Awards. Ladies, we can do better…! Taboo II from the series explored how the family that lays together stays together. My ex once brought home The Erotic Adventures of Alice in Wonderland which wasn’t too bad. Alice was an uptight virgin who embarked on a kind of cute journey of sexual discovery. One I liked, and watched again recently on YouTube, was Young Lady Chatterley II. Among its many charms included Adam West as a dorky repressed professor who finally gets laid. It wasn’t Oscar-winning storyline material, for sure, but it beat My son has a big thick cock, I think I’ll fuck him. Do you know what I’d like to see for feminine porn? Women’s romance novels, brought to the silver screen in all their throbbing-manmeat-penetrates-her-quivering-moist-love-flower glory. If nothing else it will eliminate all the tedious tortured descriptions of sex and genitalia necessitating the author’s ever-more-desperate search for descriptive euphemisms, a big challenge when every other scene is down ’n’ dirty and she had to search for ever-more-obscure euphemisms she hadn’t used yet. I’ve never been a fan of bodice-ripper romance novels, mostly because the heroines are too wussy for my taste (once again, I haven’t read anything written since probably 1985) but with a little modernizing to make them stronger heroines, it would work better. Or rework real movies as porn has always done. Chris Hemsworth starring as The Gunslinger in The Good, The Bad and The Underlaid! Ryan Gosling as The Lifeguard in Beach Blanket Bang-o! Salvatore Esposito in Under The Tuscan Buns! Justin Bieber in A Hardon Day’s Night! Marie Clare has listed 75 Porn Movies With Great Plots And Better Sex. I’m up for a few extra suggestions. Good, feminine, cis-het porn where the woman gets penetrated at least occasionally by guys. It’s out there somewhere, to quote The X-Rated Files. CC0 public domain at Pxhere This post first appeared on Medium in September 2021. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

The captain of his own soul urges victims to liberate themselves first, and never stop fighting Creative Commons 4.0 image from South Africa Gateway We would fight inside as we had fought outside. The racism and repression were the same; I would simply have to fight on different terms - Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom The South African white government considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist; he considered himself a freedom fighter. The African National Congress, formed in 1912 to unite black South Africans and fight for the freedoms they longed for under white oppression, took a more critical turn after the notorious segregation system known to the world as apartheid manifested in 1948 under the white supremacist National Party. The ANC (originally the South African Native National Congress) wasn't conceived as a violent organization but it transformed after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, at which 69 black Africans were killed and 180 injured when the police opened fire on 7,000 protesters at the police station. The police argued self defense, but some protestors were shot in the back as they fled. Non-violence wasn't a principle for Mandela the way it was for Mahatma Ghandi. Mandela considered it a strategy , and noted it was only useful if your opposition plays by the same rules as the resistance. As the ANC and other groups' resistance met with consistent violent government response, Mandela noted nonviolence's ineffectiveness, and the Congress laid out the four types of violent protest: Sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution and discussed how to begin with sabotage, the least violent. Reading Mandela's classic autobiography Long Walk To Freedom broke down for me the social justice warrior mandate into three parts: First, liberate yourself. Second, always fight no matter where you are. And third, the most difficult lesson of all: Never fall into despair and hatred. 1. Liberate yourself first What interested me about Mandela's story, in his own words, was how he'd been able to overcome the personal bigotry and hatred that so many others fighting a powerful, violent enemy have succumbed to. A few years ago I'd read the book the movie Invictus was based on. Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made A Nation detailed how Mandela learned to see the humanity of the white men who dictated his life for 28 years in prison, even the most brutal of the prison guards. He talked to them; he listened to them; he carefully and gently corrected their perceptions about Africans and the ANC and why it had turned to violence. He reminded me rather a lot of Darryl Davis, the black man who befriends Ku Klux Klansmen. Mandela doesn't discuss that journey nearly as much as I'd hoped in Long Walk , but his observations on power, both personal and political, made up for it. They might seem like no-brainer silly platitudes-- Liberate yourself and Don't despair? Really?--but they're the lessons we say we know, except we don't. We repeat them dutifully like obliging children, often with the sort of tonal twist to indicate Sorry I'm saying something everyone knows , perhaps prefaced with It goes without saying , but we don't mean them. We don't understand them. We don't apply them to ourselves. The existential human crisis we're mired in after decades of neglecting our human connections and buying into the intensely patriarchal Every man for himself philosophy belies the lies we tell ourselves. It's always different when it's me. Liberating one's self requires a constant stream of self-education, as most SJWs know, but also self-reflection, which many today don't. Mandela took education wherever he found it and praised rather than damned the religious-run schools for African children despite being morally rigid and colonialist in their attitudes. The government was unwilling to run decent schools for those at the bottom of the white-imposed strict racial South African hierarchy and he described them as "far more open than the racist principles underlying government schools." Mandela read many books and held long debates with his comrades in the ANC and others. They engaged with the Communist Party, some of whose ideas they shared, a relationship which would come back to haunt them many times and subject them to the widespread perception (aided by government propaganda) that they were a Communist-led or infiltrated organization. Mandela valued the importance of engaging intellectually with others with whom he might not necessarily agree and this extended eventually to his greatest challenges in white-run prisons. Still, the goals of the ANC remained, even after its turn to violence, for a free and equitable South Africa with no intention to 'drive the whites into the ocean,' a phrase he doesn't credit to an earlier source but sounds remarkably like an older Arab claim to ' drive the Jews into the sea '. Mandela continued reading and studying in prison, sometimes with permission and sometimes revoked when he 'caused trouble', which he did rather a lot by leading prison strikes and other forms of resistance for better conditions. He also describes ingenious ways for them to learn news of the outside world and spread it among other prisoners from forbidden newspapers utilizing many clever tactics. Mandela challenged himself in a way SJWs don't often do today. An early story details himself and his pre-imprisonment comrades ignorantly cheering a black Sudanese leader commemorated in a Moroccan parade for shallow, superficial reasons rather than asking what the man had accomplished. They reacted out of nationalism and ethnicity, he realized, for a black man in a country with, at that time, few of them. "Later, our hosts informed us that Sudani had been a legendary soldier, and had even reputedly captured an entire French unit single-handedly. But we were cheering him because of his color, not his exploits." Something for the antiracism set to think about the next time they cheer Colin Kaepernick, a good but not great quarterback whose greatest accomplishment was bending a knee during a song. Twenty-eight years of prison time, most of it spent in brutal conditions, taught Mandela further resilience and gave him more time to study, read, think, and debate with his fellow political prisoners (often under their breath as they toiled in a quarry) to keep his mind nimble. When he debated, he hoped to change minds as everyone does, but always remembered, "It is easier to educate a man when he wants to learn." 2. Always fight oppression no matter where you are When he was just a few feet from me, I said, as firmly as I could, "If you so much as lay a hand on me, I will take you to the highest court in the land and when I finish with you, you will be as poor as a church mouse." Mandela's indomitable spirit bought him many bouts of solitary confinement, withholding of food and other punishments for 'causing trouble'. Political prisoners were separated from the criminal ones on Robben Island lest they 'contaminate' them with their political ideas. Oppression and maltreatment descended to a whole new level for African prisoners. Mandela fought for more rights, and against new wardens who'd been brought in to 'tighten discipline'. He managed to get a few transferred out with his efforts. But he also strove to 'refuse to become my own jailer'. He recognized the importance of finding value in everything he did, whether it was doing a superb job of sweeping his cell or the hallway, or washing his clothes well. He spoke to his jailers and guards when permitted and he communicated with his fellow prisoners whether permitted or not. He strove to lift up the other prisoners, including the criminals, and it strengthened everyone. He fought for their rights and resisted special privileges if others couldn't share them. It made him an even greater future leader. 3. Never allow yourself to hate and despair "There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lay defeat and death." Mandela drew a strong lesson from the ancient, classic Greek plays he read in prison: "...that character was measured by facing up to difficult situations and that a hero was a man who would not break even under the most trying circumstances." He famously drew strength from the poem Invictus by the 19th-century British poet William Ernest Henley, particularly the last verse. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Mandela never forgot that, and never shirked responsibility for himself. Today's SJW victimhood culture, which emerged from the '60s turn to identity politics, has ironically taken firm root in the United States, arguably the most privileged culture anywhere today. It's hard to imagine how today's so-called 'social justice warriors' would have survived the genuine, lifelong, day-to-day deeply institutionalized racism suffered by Mandela and his fellow Africans. Complaining about 'microaggressions' is a sign of just how privileged one is. Mandela's eventual reputation--even while still in prison--of being a uniter, of being someone 'whites could work with'--only came about because of his willingness to listen to people he didn't much agree with, and meet with them without calling them insulting names, however well deserved. If today's MAGAs are unwilling to listen to 'libtards' and paint them as evil, the equally identity-obsessed 'woke' are no different, apart from being willing to destroy their own if they don't hew to fanatical 'woke' dogma. The right intra-fights as well, but at the end of the day they come together to unite against their common enemy and they're far more effective at implementing their social engineering objectives than the left. The left's 'self-education' consists of readings and consumption of sources from the woke's 'approved' list, frowning mightily on anyone who dares search outside that constipated lump, not unlike the days when the Catholic Church proscribed any book or scientific discovery that challenged its religious and political ideologies. How many 'antiracists' today would be caught dead learning from a play by a dead white Western civilization-based Greek man? Mandela fought against mental self-imprisonment, acknowledging that black Africans suffered from a psychological inferiority stemming from 300 years of white rule. The Black Consciousness movement advocated that blacks first liberate themselves from their own mental chains so they can rise up in confidence and liberate themselves. Those same chains exist for SJWs in every era, and they prohibit real social change. One might instruct them Physician, heal thyself , to quote Schrodinger's Jesus, a man reputed to have both died and lived (again). I don't share the black experience but it bears many similarities to the female experience. Feminism has become as mired in victimhood and lack of resiliency as antiracism has in some quarters, seeded with self-infantilized yet dramatically privileged women wouldn't last ten minutes in downtown Kabul, before the return of the Taliban. What if they held a culture war and nobody came? What would happen if black people paid less attention to so-called 'white supremacy' unless genuinely confronted by it? Like, someone calling one the n-word or telling them to get the hell out of 'our' neighborhood, rather than hunting for 'microaggressions' and arguing that intent doesn't matter, but rather the black person's feelings , and why don't you just confront your own white supremacist privilege? If that's 'white fragility', just try talking to a certain kind of 'antiracist' about all the white men killed by police under near-identical circumstances as black men, and point to problems within the African-American community the people themselves have to address , that can't be blamed on racism. I am probably 'microaggressed' against by sexist men every time I go out, but I don't notice because I'm not paying attention . I don't look for it. The Patriarchy exists more strongly for and in some women than others, just as not every black person claims to be subjected to wall-to-wall perpetual racism. When you don't sweat the small stuff, you take its power the way you take an angry person's power when they insult you and you respond calmly and non-combatively. Sonofabitch, that wasn't what they wanted you to do! If we don't notice a biologically-based bigotry has occurred, are we oppressed? The intended victim isn't. At the very least, our day isn't ruined. Mandela's most impressive virtue was his resiliency, germinated in his pre-prison resistance struggle and refined and polished for the next twenty-eight. Resilience poses a particular challenge for modern social justice warriors who haven't grown up in the same oppressive circumstances as did black South Africans under apartheid. I see little of it in today's SJWs, who overreact to perceived and unintended slights and catastrophize them, who prefer to fight a ten-year-old 'racist' joke they found on Twitter rather than look inward and ask how black people or others are holding themselves back. I call out that lack of resilience in today's antiracists living in a racist world because I'm a woman living in a patriarchal world. I see my own and feminists' lack of resilience, especially those who self-infantilize with chronic victimhood. It's easier to blame 'patriarchy' (or white supremacy) than to acknowledge how much one gives each its power, rather than asking when to turn the blaming finger upon one's self. What can I do differently? How can I act more powerfully? How can I push myself more? I dare to ask myself these questions daily. I dare you to do the same. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Have you got the labia to challenge your friends’ choices? Photo by Philipp Wüthrich on Unsplash She was so damned cute, reddish-brown hair and big brown eyes. And she had no idea. Why would she tolerate the emotional abuse from her ex? She could get a way better guy. Without even trying. He’d dumped her for reasons I no longer remember, but kept calling her, stringing her along, making her hope he’d come back to her. He tortured her with stories of his new women, and she listened. She listened. She accepted his phone calls. And cried. She gave him permission to abuse her emotionally. That’s called ‘blaming the victim’ in modern feminist parlance, but my mother called it ‘being a doormat.’ “Why the hell are you even talking to him?” I said. “He has no respect for you. And he’s cruel, bragging to you about his other alleged women, knowing how you feel about him. Why don’t you find yourself a real man, one who knows how to treat you properly? Never take a phone call from this asshole again!” You know why she allowed it. It’s the Achilles heel of female psychology. “It’s because I luuuuuuuuuuvvvvv him.” I don’t know if that girl, who I met only once at a party, took anything from that exchange, but I knew a lot of women back in my twenties who tolerated all kinds of abuse from men. There are women who are willing to take it, and women who aren’t. I’m the latter. I have never been physically abused by a man and I never will be. I would never allow it . Girlfriends don’t let girlfriends make excuses Feminists are too nice when it comes to stopping male partner abuse. They’re willing to politically challenge abusive men but are much less willing to challenge the choices women make that lead them, however unwittingly, down the path to partner abuse. The first choice a woman makes is in deciding who to allow into her life. The next choice is how she will allow him to treat her. And for how long. If she grew up in a family or culture or religion where women have less power, where misogyny is institutionalized and she’s indoctrinated to believe it’s her place to be submissive to men, she may have low self-esteem, not that that’s a unique problem for anyone, including her abusive partners. Welcome to the entire human race. The reasons why women permit abuse are multifaceted and complicated, so my interest is in how we can identify and challenge our friends’ choices earlier rather than waiting until she’s in the shelter and you’re thinking, I know he owns guns. Here’s something else to think about: Now your life may be in danger too. He might come after her friends. You knew he was bad news. You didn’t like him the first time you met him. You didn’t like how he looked at her, how he treated her, how he casually dismissed anything she said, how he subtly put her down and told her what to do. And she did it. You were appalled, but you said nothing. Later, she complained he was controlling and threatening. Why do you put up with this? you asked and she gave some bullshit excuse. Then she changed the subject and you let it drop. Why didn’t you challenge her? Maybe you were afraid of hurting her feelings. Or of pushing her closer to him. Or you thought it was none of your business. It’s time for us to challenge ourselves, to challenge our friends more, when they make choices you know are going to lead to a bad end. We can’t just let her walk down that path to abuse. And we have to find our own inner strength to do it. Have you got the labia? Stop Male Abuse When It’s Happening…Maybe? It’s hard. You don’t want to lose a friend. But you might not. What if she listened to you? It might take awhile, but what if she knew you didn’t approve of her partner and you made it very clear whenever she complained about him that you would never allow a man to treat you like that, and that she was far too good for him, that he didn’t deserve her. And to point out that the longer she waits, the harder it will be to leave him. To get out now while it’s still relatively safe. You’ll help her. So will your friends. You’ve got her back! How many of us have the labia to do that? Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels How can we nip abusive partnerships in the bud? In what passes for much of today’s ‘feminism’, the woman is never wrong. She’s never to blame, never a contributing party to any dispute that ends poorly for her. In a noble desire to correct legal and justice abuses of the past in blaming the victim, whether it was rape or domestic abuse, feminists have jumped the shark. Yes, in the past attention focused on the woman—What was she wearing? What did she say to make him so mad? — rather than the man with anger issues and zero impulse control and who actually broke the law. Regardless of what she said or did, it’s no excuse to beat her up. If she’s violent with him first, he needs to get to safety and call the police, not smash a decorative geode against her skull. Feminism today has sacralized ‘don’t blame the victim’ and turned women into eternally weak, helpless girl-children. By the time feminists turn out to help an abuse victim she’s endured far more trauma than was necessary. How can we nip abusive partnerships early before they escalate into far less manageable and dangerous problems? We need to stop tolerating abuse. Not just in our own lives but with those friends and loved ones who do tolerate it, who make bad choices , and even more critically, don’t learn from their mistakes. We especially need to gently but firmly challenge women who keep cycling back to abusive partnerships. Something in them is broken, some synapse fails to fire, and they need help bridging the judgement gap. Not yelling, not remonstrating, not asking judgmentally Why don’t you just leave him, but to ask more helpful questions like, Why do you let him treat you this way? Why do you let him control you? How far are you going to let this go? You weren’t like this in high school, what changed? Questions that emphasize her own personal power. She has it, she just doesn’t know it. She needs to be reminded, especially if she’s fallen prey to the popular cult of feminist victimhood addiction which infantilizes women far more effectively than any ‘ patriarchy ’. The feminist word for the day: Prevention. Like it or not, abusive partnerships start and proceed with the choices women make and continue to make. As we all know, the longer one stays in an abusive partnership with a man, the harder and more dangerous it becomes to leave. We all know the statistics on the heightened risk for a woman when she leaves an abusive partnership. This is why it’s absolutely critical that we address how to help each other avoid these partnerships before they begin. In many feminists’ perfect world, men stop abusing women when all of them finally get the message. In my perfect world, and I think more realistic fantasy, abusive men can’t laid because no woman will put up with their shit. Change, or die incel. What If Women Refused To Have Sex With Abusive Men? It’s easier to fall into an abusive partnership when a woman is young, less experienced and so desperate for boys or young men to fancy her. Especially in junior/high school when there’s so much pressure to have a boyfriend. When it’s wired into women’s brains to please others, augmented by socialization that reinforces it, and addled by raging hormones that reduce their ability to think straight when they’re around Captain Superhot, young women will do just about anything for his attention, including overlooking his misogynist comments or inappropriate remarks about her body parts he finds most pleasing (or doesn’t). I remember what it was like. I used to put up with that shit too. Plenty of young women can challenge their friends when they recognize what their hormonal friend can’t see: That Captain Superhot is really kind of a dick. We have to have the labia to stand up to abuse not just when men perpetuate it but when women tolerate and make excuses for it. We aren’t living in the Third World. We have agency, power over our lives, good jobs, and we’re educated. Even if we haven’t gone to college, we can still self-educate. We don’t have the excuses that our less-empowered sisters elsewhere have. We can make choices. And we do, every single day. The challenge: Show some labia! (Figuratively…) Sometimes those choices are poor, or downright awful. We need to kindly but firmly make it clear that abusive men, whether their abuse is physical or not, should never be tolerated. We need to help her figure out why she settles for low-quality men when there are so many great ones out there who aren’t abusive dicks, who know how to treat a woman, and who are getting overlooked because they’re not ‘bad boys’ or hypermasculine (both of which are big red flying Bad News freak flags). The #1 Red Flag Of The Abusive Man After all, you as the friend have skin in the game too. Her bad choices might lead to you being stalked, harassed and threatened too. She has no right to put your life in danger like that. She has a responsibility to her friends and family when she makes partner choices. REAL friends don’t want her to get hurt, or die. And a quick note for men Ditto. Don’t tolerate abusive, toxic women. You’re too good for her. Don’t let her physically abuse you. The moment she starts hitting, get out of her vicinity, call the police, and later, you can tell her she either gets therapy for her anger management and impulse control issues or you’re out of there. That’s what REAL equality looks like. You don’t have to put up with her shit, either. This first appeared on Medium in September 2019. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

And here’s why it never happened again Photo by ramzi hashisho from FreeImages (cropped) “Ugly dog!” I heard that a lot my last two years of high school. Mostly from Dan. We were in the same vocational class which meant three or four consecutive periods of togetherness. He also liked to call me Wolfwoman, and he called a suspiciously gay friend of mine Tinkerbell or Tink for short. Dan had some serious masculinity issues of his own. He was crazy about wrestling and his idol was Sergeant Slaughter . He was forever trying to get the other guys in headlocks. Make of that what you will. He loved to walk around the classroom intoning, “He a MAN!” Especially if one of the other guys did something he thought was unmanly. He was always pointing to his dick as though someone should give him a blowjob. As though he’d ever known what female lips felt like down there. He almost got fired from his grocery store job when he made homophobic comments at my suspiciously gay friend while he was shopping with a neighbor. The neighbor insisted on reporting Dan to his boss who forced him to apologize and warned if it ever happened again he'd be fired. Dan was my worst bully in high school. I was angry at him for years after. For all his declarations that I was supremely hideous and no man would ever want me, I never knew Dan to have a girlfriend in high school. One day Dan hit me. Our lockers were next to each other and that was always a prime opportunity for verbal abuse. I forget what our altercation was about, but he whacked me upside the head, and then skittered away, just like a five-year-old boy. Yeah, right, he a MAN!!! I was really pissed, but I let it go. What was I going to do, chase him down the hall? What a wuss, to hit a girl and then run like one. But, I already knew the school principal wouldn’t do anything about him and neither would the teacher. Back then, no one worried about bullied teens bringing guns to school. Good thing, because Dan remains the only person to this day I ever felt like I could have murdered if I’d known I’d get away with it. That was kind of a scary thought at sixteen, thinking that if I was alone in a room with a knife and Dan and no one knew we were there, that I might kill him and do the world a favor by ridding it of one useless and (in my mind) irredeemable bully. I was too young to realize he’d eventually outgrow it. It took him awhile, longer than the rest of us, but he’d finally become something resembling a man by our five-year reunion. When he called me Ugly Dog or Wolfwoman I’d call him Yellow Belly and ask if he was still fighting girls. One day, he hit me again. I knew he would. This time I was prepared for his hit-and-run. We’d been outside the school working on a class project together, Dan and I and maybe one or two other classmates. He’d been his usual abusive self, and in the hallway he didn’t like that I wasn’t moving fast enough with something and he whacked me upside the head like the last time. And of course he ran away — he was taller than I — laughing. Nicole and Dan prepare to meet on the field of battle. Ugly dog photo by Faithnow22 on Flickr and Yellow-Bellied Marmot by Alan Vernon (CC0) I went back into the classroom. He came in a few minutes later, lugging something heavy and laughing. “Hey Nicole, is your ear ringing?” WHAM! “Is YOUR ear ringing, Dan?” He dropped his heavy load and came at me. This time he wasn’t going to run away. He also wasn’t going to get away with hitting girls without the entire school knowing about it. I’d planned for this moment for nearly a year. I went for his face with my fingernails. When he realized what I was going to do he turned around and kept his face away, so I clung to his back and scratched viciously at his neck. By the time our other classmates pulled us apart, Dan had ugly red streaks on both sides of his neck. I kind of regret not taking the opportunity to take one last swipe at his face after the fight ended. If you’re wondering where the teacher was, he was in his back office smoking up a storm as usual. By the time he came out it was all over. Now Dan would have to explain to everyone the next day how he’d gotten those scratch marks on his neck, and admit to fighting with a girl. I’ve always wondered what he told his father that night. Was Daddy-o sympathetic, or was he ashamed of his son for being a big wuss? I mean, who was teaching Dan to be such a pseudo-masculine wanker? Although it’s possible that Dan was just a dick. He never hit me again though. I knew he wouldn’t. We got along better, too, with only the occasional insult tossed at each other. Now I had a new one. “Hey Dan, are you still fighting GIRLS?” I guess it was the only way he was ever going to touch one unless he grew up. Until then he had to settle for touching guys under the pretense of pulling wrestling moves. I often wondered over the years, and occasionally discussed with my gay friend, whether Dan was actually a closet homosexual. He was more homophobic than most teenage boys, many of whom outgrow it. Although he refused to call me Ugly Dog at the reunion, he hadn’t outgrown the homophobia. I accepted his Facebook friend request many years later because I was dying to know if he’d finally come out of the closet. His profile indicated he was married, with a photo of his son. Congrats, Dan, you finally got laid! Once, anyway. No man has ever hit me since then. I would never allow it. Obviously, you don’t always know it’s coming. And you can’t always fight back like I did with Dan. But you don’t have to tolerate it either. You especially don’t have to go back for more. My mother taught me never to tolerate abuse from a man, and that’s how I grew up thinking about it. That getting hit sometimes happened, but that you always had a choice as to whether it would happen again. Maybe not always, in some cases. Like if the abuser is in your family. Or you to go to a school where they’ll never address bullying until some kid blows away the ninth grade. There are other ways to fight back than physically. Like leaving the guy after the first incident, when it’s far less dangerous than after getting whacked around several more times. Or filing a police report. The reasons why women don’t do this are complex, but we need to talk more about the importance of getting out early and not returning and giving tacit permission to do it again. Because it is permission. That’s not a popular idea with some who think we should keep the focus on telling men not to hit women. I say that’s a feminist pipe dream and in the real world, women have to protect themselves. Because we have the power to decide how we’ll be treated. Not all women understand that, and unfortunately, they’re not always going to learn that from feminists. I want them to know they do have the power. I want young girls like myself back in the Jurassic days to know this, very early. They’re not all going to grow up with a mother like mine, who taught me to never, ever, be a victim. So we have to teach them NEVER to accept abuse. The challenge starts with ourselves, and our friends. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Life is hard for men too. Deal with it. Image from Claudio_Scott on Pixabay North American women do love to complain. It’s a privilege of living in one of the two most advanced, modern cultures in the world, where they’ve got it immeasurably easier compared to women in days of yore, including the world I was born into. “It’s so haaaaaaaaard to be a woman today! It’s just exhausting!” I think the worst, the very worst part of being a woman in North America is having to listen to educated women of all types whine like little girls about how haaaaaaarrrd it is to be a woman. Oh please. Shelly Fabares had it right in Bye Bye Birdie. If it’s that hard to be a woman in 2022, you’re doing it wrong. When there was still a patriarchy thing Okay, I’m a lot more experienced at being a woman than most. I’ve been at it a lot longer. When I was born in the Mad Men era, women couldn’t own credit cards without a co-signer, had a harder time getting an apartment of their own (because she might Have Sex), couldn’t get a legal abortion in most places nor could she get birth control (See: Punishment. Having Sex. Nice Girls Don’t.) She also couldn’t attend certain exclusive schools. When people asked me that dumbass question they love to ask six-year-olds, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I said I wanted to be a nurse. I didn’t see a lot of career options. Like, also, mommy, secretary, teacher. “You could be a doctor,” my feminist-in-denial mother said. (She hated ‘those damn women’s libbers!’) “I can’t be a doctor!” I protested. “I’m not a boy!” “Girls can be doctors,” Mom said. “No one’s stopping them.” “Whoever heard of a woman doctor?” I asked, drawing on my vast experience with the only doctor I’d ever known. “There are women doctors,” Mom told me. “They’re just not very common.” Who knew there weren’t laws against this sort of thing? Victory for women? Move along, nothing to see here! When I entered university the Computer Revolution was underway. It was a little chickie-boo who liberated the (male) masses by smashing the patriarchy (literally) Feminism had a harder edge now, and young women like myself took it for granted we could be whatever we wanted. We had big-ass shoulder pads to prove it, too. Somewhere along the way, though, everything went — if you’ll pardon the expression — tits up. Women lost their edge, sort of pretended to be empowered, but their message became just — weak. They talked about this patriarchy thing as though it was the source of all evil. Patriarchy exists in regressive, retro parts of the world, but here in North America it’s more of a geriatric Fox News-addled old crank. Hey, great news! Harvey Weinstein just got sentenced to 23 years in prison for being a mass rapist! Not long after Bill Cosby got sentenced! Time to celebrate, right? Well, at least women didn’t *vote* for Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby… Dude’s 67. He’s going to die before he serves his sentence. What did she want, the Braveheart treatment? Let’s note: For once, the white rapist got a longer prison sentence than the black rapist. I mean c’mon, Weinstein’s been getting away with this for years. And Cosby even longer. Almost as long as I’ve been alive, when Sunni Welles became his first alleged drug rape victim . Honest question: Do women not report sexual assault more because they won’t be believed, or because feminists keep telling them they won’t be believed? Instead of celebrating a second big win, women downplay it and claim there’s no justice for women. Because Trump, or something. Victim feminists have a major phobia against ever admitting women are making progress every damn day. Naomi Wolf wrote a whole book about it. Mama Didn’t Raise No Victim Feminist No matter how good things get, no matter how much better women have it, no matter how privileged we all are, no matter how much justice we do see, no matter how much the rape rate has gone down (63%) since the early ’90s, (and maybe a few extra percentage points since Weinstein got arrested) all too many feminists can do is complain about niggling details instead of tackling real problems facing women, like how we can make it safer and less stigmatizing to report sexual abuse immediately. Some see a victim of patriarchal exploitation that only values women for their sexual release value; others see an empowered woman unafraid of her own sexuality or what others think. What do *you* see? Creative Commons Zero — CC0 on Pxfuel Men have it hard too Of all the stupid mental junk food modern feminists gorge on, the most ridiculous is the notion that men have it so much easier. You’d think life was just a cakewalk in the park for men compared to how haaaaard women have it in 2022. To be sure, men still possess an unequal amount of power, and let’s stop colorizing it, because in many parts of the world where women live with genuine patriarchy, their oppressors often aren’t white. ‘White privilege’ didn’t protect dozens of women from Bill Cosby, either. Men find existence pretty damn difficult too, and they’re dealing with a lot of the same problems women have. What’s the Hardest Part About Being a Man? I’m a Doctor and I Struggle to Help Men With Depression It’s no picnic being a man, either. I read a lot of articles about all the things women claim they aren’t ‘allowed’ to do. I’m not sure where that comes from. I see an awful lot of the very same messages to men , too, of all the things they’re not ‘allowed’ to do. Those forbidden things may be different from what women aren’t ‘permitted’, but men still receive numerous negative messages about how they’re supposed to be and act. They can’t have feelings, they can’t cry, they have to define themselves by work, they have to be strong and stoic at all times, real men don’t ask for help. They can’t complain if they get beaten by a woman. Or raped. Yes, it happens, and not always by another man, either. It’s difficult to ‘be a man’ when you have to be on constant guard against the Homo Police. Sociologist Michael Kimmel writes about it in Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. “Homophobia — the fear that people might misperceive you as gay — is the animating fear of American guys’ masculinity.” Teenage boys in particular police each other for signs of ‘gayness. It sounds exhausting. “It’s not like I want to stay in that box,” says Jeff, a college student. “But as soon as you step outside it, even for a second, all the other guys are like, ‘what are you, dude, a fag?’ It’s not very safe out there on your own….But now, in my fraternity, on this campus, man, I’d lose everything.” Men buy into society’s toxic lessons, as do women. Just type “women aren’t allowed to” in the Medium search bar, look at the articles it retrieves, and ask just who’s holding all these women back. Is The Patriarchy holding guns to their heads, or are they blaming men for their own lack of labia? It’s time for all of us to examine toxic social messages and ask, “Do I have to mentally consume this garbage?” Life is hard. For everyone. One thing that hasn’t changed for humanity since we first crawled out of the ocean 400 million years ago is that life is pretty damn difficult no matter who you are. Although we live longer and richer lives, we still torture people for fun like they did in the Middle Ages, although now it takes the form of bullying and abuse — gay-shaming for boys, slut-shaming for girls, fat-shaming for everyone. We are still tribal. The worst punishment is social ostracism, and we always find ways to push others to the outside. It’s universal. Life is hard no matter what historical time period you live in. It’s hard for everyone; all colors, all genders, all preferences, all religions, all cultures. While there are countless competitors in the Victimhood Olympics, I’m not sure there are any clear winners. How much one ultimately suffers is correlated to their degree of mental health, and how much they’re willing to torture themselves. How to make it easier to be a woman What makes our suffering worse is when our egos feed us narratives that make it all about ourselves. This is why I roll my eyes at feminitwits who are always droning on about how ‘misogyny’ and ‘patriarchy’ are everywhere. They invented much of it. Seriously, these obsessions are piling misery on Western women in an already miserable world. These ideas have their place, but mostly in textbooks, not between one’s ears. It’s painful to watch women mentally stab themselves over and over again with toxic interpretations positioning themselves, or women in general, as victims. Girls just want to have fun, but perma-victims live to suffer. 11 Instances of Everyday Sexism lists a few, to my eyes, miniscule misogynies women have to live with: ‘Shaming’ for having our period. Um, maybe in cultures where it’s still taboo, but in North America? What, because feminine hygiene products are still taxed in some places? Because trans women had to put up with the indignity of the Venus symbol on their sanitary napkins? (Is it just me, or do trans women activists seem even more entitled than born women?) Being told to smile. Maybe there’s only so much resting-bitch-face people can put up with on the train in the morning. Men should smile more too. Congenial faces might help to reduce some of the misogyny and misandry in the world. Can someone send Greta Thunberg a memo? Getting ignored by co-workers. Yeah, because that never happens to men. Missing out on networking opportunities. What, does LinkedIn have a virtual ‘pink office’ somewhere? ‘Mom shaming’ for not being a good enough mother. Do men have anything to do with this??? Has there ever been a mom-shaming on social media that didn’t involve a gaggle of self-righteous, supermommier-than-thou stroller tank jockeys? Being expected to have orgasms from intercourse. Okay, no one needs that kind of sexual pressure but I’d like to point out: When I was born, feminists themselves could barely find the clitoris, much less men. Be glad he even knows what a female orgasm is! Can You Find All 15 Signs Of The Patriarchy In This Picture Of A Tugboat? (Warning: Satire!) I want to scream, “Stop telling yourself such nasty stories! They’re not true! You’re poisoning yourself, and women!” People have it hard in a toxic society that grows ever more toxic every day. Suicides are at record rates , up 33% for Americans since 1999. Stress is up too. Teens rival adults . Racism is linked to faster aging in blacks , but white men still kill themselves at far higher rates than black men. So much for how hard it is to be a woman. It sucks for all of us, kids. It’s not a competition. Deal with it. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

But only once. Not sure what he saw in me. Surely not victimhood… Photo by Charles C. Collingwood on Unsplash He did a double take as he passed me walking through the mall, and stopped to chat me up. He reminded me a little of a young Frank Langella, so I let him. I’d just moved to Canada. “I’m sorry. I felt compelled to say something. You look so much like a friend who’s recently died.” It was one of the weirdest pickup lines ever, but I fell for it because of prior precedent in my family. My mother’s second love had done a double-take on the bus when he saw her. She said he looked so stunned she believed him when he said Mom looked exactly like the woman he’d been in love with who died back in Germany. He and Mom fell in love, but the romance went nowhere fast because he was already married. So, like mother, like daughter, n’est-ce pas? Well, except for the married part. His name was Sam, and he wanted to take me to lunch. Okay, I said, but first I have to apply for my Ontario Healthcare Insurance Program card. He went with me, and we talked in the waiting room. He seemed okay, nice and friendly, and I kind of liked him, so I thought I’d better drop the bomb that ended things quickly with a lot of Yankee men: I told him I didn’t want children. “Neither do I,” he said. Well okay, then! We couldn’t just eat in the mall, it seemed; he had some special place he wanted to take me. Foolishly, I got into the car with him and we drove somewhere. This is what I call women ‘doing dumb shit’ that puts us in danger. Dumb Shit I’ve Done I didn’t get raped, but I sure made it easy for them. Spoiler alert: Nothing bad happened. We went to some restaurant on the water — probably Lake Ontario. I had no idea where I was. He’d been pretty free with the compliments, oh how pretty you are, you’re so pretty, I just love being with you, blah blah blah. Guys say a lot of stuff. There was something not right about him. Kind of phony. He asked a lot of questions. He seemed eager to establish an early intimacy. “What are your plans for this summer?” he asked. I mentioned I was going to a family wedding in New York in September. “I’m going with you,” he informed me. “Um, excuse me?” “I’m going with you,” he stated. “Oh no you’re not.” “Why not?” I gave him A Look. “Because we don’t know each other well enough.” “We will by then.” “Why are you worried about September? You don’t even know if we’re going to make it to the weekend yet.” “Why wouldn’t we?” “You’re not going.” “But I want to meet your family.” “I’ll decide when you’re ready to meet my family.” Wisely, he dropped it. There’s nothing that sets a control freak back on his heels quite like an early sign that his victim doesn’t take any shit. Later he pushed my hand down and took the fork from me. “Let me,” he said, and he tried to feed me himself. What was I, two? “No,” I said, and I took my fork back. Did he think that was romantic? I found it infantilizing. After a little more conversation — oh yeah, we were sitting side by side, he didn’t want to sit across from me — he announced, “I’m in love with you.” Photo by Gage Walker on Unsplash I crinkled up my face and said something along the lines of, “What the hell?” “It’s true,” he replied. “I’ve fallen in love with you.” “After only two hours?” “I’m serious.” “Oh, cut it out!” I spat. “You’re not in love with me. That’s bullshit.” “I am,” he insisted. I’d had enough. This afternoon was growing tiresome. I realized I was somewhere in or around Toronto, nowhere near a bus line as far as I knew, with some joker I’d met at the mall and had idiotically gone somewhere in a city I didn’t know very well. Worst came to worst, I could call my roommate to come get me, but that would be supremely embarrassing, not to mention a huge inconvenience for him. Still, I didn’t feel like I was in danger. I’ve gone through life largely convinced I’m not the sort of woman who gets raped and/or murdered. So far so good. He asked a few more questions, but I wasn’t in the mood anymore. “Tell me your hopes and dreams,” he said. “What???” “Tell me your hopes and dreams,” he smiled. Who the hell says that? What were my hopes and dreams? To make a new life in Canada. To find a job soon. To finish my dark fantasy novel and get it published. To be a famous writer. To meet a great guy and fall in love, after so much disappointment in Connecticut. “I don’t have any,” I stated. “What? How can you not have any? Everyone has hopes and dreams!” Sam cried. “I don’t.” “Sure you do. Tell me.” “Nope. I don’t have any. Sorry.” Stated with that smug sarcasm that says screw you, buddy boy! He tried, but he couldn’t pry any hopes or dreams out of me. I was done. I sat back. “I need to get home,” I said. “I have to start making dinner for my roommate.” Or some other stupid lie, I don’t remember. I wondered if he’d return me or just abandon me, but we got into his car and went back to the mall. He dropped me off there. The conversation was more real, less phony, so we kissed before I got back on the bus. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. Today, that would be the end of it, but back then I was trying to turn over a new leaf. My last five years in Connecticut hadn’t been good after my ex and I split up. I call them my Angry Drunken Bitch years. But, there was enough about Sam to like and we’d talked a lot, so when he reached out for another date I agreed. I wanted to be less picky and judgemental. I’d been rather unfair to men, and my last foray in Connecticut, with a customer I’d met through work, hadn’t gone anywhere. The second time Sam called, I had planned to get a haircut. “Cancel it,” he said. “Let’s go do such-and-such.” I was a little taken aback, but I was flattered he wanted to see me so badly, so I did. The next time, I was en route to the salon when he called. “Let’s go do something." “Not this afternoon. I’m going to get my hair cut,” I said. “Cancel it.” “No. I did that last time.” “Do you have to do this today?” he asked. “No, but I cancelled it last time for you. This time I’m getting my hair cut. Some other time, Sam.” For some reason, he expected me to just drop everything when he decided we should go do something. Once or twice I reached out to him, but he said he had other plans. I didn’t ask him to cancel them. I wondered if it was another woman, but I didn’t ask. None of my business; he wasn’t my steady boyfriend. One day we went out to lunch. No annoying comments or pushy suggestions this time. Then we went to see the movie Cinderella Man. All was fine until he tried to push my head down on his shoulder. I pulled it up again. He pushed it down again, more forcefully. “Stop it, that’s annoying,” I hissed. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he trying to force this intimacy? It was like when he tried to feed me. And told me he was in love with me. He’d said the love thing several times since but I never said it back, and he didn’t ask why. I didn’t believe him either. Five years of bad dating experiences taught me not to believe anything men said anymore. We went back to my place and made out on the couch a little, then he had to go. And after that, I heard nothing. Not a thing. I was pissed. Still quite insecure, I had outdated ideas of how dating was supposed to work. I’d been out of it for awhile. The ex and I were together for over seven years, with a split in between, so by the time I moved to Toronto things had changed a lot, but no one cc’d me the memo. I thought if Sam really cared he’d call. It was out of the question that I call him. I don’t remember if I was just being an idiot or testing him. The silence drove me insane. My roommate and I decided to spend a weekend at Algonquin Park, a huge nature preserve north of Toronto to shoot some moose. Relax! This is the only way we shoot moose. Although that mofo does look like he’s contemplating pulling some shit with me, doesn’t he? I enjoyed myself, but I also stewed a lot. I never believed Sam’s love bullshit, but it always aggravates me when men meet my low expectations. So much for his great love if he couldn’t be bothered calling! Then I accidentally almost dialed him since I’d either forgotten or not gotten around to deleting his number from my mobile. I hung up quickly. A day or so later, he called, seemingly out of the blue. “I’m so glad I found you!” he exulted. “I’d accidentally deleted your number, and I couldn’t remember it. I tried everything to get it again but I couldn’t remember your last name either. Finally I saw you called!” “How come you didn’t have my number written down somewhere?” I asked as I rode the bus. “I never thought to do that, I’m sorry.” “I thought you were madly in love with me. If that were true you’d have made damn certain you wouldn’t lose my number.” “I should have, I apologize. “Or bothered to learn my last name.” “Uh, yeah. Where are you?” “On the bus.” “Well get off. I’ll pick you up wherever you are. Let’s go out to dinner.” “I can’t. I just got a job offer and I have to go do the paperwork.” “Can’t you do it some other time?” “NO! Sam, for god’s sakes, it’s a new job!” “Okay. I really want to make it up to you for losing your number. I’ll take you out to a really nice place I know. I’ll pick you up tonight, then.” “No, I have plans tonight,” I lied. “Cancel them,” he said. “Fuck you,” I replied. “What?” “Thursday night is better. We’ll go out to dinner Thursday night.” “I can’t. I have plans.” “Cancel them,” I said. “I can’t.” “Why not?” “Because I can’t.” “Just call her and tell her you’ll meet her some other night.” “It’s not another woman.” I highly doubted that, but I honestly didn’t care anymore. “Thursday night is best for me. If you want to go out, that’s the night to do it.” “I can’t. I told you. I have plans.” “I’m expected to drop everything when you call. Now, I don’t actually give a damn whether we go to dinner or not. I’ve over you. You want to do this, we do it Thursday night. We do it on my time now. Otherwise forget about it.” “I can’t cancel.” “Okay, we’ll just forget about it, then.” “I still want to take you out!” “Nah,” I said. “I’m over this. You disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind." Not true, but I’ll bet he believed me. I always wondered what Sam’s deal was. Everyone’s obsessed with narcissists, so I wondered if maybe that was his problem, but I tend not to go with pop-psychology labels, so I figured maybe he was just a manipulative little bastard. At any rate, I lost no further sleep over him. That Cancel them crap had gotten on my nerves more than anything else. It wasn’t until I watched a TEDx talk by a domestic violence social psychologist named Dina McMillen that I realized there was a possible explanation I’d never considered: That I was being groomed for an eventual abusive relationship. McMillen tells of over 630 violent domestic abusers, (95% male) she’s interviewed over the years in a client-doctor relationship in which she’s prohibited from telling on them. Without fear of punishment, these men have ‘dropped the mask’ and spoken with her quite freely about what they did to their partners, displaying male privilege at its ugliest and often evincing no empathy for their objectified partners. McMillen believes our solutions to domestic violence are too reactive rather than proactive. She advocates teaching young girls and women ‘in about two hours’ the ‘secrets’ abusers don’t want women to know about their psychological manipulation techniques. The mind-blowing, eye-opening takeaway for me was when she ran through the list and Sam ticked off several. Like: He needs you to trust him, plan a future with him, and fall in love with him. He pulled ‘too much, too soon.’ Early claims of love; artificial intimacy attempts; telling me what we were going to do; planning for our future together. All at the first meeting . I wondered if he’d read The Game or something that told him women think you’re serious when you speak about the future with them. McMillen spoke about pushing for constant contact but Sam didn’t do that. He did, however, want my attention like a cat: When it was convenient for him. He tried to get me to confide in him before he’d built trust. He expected me to drop everything and be at his beck and call, although he didn’t get mad when I wouldn’t. However, McMillen noted that often women go along with the little decisions these guys constantly make for you because we want to be liked and thought of as easygoing. Which I did. I’ve long believed our need to be ‘liked’ by men is one of the biggest vulnerabilities in female psychology. Whenever I’ve done dumb shit that put me in danger, like getting into a strange man’s car, it’s been because I wanted him to ‘like’ me. She offered several other red flags but you can watch the video for yourself. I strongly encourage it; it’s not graphic with no descriptions of violence. She was only able to speak very generally about her subjects and not identify anyone. “Holy fuck,” I said as I watched. She didn’t even list all the warning signs. It would take too long. She wrote a book about it, though. "But He Says He Loves Me!" - The Women's Abuse Prevention Manual Sam complained a few times about my ‘walls’ when he tried to get too close to me. He was right, but I felt pretty justified. He telegraphed his phoniness at every turn. I wonder what might have happened if I was more of a victim. Or what I might have done if I’d met him when I was more emotionally naive and trusting. Would Sam have had better luck taking advantage of me? Maybe, although I don’t think it would have advanced to emotional or physical abuse. I’ve never been abused by a man and don’t believe I’d have tolerated it from anybody. Do You Have A Thing For Abusers? Knowing the red flags will help you avoid them When I was young, I was, like many women, easier to manipulate with the carrot-and-stick approach. It’s unconscious and not specifically male; women do it too. It’s when you give someone just enough attention to keep them interested but you’re really not that interested yourself. Didn’t understand that one until I read the book He’s Just Not That Into You. I recognized how this had been done to me several times, but also, that I’d done it a few times myself. Wish I’d had this book when I was younger. I hope others will take lessons from this and realize that abusers can’t abuse you unless you let them. First and foremost, recognize their need to control and establish authority and resist it. And get out early. Because they can’t control a woman who won’t take their shit. This article first appeared on Medium in January 2020. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Systemic discrimination isn’t just to your disadvantage. It’s to mine too. CC0 2.0 photo by InvestmentZen on Flickr I’ll admit: I don’t have all the answers. I have a lot of diagnoses, and I do occasionally offer some answers, but they tend to piss off anyone resistant to the notion they have personal agency and might share some role in where they’re at. What I do know is this: United We Stand, Divided We Fall ain’t just a cheesy-sounding motivational poster phrase. It’s for reals. We’re proving it right now. Tribalism divides us equally — what’s called ‘identitarianism’ on the right, a dog whistle for ‘racism and other assorted bigotries’ — and ‘identity politics’ on the left, a dog whistle for ‘woke identitarianism and other assorted bigotries’. I’m tired of all tribalism. Tribes are drawing lines and saying You have to do this to make our lives better. You owe us this. You have harmed us. Keep your hands off our cultural shit, because, you know, it's ours , not yours . The antiracism movement is famous for this. Many want 'slave reparations' to compensate people who have never been enslaved from people who've never owned slaves. While I recognize the United States was founded on mind-bogglingly brutal systemic discrimination and injustice based on owning other people — dividing ourselves up with ever more precise labels (I’m a pansexual tripartite half-black one-quarter Native American Libertarian Satanic Scientologist who identifies as a Japanese otaku) and fighting for only our own tribe (of like two or three?) makes no sense. It sounds cheesy to say We’re all in this together, because we don’t believe it, but we really are, especially with the most non-racist enemy ever closing in on us all: Climate change. We’re going to be together a lot more closely in the coming decades as we began congregating in the islands of North America and elsewhere where climate change will be somewhat less traumatizing than wherever you live now. Midwestern Red States with an influx of California liberals moving east: I hope I’m still alive to see that! It may sound cheesy and ’60s and all kum-bye-ya to say it, but I’m done with tribalist thinking. I reject your tribe, including my own. If you can’t play nicely with others, you are not of my new tribe: Us. Not U.S. Us. Screw your tribes, and mine too Why am I fed up with you and your tribalism? I read Kurt Andersen’s book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History. It’s a forty-year revisitation describing how conservative masterminds remade America with subtle, behind-the-scenes political and economic changes, benefiting those with money and privilege and creating the yawning chasm of inequality we experience today (and if you’re still well-off, Matt Taibbi’s ‘vampire squid’ siphon is coming for you too). It’s a depressing slog through How The 1% Did It. I won’t get into the details — if you haven’t read it, buy it or borrow it. It’s an eye-opening read, especially if you’re old enough to have been an adult through all this mishegoss. You’ll find yourself nodding and thinking, “I remember that! So THAT’S how they did it! Holy crap, I had no idea at the time.” I had a news junkie friend who had a bit of a nose for prophetic news a while back. Fifteen years ago he regularly forwarded articles he thought interesting. One, from the mid-2000s, warned of the danger ARMs — Adjustable Rate Mortgages — posed to the global economy which came to pass just a few years later. A couple of years later, they came to pass in The Great Financial Apocalypse of 2008. Another article warned of the dangers of growing economic inequality, and how the poor had been siphoned dry, and the working class almost there, and how they were coming for the middle class next. This is exactly what happened, for many new members of The Class Formerly Known As Middle after the GFA2008. Trillions in investments were lost by people who weren’t super-rich, and those trillions went somewhere. Hmmm? ‘Middle’, of course, meant ‘mostly white people’. (Off-topic question: How much money does a black person have to make before they become a Republican? Discuss. Debate. Explain.) The article also warned the money will continue to flow upward, which meant the higher classes will come next, except for those able to scramble higher. But — now our ‘slightly betters’ can’t find people to work for them, since they’re unaccustomed to paying living wages to those losers, which puts their businesses and livelihoods in jeopardy. The 20% ‘haves’ will become 10% and then the 5% and then the 1%. Then, it will move to .5%. Unless something changes. Now. My bud’s articles didn’t speak much about climate change (though he sent articles about that too), and virtually nothing about pandemics driving many to commit suicide by conspiracy theory, which may change or delay the prophesies but the pattern is clear: We’ll get there eventually if we permit it. We can’t fight it with tribalism. Group-rights protests are critical for change but they can only accomplish so much when your message is You have to change a system that benefits only my people, not your people. How can social justice movements get everyone on board? What’s in it for me? The system doesn’t work anymore even for us privileged white folk. Some people just haven’t gotten the message yet, and that’s a whack load of white people and male people. You know, the ones at the top of the power hierarchy. I’ve begun to imagine what it might take to equalize the system for all of us. I’ve assembled some random thoughts on this to get others thinking. I have no hard answers, and even if I did we couldn’t implement them any time soon, perhaps even for generations after the Trump Epochalypse. But we have to think differently. Tribalism ain’t working for America and it never has. Not white supremacy and not identity politics — two sides of the same corroded coin. It only worked — and works — for some, and you can recognize an inequality system by its volume of civil unrest. CC0 2.0 photo by Chad Davis on Flickr The system ain’t working, period. Creative Commons CC0 2.0 photo by GoToVan on Flickr Here’s what I randomly muse when I’m out walking. Not all white people are created equal White skin isn’t the magic ticket to everything you ever wanted and a hassle-free, stress-free life the way I suspect some people of color imagine. Their 'Kyles' and 'Karens' are the Critical Race Theory antiracism set's stereotypes of the incels' 'Chads' and "Stacys'. If melanin deficiency was a fix-all, there’d be no such thing as Trump rallies because we’d all be sitting around in our hot tubs sipping Dom Perignon and checking our investments. We wouldn’t worry he might actually return in 2024. Republicans have juiced white fears of loss of privilege and power-sharing because they know how to manipulate their white inferiors. How all white people live, as envisioned by the CRT-addled. CC0 2.0 image by Christopher Porter on Flickr Trump supporters are what the Soviet Union's Communist Party called ‘useful idiots’, or people too ignorant and uninformed to fully understand the goals of the ruling party seeking to undermine them. Including some of the better-off ones who think the money siphon will pass them by. The system doesn’t serve many Trump supporters much better than it does POC, although MAGAs may arguably get away with shoplifting more unless they look like heroin addicts. Green privilege trumps white privilege Money is privilege, and its brother is celebrity privilege. The latter is icing on the cake for those who want to break any law imaginable. It blows my mind to think how long Bill Cosby got away with raping mostly white women when you consider how many black men swung from trees or worse for the alleged crime of raping white women. Was there ever a guilty black man lynched? I’d bet not in pre-civil rights America. A black-on-white rape would be the equivalent of a Slut Walk protest in Afghanistan today. Cosby is accused of having committed his first rape back in the mid-1960s. A black man genuinely raping white women, and he got away with it! His victims knew damn well his green privilege (and possibly his male and celebrity privilege) outranked their white privilege. Even in the 1960s. My mind boggles, because back then, had it come out, I’m not sure what would have happened to Cosby. It’s conceivable he himself might have been murdered, especially if he ventured below the Mason-Dixon. He might today be A Civil Rights Martyr, rather than a convicted rapist recently released after serving less than three years in jail. Just like a white man. O.J. Simpson got away with murdering a white woman and her white male friend. He could afford the hugely expensive legal ‘Dream Team’ most black men can’t. Also, O.J.!!! Heisman Trophy winner! Record holder! First-time 2,000 yards in a season rusher! Movie actor! Hertz airport-jumping guy! “If [the gloves] don’t fit, you must acquit!” said Johnnie Cochran even as someone said they heard O.J. confess to former footballer-turned-minister Rosey Grier. Green privilege trumps white privilege far more than we acknowledge. Some of us have more green privilege than others and there’s where you encounter fifty shades of white privilege. Plenty of white people are now left behind with the ones who were always behind. Plenty more of us will be joining them soon if we don’t all start fighting our common enemy. The 1% is everyone’s problem. I’m okay with a world where we share wealth and power with people who don’t look like me because… I actually believe that United Negro College Fund shit I appreciated the value of education and learning growing up even if I wasn’t so fond of school, where I was bullied, but also because I was the same young dipshit most American kids are, more preoccupied with the opposite sex and TV shows than lessons I found pointless at the time. I learned to value education more in university, and I agree with the United Negro College Fund commercial from the '70s. A mind really is a terrible thing to waste. I often wonder what the world would look like today if women and POC had been granted educational opportunities sooner, or never been denied them at all. I wonder how many great brains, how many amazing innovations and brilliant insights we’ve missed out on because we rely so heavily on white male thought leadership? Sure, white people have innovated and invented many positive contributions to Western culture, but always built upon the innovations of people who didn’t look at all like us. Thank the early Muslim world as just one example, bringing us pioneering surgical techniques, hospitals, medical knowledge encyclopedias, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, pharmacology, and numerous other progressive innovations, before it descended into ignorant fundamentalism about four hundred years ago like the U.S. is doing today. What would a genuine meritocracy look like? What if we made HR’s ATSes (Automatic Trash Systems — er, I mean Application Tracking Systems) work for all of us, rather than overqualified young people willing to work ‘entry level’ jobs requiring multiple degrees for less money than a Starbucks barista? What if employers were forced to run applications stripped of identifying information into the system and evaluated on genuine merit? If you didn’t know the age, race, gender, or economic class of the applicant? And those systems were regularly audited by third-party impartial firms to ensure employer impartiality? And hiring decisions were made based on true impartiality? Sounds impossible but how rock-solid airtight our most contentious recent federal election was is why I think this is imaginable and workable. How equalizing would a UBI be? We’ve begun revisiting nascent UBIs (Universal Basic Income) in the U.S. and Canada, where mini-experiments in a guaranteed ‘mincome’ have been conducted for decades. Read about Canada’s most successful one , which debunked a lot of conservative myths about lazy humans and was, unsurprisingly, shut down by a Conservative government (although it was begun by an earlier one). In 2020, CERB (Canadian Emergency Response Benefit) kept many of us from sinking into economic oblivion by offering $2,000 a month to those who qualified. (In the U.S., taxpayers received three different stimulus checks.) My employment insurance payments had just ended and I still had no job thanks to purple squirrel-seeking ATSs and a heavy dollop of age discrimination, so CERB saved my bacon, along with millions of other pandemic-shocked Canadians. Today Americans receive additional stipends that cause employers to complain people would ‘rather sit on their asses than work’, an utterly ludicrous claim in a society that worships ‘free market capitalism’. As Biden sarcastically whispered, “Pay them more!” Believe me, when I finally got a job with a freelance sales agency that paid more than CERB, I happily departed, and I would much rather continue working for them than go back on (less) government benefits. Also, I don't feel like a parasitic loser. The cost of living is shooting up everywhere. Time for wages to shoot up too. If you can’t afford to pay people more you may not be bright enough to run your own business. Hey, Mr. & Ms. Former Business Owners, I hear Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Dollarama are hiring! G’wan, they’re dying for people not too lazy to work! How do *you* imagine a more equitable world? I’ve focused on ideas that will mostly outrage conservatives, but I don’t want to leave progressives out of the fun. Dealing with a voracious 1% for whom too much is never enough is our biggest crisis (or maybe climate change; or maybe the next killer pandemic). The left at least pays more attention to social justice for which I can grant them that, but it takes too many cues from Christian fundamentalism and identitarian politics. And while the right destroys lives with policies and mass shootings, the left destroys them with social media’s ‘cancel culture’. As Dave Chappelle said in his controversial Netflix special The Closer , “When you destroy a man’s livelihood it’s the same as killing him.” Nice work, ‘Progressives’! This first appeared on Medium in October 2021.Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

This is your life. Now who’s going to clean that up? Relax, it's just a sculpture. CC0 2.0 photo by Guano (of course!) on Flickr) “Someone just dumped a big pile of shit on your porch. What are you going to do about it? The people who dumped it aren’t coming back to clean it up. No one else is going to clean it up for you. It’s unfair, but life isn’t fair. Are you just going to leave it there to stink and get worse, or are you going to clean it up?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what Ajahn Brahm, the funny, non-reverential monk and Spiritual Director of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia says about the problems, obstacles and injustices in one’s life. It makes you part of a highly non-exclusive social club. It’s called the Human Race. Which means you have to clean up your own massive mega-deuce, regardless of how much or not you contributed. Of course, as Ajahn Brahm points out, shit is critical for real growth. In fact, mud that little fishies and turtles and froggies crapped all over, maybe even some alligators depending on where you live, lies at the very core of what Buddhists believe. The lotus flower symbolizes the beauty that springs joyfully from the mud. That messy, messed-up mental muck is where the beauty of the lotus — enlightenment — lies. This is a lotus flower in mud. This is your enlightened brain on mud. Any questions? Creative Commons CC0 photo from Pxfuel It doesn’t necessarily mean sitting-under-the-bodhi-tree-while-the-kundalini-energy-shoots-up-your-spine-like-a-newly-plumbed-spigot enlightened, but more peaceful and insightful than you were before. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to do this, of course. Christians have a ‘born again’ experience, which is when you take your faith and beliefs more seriously and actively strive every day to be a better Christian. What Would Jesus Do? I don’t know what other religions call a similar enlightening experience, but I’m sure they have it even if they use a different name. Regardless of your label, once you consciously commit to becoming a better, more enlightened person, you’re confronted with a big pile of shit you may have largely ignored most of your life. Which is, your life. Nobody likes dealing with it, and feels fairly resentful because we prefer to blame everyone and everything else for it. But…you can’t spiritually grow without that life-giving shit. In fact, you waste a lot of energy railing against a cruel world that dumped it on your parietal porch because absolutely everyone who has ever lived has had to deal with their shit (or not). Even Jesus had to struggle against the Temptations of Satan in the desert and doubts about his own divinity. Buddha famously spent an entire night, according to legend, assaulted and attacked by the demon Mara while he was meditating. Mara ended by lobbing his final thermonuclear-level self-doubt Buddha bomb, “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” Needless to say, both Masters survived the onslaught. They famously grew to be great teachers before their deaths. But both were cursed at birth with a human brain, and they couldn’t escape having to clean up their own shit. Neither can you, which is why your deity or Darwin’s biology gave you, quite conveniently, your own cortical caca from which you can grow and flourish and turn into something as lovely and sweet-smelling as the lotus. Thank God! You’re welcome. (Or just be grateful for evolutionary biological bullshit, if you’re an atheist.) Plus, we all play our part in the spirit of cooperation by generously dumping more shit on each other in the form of family dysfunction, social and economic inequality, bullying, abuse, war, crime and a wide assortment of extremely unfair conditions into which we’re born without any say in the matter whatsoever. The big Pile O’ Poo springs from different places. Some you control, some not: Your default cavecritter neuro-circuitry Your genetics Your environment and proximal humans The circumstances you were born into Mental illness (psychological disorders) Mental illness (more common — depression, anxiety, stress, maybe PTSD) “Some are born shitty, some achieve shittiness, and some have shittiness thrust upon them.” — William Shitespoor It’s not fair, but there it is: We all have shit to deal with. One reason why I like writer Ayodeji Awosika is because he reminds us over and over that life isn’t fair. That people rage against government, inequality, the machine, politicians, unfair employers, and anyone else they can blame their problems on. He acknowledges these obstacles are real; but he questions how much they have to control you. Social media certainly seems to be Ground Zero for the permanently outraged. I’m frustrated with the relentless negativity of both political sides in the United States, from whence I came, and Canada, to which I’ve come. Folks rage about a lot of real and systemic odds unfairly stacked against them, due to unfair interpretations about their biology or merely the circumstances into which they were born. Then there’s the other side, railing against having been left behind economically, a changing world they didn’t have time to keep up with, stagnating income, and getting really, really, tired of this so-called privilege others say they have which they legitimately can’t see sitting in their trailer park home with a fifth baby on the way, no health insurance and an employer that just cut their wages again. Also, very real and systemic challenges. “That is one big pile of shit.” — Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park Many writers expose us daily to the challenges they face from their own traumatic upbringing, including rape, other forms of sexual abuse, neglect, crazy religious and cultural traditions, and sometimes just poor decision-making by young people born into this world without a reliable user’s manual or effective parenting. It’s fair to differentiate who’s responsible for your shit, because blaming yourself for it all, as many do, is counterproductive and downright toxic. But…blame is the name of the game in our divided and hyper-individualistic culture where assigning it means never having to assume any responsibility. I.e., having to clean up your shit. You can debate whose fault it is, and how much you added to the shit pile, and dissect the intersectional subtle and overt institutional and systemic aggressions and microaggressions that obstruct your maximal self-potential, and you can fight this white cis-centric patriarchal power structure with protest signs and pussy hats but in the end (or out of it, ar ar)… It’s still your shit, and no one’s going to clean it up except you. Or not, as you choose. The good news is, as the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach likes to say, if you shine the light on the deepest wounds, therein you’ll find healing. Buddhist monk, poet, activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of Encouragement, the second turning of the Four Noble Truths wheel. “Our suffering — depression, illness, a difficult relationship, or fear — needs to be understood and, like a doctor, we are determined to understand it. We practice sitting and walking meditation, and we ask for guidance and support from our friends and, if we have one, our teacher. As we do this, we see that the causes of our suffering are knowable, and we make every effort to get to the bottom of it.” — The Heart of the Buddha’s teaching: Transforming Suffering to Peace, Joy and Liberation He doesn’t differentiate between the pain we’re born with, or created ourselves, or which was forced upon us by others. It is our unique pain, ergo our responsibility. CC0 Public Domain by Linnaea Mallette It’s not easy, and usually pretty damn scary, and sometimes our shit is so critical we require professional help in handling it. Sometimes, it’s best not to go too deeply into the shit-wounds without a trained professional, or at least a very good friend, to accompany us. It may be hard to let go of our shit. It’s been with us all our lives; how can we live without it? Who are we if we’re not defined by our shit? What if we’re supposed to forgive those who tres-pissed against us? Are we seriously expected to just let them off the hook? Forgiveness isn’t for those who dumped a lot of that shit on you; it’s for yourself so that you no longer suffer from it. The good news, the great news, is that truly letting go of your shit, learning different coping mechanisms, perceiving the world in a different light with a less egocentric point of view, and taking life and perceived slights less personally can be marvellously healing and reduce the negative emotions and reactions that now darken your otherwise astounding life. CC0 Public domain on PXhere The reason I call myself the Crappy Buddhist is because I’ll never finish shoveling my shit, and I sure as hell will never become an enlightened kundalini-spewing spine spigot. But a couple of years ago I decided to face my anger management problem and have been actively working on becoming less triggered, correcting my Wrong Perceptions as best I can, and thinking before I speak. I’m far from perfect but I’m less easily triggered than I had been, and I recognize now which triggers to avoid and sometimes I even stop myself before an emotional hijacking kicks my tongue into high gear. I must do my Buddhist duty, dodge the fecal finger of fate (not to mention my colonoscopy-obsessed doctor), and shovel more of my own shit, but there’s room for a few lotus blossoms now. Here, take a few seeds. I want you to have some lotus blooms too. Namaste! Public domain photo by Namair on Needpix This shitty article first appeared on Medium. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Women who love monsters are merely the extremest of the Bad Boy lovers Richard Ramirez with one of his many sweeties. Photo by Mario Solera on Flickr WARNING: Possibly triggering details of violent assaults. Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’ who terrorized Los Angeles for over a year in the mid-’80s, was quite the little hotcha-hotcha. The self-professed ‘Satanist’ convicted for thirteen murders, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults and fourteen burglaries was one of the biggest ladies’ men, attracting a huge following of groupies that continues even though he died on death row from liver cancer in 2013. He married a groupie in 1996 and they divorced years later. He was engaged to a 23-year-old writer at the time of his death. Prison groupies for serial killers and other less accomplished murderers are nothing new, and even gay killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy owned their share of women wet for torture and murder. As I researched serial killers for a friend’s movie project awhile back, falling down a related rabbit hole on murderers, torturers, rapists, and the women who love them, it struck me just how vulnerable female psychology can be to abusive men, and how we as women and feminists need to work harder to recognize and challenge those vulnerabilities. No woman deserves to be hurt, but oftentimes we put ourselves in stupid situations that increase the likelihood. I’ve done it; you’ve done it. Dumb Shit I’ve Done I didn’t get raped, but I sure made it easy for them Some women have a real jones for dumb shit. My friend Sandy was one of them. Do You Have A Thing For Abusers? Knowing the red flags will help you avoid them I can’t imagine any dumber shit than pursuing a sadist guilty of some of the most heinous crimes against (usually) women. Bad-boy prison groupies’ psychological profiles usually include: Low self-esteem Believe these guys to be ‘misunderstood’ Believe love can ‘save him’ There’s actual safety pursuing the baddest of the Bad Boys: He can’t hurt her in prison. And now he’s her Bad Boy. There’s also an element of control for many of these women, who may have received an overabundance of it from their not-so-jailed boyfriends. She controls his access to her, not vice versa. She decides when they see each other and she doles out the gifts. He can’t screw around on her with other women. He needs her attention more than she needs his. She has a life he doesn’t. Some really sick groupies add an additional psychological kink you don’t find in regular abuse victims: She wants to live vicariously through her bad boy’s crime stories, particularly if he shares a detail or two that supposedly no one else knows. It makes her feel ‘special’. Not unlike non-homicidal abusers who share tidbits about their past with a lover, for the same reason and also maybe to ‘excuse’ his past and forthcoming behavior. Some women are aroused hearing firsthand about sadistic crimes. This also explains some of the husband and wife/partner teams where she claims she was afraid of refusing her husband’s demands or expectations that she aid him in his crimes, but was nevertheless aroused by it. Now I think I understand serial killer Karla Homolka, famous to Canadians during the late ’80s and early ’90s when the blonde beauty and her babelicious husband Paul Bernardo raped and killed three teenage girls, including her own sister. The two strangers were tortured before they were murdered, excruciating details revealed on videotapes of the crimes found too late to do anything about Homolka’s ‘deal with the Devil’. I never understood why she participated, as her life and mindset didn’t follow the well-established psychopath course her husband did. But, she clearly enjoyed what she was doing. The ‘Barbie & Ken Killers’ raped and killed her sister the night before Christmas Eve, and in a video made a few weeks later (they documented much of their lives this way), Homolka mentioned how much fun raping Tammy had been. Before they married, she knew Bernardo was a Bad Boy but she didn’t yet know how much. He tested the waters, telling her he might want to rape people, maybe do even more (he was already the as-yet-unidentified Scarborough Rapist who’d terrorized the eastern part of Toronto in the late ‘80s). Karla dug it. She was into it. She’d claimed on the witness stand that Paul had committed the murders, not herself, but the videotapes proved otherwise. Why do women fall in love with men who’ve committed such terrible crimes? Especially those who identify as feminists? And many do. One might surmise these women are unattractive and not terribly bright, but some are beautiful and educated. Many consciously recognize their attraction to society’s monsters, and know they’re bad partner choices. Many women love ‘alpha males’ and these men are the epitome. But prison groupies just can’t seem to help themselves. It never occurs to them to challenge something in their brain that drives them to such a bad decision, or maybe they don’t want to. Yeah, blame it on Hollywood. That’s the $64,000 question. Maybe they’re empowered by the knowledge that other women share their fantasy, ‘normalizing’ it. Plus, women are traditionally — and as part of our neurological wiring — ‘carers’. The belief that these men are ‘misunderstood’ and that love can ‘save him’ is the same psychological profile you get with garden-variety abuse victims. These clear emotional brain vulnerabilities, unchallenged, drive women to put themselves in dangerous situations, and to get involved with abusive men who simply can’t be ‘fixed’ by the right woman. I understand why women are attracted to ‘bad boys’ and ‘bad boy behavior’, if not at the level of a man who tried to zombify one victim and eat others as Jeffrey Dahmer did, or torture their victims like Ramirez and Bernardo/Homolka did. I used to have a big thing for Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. I also had what I now regard as a fairly unhealthy attraction to Alex, played glamorously by Malcolm McDowell in the 1971 movie A Clockwork Orange (although I didn’t find Alex in the novel, which I read first, attractive at all). Still, I never wanted to meet a real Alex. A friend who also shared my Spike fixation once said, “How come I can’t find a guy like Spike?” It’s dangerous not to understand the difference between the fantasy of a ‘bad boy’ and the real thing. ‘Bad boys’ are best left for one-night stands or the occasional fling, without making more out of it. Bad boys (and girls) don’t make for positive, functional life partners. “There’s no such thing as a man like Spike,” I replied. “He’s our idealized bad boy. He’s brutal, but never to Drusilla [his vampire love interest] unless it’s part of sex play. He loves her to pieces and will do anything to protect her, but he never, ever abuses her, not even when she callously flaunts her new lover in his face while he’s temporarily stuck in a wheelchair. A real-world man like Spike would beat the snot out of her regularly whether she screwed around on him or not. She’d live in constant fear and probably wind up in a domestic shelter.” How many times did I hear from abuse victims, when I was younger, “I thought I could change him?” How many thought their love was enough? The idea you can ‘reform’ a highly damaged person with love can be fatal to women who buy into it, especially if Monsieur is released and there are no longer guards and barbed wire standing between her and her Wuv-Twoo-Wuv. Carol Spadoni learned that the hardest way when the convicted murderer she fell in love with was released, subsequently murdering her, and her mother as well after sexually assaulting her. Two Australian women married incarcerated men they fell in love with, one of whom committed minor property crimes and the other convicted of killing his previous wife. The one in love with the thief died from the business end of his hammer and the other guy went back to prison for trying to cut off his sweetie’s ear and pull out her teeth with pliers. I don’t know if either of these men were psychopaths, but it’s extremely hard to reform an abuser who doesn’t want to be reformed, and it’s nigh unto impossible to reform a psychopath. No amount of love will change them; they are neurologically incapable of giving or receiving love, although they’re way good at faking it. This notion that we can change a ‘bad man’ with our love is one of the most toxic elements of female psychology and something feminism needs to seriously challenge. There’s a difference between loving genuine monsters versus female-porn fictitious ‘bad boys’ who are bad the way we want them to be without ever turning their unholy rage on us. The ‘rape-y’ books and movie scenes women love depict ‘rape’ defined as a woman fantasizes it is, with a hot man driven uncontrollable by lust or love rather than hostility or the desire to jack off with her body as so many drunken frat boys do. It’s the dangerous excitement of not being quite sure what’s going to happen next. The power of one individual over another. The sex appeal of Christian Grey and his Red Room, knowing the torture is consensual , and he’s not going to kill, dismember, or serve you with fava beans and a nice Chiaaanti. Where it all goes tits-up, as it were, is when we confuse the man who doesn’t exist with the one who does. It’s how we put our lives in danger whether it’s Sexy Hypermasculine Guy who beats you when he’s feeling low, or at its most extreme, when we fail to question why we think raping, torturing and murdering a woman is extremely hot when we’d never want that done to ourselves or any woman we could think of. It’s putting yourself in harm’s way. It’s a conscious, deliberate dance with danger. It’s doing dumb shit. We’ve spent enough time analyzing abusive men, what role male entitlement and privilege and ‘The Patriarchy’ plays. We need to turn our attention to our own psychology, our own choices, our own desires. When we identify vulnerabilities we have to address them, not just shrug and say, ‘That’s how I roll.’ And we need to challenge these toxic desires in others. We need to call out toxic feminine psychology, however kindly, in our family members and friends just as we call out toxic masculinity. It takes two to tango, as my mother likes to say. “Marisol takes a lot of crap from Jean-Paul,” Mom used to say about a female friend of hers, “and I say to her, ‘Marisol, why do you put up with this?’ He acts like a jerk, but she tolerates his behavior.” Prison groupies share some of the same psychological elements as many regular abuse victims, but are simply farther down the spectrum. They’re not as far removed as regular victims might believe. Time to stop making excuses about ‘blaming the victim’, and challenge women to stop being the victim. We must make this feminism’s manifesto for the 21st century. Our lives depend on it. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Forget killer viruses, fires, superduperhurricanes or murder hornets. Russia has been invaded. America is next. It hates you. And it's coming for you. Free for commercial use photo from PxFuel Sochi, Russia, became Ground Zero for a massive Spider Invasion last year. Hordes of giant killer spiders invaded Russian homes in this subtropical city (who knew Russia had subtropical anything?), terrorizing the locals. Okay, I might be exaggerating a little. They’re about three centimeters long, so I guess, technically speaking, that doesn’t compare well to real giant spiders, like you find in Australia. Also, it’s not, maybe, hordes of spiders, just a farkava lot of ’em. And they’re not human extermination armies. Entomologists, people who study things with more than four proper legs and whom you don’t want to talk up at cocktail parties lest something horrible crawl out from their shirtsleeves, say they’re harmless wolf spiders, that they pose no threat to humans and their bite is about the same as a bee sting. Pardon me, but doesn’t BITE suggest a real danger to humans? And ever been stung by a bee? I was, last summer. My foot swelled up and itched for days. It was horrifyingly traumatic. Okay. Exaggerating again. It was horrifyingly annoying. But still. Spiders. BITE. That’s all I have to hear to cross Sochi, Russia, off my bucket list. (Okay, exaggerating again. I’ve never had the desire to visit Sochi, especially after the Olympics debacle . But now I have even less of a desire. And then there's the whole war they started in Ukraine. Like, everyone would hate me if I gave them my tourist money. But, I'll be honest. The spiders keep me away from Russia more than the Evil Empire thing.) These entomologists note Sochi’s new housemates might actually do some good while they’re living there rent- and mortgage-free. They may not be much of a danger to humans (apart from the BITING stuff) but they do eat midges, cockroaches and fleas. Look, I don’t care if they eat Republicans. I don’t care if they eat unmasked white-sheeted swastika-bearing Plague-carrying MAGA morons. I don’t want three-centimeter-large spiders in my apartment. EVER. Even if they all sign waivers promising never, ever to bite me. If I find Republicans in my apartment, that’s what the Raid is for, and I’m going to have a word or two with Border Control since I live in Canada. The spiders’ weird behavior may be a symptom of climate change, or it could be they’re horny little bastards who just need a warm, dry place to mate. Because, you see, it’s mating season for Sochi’s aroused arachnids. So don’t worry, Russkies, they won’t stick around, they’ll just use your home for a quick in-and-out, bum a cigarette, and maybe cart off a vodka bottle or two, but then they’re gone and out of your hair. (I know, nightmare-inducing mental image!) This isn’t the first climate change-induced spider invasion shot across the bow for an increasingly creeped-out humanity. In 2012, the Australian town of Wagga Wagga (and that’s pronounced WOGGA WOGGA, not WAGGA WAGGA, as an Ozzie friend archly informed me, despite the fact that it’s spelled WAGGA WAGGA and not WOGGA WOGGA and is without question the world’s stupidest town name) got invaded by giant horrible evil brain-destroying monster spiders from hell, I suspect because Wagga Wagga must have been a very, very bad town in a former lifetime. A sillier explanation holds that the horrible beasts relocated to higher ground after a flood. Just to put things in perspective, this apocalypse was prophesied in what was once thought to be a cheezy horror movie but is now understood to be an insightful documentary, 1975’s The Giant Spider Invasion, set in the mythical state of Wisconsin: Giant spiders have a big thing for polyester pantsuits. Avoid them, Ozzies! Not to put too fine a point on it, but there was a more recent ‘horror movie’ (read: explosive documentary) on what happens when spiders go all Hell’s Angels on an entire town, 2002’s Eight Legged Freaks: So anyway, God’s wrath of horrid little frightmonsters snowed on southern Australia, dropping down in white billowy hellwebs from the sky, literally coating poor Wagga Wagga with web sheets filled with, ugh, bazillions of flood water refugees. You know what? I’ll take the Murder Hornets any day. Crikey, some might argue that Wagga Wagga’s Boschian nightmares aren’t exactly giant spiders at 1–6 millimeters, they’re merely ‘money’ spiders or ‘sheet-web weavers’ (that jump! ), but it’s only Australians who say ‘merely’, because they’re grateful the little futhermuckers aren’t the normal Volkswagen-sized beasts that customarily terrorize tourists. Listen, I know about ‘merely’. I grew up in Florida where we had big ugly demonic fiends — ‘merely’ garden spiders. Some of the beasts had pretty colors but I maintain that any spider bigger than a dime is a Big Ugly Spider even if it’s got a friggin’ original Picasso on its huge tank-like back. Yes, Floridian spiders’ eyes gleam with Satanic evil, are armoured like a Sherman tank and will fucking kill you if you so much as entertain a fleeting thought of pulling your shoe off. Image by Ray Shrewsberry from Pixabay My mother said there was a spider web between two trees outside my bedroom window when I was a baby, and she tried to hose it down, but the web was too strong, and then she tried a flame-thrower but it was still too strong, and it even survived her small tactical nuke. So she sent out the big guns — or rather, the big pole — in the capable hands of my father, who made short work of the aerial lair and the vicious lemon-sized beast Mom swears had glowing eyes and giant fangs. But, you know, Mom’s even more arachnophobic than I, so she might have exaggerated a wee bit. I used to watch something like the little dude to the right hanging off a bush outside our church during the sermon and I thought that was a really scary-ass spider but clearly I’ve never been to Australia. Or Sochi. I will never move back to Florida, which suffers world-class hurricanes and floods and if millions of these murderous mutants moved into my living room in their tiny little rain slickers and bug-corpse-speckled umbrellas I’m leaving the whole damn galaxy! Image by Jools Theriault from Pixabay Wagga Wagga isn’t the only place with terrifying climate change-crazed spiders. A user on Reddit recently posted a photo of some monster who lives in his backyard who bears a striking resemblance to Aragog, the evil giant spider queen in the Harry Potter movies. He doesn’t say where he lives. Which means…this mofo could be ANYWHERE. Maybe even in your hometown. In your backyard. Escaping, I don’t know, climate change or maybe it’s in lockdown or maybe just waiting for the next Trumpocalypse. The Horny Spider Invasion isn’t just happening in Russia. Wolf spiders, (spider wolves?) have invaded British homes looking for a shag ’n’ fag. This came just weeks after a massive British daddy longlegs invasion, in which bugs (not spiders) with legs as long as the Great Wall of China scoured British homes looking for mates. Britain, too, was very bad in a former lifetime. Image by Henryk Niestrój from Pixabay I’m not at all clear why spiders think anyone’s homes are bangalicious bug brothels, but who knows what those Brits really get up to behind closed doors, oi, mate? So far, Canadians seem safe from horny spider invasions, maybe because it’s still too cold here, or because I live in Toronto, where the spiders are really boring, or because I live in a skyrise and they can’t climb this high (there’s a method to my madness!) We might have stinkbugs. They’re a problem in New Hampshire , which is like a Great Lake and a state-and-a-half away from me, but I found one on my porch last week. (A stink bug, not a Great Lake.) It was hanging on the wall, not bothering anyone, and after a few hours I suspected it was dead. I didn’t poke it or anything to see, as I wasn’t sure if it could fly or not, but it must; how else could it have gotten up here? A few days later it was gone. So either it dried up, dropped to the floor and blew away or maybe it decided to quit loafing around and go get some stinkbug shit done. Brace yourself, kids: Things are going to get EXTREMELY buggy in the next thirty years. An international team of research scientists tasked with keeping the world in abject paranoia in case a vaccine is found for coronaviruses, Republicans, and other plagues of humanity, have determined that biological creepy-critter invasions are going to increase by a mind-boggling 36% by 2050 . This means ‘non-native’ insect species, so whatever shit’s been terrorizing Asia and Europe and maybe even Australia while we laugh and point our fingers at the other side of the globe, may be coming for your ass! Europe’s gonna git it the worst, followed by Asia and then the Americas. The only North American creepy-crawly-lover on the team said the study will allow ‘a shift from a reactionary stance to a proactive stance in defending against biological invasion.’ Which means to me the Biden-Harris House damn well better have a plan to protect Americans not just from the Supreme Court and $20/pack toilet paper but from the Horny Spider Invasions to come. Because spiders famously laugh in the face of Border Control when they're parachuting over the 49th Parallel in their Wagga-Wagga hellcloud balloons. God has spoken, and He’s pissed at us for not taking better care of the Earth. He’s even getting all Biblical and shit elsewhere, not with spiders but with plagues of locusts on Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia. These ravenous little bastards can travel up to 150 km a day, or over 5,000 km if they hitch a ride on an airplane. So, like, don’t think the oceans are stopping anybody from invading North America. Or from within. Scientists suspect climate change may also be behind the recent invasion of venomous pus-shooting ‘walking toupee’ caterpillars in Virginia, customarily found farther south but now on the northern move because, well, who’s going to stop them? Stinging flannel moth caterpillar image by Andreas Kay on Flickr . Do not pet these. DO NOT PET THESE. Scientists believe there are two primary climate-related explanations for why insects, arachnids, and a lot of larger, furrier wildlife are migrating, bringing with them our next possible pandemic . Changing weather is modifying insect traits and also impacting their food, natural enemies and predators. Rising and falling temperatures affect arthropods (insects, spiders, anything with a bunch of legs and an exoskeleton) and so do weather events like floods and droughts. They’re on the march to escape imminent death, predators and to find food. So, all laughs aside, climate change’s impact on insect populations means humanity is about to get up close and personal with creepy-crawlies in the coming decades. And speaking of coming, you might want to stock up on cigs and beer. The last thing you want is a spider getting peevish on a host unprepared for post-coital spider bliss. Aaaaaahhhh, a spider bite is no worse than a bee sting. This first appeared on Medium.

Tired of the mass shootings? The smash 'n' grabs? The venomous political division? Had enough with the Ignited States? Then it’s time to break up. Here’s how. I’m not sure if the sun is rising on a new America or setting on a soon-to-be-failed state. I leave it to you to interpret this for yourself. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash I think the moment I realized it was over between myself and the United States was an evening in 2004 as I ate dinner. The newspaper photo of a Muslim prisoner in Abu Ghraib presented me with a man on a box, dark-robed and hooded like an obscene parody of a Klansmen, arms outstretched like Jesus with electrical cables gripping his hands. Moral degenerates, or as George W. Bush called them, “My base,” cheered and made excuses for why it was okay to torture prisoners like we were some goddamn ‘shithole country’, as an American wag more recently put it, although he was talking about other people’s countries at the time. I’d schlepped off my Canadian immigration application three months prior, but I don’t think I was yet all-in. Committed enough to go through the trouble and expense (I think so far it had cost me around $1,000, not a sum I’d had to pay all at once) but when I saw the now-iconic photo, I knew it was over between me and America. We had to break up. We couldn’t live with each other anymore. The moral degenerates have multiplied, the self-infantilization of America continues, and the difference between the left’s and right’s extremism has become so blurred the only difference is in who they hate and how they express it. No, the left isn’t as violent as the right. Yet. So you want to become a Canadian My focus for this article: Americans, since others’ mother countries may vary. Immigration, not asylum claims The Skilled Worker program, which is how I entered Some of my information may prove out of date, as I started the process 19 years ago. Happy to update my information if someone tells me what's new. If you’re interested in the story behind my decision to leave America, you can read a guest blog post I wrote for a writer friend several years ago, when I had more of a sense of humor than I feel today. Consider this your starter article on How To Become A Canadian. Your home base will be the Canadian Immigration & Citizenship website. Bookmark it. Immigration and citizenship Apply to travel, study, work or immigrate to Canada, apply for citizenship, a permanent resident card or refugee… www.canada.ca There are two ways to enter Canada: Immigration and asylum, and this article doesn’t take into account COVID-19 restrictions. Applying as a refugee doesn’t apply to Americans, although never say never. America’s on the ‘safe country’ list, for now. WARNING: Famously Canadian niceness and courtesy does NOT extend to Canada geese. They are assholes. Two main immigration options Federal immigration Quebec immigration Quebec is a slightly different province from the rest of Canada for many political reasons I won’t get into here. The answer you care about is there’s a separate immigration process for it. If the Canadian government rejects you, you can still apply to Quebec and if it accepts you, the federal government may still approve it unless there’s a good reason to keep you out which can include having a criminal record, medical condition, or other problematic details (like ties to terrorism). I considered Quebec my Plan B. You don’t have to speak French to live in Quebec but if you don't you'd best live in cities like Montreal or Quebec City where you can get by with Anglais . The farther you get into the hinterlands, the more French-only it gets. If you successfully enter Canada, you become a permanent resident and can live anywhere in the country you want, including Quebec. You have most rights as a native-born Canadian but you can’t vote or sit on a jury. You may not be eligible for provincial government-paid healthcare for a certain period after you enter (I waited a month or two in Ontario, I think). You can’t become a citizen until you’ve lived here roughly three years, and that means your butt inside Canada. When you apply for citizenship, you have to specify how much time you spent outside the country during that time period, and then calculate how many hours you’ve been here because they look at hours. I was here eight years before I applied and I had a bitch of a time cataloging all the times I went to the States for family reasons or took vacations. And I forgot one stupid business trip to Chicago which they found stamped in my passport, but fortunately they let it pass. The main immigration choices Skilled worker. Canada now offers Express Entry for skilled workers which wasn’t available for the slow-ass process I went through. Provincial nominee program . Applies to anyone who’s got special skills that would apply to a specific province. Maybe you’re an oil worker who wants to work in Alberta or a miner who can work in the northern territories (bring some heavy-duty clothing, it can get quite nippy closer to the Arctic Circle!) Atlantic immigration pilot . A company or business who wants to hire you needs to sponsor you. It’s for jobs the business hasn’t been able to fill locally. Start-up visa. Canada actively encourages entrepreneurs and investors to build potential businesses in Canada. The Greater Toronto Area in particular is actively seeking people with startup/entrepreneurial tech skills as it aspires to become the Silicon Valley of Canada. Rural and northern immigration pilot . Similar to the Atlantic one, this one is designed to encourage people to move to smaller, more rural, less attractive communities. Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal remain the most popular destinations for new immigrants, so the federal government is always trying to persuade people to choose different regions (which you may want to consider anyway as the major metros are getting too expensive for even the rest of us to live in). Refugees. Doesn’t apply to Americans, but people living in those considered asylum countries can start here. Family sponsorship . If you’ve got Canadian family members, including relatives, this is one route. Just keep in mind your sponsors are ultimately responsible for you, which will factor into whether they’re willing to cooperate with you on this. Quebec-selected skilled workers. If Canada won’t have you, maybe the Quebecois will! Bonne chance! Caregivers. Self-employed. Are you hockey-mad? Love curling? You must have ‘relevant experience in cultural activities or athletics’ and be able to contribute in some significant way to those activities or athletics here. Agri-Food pilot. Canada needs food industry workers, but you’ll need a job offer. Several requirements are those you’ll find as for the skilled worker: Proficiency in at least one of the two languages (English or French), the funds to support yourself until you get on your feet, educational requirements and eligibility in one of the industries. Immigrating to Canada is a big undertaking. The federal government requires an insane but not insurmountable amount of paperwork. Among the crazier information they asked for was every damn address I’ve ever lived. Literally. I wasn’t sure how good they were at checking so I was as rigorously honest as I could be, even including calling a post office in Kent, Ohio to ask the lady on the phone if she could tell me the house number directly across the street. I lived there while the post office was being built in 1986. If you don’t drag your ass like I did you can pull the initial application together in a few months. I think it took my dithering ass something like 6–8 months. I was at maybe 90% ready to go, and asked myself, “If you don’t do this, where will you be in five years?” The answer terrified me so I did as a British friend predicted, “If I know you, you’ll just say fuck it and jump.” The process will take longer if you have legal complications, children, and an ex-partner who may create trouble. They’ll want to know about all your exes, including any relationships you still have with them. I schlepped the application off and reminded myself that if I stayed, in five years I’d probably be exactly where I currently was, except even crazier. When I saw the Abu Ghraib photo, I couldn’t wait to GTFO of America. What happens if your initial application gets accepted For the skilled worker and other programs, you’ll need to: Send your fingerprints to the FBI , if they don’t already have them (and if they do, maybe you shouldn’t even bother with this project). I visited my local police station and requested it. It was free at the time in Bristol, CT. Then you ship them off to the FBI and wait for the criminal check to come back. ***IMPORTANT TIP!*** Keep on top of the FBI with this! I had ninety days to submit my report to Canada and after two months I called the FBI to see when they’d get back to me. Not for many months, they said, as they had a new whack of paperwork submitted thanks to the recently-passed Patriot Act III. I wanted to jump through the phone and scream, “DON’T YOU DARE FUCK THIS UP FOR ME!” but I didn’t; I kept my cool and was really really really nice and polite and asked what we could do, as I needed to submit my report in the next thirty days. The lady quite kindly offered to look for my envelope and it was more of an undertaking than you’d think, but she called back an hour later, said she’d found it (I’m the only Nicole Chardenet on the planet, as far as I know) and that she’d put it at the top of the pile. “They should be getting to it very soon,” she said. And they did, in the sense that I got it back a few days after my deadline. I schlepped it off, with a letter detailing why it was late and describing all the lady went through to find my envelope and put it at the top of the pile. I asked them to please not stop my application for this, it wasn’t my fault, as I’d gone down to the police station the day I’d gotten approval to move forward, and I mailed it the following day. This is funny, but seriously, NEVER bring weed across the border from either direction. It’s illegal to do so in both countries even from federally weed-legal Canada to or from a weed-legal State. The next missive informed me my next step was to: Visit a Canadian-approved doctor in the U.S. for a medical exam at my expense to make sure I wasn’t bringing any expensive diseases or conditions into the country. One weirdness I encountered: I reported I’d been treated for depression (I was afraid to lie in the slightest) and the doctor asked if I’d been suicidal. I hadn’t, but I still had to fax him a document from my doctor certifying I hadn’t been when he treated me to get his approval. “Why would I go to all this trouble and expense to move to Canada if I wanted to kill myself?” I asked. “I can just do it here.” He wasn’t sure either. But Canada won’t turn you down just because you got treated for depression. If they did, he said, they’d never let anyone into the country. “Ninety percent of people experience depression at one time or another in their lives,” he said. “And the other ten percent are lying about it?” I responded, and we both laughed. Submit several original documents that will make you extremely uncomfortable including your birth certificate. How much time did it take? The process took a little under a year and a half from the time I mailed the initial application packet the first week of January 2004 until I got the temporary visa in the first quarter of 2005. Processing time can vary greatly, and often, so consult expected processing times regularly. The less complicated your life is, the less time it will take. I, for example, was just moving myself and a cat. No family, no house back home to deal with, no crazy exes wielding custody disputes. This is hilarious, written by one of Canada’s best humourists, but it’s also an excellent introduction to Canadian culture for the Canadian noob How much did it cost, and what was involved? I don’t recall the exact amount, but I think it was around $3,000 total to move to Canada. The breakdown, as best as I can remember: A two-part immigration application fee. The first was non-refundable even if you got rejected. The second, paid some months later, was roughly the same amount, and refundable. The doctor’s visit Special mailing and shipping fees. I didn’t want either country’s postal service screwing anything up so I paid extra to mail anything to Canada. I chipped in even more to send my original documents in an armoured truck and to ensure they were returned safely. I think I included the costs of the move like renting a U-Haul and hiring some local strong guys through a temp agency to help load the van. Other miscellaneous expenses What else do I need to know about moving to Canada? DO NOT USE U-HAUL. They suck. Just Google ‘U-Haul problems complaints.’ ‘Nuff said. Unless you’re a refugee, you will almost certainly be expected to prove you can speak one of the two main languages reasonably well. The absolute safest way to do this is to pay for a language assessment. By the time I got to this I was tired of forking out money so I took a small risk. I wrote two essays for the Canucks: One in English and one in French. In each, I detailed my experience with the language, including being born, raised, educated, and working in the U.S. for over forty years. That I spoke and wrote English better than most of my countrymen and if they didn’t believe me they could Google my unique name and find my work online. For the French one, I stated I hadn’t had help from anyone with the essay as reading it should make it immediately apparent why I gave myself fewer points for French fluency. I can get by, I said, but I can’t hold a conversation. I noted that I’d spent the previous year and a half working on my French. The IRS is unclear on whether you have to continue paying taxes after you move to Canada. You probably don’t, but we had several conversations about it and I still moved here thinking I didn’t have to file a tax report every April as always. You do, but unless you make a certain amount of money (usually somewhere around $100,000 a year) you don’t have to pay but you still have to file a report. Unless you’re a tax genius, you WILL need a special accountant who knows how to do it because it’s far more complicated. Kiss the EZ-1040, or even the not-so-EZ-1040, goodbye. You’ll need to show you have enough funds to support yourself for six months or so. I think at the time I had to prove I had $10,000 in the bank. That’s Canadian dollars, and at the time the exchange rate made it $7,500 American dollars. You can’t become a citizen until you’ve lived here three years. (See: Calculating hours, under Two Main Immigration Options.) If you’ve got a Driving Under Impairment conviction, you might be inadmissible for ‘serious criminality’, although you have options. Other reasons why you might be inadmissible. What to do if you’ve had any criminal convictions. Do you need a visa or Electronic Travel Authorization to come to Canada? Something that may help your case that didn’t exist when I immigrated: A Nexus card for expedited cross-border travel. It means both countries already agree you don’t need to be subjected to as much scrutiny at the border as those without. If you travel across the border as much as I do (pre-Plague), the <$200 fee (today) for like five years is money well spent. Don’t bother with an ‘immigration consultant’ or lawyer unless you’re quite sure you need one. Especially the ones who claim they can fast-track your application. The immigration authorities here move with all the haste of the IRS or any other monolithic, inefficient government agency. One reason why it might be an effective use of your money is if you’re a federally convicted well-connected psychopathic asshole who was once a citizen. (He was allowed back in.) In conclusion Good luck! Bonne chance! Image by World Bank Photo Collection on Flickr (2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) This first appeared on Medium a few years ago, but I've updated it a little for more recent events. This was originally in response to the hotly disputed 2020 U.S. election. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!