Social justice is laudable. But privileged and luxury belief-laced extremism has turned to the same evils it claims to fight. Can it be saved? Pretty, serious-looking brunette young woman in the foreground, walking down a hall, the other people blurred In the late ‘90s I was on the Internet Usenet forum alt.support .childfree, for those who’d chosen the no-kids life by choice. It was a great support forum, for awhile. Later I complained to my then-partner, “It’s gotten very anti-child. We’ve always had a few of those nutters there, but now even the reasonable ones sound extremist about kids, and put down expectant mothers. They don’t seem to understand that kids are human beings too.” ‘Stork parking’, the spaces reserved for pregnant women at shopping centers, had just become a thing and many asc’ers were outraged. “Unfortunately that seems to be the way of discussion forums,” he replied. “Eventually the extremists take over if users don’t moderate.” I left a.s.c the day a friend with children scrolled through and was appalled at the nastiness. Embarrassed to be seen in such company, I didn’t offer a farewell or a reason for departure; I simply stopped contributing. The natural gravitation toward extremism Liberal feminists have achieved many fantastic victories. Women’s education, Roe v Wade, Title IX, better if not yet equal pay. Men no longer have the right to rape their wives, arguing that ‘We’re married, she has to give it to me.’ Black civil rights progressed down a close similar path, and, thanks to progressive liberals, only in red states now is gay marriage considered a scandal and an offense against God. Now, most of the progress to de-marginalize further lies with individuals’ responsibility to step up and ‘do the work’ of improving and developing themselves, trying harder, asserting themselves more, refusing victimhood. It’s up to you , baby. But social justice needs new mountains to scale, and because of the last half-century’s successes, activists must climb higher to find new forms of ‘oppression’ they can fight. They have to exaggerate and catastrophize because on some level they know their current projects are fairly weak. Hence the rise of ‘microaggressions’ and ‘intersectionality’ to find ‘marginalizations’ people didn’t know they had, and who are too privileged or too young to know what real discrimination feels like. These ideas have come to be known as ‘luxury beliefs’, those you need to be wealthy and educated enough to support. Rob Henderson, the author of the newly-published Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family & Social Class , argues that luxury beliefs are the new status symbols, in an age where almost anyone can afford luxury goods, or cheaper knockoffs, or you can just steal them. They’re beliefs people higher up hold that benefit themselves, but harm the classes below them . Social justice activism tends toward extremism on the other side, too. Conservative activism has moved toward a cult of personality and MAGAism after getting much of what they wanted—an end to Roe, unfettered access to guns, the end of affirmative action and a more conservative Supreme Court friendly to rolling back other liberal successes. Activists and the ‘chattering classes’ demonize the opposition and compete for attention expressing ideas and opinions ever more extreme, just as my compatriots once did on a.s.c. How privileged do you have to be to think the protected speech of ‘misgendering’ is actually a crime, however much you support trans rights? Those who police and criminalize protected speech that offends their delicate sensitivities and succeed demonstrate just how marginalized they aren’t . That goes for those supporting ‘Don’t say gay’ Ronald DeSantis or insurrectionists pitching a tantrum because their side lost. These, too, are luxury beliefs. What once was called ‘wokeness’, a commitment to social justice and correcting inequities in the system, is now primarily a well-to-do luxury brand for the non-marginalized of all colors, fast-tracking toward the authoritarianism they claim to fight. Twenty-four hours after the October 7 attack, students at academic moron factories celebrated antisemitism and a vicious terrorist cult, when they would have better served genuine human rights by encouraging Palestinians to stop murdering gay and transfolk . Regressive Left feminists turn into good little Handmaids for the Patriarchy when sly sexual predators claim the fake-ass ‘gender dysphoria’. Woke social justice activists claim to fight homophobia while ‘trans-ing’ any kid unfortunate enough not to fit the rigid gender stereotypes they condemn the right for, and favor ‘de-colonizing’ everything except men in women’s bathrooms , changing rooms and prisons. But still… Wokeness, the extremism that once properly called itself progressive and liberal, is rooted in pre-civil rights black social justice and originally referred to staying aware of impending violence and systemic racism at a time when it was still unofficially okay to lynch a black man. After the Ferguson, Missouri riots in 2014, it elevated the meaning of awareness of dangerous cops, a caution important for white people too. Is it possible to be ‘woke’ and ‘not a fasch-hole? On another note I also wonder: How many conservatives are tired of their political beliefs and ideologies being twisted by a narcissistic psychopath and his mouth-breathing miscreants? I use the word ‘woke’ somewhat less as I realized it was offensive to people who are ‘woke’ but not crazy-ass extreme, including some of my friends. The most extreme, I expect, have defriended or unfollowed me by now and the rest ignore me. I’ve taken to referring to wokeness as ‘illiberal’ which makes a very important point that some so-called liberals aren’t. It does seem a shame, on some level, for ‘woke’ to have been misappropriated as badly as it has been. Or ‘colonized by white activists’, if you want to wokely honest. I’m not sure it’s as effective anymore as a term solely for black awareness when there’s less racism in America, regardless of what you’ve heard about the prevalence of ‘white supremacy’. There’s something to be said for being ‘woke’ to injustice, if only we could agree on what that is. Is injustice really some old white lady who said ‘Negro’ because she was young in an era when that was a perfectly polite way to refer to black people, or is it better focused on the practice of ‘carding’ by some police departments, randomly stopping people and demanding identification, asking questions, who are often disproportionately black? When did ‘woke’ become so weak? It’s not as though the world lacks for oppression to eliminate. A black President drew out bald-faced American racism on the right the way Hamas’s attack on Israel vomited the anti-Semites and whitey-haters on the left. Maybe social justice is just weary after fighting so hard for so many genuinely progressive projects and they want easier assignments like de-’whitewashing’ Hollywood. Somewhere along the way it became the problems it tried to solve, and refused to look within and ‘do the work’ it demands of others. Marginalized = sinless, apparently. How is Ibram X. Kendi prescribing black racism against white people not 100% bloody racist himself? He’s a non-starter for many liberals because he’s the problem he claims to want to solve. It strikes me that the next iteration of ‘antiracism’ in America—2.0—should be examining and coming to terms with anti-white racism, which sounds right-wing and ‘yabbut’ but genuine antiracists can see how unserious woke ‘antiracism’ really is because it supports racism. Yeah, we can see where that’s going. If there’s one thing you can count on with humanity, it’s to exploit others. Will Kendi eventually advocate for 400 years of white slavery to ‘atone’ for a past we turned our back on 160 years ago? Wait for it. Woke social justice craziness isn’t over yet. I suspect ‘social justice’ will get worse before it gets better, especially if the Republicans and their golden god prevail. (Where are the statue puller-downers when you need them?) Unless those wokes who haven’t yet given their brains over to the dark forces of extremism join other level-headed liberals to fight to take it back. ‘Woke’ can be rehabilitated only if enough level-headed liberals grow the labia and balls to do it, and make it clear that illiberals are hardly ‘woke’ to racism, sexism, and homophobia when they’re pushing it themselves. Woke social justice warriors don’t listen to the right, so they have to hear critiques from their own, which is risky. The ‘woke’ are famously intolerant of those who fail to hew strictly to social justice doctrine, but the times they are a-changin’, and it may soon become less socially acceptable to identify as ‘woke’ in 2024. DEI, one of the main engines of toxic wokeness, is under fire. Colleges and universities are slashing their DEI budgets and the legal system is examining whether it’s constitutional to demand pledges to political narratives like ‘antiracism’ to get or keep a job. It’s becoming clear that DEI, as it’s implemented today, is creating and encouraging racism and other bigotries rather than alleviating it. ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ Doesn’t Go Over Well At Uber The DEI industry could save itself, I suspect, if it embraced a universal social justice commitment to reducing all racism and discrimination. Like if it told the full story of slavery rather than treating it as though Europeans singularly invented it in 1619. It would enjoin POC to examine themselves along with their white cohorts and ask themselves whether they’re treating white people unfairly (or men, or ‘cis-het’, or whatever). Because tribalism is universal, and racism is tribalism, and anyone who hasn’t lived all their life in a cave knows it’s not just restricted to white people. Or men. Or cis-het. I don’t think DEI will do that, though. Illiberal fundamentalism has seized the far-left soul and I already know from twenty-plus years of arguing with Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. that you can almost never change the fundamentalist mindset. Ibram X. Kendi said it and I believe it! A Man’s Suicide Started With A DEI Consultant’s ‘Antiracism’ Workshop We have to hold these people to account, just as we do the crazies on the MAGA side—demanding facts, evidence, and rational theories pertaining to others’ suspected motivations, not conspiracy theories and blanket ‘they hate us, they hate America, they hate democracy’ condemnations. That’s whether they’re on the right or left, or you are. Hold your own as accountable as you do the other side. I have a formerly progressive friend who, over pandemic lockdown, fell down the rabbit hole of left-wing conspiracies. He gets really, really mad when I challenge some of his crazier assertions. It’s QAnon crap for the left. We need to make more ‘illibs’ like him really really REALLY mad. I’ve begun by challenging the broader, wokenized definition of ‘white supremacy’. Systemic racism exists, but if we hadn’t made progress black people would still be using separate fountains, feared for ‘contaminating’ swimming pools and Clarence Thomas would have picked pubic hairs off his Coke can on a park bench rather than a law office. White supremacists are the KKK, not you or me or even the guy who cracks a racist joke. White supremacists are racists, but not all racists are white supremacists. What can you do to challenge social justice extremism, and bring ‘woke’ back to some semblance of normalcy, not to mention social justice? Or the crazies on Team MAGA? I do suspect Americans are getting fairly tired of both, since voters are famously switching sides for the forthcoming election and I honestly don’t think anyone has a clue which candidate will win. We in the Murky Middle are the new Silent Majority, although maybe with the decline of power on both sides, we won’t have to be afraid to speak up anymore. 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 damn thing!

NY Magazine's manly misogynist Andrew 'Andrea' Chu sees children as mere pawns and women as obstacles in the trans cult's weird, gender-bending games Image from Rawpixel It’s never about the evidence. Or lack thereof. Andrew (Andrea) Chu, the NY Magazine book critic, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize short story whose lead ‘graph is about all the things one could stick up one’s ass (don’t ask, but if you must know…. ), has written a cover story for the periodical that makes me very glad I don’t subscribe (and not just because I’m not interested in DIY proctology). Chu, a trans-identified male, has written a delusional, very dude-ish, and occasionally downright creepy cover story called Why Trans Kids Have The Right To Change Their Biological Sex , which demonstrates how divorced (acrimoniously) from humanity the trans craze is. He doesn’t mention the WPATH Files ; his story was published five days after its release so it may have already gone to press, or he deliberately ignored it. He’s defensive and dismissive and has that whole mansplaining vibe of a guy who’s been outside his wheelhouse ever since he slipped on his first Wonderbra. He argues about what I guess is a new human right we never knew we had—to change sex whenever the hell we want, at whatever the hell age we want. Damn the critics and those few brave scientists who say No, you’re assigned your sex at conception, not by the first doctor who sees your mini-wee-wee or wittle hoochy-cooch. Nadda mention of ‘gametes’ anywhere, which are the Ultimate Decider of how that shalt meander down one’s life’s journey. Gametes, in case you’ve forgotten your high school biology (don’t worry, I Googled so you don’t have to!), are an organism’s reproductive sex cells, X and Y, and you’ll probably at least remember from Mr. Hanson’s class that shit started When Eggy Met Spermy. Recall, please, that Eggy tosses an X, and Spermy tosses—something—and then it was a toss-up (ar ar!) as to what resulted until Birth Day, or with the ultrasound if you were born in the 1970s or beyond. I can’t find this sex-changing ‘human right’ anywhere in the U.S Constitution. Maybe I have a defective copy. I wonder how the Founding Fathers would react, say, if I travelled back in time and asked them about the right to change sex. It didn’t go well. The First Continental Congress degenerated into mass chaos and Button Gwinnett moved to forever ban women from Congress. Image generated by Poe AI, which knows historical white men when asked about them. The ‘right’ to gender reassignment Trans kids have this ‘right, Chu says, without the need for parental approval, and he puts words in their little mouths when he writes, “What trans kids are saying is this: The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too.” First of all, no, they’re not sophisticated enough to think that way, and two, the way Chu describes it you’d think all the adult role models in kids’ lives have been racing to the trans clinic for decades switching back and forth—Heather Has Two Mommies! No, Wait, Heather Had Two Mommies, But Now One Is A Daddy—No, Scratch that, Heather Has One Daddy and One Non-Binary Parent—Now Heather Has Two Non-Binary Genderqueer Parents—Now Heather Has A Perpetual Prescription for Prozac Because She Doesn’t Recognize Either Of Her Parents When They Walk Through The Door And The Other Day She Called 911 Because She Thought Some Strange Weird Guy In An Expensive Dress And A Beard Was There To Steal Their Car. In Chu’s world, children should be understood as ‘full members of society,’ and claims ‘it does not matter where it [the desire to transition] comes from.’ Perhaps in their zeal to ‘destigmatize’ mental illness, which is one of the many non-dysphoric explanations behind the rise in transgenderism, the illibs decided to deny it even exists. Rather a lot like their denial of the differences in male and female brains. So, when someone experiences psychiatric distress of some sort, we treat the body rather than the brain? Then, I assume, if someone walks into the clinic with cancer, which is happening already with girls put on ‘T’(estosterone), [p.23, WPATH Files] we will teach them to woo the cancer away with, I don’t know, psychotherapy? Crystals? Rebirthing? If you’ve ever dealt with a cult, or a conservative religion that closely resembles one, you know there is no such thing as questioning the Sacred Dogma. Posted on Facebook, ‘Transwomen can’t have babies because men haven’t got a womb.” Public domain image from Picryl Evidence is for right- and left-wing whack jobs In Chu’s crazy transactivist world, which has gotten a lot crazier since the release of the WPATH Files, the massive collection of data, videos, screenshots of exchanged messages and discussions, and reliable citations isn’t enough to make the trans crowd take back what they’ve been saying for years (which no one expects they will), or rethink what they thought they knew , or at the very least, have the brains to STFU and hope everyone forgets about them when the world finally comes to realize what pseudoscientific and desperately harmful claptrap they’ve been promoting for years. Don’t expect the True Believers ever to acknowledge they were wrong. Chu’s abject denial of the evidence he acknowledges exists is breathtakingly Kool-Aidy. And OMG, the public is beginning to realize the jig is up! "First, it [an Atlantic article by Jesse Singal called When Children Say They’re Trans ] took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights. This tactic has been successful: The political center has moved significantly on trans issues." Chu even identifies his previously unrecognized allies of his customary right-wing and radical feminist adversaries: Liberals. Those of us on the left who aren’t wokenized and fight his authoritarian illiberalism. His real tragedy is evidence, or clear lack thereof, moving public opinion! But now the facts are firmer with the release of the WPATH Files, not to mention support from the lib-iest in Europe. Which is: Gender reassignment is all a load of crap and experts know they’re harming their patients and that many will come to regret their decisions. But as Chu notes later, “If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will.” So they’re going to blame the high regret rates and ruined lives on the kids’ poor choices. How can children have the same free will as adults when youthful free agency only goes so far when you’re seven years old, eyeing the cookie jar, and your internal morality debate only rises to the level of How likely am I to get away with this? vs I should do what Mommy wants and stay out of the jar since I’m diabetic and that cookie could send me to go live with God! For men like Chu (and, as we shall eventually see, he absolutely thinks like and is very much a man), children have free will when it’s convenient for The Cause but I’m not so sure he wants empowered ten-year-olds driving down the highways by themselves. He adds, “This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right." WTF? Puberty is not something you 'consent' to! This is trans-narcissism writ large, fueled by the traditionally male medical arrogance that they can 'fix anything', including that which ain't broke. Puberty is a natural life transition that every human being who’s lucky enough to make it that far goes through; the ones that don’t rest in small coffins in cemeteries. If you want to talk about consent, name one human being who ever ‘consented’ to being born. Life’s a bitch and so’s the disembodied asshole who sentenced you to the life you got, with the parents you got, and if you don’t like it, tough shit. It’s just life, man , it ain’t easy, but people go on to have happy lives and the ones who fare best are the ones who don’t fight reality, unlike Chu who projects his own conscious decision to transition onto the “many opponents of trans rights who observe with horror that they too might have transitioned given the chance…” Has anyone in the last sixty years said that, ever? Because it’s been an option for that long, although most people had to pay for it themselves, they didn’t have woke health insurance covering sex-change operations, and Chu believes it should be covered under Medicaid for All. Funny how he and his fellow cosplayers fail to advocate for health insurance covering detransition, which is estimated in the WPATH Files as being as much as 27%. Chu further projects his personal fantasies onto teenage girls when he claims these theoretical jealous still-stuck-in-their-birth-bodies anti-trans-ers fight transitioners because “so intensely did they hate being teenage girls.” Speaking as a former teenage girl, I never hated it, just the bullying that comes with failing to be a stone cold fox. Speaking as a former little girl whose Depression-era mother tried to teach her how to be a ‘lady’ (spoiler alert, it didn’t ‘take’!) I remember being annoyed by needing to be this stupid thing when it was clear boys had more fun and more freedom. I never wanted to be a boy, I just wanted the same rights and freedoms they enjoyed—and I still do. At the same time as Mom tried to turn me into Grace Kelly, feminists were taunted by misogynists (in early ‘70s parlance, ‘male chauvinist pigs’) who asked them, “What do you want now, a penis?” No, just the rights and freedoms a penis symbolized. But in TransWorld, as in the medical profession which has embraced this new ‘human right’ so assiduously, if you don’t feel good, fix it. With a pill or some ‘T’ or some health-degrading lifetime drug-dependent surgery. Live for the now, fully rational and soon-to-be-sterilized nine-year-old for whom the prospect of babies are 10-20 years away! Who knows when you’ll change your mind, if you think you don’t want them? Famously child-aversive George Clooney changed his mind at 56, when he agreed to impregnate his wife. Future fertility, though, is something Andrew Chu sneers at, assuming that we’re all Elon Musks worried about repopulating the earth: “The specter of mass infertility [he acknowledges this] cannot be underestimated. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the anti-trans movement is driven by a deep, unconscious dread that society will not have enough working female biology to support the deteriorating nuclear family — and, with it, the entire division of sex itself." Yeah, because with only eight billion people on the planet, the next pandemic could wipe us all out or something. And when did his enemy the liberals worry so much about the nuclear family? He claims, “Sex-altering care can indeed affect one’s fertility but not always irreversibly,” (actually it is pretty damn irreversible, although we can’t yet say exclusively), “(but it's happening a lot), and the trans population is still far too small to bring about that sort of demographic apocalypse." Um, what about those today who might want kids later, which, especially for women, happens around age 30? And for men, who can change their minds at any time? No thought to the individuals, the humans these decisions are affecting. This is all about preserving the precious narrative, with sneering condescension and disrespect at the lives that may be ruined by all of this. (Sudden thought: I wonder if Andrew-ea is secretly sorry s/he transitioned? Regrets, ‘ave you ‘ad a few-ah, Ands?) Where were all the trans kids before this? There's always so little discussion of real science in these trans-debates. Chu dismisses Lisa Littman’s heavily peer-reviewed seminal paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria as a ‘sham’, the customary dismissal with which transactivists wave their large hairy man-hands when a scientific paper fails to parrot their genderwoo quackery. Don’t ask, of course, Why all of a sudden has evolution gone off the rails? We evolved as a sexually dimorphic species to reproduce in a specific, immutable, irrevocable way; whether we do as individuals or not is beside the point; it's how we're designed. Intersex people are chromosomal anomalies and the primary reason why we must preserve the ability to receive sex reassignment surgery if warranted; for all others, after we've eliminated all likely non-dysphoric reasons for feeling this way. Mia Hughes, the journalist who wrote the WPATH Files report, suggests waiting until 25, when the brain is fully developed, but that's still dicey as women's biological clock often doesn’t ring until they’re closer to thirty. Sterile men may find it harder to marry or partner if they can't produce children. And as the WPATH Files have taught only those who hadn’t been paying attention, kids can't think far ahead enough to prepare for eventual non-traditional fertility, and may not yet be old enough to produce viable eggs or sperm. What we do know is that people considering transition often change their minds when they’re given the full story of what to expect. The WPATH Files tells the story of Dr. Az Hakeem who ran therapy groups at the Portland gender clinic in London twenty years ago. He introduced those who sought transition with regretful post-transitioners who shared why. The wannabes were excited and euphoric, until they met the post-trans group, which Dr. Hakeem described as “mourning, depression, and sadness.” And, “ They realized they didn’t really feel that authentic in their transgender identity, so they were still feeling just as inauthentic, but just in a different body.” As a result, almost all the wannabes gave up their dream when they realized just how difficult post-operative life was, and how fantasy-based their expectations. The Dudest Dude Since ‘The Dude’ Andrew-ea Chu came to extreme transvestism (he’s had ‘bottom surgery’) not because he was ever gender dysphoric but via one of the most female-offensive avenues imaginable: Sissy porn. I’m not going to describe it. Click the link if you want to know more. This explains why his article is an exercise in resounding male cluelessness: He’s just another sexual fetishist. A cross-dresser as dude between his ears as he once was between his legs. There are people who try to understand the other sex and others who don’t. When I wrote for Medium I was frustrated by all the self-victimizing young ‘feminists’ who hadn’t the foggiest clue what it was like to be a man in today’s society and weren’t interested in learning. There are men who don’t know or care what the world is like for women, and don’t want to hear about it. Then there are men like Andrew Chu who, despite having declared themselves female, think they know what it’s like to be a woman and prove themselves laughably wrong whenever they open their mouths or set fingers to keyboard. Ye shall know them by their clumsy, klutzy inability to put themselves in someone else’s kitten heels, even for one tiny nanosecond. Chu accuses J.K. Rowling of “ anxiously projecting her fears of sexual assault onto them [trans kids] from across the sea.” I don’t think she’s worried about kiddie rapists; she’s worried about the documented adult rapists in women’s clothing. But it doesn’t get dude-ier than this: “The TERF does not, after all, fear being assaulted by a Y chromosome in a women’s restroom. Her paranoid fantasy is of a large testosterone-fueled body wielding a penis — an organ to which, as [transactivist author Judith] Butler points out, the TERF attributes almost magical powers of violence." Only. A. Man. Could. Write. This. ‘Paranoid fantasy’. And not just any man. Only the sort of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, club wielding troglodyte who sees women as objects to be swept aside if they block men’s desires, and children as mere pawns in whatever weird-ass gender-bending game these jackoffs are playing. Only a man as large as Andrew Chu, who no one will ever try to rape because he clearly can fight back in a way a real woman can’t, fails to comprehend what it is to go through life always being minimally aware of the strange men around you, and hyper-aware if you’ve ever been critically assaulted. Only a man can write like this, for whom biological women are merely stumbling blocks to be removed, forcefully if necessary, so that entitled, narcissistic fetishists and misogynists can get whatever it is they want. For a fair number of them that’s autogynephilic male sexual pleasure, but I’ve seen enough to believe there are other reasons misogynist, dudier-than-The-Dude men might want to appropriate womanhood. There are political reasons. Pleasure reasons that may not involve autogynephilia per se: Simply forcing women to bend to your will, as they currently are permitted to do in what’s supposed to be the free Western world, or, more creepily, as one step closer to acceptance that if children have ‘free agency’, then they have the ‘right’ to decide with whom they want to have sex . This is where he’s going, whether he realizes it or not, when he argues children must be accepted as full members of society and it doesn’t matter why they want to transition. He's making an argument, in essence, that children are as logical and rational as adults and every wish of theirs should be respected. He's edging closer to, "Kids should be allowed to make their own decisions, period." The liberal media, with a few exceptions, is dragging its woke ass on acknowledging the release of the WPATH Files. So too, weirdly, is Fox News, and when I sent it to them I got a form email back saying they’d reach out if they want more details. So fuck ‘em. Tell your Congresscritters, especially the Republicans, that you demand a congressional investigation into WPATH and the medical profession at large. Canadians, we can do something similar since our Prime Minister is woke-as-fuck on trans rights over women’s rights. And if you haven’t already, download the WPATH Files and send it to any parent who’s considering or being railroaded into allowing their child to transition. The first step is stop with the pronouns. Now. It’s the only to way to fight back. 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 damn thing!

Persephone Phoenix reveals how she grew the labia to leave her abusive partner, and encourages others to do the same If you missed Part I of Persephone’s awesome story, it’s right here. Go ahead, we’ll wait! Don’t miss her excellent advice for others stuck in bad relationships (especially the part about ‘bad feminist theory’) at the end of this one, either! He had an absolute fit. He drove over to my house, used his key to come in and started yelling at me. He kicked a side table across my living room. I calmly picked up the phone and called 911. I told the operator my husband was attacking me. I told him to get out. He went downstairs and meekly sat on the porch waiting for the police. They talked to him and told him to go home and get some anger management training. They made sure I was okay and left. I installed a deadbolt on the front door. He called me the next day and cried like a whiny little bitch, saying “I can’t believe you called the police on me.” So much for his big, macho, Iranian male power. I hired my own lawyer: new attitudes, beliefs, behaviors emerge. After we were divorced, I found a lawyer who specialized in unfair separation agreements. He was appalled by what I had agreed to. He sent me a summary of an even more extreme case that he had won for a woman with a scheming husband who made my asshole look like the sweet Tom Hanks character in Forrest Gump . He got her a substantial settlement after the fact. My wonderful lawyer immediately sent a letter to my ex-husband. He, in turn, hired himself a shark lawyer who countered with threats and outrageous demands. My lawyer countered that with some simple observations about Canadian law. And that was that.  I got my fair share of the fancy house that had considerably increased in value in a hot real estate market. It turns out the other house was half owned by his business partner, so he couldn’t have given it to me in the first place. But I got a share of its value as well. He turned our daughter against me: Luckily, it was too late to turn back. By the time I came to my senses and demanded compensation from my ex-husband, our daughter was about 19. And he was not about to let things go. He was pissed that I was asking for his hard-earned money. Unfortunately, she still lived with him. Even when she was 15 and I lived down the street from her, she decided to blame me for the divorce, and refused to spend much time at my house. Now that she was in university, she wanted her own apartment, so he provided her with that--which gave him more opportunities for badmouthing me. At one point, she phoned me and asked, “Why are you trying to take all of Daddy’s money?” (My settlement was a tiny fraction of his net worth).  When I tried to explain to her how marriage law works in the civilized world, she angrily shouted at me, “I don’t want to hear about it!” In true narcissist fashion, her father had love-bombed and manipulated her to see me as the enemy. The estrangement from my daughter lasted a few years. We still saw and spoke to each other regularly, but there was tension that never fully dissipated. She resented me for reinventing myself, for losing weight and being happy about it, for dating, for getting remarried, for moving temporarily out of town.  She was very, very jealous of my new boyfriend whom I met after my second husband died suddenly and whom I eventually married. At least she was proud of me for learning to drive! (I finally got my license in my late 40s). He disowned our daughter—his only child: a new nadir for him, not me. It seemed like I would always be the second-best parent to my daughter. Daddy gave her a free apartment with a marble kitchen and bathroom right across the street from the home she had grown up in. I lived miles out of town on a farm and she had to take the train to visit me.  Horrifyingly, she was raped when she was 25. She didn’t even tell me. She also didn’t tell her father fearing that he might actually kill the guy or have him murdered by the Persian mafia (I honestly wouldn’t put either of those things past him—he was physically violent with males who thwarted him and had hinted darkly at connections to the mob). But I was about to become a heroine to my daughter. My ex developed knee problems. In exchange for the fabulous apartment, he had basically enslaved his daughter (as he had tried and failed to do with me). He required her to come over to his house regularly to do things like scoop the cat litter for his cat. He insisted that she work at his cafés for less than minimum wage, despite her university degree and knowing her desire to work in the tech industry.  I worried about her career, because she was nearing thirty and had only worked in restaurants and coffee houses. I stepped in. I arranged for an internship in New York City with my boyfriend’s brother-in-law. I gave her enough money to rent a shared apartment and live in Brooklyn for three months. Her dad was pissed . He had lost his little servant. When she came back, he demanded that she manage his main café while he recovered from surgery. She was sick of the abuse and control and refused. After that, she was dead to him. She still lived in his apartment and he began harassing her by sending over his submissive Asian girlfriend with messages like, “You have three weeks to vacate the premises.” He stiffed her for the final electric bill of over $400.00 even though he knew she had literally no money.  She couch-surfed for a few weeks, got a menial job, and moved into a truly awful shared apartment with a stranger. But at least she was free of her father. She no longer needed me to rescue her; she got started on her own hero journey. Photo by Vie Studio My daughter eventually achieved incredible career success all on her own: the hero cycle continues. She is now a software designer making a competitive salary. Five years after her father disowned her, she no longer needs him. She lives in  her own cute apartment with an adorable rescue cat. Oh, and we are now best friends. I got some therapy: Almost at the return threshold. Before I could have a successful relationship with my ill-fated second husband (he died two-and-a-half years after our wedding), and finally with my new, utterly perfect husband, I had to get some counseling.  There were leftover issues from my childhood that were preventing me from relating in a healthy way with men. I dated fruitlessly for several years trying to heal my wounds: Getting over that return threshold is hard. I could probably write a book about the losers I dated before I found any kind of committed relationship. There was the drunk, the player, commitment-phobe, and also the many married men who reached out to me on dating sites looking for a little action on the side (these ones I knew enough to refuse). My second husband was not perfect, but he made me feel loved and desired. I was amazed that someone could actually be crazy about me; that had never happened before. When he died suddenly in front of me one morning, I was devastated. I thought we would live out our lives on his farm. We were only together for two-and-a-half years. I met my new husband at age fifty: my reward arrives. Less than a year after my second husband died, I met my true husband. He was younger and handsome, and…Jewish!  (I have always had a religious bent and had become fascinated by Judaism at an early age). I could not believe my luck.  A few years after we got together, I converted to Judaism. We have a blissful relationship: The ultimate boon. I could write a whole other article about how happy I am in my marriage. I will try not to gush too much, but this man is amazing! We have been together over a decade and married for a couple of years.  He does almost all of the housework (I do most of the cooking and grocery shopping). He loves my cooking (even better than his wonderful mom’s!). He encourages me to buy things I need (instead of, like my ex, yelling at me in stores if I dared to buy clothes while he loaded up his shopping basket with whatever attire he felt like). He praises me to others (instead of complaining about me to whoever would listen, often right in front of me). The best thing about being with him is the constant, delightful two-way conversational flow (my ex-husband thought I talked too much; he once held up my teaching license, which had just arrived in the mail and declared scornfully: “License to talk!”). In short, we are best friends. Even spending time basically 24-7 during the pandemic lockdown did not lead to fights or irritation. No, our relationship is not conflict free—that would be impossible. But any fleeting arguments are usually over and forgotten about within minutes. He likes it when I drive. He compliments me and thanks me constantly. And I do the same for him. We both love classical music, take music lessons, and joyously attend concerts together (My ex-husband explained to me that classical music is “for snobs”). We agree on life goals. I would move anywhere for him (we recently moved from Canada to the United States). He has to work, while I am retired, so I don’t mind being flexible. In short, we have as ideal a relationship as possible given that we are both homo sapiens , the most problematic and aggressive species on the earth. Final reflections: The master-mistress of two worlds. Yes, life with my husband, with my daughter, and even with my ex-stepson (my late husband had a teenage son when I met him and we are still close. He is now married to a lovely woman and they have two adorable tiny humans, one of whom is old enough to call me “Gamma”), is more or less my dream life. But that is not the point of my story. My advice to women (and men) in abusive relationships, is to stop accepting treatment you don’t deserve. Women especially, do not rely on feminist theory about how the patriarchy is making you powerless and spend your time complaining to your girlfriends about how bad your partner is and how much he is victimizing you (I did this to a horrifying degree).  It does no good and simply reinforces your victim status. Victims don’t become heroes. And please, please, don’t wait around for someone to rescue you. Get some self esteem, even if you had two narcissistic, abusive parents like I did. Find a good therapist. And don’t wait until your 40s to do that. Try to realize your real value. It’s too easy to fall down the proverbial rabbit hole with an abusive partner, too easy to accept his or her negative evaluation of you that only serves their dark purpose to keep you entrapped. Don’t be naive about human nature; people usually don’t change when they have power. When you stay with an abuser, you give him permission to abuse you and any children you might have. Don’t let that happen. Do not make excuses for an abusive partner. It doesn’t matter what his mommy or daddy did to him. Your sympathy will only embolden him. If you have a good job and are financially stable, get out! If you don’t, bide your time and get away when you can. If you procrastinate like I did, don’t get down on yourself. It’s never too late to leave. I have a friend who put up with his abusive wife until his 60s. He always told me it was too late for him. She died and he immediately met the love of his life. So leave. Maybe you want a better relationship, or maybe you want to be alone because dating in the 2020s is an absolute shitshow. That’s okay too. Live your best life. Don’t let anyone stop you. Be the hero that lives inside you. I want to hear from other women, and men, and transfolk who've gotten out of bad relationships. What did you learn about yourself? What made you think differently about who you were letting into your life and why you let them stay? Drop me a line from the contact form in my main menu! And in the meantime, 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 damn thing!

There, rape activists. We said it. Some decide NOT to let this ugly event define them. Too bad feminist theory teaches women little of value re recovery. Free image from Pickpik I feel vindicated to read someone else say it. Not all women are destroyed by the trauma of rape. Eagle-eyed Grow Some Labia subscriber and Patriarchy bitch-slapper herself Persephone Phoenix sent me a fantastic article by Larissa Phillips on Quillette whose brutal, frank description of her rape by two undocumented North African migrants in Florence, Italy thirty-one years ago is framed within the context of her prior history of feminist perma-victimhood indoctrination, and how little it served her when Da Patriarchy dragged her into a park one dark night. She fought back, sustaining heavy injuries. She says resisting contributed to her recovery and she quotes two researchers in a 1985 report about avoiding rape who note that “[O]ne of the most important functions of physical resistance is to keep women from feeling depressed even if they have been raped.”  That’s the first time I’ve ever read or heard that! Fighting back is risky, for sure. Women have been murdered or permanently mutilated for their efforts. But some have successfully fought off their rapist, and Phillips, at least, is less depressed knowing she did what she could to stop the rapes. She condemns the feminist weakness-worshipping literature that teaches women to give up their power and thereby make themselves easier pickins for predatory males. Who knew that, if you fought back and survived, that it might actually contribute to your recovery? Phillips made the fatal decision one night to walk the two miles to her home in Florence when she missed the last bus and turned down an offer for a ride from friends who weren’t ready to leave the bar just yet. Two men dragged her into the park and did the dirty deed. Phillips’s screams prompted at least one person nearby to call the cops and report a possible rape in progress. Then she went home, and consciously showered off all the evidence except for her swollen and bleeding face. She had no intention of reporting it, of course; feminist gospel teaches women to just compliantly accept it. You’ll never get a conviction and he’ll get off scot-free. Rapists Who Get Off Easy Don’t Get Off Scot-Free Just one ‘problem’: Her boyfriend, Enzo, ‘unfamiliar with the feminist literature on rape,’ disagreed and pushed her to report it to the police. As it turned out, when the police finally showed up, they informed them that two men matching the description of her attackers had just been arrested for crashing a stolen car. Both were apprehended. And guess what, they fit the description of a recent past attempted rape victim too. Long story short, the feminist rape stories Phillips had been inculcated with were still right about some things, but ultimately wrong about everything else. Her treatment at the hospital by all-male doctors was, as predicted, further traumatizing; they were professional but it was invasive and humiliating. She watched from her room as her rapists were wheeled on gurneys down the hall. The nurses ‘snapped’ at her when she refused the pelvic exam, having had quite enough. They told her she’d wreck the investigation. Enzo got her to go along with it, recognizing what a mistake she was making. He promised to hold her hand throughout it, and he did. Then, months later, guess what happened. Despite all the failure prophecies by defeatist feminist rape activists, Phillips and her fellow victim got a conviction. What inspired Phillips to write her article was reading Celeste Marcus’s recent story in Liberties magazine and her public takedown of her alleged rapist, writer Yascha Mounk. How To Not Report A Rape And Compromise Your Own Credibility When You Do Phillips disagrees with the medieval-style justice meted out by Marcus to her accused when she alleged to The Atlantic editor, where Mounk was a writer, that they ‘had a rapist’ writing for them. So of course they severed ties with him. In our savage, disintegrating democracy, an accuser can get someone fired on an unproven allegation. Unlike E. Jean Carroll , Marcus has no proof; she preserved no physical evidence of the alleged rape, and unlike a woman in Tampa last year , she never filed a report. So, like, it’s he-said-she-said. Mounk denies it. Because Phillips reported the incident, she and the woman the two men had attempted to rape days earlier cooperated to put them in jail. Despite believing they’d never get a conviction, which is what Phillips’s female lawyer predicted. But they did. Phillips said, “Even if they had been acquitted despite my best efforts, the fact that I had pursued them to the furthest extent possible using the most effective tools available was important to me.” Fatalist feminism Had Phillips listened to Gender Studies weak-asses rather than her boyfriend, these two pricks might well have raped again. ‘Feminist’ literature collaborates with rape culture by preaching the article of faith that women won’t be believed, that there’s no point in reporting a rape because the process will be hell and they’ll likely never get a conviction. What they don’t tell women is that without a report, the rape never gets investigated, the rapist doesn’t get arrested, which also results, shockingly, in no conviction. What they also don’t point out is that the rapist is now free to do it again, knowing feminist theory has got his back. Phillips quotes Marcus’s Liberties article: “I don’t know a single woman whose rapist was punished by police. I don’t know anyone who does. Do you?” Well, no, I don’t. That’s because out of all the rape stories I’ve heard from the women themselves, I don’t remember any of them saying they reported it. I wonder how many others got raped because of that failure. I wonder how many of these women themselves got raped because someone else didn’t report. Phillips decided to report and, controversially, she points out, to emerge stronger than before. That’s verboten to many of today’s ‘progressives’. Feminist rape credo teaches that a victim’s job is to be traumatized, which is to be expected, but forever. She must be strong, but only in a vulnerable, victimized way. She can share her story and rail about The Patriarchy with other victims and women but she must never, ever, suggest that women can fight back or otherwise defend themselves. She must never note how women often fail to take personal responsibility to protect themselves, as Phillips did not, by not carrying pepper spray, or not walking home late at night because she believed Florence was fairly ‘safe’. Some places are, until someone gets assaulted or murdered. Permanently identifying with victimhood harms women by teaching them to comply with rape and to heal later, but not too much. Don’t emerge too strong, too smart, more accountable than thou for her own personal safety which might result in other victims realizing they maybe unconsciously collaborated as well, but who’d rather not learn from it and make better choices next time. Or warn others not to make those same mistakes. Phillips bears physical scars from her ordeal of which she’s proud; they’re badges of honor that she’s a survivor , that she fought back , that she refused to just lie down and submissively take it. She cites holding her attackers accountable as critical to her recovery. She chides the childish magical thinking from writer Roxane Gay, herself a victim of childhood rape, who refused female agency and personal responsibility at a conference by saying, “All of these problems could be solved by men learning not to rape.” Good luck with that, little lady. There are roughly four billion men in the world. Let us know how that works out for you. Grow Some Labia! is a reader-supported publication. I lean left, but not so far my brains fall out. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. When not to fight back Not all women could, or, Goddess help us all, ‘should’ respond the way Phillips did. There are times when it’s good not to fight back. Her attackers persuaded her to stop struggling and screaming when they held what she believed was a knife to her throat and threatened to kill her if she didn’t stop. They also threw her onto her belly and threatened to rape her anally if she didn’t comply. She complied. As I would have. As I expect a lot of women would have. Some women don’t have it in them to fight back, and we can’t fault them for that. You never know what you’re going to do in that situation unless you are. There are three immediate options available: Flight, fight, or freeze. Many of us, not just women, freeze in immediately dangerous situations. A military veteran has described to me how he and his fellow recruits were trained trained trained trained TRAINED to just respond how they were trained to many different dangers and they practiced until it became second nature to them. “Don’t think, just react!” We civilians don’t have that training, which is why self-defense classes aren’t necessarily the best protection against physical assault. Unless you’ve practiced it until it flows from your largest vein into your tiniest capillaries, you may very well freeze when shit gets real. It’s a quick way to die on the battlefield. It’s also a very good way to not die when you’re being raped. But women need to know that fighting back is a real potential option. Even when it doesn’t stop anything. Who knows; maybe something from that self-defense class will come to mind. Phillips notes from the 1985 anti-rape report Stopping Rape: Successful Survival Strategies, that the best ways to avoid rape are, from best to worst: Flight; screaming; fighting back; verbal reasoning; environmental intervention; no strategy. The most successful at stopping a rape were those who used more than one. It doesn’t always work, but the report notes that of women they interviewed about their rapes or attempted rapes, six—nearly half—of those who fought back with another strategy avoided rape. Physical force plus one or more techniques increase a woman’s chance of avoiding a rape. None of the women who used three or four strategies in addition to fighting back were raped. This report was published in 1985. Thirty-nine years later, what have modern feminists learned? Nothing; they promote the same submission from forty years ago, when we had a lot less research on how to avoid rape. If I sound harsh or insensitive, it’s because I’m very, very fed up with hearing the same goddamn stories over and over again for four decades and nobody ever learns anything new or valuable they can offer others. She Is Willing To Do Whatever It Takes To Be With Me Feminism today teaches women self-infantilization. To identify with vulnerability, not strength; with fear, not determination. I was raped. I am permanently ruined. I am hopelessly damaged. I am helpless against animalistic male sexual urges. Phillips reframed her experience when she discovered other women had been through far greater hell than she. She read, like a moth to the flame, of the horrors visited upon Bosnian and Muslim women as the Serbian army ripped through the civilian population during the Balkan Wars. The gang rapes of young girls, children. She realized she was a sexually mature adult when she got raped, and it was one time. By ‘only’ two men. She wasn’t raped or gang raped long-term, sometimes in front of her family or children. She wasn’t intentionally impregnated by her rapists and held hostage until she’d given birth to a Serbian child. She wasn’t permanently maimed, murdered, or forced to marry her rapist. She wasn’t reviled by her family and friends; they all supported her. She wasn’t blamed and murdered for her rape. Phillips observes that she made some mistakes that night. She got a weird feeling about the guy that had gotten out of the car to take a wiz on a tree and what she initially believed was a wife or girlfriend in the car. She had a strong desire to cross the street but she didn’t; why? Because the man was dark-skinned and she didn’t want to look like a racist. That’s another massive failure of progressivism’s ‘social justice’: Turning racism into the worst crime imaginable. This played into how Phillips unconsciously collaborated with her rapists. She didn’t want to be that white woman who crossed the street when she saw a black man. How convenient for any dark-skinned men who want to rape with impunity . She cited Gavin de Becker’s classic book The Gift of Fear which notes we’re better at sensing danger than we realize, and that when our hackles go up, when we can feel our heart, that’s the time to get the fuck out of there. In fact, in the beginning of the book de Becker cites a rape victim who got a weird feeling about the guy but ignored it, because up until then the stranger seemed okay. The next few hours were hell. The seeds for Grow Some Labia were planted the day I got into a strange guy’s car I’d met for coffee despite my feeling it wasn’t a good idea. He drove me into a dark basement. I got out, mostly because he wasn’t heavily committed to rape. Larissa Phillips decided to get on with her life, her loves and her interests, including classical art which she now realized was ‘saturated with rapes’. Her parents, divorced, supported her, and her father brought her books, including one by controversial feminist Camille Paglia. At first she disliked Paglia’s views on sexuality and rape, but she resonated with her views that women needed to be responsible for themselves, that it wasn’t, as feminists believed, ‘society’ that caused men to rape, but which kept more of them from raping. I’ve read several books by Paglia. Her essays and critiques she wrote in the ‘80s and ‘90s were spot-on refreshingly honest, real, and actionable. “Today, I am dismayed by my initial reluctance to report my rape and grateful that I was with someone who cared enough about my interests to talk me into doing so. The thought that I almost chose to treat the assault as something less than a serious crime worthy of judicial oversight is chilling to me,” Phillips writes. It’s something for all of us to think about. Women can be raped at any age, including in their nineties . Phillips, like me, regards women like Celeste Marcus as unserious about wanting to stop rape. I make no judgement on Marcus’s claims; I don’t know what happened, but I know she doesn’t look as credible as E. Jean Carroll who claimed to have a stained dress with which her accused, Donald Trump, could have exonerated himself by providing a current DNA sample. But he refused. Hmmm. If nothing else, when you’re raped, preserve the evidence! It takes seconds to remove the offensive garment—which you’re never going to want to wear again anyway—and safekeep it in a plastic bag. If archaeologists can extract DNA from a thousands-year-old skeleton or corpse, it can exonerate—or not—an accused rapist weeks or months or decades later. And if he refuses—well then, who’s the most likely rape liar? The one who says he did it or the one who refuses to prove he didn’t? Rape ends when WOMEN decide it ends. Not until. Sorry, Roxane Gay. I’m interested in hearing and writing men’s and transfolk’s stories about rape and sexual assault. I know it happens and it can traumatizing for them because people can take it less seriously than women’s stories. Anonymity is okay. Drop me a message at growsomelabia at gmail dot com. Don’t send a written story; let’s discuss it first. And don't forget to subscribe to my Grow Some Labia newsletter on Substack!

MAGA agitators and woke 'social justice' warriors make up, together, about 33% of political thought in the United States. So why is the 66% so afraid of them? Public domain image by Kai Stachowiak It was U.S. President Richard Nixon who first popularized the phrase ‘the Silent Majority’. He enjoined the nation in November 1969, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support." Who was the ‘silent majority’ to whom he referred? He meant those who weren’t counted among what might have been considered ‘wokes’ of the day. ‘Middle America’ remained silent but didn’t agree with the counterculture, the war protesters, the radicals, the women’s libbers, the highly vocal and smoke-enveloped, psychedelic visible shroomheads of the day. The phrase has long been popular with conservatives. Ronald Reagan appropriated it in his various political gubernatorial and presidential campaigns, as did New Yorkers Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in the ‘90s, along with Christian fundamentalist televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The tacit assumption was always: We’re not like those filthy liberal hippies! Regardless of the decade. America’s blindness was in thinking that all of the right was included in ‘middle America’. The John Birch Society, Christian Crusade, and the McCarthyists were no more representative of the Silent Majority than the Yippies, Gloria Steinem or the Black Panthers. Middle America was a lot fuzzier back then. Americans couldn’t agree on much, but apart from the long-haired freaks and relentlessly buzz-cutted anti-Commie crazies, we did at least support the essentials of democracy and respected the Constitution, even if we didn’t always like Supreme Court rulings. At the end of the day, we could usually still shake hands. Thanksgivings still had to be mediated or prepped with what was verboten . “Don’t mention FDR in front of Grandpa!” Mom might counsel the kids, not that any of them had any clue what that crusty old fart in a wheelchair had done. “Please, don’t get him started on the New Deal!” “The war is off-limits , do you understand?” Dad might sternly inform his teenagers. “Uncle Bob and Aunt Edith have been warned too. They support it as much as you don’t, but what your mother and I support is a conflict-free family occasion, and anyone who violates this gets sent to the kitchen to finish dinner!” It’s time to redefine The Silent Majority in 2024, which no longer, and never truly has been, about who holds conservative values and who doesn’t. The far left, then and now, have always been among the loudest voices, but today the far right is just as noisy. In order for there to be a ‘Middle America’ there must be two sides. In the DisUnited States of the 21st century, ‘Middle America’ is now those of us who can’t stand either fanatical extreme. The Hidden Tribes of Americ a is a 2018 report I found awhile back and have referred to from time to time. It’s the brainchild of More In Common , a non-partisan organization that “does not endorse, support, or affiliate with any political candidates, political campaigns, or organizations,” and states they exist to advance the common good. Hidden Tribes examines the levels of polarization in the United States and divides Americans into seven groups or ‘tribes’. The more vocal and extreme elements, or ‘wings’, bookend the rest of us, the ‘Exhausted Majority’, which sounds like a pretty apt description of how I and many others I know feel about what passes for political discourse in the country. The left ‘wing’ are the Progressive Activists, what might be better described as the ‘woke’, although Common Ground never mentions that word. They’re defined as the social media addicts concerned about diversity, equity and inclusion. They comprise about 8% of political thought. The right ‘wing’, by their definition, is larger - including the ‘Traditional Conservatives’ (19%) with what we would call the MAGAs at 6%. That leaves the remaining four Exhausted Majority tribes as Moderates, Politically Disengaged, Passive Liberals, and Traditional Liberals. Interestingly, they include no conservatives inside the EM. I disagree with excluding the Traditional Conservatives. The report was published in 2018 which might explain the discrepancy. Polarization has happened swiftly in the last 10-15 years and six can mean a big difference. Conservatives aren’t as monolithic as they might once have been, and I know plenty who are as fed up as those of us on the Level Left. I suspect the report could use some tweaking as we face a federal election over which hangs a giant question mark with two deeply unpopular, elderly candidates, and the only people who love them are, it seems, those who think the other side is Evil Personified. Two reasons why I think more conservatives are part of the Exhausted Majority than the right Hidden Tribes ‘wing’ in 2018: The Political Homeless - Many liberals and conservatives, including me, are abandoning their party because it no longer represents their interests. But they still regard the other party with the same distaste they’ve long held for it. They don’t know who they’re going to vote for, and maybe they’ll suck it up, hold their nose, and vote for Our Grandpa, or maybe they’ll just say fuck it and vote for an independent, even if it’s a crazy conspiracist they know can never win. It’ll be more of a protest vote. The Reshufflers - They’re the side-switchers who will vote for the other side’s candidate if they think that party better represents their interests. It includes Republicans turning Democrat and vice versa. It includes blacks and Latinos who will not so reliably vote Democrat this time, along with Never Trumpers and those who voted for him before but are now thoroughly disgusted with ninety-one federal charges. I think this election with be a real nail-biter except for those of us who won’t be happy with either outcome. Let’s take a quick look at the rest of those Exhausted Majority Hidden Tribes: “Traditional Liberals  (11%) tend to be cautious, rational, and idealistic. They value tolerance and compromise. They place great faith in institutions. Passive Liberals  (15%) tend to feel isolated from their communities. They are insecure in their beliefs and try to avoid political conversations. They have a fatalistic view of politics and feel that the circumstances of their lives are beyond their control. The Politically Disengaged  (26%) are untrusting, suspicious about external threats, conspiratorially minded, and pessimistic about progress. They tend to be patriotic yet detached from politics. Moderates  (15%) are engaged in their communities, well informed, and civic-minded. Their faith is often an important part of their lives. They shy away from extremism of any sort.” This is a nice little sandwich of people who still care on either side along with those who are too fed up to give a shit. I strongly suspect it’s the Traditional Conservatives who are the right wing’s wild cards on their side. Some of them seem to be as fed up with polarization as those of us on the liberal but not radical left. According to a Pew Research Center poll, “ 65% [of Americans] say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics.” Seventy-eight percent say there’s too little focus on the issues facing the country, and 28% of the public had a negative view of both political parties. (Sept 2023) A few years ago, I met an early example at a political meetup in which I got into a friendly debate with a conservative who, like me, didn’t approve of violence. But he felt the left was as violent as the right and I disagreed, saying they might be eventually, but not yet. I now think I was wrong-ish. This guy talked about the then-recent CHOP protest in Washington state - a Capitol Hill Occupied Protest neighborhood shutdown in Seattle which was declared an unlawful occupation, in protest of the George Floyd killing. It was a minor protest but two people were nevertheless shot; one died. But January 6th it wasn’t, and the occupation didn’t last long. He also argued that the post-Floyd Minneapolis protests qualified and I again disagreed; however I simply wasn’t paying attention at the time. The killing was so depressing I avoided most discussion of it, compounded by the new lockdown world and my unemployment benefits having just run out. If I ever meet that guy again I want to tell him I was wrong. The Minneapolis riots and other Floyd-related ones pointed to more violent radicalization on the left, and now, in the post-October 7th era, college campuses are beginning to resemble mini-January 6ths. The CHOP protests were small potatoes and received more conservative fear than they deserved, but the Floyd riots were worse than I’d realized. Even the G20 riots and protests we had in Toronto in 2010 paled in comparison, although looking at the history of Gx protests, the signs have been there for decades that the left has the capacity to be violent. Again. Like it was in the 60s and 70s in the U.S. But here’s the thing: We in the Exhausted Majority (including, in my opinion, many Traditional Conservatives) are becoming a threat to others. I’ve just seen the first shot across the bow that illiberal ‘progressive’ activists are beginning to psychologically disengage from the notion that they themselves are ‘liberal’. Andrew/Andrea Chu, the really dude-y transactivist , sneers at liberals and blames us for being ‘the most insidious source of the anti-trans movement in this [the U.S.] country’. It’s the first shot across the bow I’ve seen of a ‘woke’ social justice activist showing hostility to (and fear of) liberals. I wonder how many others on the Illiberal Left have begun to regard us Traditional Liberals as The Enemy. It means we could find ourselves on the receiving end of their violence. WPATH Files (liberal!) activist Michael Shellenberger told a British interviewer on YouTube that he’s increased the security around his property in anticipation of violent harassment by transactivists. He expects he’ll likely get doxxed. It’s not good news the far left is beginning to match the far right’s violence record, but it is that they may be detaching from the rest of us. For one thing, it makes them more honest about who and who isn’t a liberal. For another, if we’re The Enemy of the far left, just as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) are The Bogeymen for the far-right’s True Believers, it opens up new avenues for the two less radical Majorities to come together and cooperate to resist and defeat the forces of authoritarianism in our respective extremist wings. As a woman, I know that authoritarianism is never good for us and children. As someone who’s been politically active for over forty years, I see that the problem with the far left is they can’t say no to anything , and the problem with the far right is they say no to everything. It’s why I won’t support the Democrats this November. I know Trump is bad for women and children although he’ll probably hit the brakes on trans nonsense, especially transitioning naive children, but I also won’t support a candidate who supports the misogynist and homophobic trans movement, as does Biden. I know I can work with at least some conservatives, and I believe some are coming to realize they can work with some liberals—we’re not all crazy antisemitic wokenazis. I encourage you to read The Hidden Tribes report, or at least skim the (somewhat lengthy) summary on their website . Maybe take the 8-minute quiz to see in which tribe you fit! (I scored as I expected: Traditional Liberal.) We are the new Silent Majority. But our day may be coming to speak up and drown out the voices of creeping authoritarianism. We’re biding our time. 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 damn thing!

If it promoted a more experiential 'under the skin' empathy for others, rather than misogyny and abuse, many of us would become allies and supporters. Creative Commons image from Vice Gender Spectrum Collection I guess I can’t blame those who accuse me of being ‘anti-trans’ even as I still reject ‘transphobia’: I spend a lot of time critiquing and complaining about transactivism. I forget sometimes that most transgender people really are living how they want without a lot of self-serving performative drama. I think about how if my 21-year-old self was transported somehow to a modern-day college campus. I might be surprised at initially how at-home I felt among people who looked like my peers. Colorful hair, pierced appendages, androgynous clothing, crazy haircuts—it would all seem so typically ‘80s until I read the protest signs and wondered, “What the hell is a cis? What does heteronormative even mean?” Then I’d talk to them and realize they weren’t like the punk rockers, New Wavers, and other clashing-colors cultures I knew. I’d find young people more abrasive. More psychologically fragile. Unable or unwilling to relax. Emotionally destroyed by the flimsiest inconveniences. And why the hell did they ask me what my pronouns were? Wasn’t it immediately obvious? When I look at today’s LGBTQ with tabula rasa eyes, I see a genuinely promising social experiment unfolding, before you look below the surface. The Boomers pulled straight sex out of the bedroom, and Gen X pulled gay sex out of the closet. Millennials, and now Gen Z, say gender identity is a fluid spectrum and we may not be as straightforward male or female as we believe. Apart from our immutable sex gametes, they may be right. I came to understand a long time ago that sexual preference was a spectrum, and maybe gender preference is too. That said, I don’t think it comes naturally to many in a sexually dimorphic, ‘cis-heteronormative’ world; and perhaps only to the intellectually provocative. ‘Gender fluidity’ is likely more social media-induced and adopted than natural, but that doesn’t make it useless. I mean, some people are bisexual, right? Some are bi-ish but more gayish or straightish than others. Myself, I was and remain a pretty firmly straight chick, but I always thought bisexuals, the red-headed stepchildren of the gay rights movement who made many uncomfortable on both sides because they couldn’t commit, seemed silly to me because who cares? What skin is it off of any of our noses? All we need is love, right? Bisexuals struck me as folks who had seen, in the immortal words of Joni Mitchell, both sides now. But 2024 isn’t 1984, and today’s gender-benders aren’t as intellectually honest as their forebears, or as educated as their outrageous tuition fees indicate. It’s less about authenticity than untended mental health issues and malign sexual predation. And politics. It’s a shame, because gender-bending and gender-questioning are such rich, provocative undertakings. Why do we believe we are who we are? How much of what we think makes us ‘male’ or female’ is conditioning, how much is biology? What if we became ‘non-binary’? What would it feel like to be the birth sex you’re not? What is it really like to be a woman? To be a man? What does that mean? Perhaps it would have been a more healthily productive exploratory journey with the values and mindset of 1984 in which you lived as you wanted but didn’t expect everyone to validate your every emotional whim. If today’s genderfluid crowd ditched largely self-imposed narcissistic victimhood and were more open to new ideas that didn’t conform to some established narrative, especially a misogynist one rooted in pornography and the ever-present sexualization, objectification, and fetishization of women, I think it would be cool to hang out with them. With people who’d gone a step further in challenging and smashing gender norms, without all the dictatorial pronoun-policing, with whom you could ask questions without being called a fascist or a bigot. How Pornography Forged The Trans Movement - Spiked What if these social experiments in thinking outside the gender box were oriented toward what the world looks like from others’ eyes? Not just your own? When I was a kid I remember reading a short story in a kiddie magazine called The Under-The-Skin-Game , about a father who teaches his son to put himself ‘under someone else’s skin’ and imagine what is must be like to be them, in their circumstances. It was an early exercise in teaching kids to think outside their customary self-obsession. I think that’s where gender-questioning and especially transgenderism could still help people discover themselves as part of a larger humanity. Instead of focusing on themselves so obsessively, they could challenge everyone’s natural narcissism and enlighten the rest of us not inclined to personally explore. I’ve watched videos by transwomen and transmen who offer exactly the sort of helpful observations from ‘t’other side’ that those of us who stay in our birth sexes can’t know. Of course, when you weren’t born into the sex you chose you can never completely understand the AF/MACs (Assigned Female/Male At Conception), but switchers still offer a valuable and worthy perspective. The deeply dysfunctional transgender movement evolved, unfortunately, out of unaddressed mental and emotional distress in young people, with a big boost from pornography, and grew into a backlash against feminism. It germinated in what historians may one day characterize as the Age of Hate, poisoned by bipartisan toxic identity ideologies, but nurtured by a ‘progressive’ illiberal environment of authoritarianism, hijacked by political and sexual opportunists . Transgenderism, in its purest form, offers us another natural extension of intellectual and spiritual inquiry we might embrace as another way to experience, quite literally, being in someone else’s skin—transracialism. But identity politics is much more tolerant of crossing sex than it is of crossing race, and it’s clear that on the left, to paraphrase one of John Lennon’s now more-offensive lines, “women are the new[ish] N-words.” The only thing less acceptable than being white, to illiberal eyes, is being a woman who stands up to demanding men. Transracialism offers transgender-similar under-the-skin lessons, but in reality Rachel Dolezal is still badbadbad for trying to be black. I sometimes wonder if she’d be more acceptable as a transracialist if she was a guy (it’s certainly over-represented by white women). Transracialism is easier and less long-term dangerous than full transsexualism, which offers its adherents lifelong health problems, permanent dependence on hormones, and medications to keep them somewhat pain-free and alive. Nor does race-switching sterilize you or prevent you from ever enjoying sex. We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism? With growing awareness that transgenderism is driven much more by pornography, sexual fetishism , politics, and mental health problems than by ‘gender dysphoria’, perhaps it can be reinvented to embrace a more educational and socially healthy pursuit: Learning what it actually feels like to be someone you’re not. It makes no sense to argue that white people going Black Like Me is ‘white supremacy’ but that men appropriating womanhood isn’t ‘male supremacy’. I’m not being provocative; I’m serious. There’s literally no difference between the two crossover ideas, and I’d rather regard both as educational opportunities instead of petty supremacy spats. I have a book I got for Christmas called The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male by Max Wolf Valerio. I’m interested in what it was like for a woman to become a man. I will never take a walk on the guy side myself, nor am I interested in personally crossing the race line, but I’m interested in others who do. It’s a great failing of the transgender movement so far that it got hijacked, like pretty much damn near everything, by opportunists who aren’t the slightest bit interested in understanding the female perspective, but instead seem hell-bent on rolling back women’s rights and grooming the intellectually malleable to return to granting male sexual demands to women’s and children’s bodies and spaces. Rather a lot like the right is doing now. First they came for your womb, now they’re coming for your birth control. Transition and Apostasy: A Wife’s Perspective - Quillette Gender Ideology And Child Abuse Apologism: The Undeniable Links - by trans-identified man Julie Bindel, who draws a clearer line between the gender ideology movement and those trying to normalize and remove the stigma from pedophilia If only transactivists were using transgenderism to enlighten rather than oppress. Perhaps it’s time for a Trans Anti-Transactivist Rebellion by transfolk and their allies tired of non-woke everybody assuming they’re assholes because they’re trans or non-binary. I recently watched a video of the opening minutes of the hilarious (and horrifyingly prescient) movie Idiocracy . In 2006, we thought it was a searing critique of the right. We were only half-correct. It’s aged frighteningly well. When I remove transgenderism from its backdrop of misogyny, gay-conversion and kiddie cult recruitment, I see an adult’s iteration of the under-the-skin game. Experiencing, rather than just imagining, what it’s like to be someone else—the whole basis of make-believe—reduces our preoccupations with ourselves. Psychologists say it’s around the third year when children begin to understand that other people’s feelings may not be their own. That maybe Darla doesn’t like playing house or maybe she just doesn’t want to right now. It’s nothing to get mad about. Make believe isn’t something we necessarily outgrow, either. We have fan cosplay; furrydom; Mardi Gras; Halloween; and historical re-creation societies like the one I was in for over ten years as fifteenth-century French noblewoman Lady Gisele du Pont Avignon and later, Ayesha the Belly Dancer. I never believed I was Gisele/Ayesha, but I did grow as a modern woman via belly dancing and weekend make-believe. That’s me on the left, and my late high school friend Thom. 1987, Pennsic War XIII, Slippery Rock PA It was a healthy approach during my own identity formation years, and I developed more assertiveness, challenged traditionalist views of female beauty (I was a zaftig, rather than rail-thin, dancer), and taught other women, often ex-high school wallflowers like myself, watching them blossom and grow and feel the same sense of female power and confidence I felt, when I first began learning in 1987. I will be a bigger supporter of transgenderism and its sister transracialism, if it evolves to get under others’ skin—more beneficially. I think it can be helpful if it’s not so sourpussed, drop-dead serious, harmful to children , homophobic and disrespectful of women. And it needs to be a lot more honest. Like about medical transitioning, which brings very real risks, and others may not be fully mature enough to make that decision until well past the most stringent age of consent—twenty-five, when our adult brains finish developing, or even into our thirties when some finally realize they want children. I would like to see healthier, less invasive ways of exploring gender and race. The Black Like M e author took vitiligo medication to darken his skin, exposing himself to serious health risks. He suffered none, and contrary to an urban legend, didn’t die from contracting skin cancer from his epidermal experiment. There are always risks to transitioning , and no genuine backsies after genital surgery. Once your fully-functioning genitals are transitioned and less sexually responsive, changing them back just makes matters worse. Meghan Murphy expressed something in her recent article, I’m a TERF, You’re a TERF, We’re all TERFs that resonated with me: We’re not anti-trans; we’re anti-trans agenda/ideology/ activism; we’re anti-everything the activists force upon us. That sums it up perfectly. I don’t care whether people are trans or how they got that way as long as they’re happy, which clearly a fair chunk of them are not, regardless of what they say. It’s clear from the growing detransition movement that trans-ness doesn’t always last forever; for many it’s a phase; for others it’s something they internalize. Both are okay. But we need better backsies. In order to evolve, perhaps a healthier starting point for LGBTQ and transgenderism is to first and foremost embrace the authenticity it rejected many years ago: It’s okay to be you from birth. To be male or female, gay or straight, bisexual or genderfluid. Others don’t have to validate you by joining the club, they just have to accept you for what you are. Be respectful of others and their concerns; don’t push yourself where you’re not wanted and where you don’t belong. And stop blaming JK Rowling for the hate your transactivists have brought down upon all of you. You let the dogs in. Why Are Women Not Protected By New Hate Crime Law? - BBC If I’m being honest, I don’t want transgenderism to disappear. I think there’s a firm, socially adaptive, educational place for it, along with transracialism. Although I’m genderpeaceful with myself, I’m interested in an honest education in genderfluidity and androgyny, without the ugly identity politics, violent male hatred and insistence on adherence to logically problematic ideologies. Just an honest assessment as to what it all means. I think we could all learn something from it, if only our teachers weren’t such clear headcases themselves. That’s where I see it, anyway. 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 damn thing!

Acceptance of reality means understanding you were abused. It can happen to men too. It's not funny or cute. And God help us all, it is NOT 'offensive' for men to speak out. Photo by Inzmam Khan I am so pleased to offer Grow Some Labia’s first guest post on domestic abuse - as suffered by a man. Jim McCoy, ‘ The Conservative Historian ’ and Jimbo’s Awesome Science Fiction & Fantasy Review decided to do this under his real name instead of anonymously because he wants other men to know they’re not alone, and that there’s help and support. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1 in 4 men have experienced physical assault by a female partner. While Jim describes emotional and psychological abuse, he told me in email Nicole hit him twice. There is, as for women, a lot of shame surrounding being a victim of domestic violence, but it’s often compounded for men because it’s not taken as seriously. Certain feminists can be surprisingly (or perhaps not) unsympathetic to a man who complains of the very treatment they’d condemn him for. I am reminded of the social media ‘team-selection’ that occurred during the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial, and the reason why I haven’t written about it yet is because I haven’t yet figured out what the hell happened with these two violent headcases, although I wrote on my website blog about how similar Amber Heard’s words to Depp during therapy sessions sounded remarkably like a man’s. It was originally published elsewhere before the trial. What’s good for the gander is good for the goose. If we take domestic violence against women seriously we MUST take it seriously for men too. It’s not funny , cute, or, as Jim told me in email, ‘offensive’, according to some women who don’t want to acknowledge women can be abusers too or think abuse sympathy is a zero-sum game. It’s true that men abuse far more than women (although they may be abused more than we think when they’re silent), but talking about it doesn’t take away from the pain and suffering of women. Gay and lesbian domestic abuse is just as awful, and lesbian domestic violence happens far more often than we know as well. And while the numbers of transfolk killed every year are grossly exaggerated by transactivists, the majority of those who really are murdered are about 75% domestic violence casualties. THIS HAS TO STOP. Jim, take it away! It shouldn't take a funeral to make a person forgive someone, but it did for me. It was so hard to give up the anger and the hate. I was so used to being angry at Nicole that I didn't know how to function without being mad every time I thought of her. When you're divorced and she has your kids it's hard not to think of them. I was just so frustrated with her on a regular basis. It wasn’t because there was something wrong with me. It was more the fact that I married her mother along with her and that Nicole never seemed to care about my opinion on anything. Oh, Nicole would ask about everything but she never took anything I said seriously. My marriage ended over four words: Exaggerating . Nicole liked to scream this one at me every time I pointed out a problem. It didn't matter what it was. If I pointed out that she wouldn't take a day away from her mother to work on her marriage, I was exaggerating. If I pointed out that she mistreated my family and I got chewed because of it I was exaggerating. And the one to top them all: “Your dad wasn't forty-two when he passed. You’re exaggerating.” Dramatic. “You won't divorce me. You're just being dramatic.” “You didn't mean that. You're just being dramatic.” “I never told your sister she couldn't bring her kids to my house. You're just being dramatic.” Sarcastic. “No, Nicole. I don't want to spend all weekend with your mother.” “Stop being sarcastic.” “No, I really think we should wait on getting a car like we agreed to instead of buying a twenty-five thousand dollar car to avoid a two-hundred dollar brake job.” “You're just being sarcastic.” FUNNY. This one gets me more than the rest combined. Disagree with Nicole on anything? You’re funny. “No, Nicole, I don't want your mother to come over here every morning to get Riley ready for school.” Funny! “No. I'm not going to cancel my birthday party because my wife decided she wants to do dinner the day of the party after telling me she had other plans.” Funny! On and on. If it wasn't what she wanted to hear, she found a way to belittle it.. She would get mad when I wouldn't talk to her but why bother? She wasn't going to listen. It got to the point that I was considering offing myself to make it stop. She saved my life when she threw me out. I was that close. I don't know when or how, but it was coming. Looking back on it, suicide would have been a revenge killing. Nicole needed my help with the kids and she wanted the little bit of income I brought in. If I had offed myself she wouldn't have gotten it. I got the same effect from divorcing her, but I've never been a big fan of that. It was by far the better choice, but it wasn't my first instinct. I honestly believe that Nicole would scream “Exaggerating!” if she saw that. I needed a wife that took what I was saying seriously, I didn't have one. Then there was the fact that Nicole was attached to her mother at the hip. I don't get it. What I do know is that the only day of the year I could regularly count on seeing my wife without her mother was on our anniversary. There was never a day when I could count on seeing my wife and kids without Nicole's mother. Not. One. Single. Day. A. Year. Nicole's mother would threaten to not eat if we didn't come over every night for dinner. Nicole cooperated with the emotional blackmail. Seriously though, it was impossible to enjoy anything with Nicole's mother around. I’m told that was probably my fault because I was the one who didn’t want her around. Not a single dinner out. We had one dinner at home without Nicole's mother. My oldest daughter, just days away from her sixth birthday, remarked that she had never had dinner at home with just Mommy and Daddy before and how nice it was. It had never been like this until after I was engaged to Nicole. We went out with her parents sometimes, sure, but that's how it's supposed to work. Then when we were engaged, Nicole's parents split up. Oddly enough, Nicole's father moved out the day after the check to pay for the reception cleared his checking account. I'm told he did it on his own with no prompting from his wife. I needed a wife who would take some time away from other people to spend with just her husband and her kids. I didn't have one. I remember the day my grandmother passed. I was at work. I knew it was coming, but it was a new job and I didn't have any time off yet. I had talked to my mom on the way into the building. I knew what was about to happen and that it would probably be that day, but attendance points, right? Anyway, my mom called me to let me know. She was worried about me, but my wife? I called her. “Hey hun, my grandma just died.” “I'm sorry for your loss. I need to go. I have to talk to my boss.”“I just told you my grandma died. I need you here.”“I need to talk to my boss. I'll see you when I get home.” I was pissed. It got worse when my Aunt Janice passed and Nicole refused to answer her phone because she was at a baby shower and then screamed at me. I was bothering her. Then she refused to go to the funeral. Seriously. Two of the worst days of my life and my “wife” couldn't be bothered with them. It's not like she was there for the good times either. She didn’t come to my thirtieth birthday party. She showed up for my college graduation but she told me that I should be making everyone congratulate her instead of me. The exact words that came out of her mouth were, “I earned this.” Then she got pissy with me at my graduation party for the same reason. So basically, she was there but not for me. She was there for herself so that she could receive the congratulations. I needed a wife who showed up for things. I didn't have one. And forget about my health. If I missed work because my IBS was flaring, I was trash. My gout flared up one week and the grass didn't get cut on my day off. I got screamed at. Another time I had a gout flare and it was three days before she found out about it. Why? Why tell her? I had a job I hated for most of my marriage. I literally had to pull off of the road to puke a couple of times on my way in because I hated that place so much. What mattered though, was the schedule. I could stay home to be with the kids while Nicole was at work. I dealt with it. Any time I mentioned it though she would run around the house screaming “How do you think I feel?” at the top of her lungs. After that would come a lecture about some horrible crime I had committed in the past. Never mind what I was dealing with. I needed a wife who cared how I was doing, both physically and mentally. I didn't have one. Nicole knew I didn't want to be around her mother. She knew if she asked me if I wanted to do something with her mother I'd say no. She started asking me if I'd do something with just her and the kids and I always said yes. There was nothing I wanted worse than time with just the wife and kids when I was married. Then she'd wait a day or so and tell me her mother was coming too. The first time it happened I figured it was just a coincidence. The second time I was less convinced. By the tenth I was damn sure I was being lied to. I called her out for lying to me. She told me that she wasn't lying, that she had said that because she knew I didn't want to do things with her mother. I got fed up with it. The most common time she would do this would be on weekends. I got off early from work on Saturday and Sunday and she would ask me if I wanted to do dinner with just her and the kids on both nights. I'd say yes. Then she'd call or text me to tell me to meet her at her mom's house. Not this time. I got up for work one Saturday. I wrote a note. “I'm not going to your mother's house for dinner tonight.” I didn't do a ‘Dear Nicole,’ I didn't sign it ‘Love, Jim.’ I just wrote the words ‘I'm not going to your mother's house for dinner tonight.’ and folded the piece of paper in half, stuck it in my flip phone and left the whole mess on her purse. I knew she'd find it there. When I got home from work that day, I found a piece of paper stuck to the door. “We went to my mom's house for dinner. Meet us there.” Oddly enough, it was folded but the open side faced out. I pulled it off the door and flipped it over. My note was on the back. I took it into the house. Then I went to Applebees for dinner. She later told me she hadn't seen that note. I was supposed to believe that somehow, she ended up writing her note on the same piece of paper I had left mine on without seeing the note. I needed a wife who was honest with me. I didn't have one. Then one day, matters came to a head. Cecilia’s baptism was the day before. It should have been a good day, but my mother-in-law involved herself in an argument. That was nothing new. An argument with Nicole meant an argument with her mother. I needed a wife that could keep problems in our marriage between us. I didn't have one. Nicole came home from her mother's one night. I had planned to talk to her. She threw a fit because I argued with her mother. I let her wear herself out. She wasn't going to let me speak if I didn't. Eventually it ended. “I'm done with your mother. I will go over there on holidays because she's your family but I'm not going over there every day anymore. If you want to stay married you won't either.” Her response was what I expected. “I'm going to my mother's every day after work. If you want to see me or the girls you will too.” Yep, typical Nicole. I asked her to fix a problem. She refused to do so. We screamed at each other. She went to bed alone. I lay down on the couch and thought about my marriage to that point. I realized a few things I needed a wife who took what I said seriously. I needed a wife who would take some time away from other people to spend with her family. I needed a wife who showed up for things. I needed a wife who cared how I was doing. I needed a wife who was honest with me. I needed a wife that could keep problems in our marriage between us. I had none of the above. At the end of the day, I needed a wife and I didn't have one. But what was I going to do about it? I didn't want to leave my kids. The only reason I haven’t opened a vein was because I didn't want them to have to grow up with no father. I didn't want to see them have to live in a house without their father either. I knew if I left I'd be at Nicole’s mercy as far as when I got to see them. I knew this though: I was done. I couldn't bring myself to sleep next to this woman anymore. I was not going to her mother's house anymore. I was done beating my head against the wall. This couldn’t continue. I spent the next six months sleeping on the couch. With the exception of when we were trying to conceive Riley, sex had never been a frequent thing in that marriage. It's not like I was missing out on anything. I acted like Nicole had for her entire marriage: I did what I wanted when I wanted. I watched football with the guys. I read books. I played games. I was single again and all I had to do was the chores: Dishes, laundry, lawn mowing, taking the trash out, etc. It was months before Nicole even caught on that I hadn't come to bed. I brought it up. She was screaming at me about something and told me not to try having sex with her that night. I asked her when the last time I had come to bed was. She stopped screaming and ran into her room. The look on her face was epic. Six months later we actually hit Splitsville. I had lied to her about some stuff related to school. I was in graduate school. I had a couple of classes where I had taken incompletes because I couldn't write with my marriage falling apart around me. I told Nicole that my grades hadn't posted yet. She was too smart to believe me. I came home from school one night. I went into Riley's room so I could kiss my hand and touch her forehead with it. She wasn't there. I went into Sealy's room to do the same thing. She wasn't there either. Nicole called for me to come downstairs. She had hacked my email and saw where I had communicated with a professor about a new due date. She didn't tell me where my kids were. We got into a big fight because of what I had done. For the record, she had every right to be upset. The screaming match was epic. I was in the wrong here, but I couldn't take it anymore. I was just done. I took my wedding ring off and spiked it on the kitchen table. She went into her room. I went in to try to talk to her. She told me to leave her alone. She was shocked when I walked out of the room. I fell asleep on the couch. I was exhausted. The next day when I woke up, she was gone. At the time I figured she was at work, but now I wonder if she had been to see a divorce lawyer. She sat down and explained to me that she didn't want me living with her while we ‘went through this.’ She was careful not to mention what ‘this’ was. She told me I needed to leave. She would talk to me about when I could see my kids after I was gone. Then she left. I moved out a few days later. I filed for divorce a month later. I called her four times. When she didn't answer the last time I left a voicemail telling her what I had done. She inboxed me on Facebook an hour or two later and told me I was a joke. Here’s the thing: If I found myself in the same position again, I’d leave. Eleven times out of ten. It took the word of a Friend of the Court referee before it occurred to me that what I had been through had been abuse. Movies, TV, and the newspaper all told me that men were the abusers. I was a man, so there’s no way I could be the victim here, right? Even then I didn’t really take it to heart. It’s been echoed by two psychologists since though, and they’re the experts. And fellas, if you’re out there, know this: It can happen to you. Don’t let a woman abuse you simply because you’ve been told it can’t happen. It happened to me. And know this: There are those out there who will shame you for telling your story. I have been told that I am offensive for stating that I was abused and for divorcing a woman. I am putting this out there with my name on it because someone needs to. I hate the phrase ‘raising awareness’ but I guess that’s what I’m doing here. Do it anyway. Don’t make it easy on the woman who abuses someone else. Your brothers need you. Speak out. Stand up. Stop hiding what you’ve been through to protect your abuser. She’s not worth it. Don’t let your kids grow up thinking abuse is normal. They deserve better. And dammit, MEN, be there for your brothers. I can almost guarantee that you know a man who is dealing with an abusive wife. Let him talk. Sympathize with him. And, by all that you hold sacred, don’t dog the guy for putting up with it. Thank you, Brandon ‘Monk’ Thompson and family for offering to take me out of my situation. I should have gone with you that day. And understand this: If you are a man and you are stuck in this situation GET THE FUCK OUT!!!! Go somewhere safe. If you can take your kids with you, do so. You matter, even if she acts like you don’t. If you are being emotionally, verbally, psychologically, or physically abused by a female domestic partner, there is help. It’s sparse compared to that for women but it’s a start, and you can find other men in your situation you can network with. HelpGuide.org - Help for men who are being abused MenLiving - This is a support group for connecting men to live more intentionally and consciously. It doesn’t seem to raise any red flags for misogyny - in other words, it’s not the wrong kind of ‘men’s rights’ group although I’m sure they do discuss rights men have. It includes trans-identified females too. They describe themselves as “…regular guys – genuine, open and aware and we’d love to hang out with you.” Reach Out Recovery - Their ‘When The Men Are Abused’ link details the basics of male abuse, offers ‘Eric’s’ story as an example, and has some great resource links at the end Domestic Violence Against Men: No Laughing Matter - Psychology Today The National Domestic Abuse Hotline , 1-800-799-7233 (1-800-799-SAFE) is for everyone, not just women. You will not be judged if you call it. If she’s physically violent, it’s critical you get out while you can, and consider your children as well - who will she take out her hostilities on when you’re not there anymore? There is help. 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 damn thing!

Campus life in 2024 looks a lot like 1970, and you know things have gotten crazy when the left has me cheering for Lauren Boebert. Bullet hole in a large metal sculpture at Taylor Hall, where the shootings occurred. Photo by the author Note: I should have published this on May 4th but I forgot. My apologies! It was 54 years ago today that the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four student protesters and wounded nine at a then-unknown small state university in northeast Ohio. Exactly one month later, on June 4th, the folk rock hippie band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released Ohio , enshrining the event in pop culture with its defiant opening guitar riff and lyrics. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming/We’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming/Four dead in O-hi-o!” The shootings put the college town on the map and ensured that anyone who graduated after 1970 for at least twenty years after answered the question, “So where did you go to school?” with “Kent State University, and no I wasn’t there during the shootings.” Because they’d always ask. The deaths shocked America, although no one paid attention to an unprecedented second campus shooting exactly two weeks later in Mississippi, when police opened fire on student protesters at Jackson State University, killing two students and injuring twelve. But the Jackson State kids were black, so no one noticed. This includes Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who, exactly one month later, did not release a song that began, “Two dead in Mis-sis-sippi!” I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to be a teenager or young adult back then; I was still learning to read. I’ve read the literature on the ‘60s, watched the movies, bought the old LPs (then downloaded them a decade later). I even was a bit of a ‘displaced’ hippie myself, a visceral response to the perfectly-coiffed, preppy-dressed, Young Republican vibe of the newly-inaugurated Reagan era. I’ve imagined how bugspit insane it must have been to grow up when, if you were a young man whose father lacked the wealth and connections to get you out of your draft notice siren call, you were forced to make a tough decision, if you were unwilling to fight: Face jail as a conscientious objector, flee to Canada or go kill people in a foreign land against whom you had no personal grudge. Because you were forced by your own government for reasons no one could clearly articulate. Campus unrest fifty-four years ago embraced also civil rights; especially in the South where the Klan still ran rogue and killed any ‘uppity n—ers’ that got in the way of conserving the dying Ol’ South. Other causes embraced free speech, the environment, or ‘ecology’ as it was called back then, and students’ rights. I keep thinking about Kent State and Jackson State as today’s college campuses, especially at elite universities, erupt in protests primarily about, once again, an unpopular war in another far-off land, but that no one in this hemisphere is forced to fight. The Blanket Hill bell, which you see in the old photographs. It was considered sacrosanct by some and only to be rung on solemn occasions, like the annual commemorative ceremonies. Rebels occasionally rang the bell anyway. I did, the night before my graduation. Photo by the author Today’s college students seem far less sympathetic than the ones I read about and studied. For pete’s sake, I never thought I’d see the day when I’d be cheering on Lauren ‘Jack-Off Queen’ Boebert trying to speak amid student shoutdowns. Free Palestine? Free speech , you student bitches! The protesters understand far less about that part of the world than their grandparents regarding Vietnam. Many can name neither the river nor the sea in their favorite genocide chant. I don’t remember reading that the student protesters of yore called for the elimination of entire groups of people, although Yippie Jerry Rubin spoke at Kent State a few weeks before the shootings and urged kids to ‘kill your parents’, as the first part of the ‘Yippie program’. “They are the first oppressors,” he added. It was a remarkably callous and wildly irresponsible remark nine months after the brutal Manson murders. Thankfully, no one took his advice. I wonder if some might take it as a call to action today. Student protesters have devolved from uncritically supporting Gaza to openly cheering for Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist group that would kill every last one of them as filthy infidels, with especial torment for Team Rainbow. Student protesters are almost never exclusively non-violent, educated, free-speech-loving little angels. They have much in common with their spoiled, entitled antecedents and descendants. The protesters of yore deplatformed campus speakers as far back as 1825 when Thomas Jefferson had to face pissed-off students at the University of Virginia rioting for the right to goof off and to resist what they considered overly strict academia. Spoiled scions of the merchant rich, these pioneering protest brats’ first noble cause was to fight for their right to paaaaarty . A century and a half later, Kent State protesters were as ‘woke’, entitled, and fractious as in Jefferson’s day. A signed nailed to a tree in 1970 asked, ‘Why is the ROTC building still standing?’ A day later, it wasn’t— it was burned to the ground . And down in Mississippi, the students at Jackson State were throwing rocks at passing cars driven by white people, further inflamed by a rumor that Charles Evers, brother to a recently slain black civil rights activist by the Ku Klux Klan, had been murdered along with his wife (they weren’t). And then someone outside the school set fire to a dump truck. As disgusted as I am by today’s kids—who do have a right to protest, even if I don’t always agree with them (and sometimes I do )—I’m worried about when the bodies will fall. Maybe it will be the National Guard, if they’re called in, or the police. Or maybe it will be a mass shooting by ‘outside agitators’, or ‘external sources’ as they’re called now. Where Jeff Miller died, in the Prentice Hall parking lot. Photo by the author Today’s campus protests, as in 1970, are a moral clusterfuck of good and bad values, right and wrong action. FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education—kind of the new ACLU—helpfully spells out for campus protesters what they have the legal right to do and not do. What constitutes free speech and what doesn’t. FIRE statement on campus violence and arrests Violence truly begets violence, and today’s Columbia University is rather a lot like yer grandmother’s. Back in 1968 students occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia, which also hosted a ‘Gym Crow’ protest over a segregated gymnasium. On Tuesday, police entered an occupied Hamilton Hall again and arrested dozens of the geographically-challenged. Hardcore university liberalism got a boost in the 1960s. According to Steven Mintz, writing for Inside Higher Ed , post-war federally enacted student loan and grant programs, with a special emphasis on making education available to the economically disadvantaged, increased college enrollments 45% from 1945 to 1960, and doubled them by 1970. College was also a good way to defer going to Vietnam. What distinguishes today’s campus protesters from their grandparents is how blatantly anti-Israeli and antisemitic they were from Day 1—34,000 Gazan lives ago, on October 8. Student America’s response to Hamas’s attack was immediate. The Israeli dead literally weren’t even cold before impromptu protests began around the country, encouraged heavily by Palestinian and other Muslim students. Young people who would never have tolerated rocks and abuse lobbed at black people told to ‘Go back to Africa, n-word!’ felt perfectly comfortable, and no, not hypocritical at all, chanting the famous geographic genocidal call to action. It’s why I’ve never taken any of them seriously. No, not even 34,000 lives later, with Israel smelling about as bad as Hamas and a seeming fuck-you-all, we’ll do what we want, you’ll hate us no matter what, so fuck it, you want genocide, THIS is genocide , bitches! I can’t even read about the Gazan War anymore. My sympathy for Israel has mostly evaporated. There’s simply no justification for the carnage, even though I shed no tears for dead Hamassholes. The terrorist group can’t be rehabilitated. But even so, as antisemitic and hateful as I find the protesters, as mindlessly psycho as so many on the Jewish left and right have become, as understandable as I find those Jewish protesters who morally sympathize with suffering imperfect humans, I flip the bird to those who align themselves with people who hate them and only tolerate their presence because they’re ‘good little Jews’, towing the ‘correct’ party narrative. I don’t want to see these kids die. They’re young, dumb, and full of rum, to put it politely. We’re all dumbasses of one sort of another when we know everything. But even dumbass young people shouldn’t die when they have their entire lives otherwise to pull their heads out of their asses and move forward through life hopefully wiser, more experienced, more circumspect. My concern is not that the police or a military response will bump them off (although that’s a possibility in the event of a Trump victory this November), but that some right-wing MAGA moron will mow them down. College campuses are full of large, tall buildings, ideal for snipers. Charles Whitman, the original mass shooter, popped off people on the street from a high tower at the University of Texas in 1966 after killing his mother and wife with knives (shades of Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza). Lee Harvey Oswald famously assassinated a president from the top of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. Most recently, in 2017, Stephen Paddock fired down on a music festival in Las Vegas from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel, killing 60 and wounding over 400. That’s what I think about: Tall buildings on college campuses where well-armed, militia-trained, right-wing MAGA morons can rain hot death from above. It would make Kent State and Jackson State look like a slow day in Detroit. Not all of today’s protests are violent, nor is all the aggressive police response justified. When kids and cops come together, civil rights are violated and laws are broken on both sides. Nothing has changed since the ‘60s, there. But what we didn’t have then was the established history of mass shootings, with a heavy percentage enacted by right-wing loners . Back in 1966, Charles Whitman was a fluke. Today he’s why one might buy a Kevlar jacket in the campus bookstore. I can’t speak for the descendants at Jackson State, but if you went to Kent State in the wake of 1970 you never escaped the taint of what happened. The reminders were everywhere. The May 4th Task Force, created to keep alive the memory of the four dead students and the nine wounded, permeated the campus, especially as the May 4th anniversary approached. I lived in the Prentice Hall dormitory, where protester Jeffrey Miller died in our parking lot. Later, I used to drink hairy buffalo and smoke weed and hash with my college dude neighbors. Miller had lived and partied there fifteen years earlier. Photo by the author’s father When I lived off-campus, two of my roommates were in the May 4th Task Force and one of the wounded survivors, who shall remain nameless, used to call and argue with Betsy. He’d been shot in the arm. There are two versions of how that happened: One, he says as he was ducking behind a tree his arm swung out and he got hit. Two, others say he hid behind the tree and stuck his arm out, hoping to take a hit. I’m not sure which to believe, but he was the go-to guy for the media every year as May 4 approached. I considered him an attention-seeking media whore. Only God knows, I guess. Today what happened at two colleges fifty-four years ago seems small potatoes considering the reality students live with now: Campus mass shootings by lone wolves who have no friends, have never had a girlfriend, and leave angry manifestos in their rooms or on the Internet. Virginia Tech must thumb its nose at Kent State’s and Jackson State’s petty-ass casualties; VT counts 33 victims in 2007. Today’s public schools do the same; entire classrooms of small children have died at Sandy Hook and Uvalde. I think today’s anti-Israel protesters are a lot more racist than they admit, but I support their right to shoot their stupid mouths off in public about subjects they know nothing about. Free speech is for morons as well as intellectuals. It’s for your Nazis and our Nazis. What’s a shame is so few in today’s media are holding today’s college students accountable for the hateful, misogynist, homophobic, and genocidal terrorism promulgated by Hamas. Oppressors vs oppressed? How can you tell the diff? Today’s Palestinians and Jews have literally been fighting each other for thousands of years in a war that’s been going on so long its germination is chronicled (lopsidedly) in a semi-historical document called the Bible. The Philistines, one of the many ancestors of the Palestinians, kicking the ass of their Israelite enemies for some goddamn reason or another. Public domain image from Internet Images archive. From the river to the sea. I hope everyone remains safe, regardless of moral purity. Young people are both brilliant and dumbass. No parent should have to send their child off to school, whether five or eighteen, and receive them back in a body bag. Whether it’s the government, the police, or some asshole with a grudge against the world, free speech is free speech, folks. It includes the right to asshole speech. But it doesn’t include the right to be violent or promote it against others. Jews have the right to live and walk freely, too. Which they don’t. Anywhere. Our fashionably kaffiyeh-clad friends conveniently forget that. 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 damn thing!

Hostility to children's genitals and human sexuality has never been 'only a right-wing thing'. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay I remember wanting to hit puberty, to stop being a little girl. Breasts! Yes! A gorgeous body like I saw on The Love Boat! Boys falling all over themselves for me! And nothing, nothing said ‘I’m a woman now’ like that magical moment (which I was afraid would never come) of getting my first menstrual period. My best friend Vera and I, in eighth grade, read Judy Blume’s classic YA novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and laughed at the four friends in the book who cocked their elbows, pulling their arms back and forward again, all the while chanting We must! We must! We must increase our bust! While Vera and I never did that (she didn’t need to), we did, I confess, keep Boy Books, just like the four girls, with lists of Cute Boys we liked. Puberty turned out to be a bit of a letdown, although I spent less time waiting for my period than for cleavage. After a half-dozen or so grody time-of-the-months I spent the next forty years wishing menopause would hurry up and get on with it. Vera already had boobs when I met her, at thirteen, and my body wasn’t cooperating with the whole Love Boat love goddess thing (an affinity for sugary snacks and an aversion to exercise apart from bike riding might have played a considerable role). Also, there was acne, oily hair, dorky glasses, braces for a few years, a complete ignorance of makeup and a careless approach to fashion. But at least I had Become A Woman, finally. Okay, puberty ain’t actually fun. Maybe it is for the girls who turned into cheerleaders and future Love Boat goddesses, but I remember Rachel, unquestionably the most beautiful girl in our grade. She was a tall blonde ‘fox’ with blue eyes and the body and mature-looking face of a 21-year-old woman. At fourteen. I used to envy her, but years later, I wondered what her life was like as a young teen trapped in a beautiful woman’s body. Oh, the slavering old perverts! The unsolicited, embarrassing comments! The surreptitious feels by filthy old men with no filters in the late ‘70s when Second Wave feminism was adolescent itself and girls hadn’t yet learned that boys and men didn’t have unfettered right to their bodies. I knew puberty wasn’t a joy for boys either, as Judy Blume’s book, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t makes clear. It’s about a 13-year-old boy who falls in with a kid who shoplifts, drinks, makes prank phone calls and reads inappropriate adult fiction. He develops an attraction to his friend’s beautiful older sister and spies on her while she dresses and undresses, since she doesn’t close the blinds. The book alerted me to just what kind of stress boys are under as they never know when they’re going to pop a boner, even when they’re in a supremely sexually unstimulating environment, like math class—and just as they get called to do a math problem at the board in front of everyone— with a boner! Blume’s male character and many of her female characters deal with masturbation, probably the first YA novelist to do so. I remember my male counterparts in school who failed to mature into Love Boat -worthy male shuffleboard and pool gods, whose height didn’t meet exacting female standards, who were pudgy and dorky and probably wondered if they’d ever get laid. One teen was losing his hair at sixteen. By the ten-year reunion he was a billiard ball. Even a mega-dork like me wouldn’t have dated them, had they even asked. Puberty isn’t easy. I remember. But it’s still the first major life change we humans endure, with more to come, and who the hell wants to be a kid their entire life, right? We spend our childhoods wishing we were older so we could do things we weren’t currently allowed to do, and puberty is the first promise that you’re not going to be a kid forever , beholden to your parents’ dictates, that you won’t be ordered around for the rest of your life, that one day you’ll be able to eat nothing but desserts for lunch if you want, stay up late and watch Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live , and this shitty school thing will eventually come to an end. No one trained us to believe puberty was a nightmare. Books, ABC After School Specials, TV sitcoms and movies depicted kids navigating a difficult phase of their lives, but no one questioned it. We read teen fiction to try and understand better what was happening to us and what to expect. No character seemed entitled to live a life they couldn’t. What we all hoped for, and not all of us achieved, was to be as ridiculously gorgeous as TV kids and Love Boat guest stars. No one committed suicide if they fell short. So why are kids and adults so terrified of puberty today, and so in denial of the reality of being human, that they’re joining a body modification cult to change their bodies into something they’re not, starting with puberty blockers because the cool kids on YouTube say it’s the best thing ever, and assure them they were born in the wrong body even though their parents are like no you’re fucking not, and their older brother thinks they’re a complete idiot? How have mostly ‘progressive’ adults managed to fuck up the most important job in the world—raising new human beings—so badly that they’re willing to let their kids self-mutilate? They share more concern when their daughters cut themselves. How have so many come to believe it’s okay to steal children from their parents if they don’t go along with gender insanity? At what point did so-called responsible educators, administrators, and teachers decide that it was more important for kids to ‘figure out’ whether they were really boys and girls or not instead of, say, learning about the founding of America? Or multiplying fractions? Or learning how to compose a coherent essay in their native language? Or teaching them the truth - that you’re assigned your immutable sex at conception? As Jonathan Haidt notes in the research he did for his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness , the mental health of girls from progressive/liberal families sank quickly and much further than any other group of kids, including their brothers. His research makes it clear that liberal, progressive girls lead the whole Gen Z mental health crisis phenomenon. It’s they who have embraced the most the whole ‘born in the wrong body’ article of faith purporting to explain everything wrong with their lives. The Gen Z mental health crisis is horrifyingly evident. Today the number of young girls identifying as trans in the UK has increased 4,000% according to one British study. And that’s on an island with 20% the population of the United States. (Real) boys aren’t left out, either. The number of ‘transgender’ children overall has doubled since social media introduced it to a generation of mobile-addicted kids, and Pod Parents automatically do what their Pod People medical professionals urge them to, put their children on puberty blockers which may sterilize them among many other unpleasant and probably permanent side effects. Never mind the lack of evidence behind the alleged suicide rate for kids who are set parental boundaries. What is this incomprehensible fear of puberty we find on the progressive left? How come kids in previous generations didn’t off themselves every time their parents said no? In a recent interview with gender researcher Eliza Mondegreen, she notes that gender transitioning may be a way of avoiding growing up . “You come to a point in life where some kind of transformation is being asked of you and there's this diversion from whatever kind of growing up or changing that you need to do into trans. You see it with kids who are having trouble navigating puberty and moving into adulthood. You see it with college students who aren't sure what they want to do when they grow up and maybe it's really scary but if they're trans now they have this road map and also this excuse to not hit the other milestones that they might be afraid of because they're trans and how could you expect them to.” It’s Peter Pan and the Lost TransBoys. How badly have we fucked up growing up when kids feel the need to go on puberty blockers not because they’re actually ‘trans’, but because, to twist Socrates, the examined life isn’t worth living? What if they had to confront their genuine mental health challenges rather than the problem everyone has, if they’re lucky enough not to have died within the first thirteen years of their lives? Since when did adulthood become something to be ‘cured’? Maybe it’s just the seemingly universal human fear of our own sexuality, probably the only species that spends as much time obsessing about our genitals and everyone else’s. Hostility to children’s private parts is hardly anything new; Jews and Muslims have mutilated little boys’ genitals for centuries under the guise of religious practice; the Catholic Church famously castrated young boys to preserve their high voices, then demanded they not marry because it would be a ‘sin’; marriage was, they instructed, strictly for making babies, and since the castrati couldn’t, they shouldn’t avail themselves of female love and companionship. Tough shit, kids. Only human beings live in terror of children masturbating, even though ultrasound shows that even fetuses play with themselves. It didn’t stop the medievals and the Victorians from devising contraptions right out of a torture chamber to stop children and horny adults from, it was believed, driving themselves mad with ‘self-abuse’ and maybe even growing hairy palms. (Has that ever happened?) Public domain patent application illustration from Wikimedia Commons I began wondering about the liberal hostility to female sexuality (no, it’s not just a right-wing thing) and the mania to 'trans' willing young girls (just like the 19th-century oviarectomies performed on women to treat every neurosis they had, as detailed in a brief history section of flagrant medical profession patient abuse in the WPATH Files ). Any liberal still in control of their pre-frontal cortex recognizes the rise of misogyny on the left expressed through the trans movement. The TERF Is A Slur website catalogues the violent transmisogyny of heterosexual fetishists still battling the scourge of feminist opposition while Let Women Speak and other rallies are characterized by violent trans-identified male aggression and physical assault. It’s quite clear that the fuss about violence against so-called trans or queer people isn’t always as ‘transphobic’ as advertised, as emerging details in the Nex Benedict suicide demonstrate. Transactivists have engaged in far more violence against women than anyone has against them, which is not to say that anti-trans violence and murders don’t happen, because they do. But it points to a hidden agenda within the largely heterosexual trans movement to force women to bend, ultimately, to male desires. Especially sexual. Which is where most of this ‘trans’ stuff is coming from. The medical profession and parents aren’t the only ones hostile to human sexuality, nor are the major world religions. Certain parts of Africa have been viciously taking a knife to female genitals for thousands of years, completely excising any part that could deliver sexual pleasure and obsessively sewing up vaginas to keep girls ‘pure’ for their husbands. Human hostility to sexuality is nothing new, it’s non-partisan and universal. I see in the liberal progressive transgender denial of puberty—which they’ve been told also often denies a lifetime of sexual pleasure with butchered genitals—that exact same traditional, conservative hostility. Conservatives didn’t invent fear of sexuality, they’ve just historically hid it less. The so-called liberal ‘hippie generation’ wasn’t much different from their anti-sex ‘Establishment’ foes; a friend who used to be a Yippie told me of how ostensibly, everyone could practice ‘free love’ but it was much easier for men because women were already trained to be accepting and submissive; when a woman chose multiple partners she was ‘punished’ with passive-aggressive behavior by The Main Boyfriend designed to discourage her from relations with other men. It became easier to just let him do what he wanted and suffer silently. “We were ‘smashing monogamy!” she said. “Sounds to me like you were preserving the Establishment,” I replied. The UK government’s Cass Report is out now and adds further fuel to the growing transgender medicine dumpster fire. In particular it goes after puberty blockers, which we’re instructed by the trans movement and their medical professional lapdogs are absolutely necessary to keep kids from killing themselves. Never mind how much that’s been debunked; Thou Shalt Not Question Holy Sacred Writ. What’s certainly being taken more seriously is the emerging evidence that children and young adults are ‘transitioning’ for many different bad reasons, almost none of them actual ‘gender dysphoria’. What needs to be discussed more—in sealed vaults if necessary to keep out violent disruptive transactivists—is the ongoing adult obsession with children’s genitals and the willingness to allow them to agree to medical mutilation without any hard evidence that it relieves emotional distress. And why puberty became a ‘problem’ to be fixed rather than a perfectly normal life transition handled by humans for millions of years, which is now believed to cause suicide if it’s not immediately halted. Adults have seriously fucked up childhood, rendered their children permanent consumers for the medical profession, sterilized many of them (who needs Roe anymore?) and ruined their ability to enjoy sex. Not to mention establish unquestionably that hostility to inconvenient science is not only a ‘right-wing thing’. This is on us, the so-called ‘responsible adults’. 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 damn thing!

When I say, 'Don't LET anyone treat you like that,' or 'Don't BE the victim,' I speak from personal experience. As a temporary ex-abuser. Women with rage. Avoid them! Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay This is a tough one to write. I’ve been nagging myself for years. Since I published Jim McCoy’s guest post about his abusive ex-wife recently, I remember my cringe. For decades I’ve encouraged women to assert themselves and not tolerate male abuse. I encourage them and others to reclaim their power, and how to avoid abusive people, but I’ve never admitted my own story as an abusive bitch. It was temporary, and only in short-term dating. Amber Heard I wasn’t, but I’m still responsible for a time when my mouth and poisoned soul were a real Love Canal . It’s time for me to own it. I always say don’t tolerate abuse (and if you do, you are ). Because I can state quite personally: Abusers know what they’re doing and give people whatever they’ll take. I would know. The label fit me for about twelve years. It’s time for admit what I was on the other side of abuse. Never the victim. Certain guys let me mistreat them. Listen up: The more of my shit they took the less respect I had for them. Remember that, always. I want you to understand, if you’ve ever been in a physically, emotionally, psychologically or verbally abusive relationship that abusers lose respect for you every time you come back for more. And coming back gives them permission. ‘Bitch’ is my two-part story of a time in my life when I mistreated men out of a sense of bitterness and romantic entitlement. I want people to know they should never put up with bad treatment from others, just as I encourage women not to tolerate it from men. Part I is how I got that way. Part II, about my abuse, will run on Saturday. The backstory In 2000, the man I was living with for years dumped me out of the blue. Jerry walked in one day and said, “We have to talk.” He punted me back into a dating scene that had changed while I’d been gone. People met online, (as in fact Jerry and I had, before it was cool), with early singles sites. Dating fatigue set in quite early when all you did was flip through photos, picking out the cute ones, then getting ignored. As opposed to, say, meeting with people at social events and talking to them. A great personality can make an average-looking person more attractive. What I also didn’t understand, tragically, was the new rise of easily-accessible Internet porn which was warping mostly male brains about human sexuality and keeping them at home rather than meeting real women. (Now it’s warping everyone’s brains.) Relentless rejection and rudeness spiralled me into a deep depression. I cried a lot. I raged at Jerry. After getting blown off, ignored, or treated insensitively by men online I wanted to meet (would it kill them to just message back, thanks, but no thanks?), my rage spread. After enough mannerless, insensitive treatment I thought, “Okay fine. If you don’t have to be nice, neither do I. If my feelings aren’t important, neither are yours.” I stopped treating men with consideration, and blamed it on them. I wonder who they learned it from. Chicken or egg, n’est-ce pas? My doctor put me on Prozac, then Zoloft. But drugs need to be augmented with therapy which I couldn’t afford. So I stopped taking them. I woke up in the morning not wanting to get out of bed. Or in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep—until shortly before I had to get up for work. In my black hole, I was obsessed with angry, self-abusive thoughts. You suck! You’re ugly! You’re fat! No one will ever love you again! You’re terrible! How can any man ever love you??? “Why is it okay for you to talk to yourself this way,” I’d ask, “when you’d bitch-slap anyone you heard saying these things to another human being?” During my more lucid moments, I realized: You’re digging your own goddamn hole. The farther you dig, the longer it will take to climb out of it. And you know you will. But right now, you’re making it worse. So I picked up my shovel and went back to work. CC0 2.0 Sharealike image by Pedro Caetano de Moura Pinheiro on Flickr One night I got blown off by some dork from an offline dating service I’d joined, Great Expectations, which I called Gray Expectorations . This guy was barely worth my time but I was desperate. I called him a few times and I got blown off by his mother. In a way my own mother had once blown off a high school suitor for me. Telling me he wasn’t there every time I called with her familiar ‘lying mom’ voice. I was humiliated that I’d sunk so low as to put all my expectations on a guy I would never have given a glance to three years prior. This exemplar of mediocrity snapped me. I became consumed by an uncontrollable black rage the last time I hung up. FINE, fuck it! Fuck you all! I hate men! I hate all of them! I’m going to get you all! I’m going to DESTROY you! I’m going to make you pay for what you’ve done to me! For what you’ve made me!” Sound familiar? Sound like the whiny-ass cry of every abusive male who blames a woman or all women for everything wrong with their lives? Incels? The manosphere? The Red Pillers? No, I don’t need to change, YOU need to change!!! Entitled much, girlfriend? Drunk off my ass, I called an English gamer friend who was up at all hours. “I think I’m about to do something bad, Gareth,” I told him. “Wot’s that?” I described a ludicrous plan to turn into this super-hot chick who would make men fall in love with me and then blow them off, because I would have no heart left. I wanted to hurt men, to destroy them, a mass-Miss Haversham. I didn’t care my future targets were innocent men who’d never done anything to me. They weren’t really innocent, I reasoned. They’d surely been assholes to other women, because that’s what men did. They had no souls, no real feelings, except in their dicks. They were penis-bots, life support systems for their dick. They couldn’t feel love. They only faked it to get dick service. Gee, I didn’t sound too much like the blanket-generalizing losers of what would later become the ‘manosphere’. Fortunately, Gareth was too sweet and kind and loved me too much to do what any reasonable man would have done, hung up on my loathsome, self-pitying misandry. Before he could even respond I took another breath and pointed out all the ridiculous holes in my own silly-ass plan. I wasn’t a super-hot chick. I didn’t have the self-discipline to lose weight. If I believed I could turn myself into a super-hot chick I would have done it by now, but I didn’t because I didn’t believe I could. (Twenty years later: I wish I’d tried harder.) I was too old to be one anyway, at 39. Also, I grudgingly acknowledged men could love and did have feelings. “Gareth,” I blubbered, “I feel like I’m about to make a conscious choice to give myself to evil. I almost did this a half hour ago. Then I wavered. I felt really close, like I was at the edge of a very narrow chasm and that all I had to do was take one small step to give men what they deserve. But then I stopped. I had this very weird strong feeling that if I did, there was no going back. And that I would render myself permanently unlovable. Somewhere, I feel like there’s always hope.” It wasn’t the alcohol talking. I had a strong fear I still recall that I was about to make a huge mistake from which there was no turning back. Maybe I’d revile evil one day but my soul would be irrevocably damaged by having given myself to it. Tainted. Ruined. The way we imagined raped or seduced Victorian women were forever ruined, except I really would be. That a part of my sick soul would wither and die, like an irrecoverable wasted limb. We talked for hours. About the evil in all of us. Of the white people in old photographs I’d been Googling gathering around for a ‘party’ - a lynching of a black man. The celebrations. The people who looked just like me, albeit historically dressed. About finding the pictures of Emmett Till’s corpse in a coffin in an old magazine story and wondering how adult men could torture a child like that. I talked about the ‘good little Germans’ who followed Hitler. The camp guards who told themselves Jews were sub-human, but not so much that they minded pulling the pretty ones out of the death queues to be their sexual servants. The civilians who smelled something cooking if they lived near certain camps and pretended it was, uh, neighbors making dinner. How I didn’t want to be like that. Like them. Gareth talked me back from the chasm. When I sobered up I didn’t want to give myself to evil. I still think I dodged a real bullet that night. Shattered self-image. I remember dreaming once of looking into a broken mirror. Image free for use from Pxfuel In retrospect, while men really had been inconsiderate clods, I came to understand that I myself suffered from a crippling sense of romantic entitlement, as became clear several years later when George Sodini, an angry incel who hadn’t had sex in years, shot up a women’s fitness center in Los Angeles. His online manifesto detailed all his grievances against the women who’d remained immune to what he thought were his many charms. Weirdly, it wasn’t just wanting sex; he wanted connection, to be loved, to have a girlfriend. Underneath many incels’ obsessive focus on sex with a Stacy lies a genuine extremely human desire to be loved. My fascination with his story was a weird sort of kinship. He was, in a certain sense, a brother-in-arms. I didn’t condone Sodini, but I understood him. I sympathized with him. I still do. Love really is all there is. He was a scumbag, for sure, but he forced me to acknowledge I had become a scumbag too. When I analyzed Sodini’s sexual entitlement, I found myself—but entitled to the easy access to men I’d had when I was younger. Sex is harder for men to come by; romantic love harder for women. Men had fallen into my lap, without my effort. When I was young, I was a pretty belly dancer, which definitely gave me cachet, like being the head cheerleader. But now I was no longer a dumb kid, and it turned out, guys my age really were more interested in younger women, especially ones who wanted children, which I didn’t. Here’s another incel-style mistake I made: Blaming men for wanting something that didn’t align with my own desires. It takes awhile to find a man who’s willing to cut himself off from this normal human desire for children, and I got a tubal ligation at thirty-nine. Many men say they don’t want children, or they don’t care, but they can change their minds, in their forties, fifties, even their senior years. Never say never when you’re a man. Men and women think and plan their lives in different ways, because we are different, physically and psychologically. We don’t always synchronize with what the other sex wants. We have a biological clock; they don’t. There are fewer real-world consequences for male tomcatting. It’s not always humanity’s artificially created ‘patriarchy’, it’s God’s or evolution’s plan to perpetuate life. It’s not fair, but it’s humanity’s reality. I had moved to Canada, where I was less isolated and had made many new friends. Getting older had calmed me down a bit, and as I moved through menopause I wondered whether hormonal changes were responsible. I still was in a bad place, but I suffered fewer dark depressive episodes and the type of cycling thoughts that trouble angry, depressed people: Men are stupid. Men are awful. I really hate men. They only think of themselves. I hate them! I really hate them! I can’t imagine how I could ever love one! A few years later I found Buddhist psychology via Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With The Heart Of A Buddha. The first time I read it, it pissed me off. Compassion talk really pissed me off. Why the hell should I have compassion for a sex that felt no compassion for me, or women, period? The second time I read it I was simply nonplussed. Meh. I should get rid of this thing, eh? I didn’t know it yet, but that reaction demonstrated progress. Then one day I cleaned out my bookshelves and put Radical Acceptance on the pile bound for the thrift store. Then I picked it up. I was depressed again, but over unemployment, not men. I didn’t even think about them much anymore, or write about how much I hated them in my journal. I only hated myself. “Once more with feelin’,” I told myself. “And if it sucks I’ll put it back on the pile.” I laid down on the couch and started reading. Then I got up to grab a Kleenex. Then I got up to grab a pen. And I started underlining. Half an hour later, my Kleenex was soaked, and Radical Acceptance was lying on my coffee table . Don’t Be The Victim - My past articles on avoiding and not tolerating abuse Part II will publish on Tuesday, and will detail how I emotionally abused men that passed briefly through my life. I knew what I was doing and I have only myself to blame. Just because some people are assholes didn’t mean I had the right to become one. Don’t be like I was. 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 damn thing!

How dare  woke liberals ask me to vote against my own interests to keep Washington Trump-free. I am Woman, hear me tell them all to go to hell! Donald Trump speaking into a mic and holding a clenched fist up with a flag in the background Nikki Haley nailed it in January.  It remains to be seen whether either party will have the balls and labia to follow through on her observation. "Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump," Haley told a crowd of supporters before she dropped out of the presidential race. "The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election." I agree. Except I don’t think either party will. Last year I wrote about how I won’t vote for Biden  this time. I’m voting independent. Or something. I don’t know who will ultimately be on the ballot from my home state of Connecticut, but if it’s just Trump or Biden I won’t vote in the presidential race. I want to encourage other liberals—true liberals, not ‘woke’ anti-progressives—to do the same. Of course, the Kool-Aid drinkers and those liberals who don’t think as much about politics as they used to are mad at me. I get the same tired petulant reply: “If you don’t vote for Biden it’s a vote for Trump!” I recently mixed it up with an old friend who said this, then he cut the phone conversation short. He said he had things to do. He never  has ‘things to do’. He’s retired, so he has even less things to do than he did a year ago, when he always had time to talk because all I ever interrupted was book-reading or movie-watching. I tell my fellow liberals what I’m going to do in order to make them think. Thinking is as out of fashion in some circles on the left as it is for some on the right. “Women are half the country, Dennis,” I said. “Joe Biden’s pro-trans positions are extremely anti-feminist, and being pro-Roe isn’t good enough anymore. Women need more than just a return to abortion access. We need our remaining rights and safety preserved and defended, and the Democrats are no longer willing to do that. Even the female Congresswomen are anti-feminist, despite ‘identifying’ as feminists.” This is a word we need to use more with ideologues who claim to be something they’re not. ‘Identify’. I’ve begun to use it in relation to the Religious Right. There’s no way to be a Christian and a Trump supporter. I mean seriously, who would Jesus vote for? That guy? ‘Identifying,’ used with the right inflection, communicates to the other person their talk is cheap. “I understand, you identify  as a Christian,” I say. Walk the walk, baby. That goes for everyone. Especially so-called ‘liberal’ ‘progressive’ ‘feminists’. My friend isn’t super-‘woke’, but he’s begun showing the political fatigue I find sets in as we approach our golden years. I couldn’t understand why, when Mom was my age, she grew less interested in politics. She just stopped caring. I get it now. Mostly I’m tired of being expected to save the world from Donald Trump by people on the left  who expect women to take one for the team, once again, and throw each other under the bus by electing the guy who supports men who claim to be women and work to hurt us every bit as much as the right and its handmaids. You want me to vote Democrat? Give me a candidate with the balls or labia to stand up to the woke-mad authoritarians in The Squad, and other illiberals that have commandeered the soul of the party via the misogynist, homophobic, deeply traditionalist trans movement. I’ll vote for the brainworm-addled conspiracy-loving cheap Bobby Kennedy knockoff or whatever other dimwit is on my ballot before I’ll vote for Trump or Grandpa ‘I Do Everything My Woke Staff Members Tell Me To Do’ Biden. I am Woman, hear me tell ‘libs’ to go to hell I’ve had quite enough of the left’s misogyny. Biden’s latest blow against women’s rights makes me want to bitch-slap any liberal who dutifully mouths, “If you don’t vote for Biden it’s a vote for Trump!” Biden’s new rules around Title IX mandate that it’s okay to discriminate against women and girls, who should just STFU about their ‘rights’ and ‘safety’. Title IX bans sex discrimination at all federally-funded institutions, which wasn’t much of a problem until Idiot America swallowed the notion that humans can magically change into the opposite sex pretty much by verbal fiat. (Please note: I now identify as an 18-year-old 85-lb drop-dead gorgeous supermodel. My pronouns are ‘Hot Stuff’, ‘Venus’ and ‘O Babelicious One’. Please send all panting, desperate marriage proposals to superbabegrowsomelabia@gmail.com !) As customary for the Woke Brigade, Title IX, as of August 1st, will prioritize the ‘rights’ of trans-identified men’s over women’s. When it says you can’t discriminate against someone on the basis of ‘gender identity’, it means you can’t stop fully male-equipped cross-dressing men from using sex-segregated facilities. Suck it, bitches! Several Republican states are suing. Guess what Donald Trump promises to do if he’s re-elected? Roll back Biden’s Title IX protections for ‘transgender’ students. I approve. There’s nothing Trump can say or do to induce me to vote for him, but I’ll cheer for him when he deserves it. And if he rolls back ‘gender-affirming’ care for children and teens, all the better. Children shouldn’t be ‘transitioning’. They should be learning language skills, geography, social studies, math, and above all , history and SCIENCE. Not CRT oppressor-oppression nonsense and genderwoo fetishism. Suck it, Democrats! I’m fed up with ‘progressive’ obsession with ‘trans rights’. I’m all for everyone’s rights insofar as they don’t put anyone’s lives and safety in danger. Transwomen are men. Trans rights are men’s rights.  We’ve historically not allowed men in women’s bathrooms and changing rooms because women are exceedingly vulnerable when they’ve got their pants down or their clothes off and men have historically attacked women in such circumstances. Just ask Third World women who have to relieve themselves  in the bushes at night. It increases their risk of getting raped, because guess who’s waiting for them. Stall walls aren’t enough  to keep women and girls safe , either. No, boys. Males need to stay out of women’s private areas. If gay men can use the men’s facilities, so can trans-identified men. Telling women who’ve suffered sexual trauma by men to simply put their concerns aside because sexual predation in such places ‘almost never happens’, even though it does, more than they admit, is the very height of traditional male arrogance, and any female fauxminist who supports him should be shamed from one end of X to the other. Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces Howzabout ‘transwomen’ ‘reframe’ their self-conception to think about the rights, needs, and feelings of others before themselves? Which is a consummately female way to think. Take notes, boyz. You’ve got a lot to learn. Why is it always women  who are expected to accommodate men? According to The Free Press, the breastfeeding support group La Leche League now accepts any male  who identifies as ‘female’ or ‘non-binary’ whether they’re breastfeeding or not. (And yes, men can now , with a lot of medical help.) Women are now forced to pull out a breast in front of strange men at meetings. This is on you , Democrats, progressives, and wokies. This is why women like me, not to mention many liberal men, aren’t going to vote for your Alpha Male this November. You’ve allowed the trans movement, primarily sexual fetishist men, to erode women’s right to say no to men. That’s why we don’t trust ‘progressives’ to keep the pedophiles away. We know pervs will eventually get the progs to offer up their own kid in service to what will one day be defined as a ‘sexual identity’ and that children have the ‘right’ to be violated by primarily teenage or adult human males. Claims that sexual predation incidents in women’s private spaces are ‘right-wing propaganda’ are actually left-wing propaganda. The far-left ‘progressives’ simply won’t acknowledge, and probably never will, how grievously wrong they are about ‘sex changing’ and how easily manipulated they are by clever men. Title IX doesn’t address male participation on female sports teams, but the Biden administration has made it very clear it supports it. You have to be blindingly stupid to not see how this is an attempt to destroy women’s sports. What girl or woman will even bother trying to compete if she’s guaranteed a loss against some cross-dresser on her team? Or worse, risks serious injury by some big galoot in a wig? These aren’t trivial, silly-ass ‘culture war’ concerns. Prioritizing ‘trans rights’ that men haven’t had since pre-Second Wave feminism is a huge step toward further eroding women’s personal autonomy and bodily integrity, in lockstep with progressives’ new allies on the far right. The right has near-eradicated women’s access to safe abortions. Even if she’s raped. What certain men want is more important than what women want, and deep in some male brains is the ancient notion, encoded in the Bible, that a fetus is the father’s property. As it turns out, the left’s misogynists aren’t much different and have now been empowered by the trans movement to join forces to further erase female agency. In the end, many men will band together non-politically in service to male sexual pleasure—the importance of which they can all agree on. Which is that women should service penises, however men want. Period. Just like it was in the ‘good ol’ days’ the right longs for. And is simply more vocal about. I’m done, kids. I’m sixty years old and I stopped feeling compassion for Americans two Presidents ago. And these are my people.  My birth country. But goddammit, people, women are the most marginalized people ever: Enslaved, dominated, and used at sexual will for 12,000 years. Those of us who aren’t ‘woke’ are tired of it. We’re exhausted. And in the twentieth century we made some real advances. We were always resisted by conservatives but now so-called ‘liberal’, ‘feminist’ men and their dizzy female allies have joined them. Thou shalt worship the Holy Phallus as thou didst in the good old centuries. Public domain image I’m not voting for Trump, but I’m not voting for Biden, and if Trump wins, BLAME YOURSELVES FIRST. YOU did this. Suck it, bitches. And c’mere. Hold your face still for just a moment. 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 damn thing!

A viral TikTok meme demonstrates how skewed female beliefs about strange men have become. What's really worse? Rape or getting eaten alive? I would be especially afraid of a bear who reminded me a little of Harvey Weinstein. Public domain image by LadyofHats on Wikimedia Commons A friend pointed me toward a viral TikTok meme in which someone asked seven women which they’d rather encounter in the woods: A bear or a strange man. “Six out of seven picked the bear,” she said. I pondered the question myself. “What kind of a bear?” I asked. She shrugged. “Just a bear.” “Well, I think it depends on the bear,” I replied. “If it’s a brown or black one, I’ll take the bear, I guess. But if it’s a grizzly or a polar bear, I’ll take the man. Even if he’s a Hell’s Angel!” On further pondering I found even more personal nuance. If I’m in Canada I’ll take the strange man over even a black or brown bear, but if the man is a Hell’s Angel I’ll take the bear. If I’m in the United States, where strange men number over 150 million, I’ll take these relatively non-aggressive bears. Grizzlies or polar bears, though? I’ll take the man, every single time. Even if he’s wearing a hockey mask, with a tuft of brown hair flapping over the top, and carrying a bloody head. I don’t know if the TikToker spoke to any Canadian women, and whether they were more afraid of Canadian men than bears. I’m definitely more afraid of bears. When I took car trips with a photographer friend to Algonquin Park, north of Toronto, while he gassed up I’d flip through a book he had in the inside door pocket about how to avoid bear attacks. Algonquin Park is likely the only place I might ever encounter a bear, nice black or brown ones, and believe me, I’m no bleeding-heart woke guilt-ridden white liberal reverse bear racist. It’s because blacks and browns are relatively non-aggressive. They don’t like noise, so if you encounter one and yell a lot or bang pots together, they’ll go away. Black and brown bears don’t want any shit. Just don’t run away; then you’re prey. Grizzlies, on the other hand? You don’t want to mess with them! We don’t have them in eastern Canada. They’re found primarily in the western and far northern parts. Grizzlies are aggressive, powerful and up to 10 feet tall standing on their hind legs. They prefer a solitary life including other animals, and they do not appreciate surprise visits by humans, however accidental. And therein lies the essential element of why I will always pick the strange man over the bear. Unless I’m in 1976’s Eaten Alive!, the man isn’t going to eat me alive. On the other hand, a bear isn’t going to rape me, nor are they heavily armed. Which is why I’d choose the black or brown bear in the U.S., but the man over the grizzly. Call me crazy, but rape is survivable, and getting shot to death is an easier, quicker death than screaming off this mortal coil as someone’s lunch. In Canada, if it’s a polar bear, and I make it a point never to go anywhere near the North Pole, I’ll take the man, including the Hell’s Angel or Michael Myers (the serial killer, not the comedian, although I’d choose the comedian over any bear every single time, and then invite him to my campsite for a beer or three, eh, to thank him for not being a polar bear!) For me, it’s nuanced. For other women, not so much. The original TikTok inspired copycats, with women all over the world weighing in and sounding more afraid of their own species than the one that has yet to put one of their own kind on the moon. One woman was triggered by a man asking the question, saying with a bear you know what you’re getting. “But not all men are like that,” he points out which upsets her a little. Um, and you know what you’re getting with a generic bear, sister? I do. I vote her More Likely To Get Eaten By A Bear Than Raped. I suppose a woman who’s had a few, or a lot, of bad experiences with Those Kind Of Men will be warier of men than bears. I, on the other hand, have had no truly bad experiences with men, and zero bad experiences with wild bears. That’s because I’ve never encountered one. In Ontario, I know what to do if I don’t have bear spray or pots and pans: Stand still, head down a bit like you would with a strange, threatening dog (“I’m no danger to you, I’m submissive!”), and then sloooooowwwwwwlllly walk backwards. I know if a bear stands on his hind legs but isn’t growling or otherwise acting threatening, he’s just curious, and walking backward slowly will likely result in no blood shed. What would I do if I was really in that situation? I’d like to think I wouldn’t panic and do something stupid, but you never know until you’re eyeballing a bear who’s eyeballing you back with no cage between you. At least I know our Ontario bears aren’t out to kill me, if I loudly signal, “I DON’T WANT ANY SHIT FROM YOU AND IF YOU GET THE EFF AWAY FROM ME I’LL STOP BANGING THESE POTS!” So what would I do if I encountered a strange man? Freak out, scream, threaten to call 911 if he doesn’t immediately exit my time zone, threaten to #MeToo him on X? I’d do what I’d do if a strange bear were to encounter me : Scan him for signs of danger. Does he look like a big threatening sort? Does he look like he lives here in the woods and smells like he hasn’t bathed since the 1960s? Or is he carrying a camera, a rifle, a bow and arrow, or holding out a birdseed-laden hand to feed the Canada grey jays? I honestly think I’d be more concerned if I was in the U.S., where men are better-armed and—crazier. But all things considered, I don’t regard strange men nearly as threatening as wild animals, and I wonder about women who do. Obviously, they’ve never been toe to paw with a live, wild bear. Here’s why I mostly fear bears rather than men: I can reason with a man. I can try and make friends with a man. Even if he’s a scary, dangerous man, I learned a lesson a long, long time ago: People have a harder time killing someone they know and like. When I was a teenager, hijacking planes for political purposes was a very common threat for traveling Americans. Sometimes it was terrorists, or prisoners on the lam, who wanted the plane to divert to Cuba for asylum. I remember reading about a Middle Eastern terrorist who’d taken control of a plane and, I forget the details as it was over forty years ago, but I think he was on the tarmac and had released everyone except one guy he used for negotiation. If the negotiations failed, he would kill the guy. The hostage began talking to the terrorist during the long stretches of nothing happening. The hostage got him talking about things like his family and his home and what he wanted in life. And the hostage talked about the same: His own family, how much he loved them, what he did for a living, what he liked to do for fun. They shared stories. They had laughs together. The terrorist released the hostage and, as I recall, capitulated to the authorities. He didn’t want to kill someone he’d come to know as a fellow human being much like himself and who had become likeable: Not just some stranger whose life meant nothing to him and whatever noble cause he thought he was fighting. If it’s possible to negotiate your relationship with a terrorist, you can do it with others too. There’s no guarantee it will work. But it’s worth a try. It’s harder to hurt or kill people we’ve come to like. How are you going to make friends with a bear? Also, some encounters with scary-seeming men aren’t so scary if you don’t act scared. (Hmmmm….just like many bears!) Once at a bus stop a large, muscular, scary-looking black man approached to wait too. And he was scary-looking. Mean-looking. Tough. I’d call it ‘the face that sank a thousand ships’. He started a conversation and I remembered the guy with the terrorist. I went into Canadian mode: I showed no fear, I engaged back and we had a really nice conversation. He offered me some of his sandwich and I declined, having just had lunch. He was such a nice man! Until we got on the bus and he started a fight with others, which I feared might get physical, but it didn’t and he left me alone. My first impression was correct, but so was my first response. I showed no fear, and one on one, we had a very nice interaction. By the way, I don’t remember others provoking this loud, threatening multi-dispute. I was like, What the fuck??? What just happened here??? The man was a grizzly bear, someone who thought others wanted trouble even when they didn’t. Hyper-aggressive and God only knows what he’ll do next. What if encountered a Hell’s Angel in the woods? I’d pray to Goddess none of his compatriots were around, and, knowing a little about biker gangs from my reading—one on gangs in Canada, and Hunter S. Thompson’s book about the Hell’s Angels—I’d do what I did with the bus stop grizzly bear: Do my best to show no fear, engage him in conversation, treat him like a normal human being, and do my best not to trigger him. I don’t know if it would work or not, but an ex-biker I used to know said if you treat bikers like equals they’ll most likely respond better. If a Hell’s Angel and I encountered a grizzly bear in the wilds of British Columbia, I’ll bet we’d band together in an instant for the literal fight of our lives. The only thing that binds humans together faster than humor is survival. And geez, ladies. If you’ve never encountered a wild bear, you have no idea what you’re up against. Or not. 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 damn thing!