I've changed my mind from a few years ago. It's a bridge too far. Why are so many of these people middle-aged and morbidly obese? Image by Marcel van Engelenburg from Pixabay I haven’t written much about trans issues recently. It seems less pressing now that Donald Trump has set the TransTrain on fire with several executive orders rolling back several key pieces of Democratic ‘progressive’ anti-scientific whackjobbery. America. Most of his EOs have met resistance in the courts, and from medical professionals who continue to insist that this gravy trai n these medical treatments are abso-freakin’-lutely necessary and ‘life-saving’. Early evidence indicates that in the short term, Trump is going to lose most of these battles. Judge orders Trump administration to return two transgender inmates to women’s prisons - This just makes me loathe Democrats and ‘progressives’ even more But the key word is ‘battles’. ‘Progressives’ will lose this war. They’re up against 80% of American common-sense normies who don’t support fake female athletes, but do support established science. Trans issues, though, motivate me less than they did two months ago. Ultimately, common sense is prevailing, on this issue if not in much else for the next four years. The horse of different rainbow colors is out of the barn. The world is moving on from ‘trans’, and Trump/Musk have introduced far bigger problems for America than those facing this highly niche elitist, largely sexual fetishist minority . It got me to thinking about my old kiddie drag piece from a few years ago— Are Drag Shows Really All That Bad For Kids? I’d felt weird supporting it in 2023, but belly dancing got in the way. I used to be the flashy, heavily-costumed, bejeweled, loud and outrageous chick embarrassing entertaining forty-year-old men on their birthdays. Kids loved me. They were my favorite audience. But I felt, and still feel, that nagging pedo-ey sensation, not because drag queens or Team Rainbow are particularly disposed to pedophilia, but because the overly-inclusive progressive movement can’t say no to anybody. We need to remember that any activity that draws children is bound to interest the kiddie-far-too-friendly. As the Boy Scouts can tell you. Democrats and progressive activists are still fighting this trans crap with Trump, despite illiberal ‘woke’ ideology being one of the many reasons they lost the election so soundly. Today, they’re polling at 27% approval with only 7% thinking they’re doing ‘a great job’. Trump, after all he’s done, is polling at 48%. Democrats and progressives WILL throw open the doors for the pedos. You can’t trust them with anyone’s safety. The whole drag performance movement is tainted by its association with transactivism and the latter’s success in infiltrating the schools and the therapy profession with gender-bending and indoctrinating children. Drag’s connection to transactivism is why I’m cutting off my tenuous support. You’re known by the company you keep. Transactivists prey on children, to mold them into something they’re not, tone-deaf to the pleas that gay kids have the right to grow up gay and that children aren’t old enough to make rational, informed decisions about sex transition. Detransition lawsuits even have begun to state the lack of real prep talk, specificall y. The trans movement is an extension of transhumanism to remake and reimagine what it means to be human, which is fine for adults, but simply inappropriate for children who need to focus on growing up and learning how to navigate the world in the wonderfully healthy bodies most of them have been granted. There’s a growing sense among the LGB that they made a huge mistake letting the trans and queer in. The Pride movement is losing supporters as normies, including liberals with a sense of decency and the need for boundaries (especially in regard to male sexual desire), quietly withdraw support. Last year in Canada, the Liberal Party and several government groups and corporate sponsors withdrew from various Pride events, mostly over the movement’s anti-Israel stance, which is a weird position for Pride to take considering how much Muslims and Islamic terrorists and the Gazans hate anything LGBTQ. Israel is the ONLY Middle Eastern country that supports gay and transfolk. You’re welcome very fucking much, you garish, overprivileged hate-mongering ingrates! I haven’t been to a Pride parade in a few years. Trans has overwhelmed it. It’s just—icky. How far is too far? What’s the deal with middle-aged and older overweight trans or drag dudes? What’s up with the dude with the beard and hairy chest down below? Women don’t have excessive hirsuteness without a hormonal imbalance. I’d bet my bottom dollar these dudes aren’t ‘gender dysphoric’. My money’s on autogynephilia. And yet, I’ll be frank, I still feel a bit judge-y as a former belly dancer, who has seen many kiddie dancers and never had a problem with it. I understand why little girls want to wear pretty costumes and dance (and, I’m sure, some boys too although I never encountered any). I adored belly dancers when I was their age, and I’ve never found anything icky about it for kids, maybe because I know how empowering belly dancing actually is. Kiddie beauty pageants they ain’t, drawing slavering pedophiles at the sight of grown-up looking toddlers. Drag has changed the game. It comes from a highly sexualized culture and I can’t ignore it anymore. Belly dancers don’t do show ‘n’ tells in school, asking kids, “Are you sure you’re not a belly dancer?” No doubt some of them are! I was, apparently. Drag and belly dancing appeal to boys too, as there is both male-style belly dancing and female-style. Because of trans extremism, genderqueer recruitment , and ‘gender-affirming care’, we’ve stopped supporting and protecting gay children. I don’t want to support trans homophobia. Some kids do need help. I wrote about Aaron Kimberly here on Substack, who unfortunately seems to have taken down all his Bearded Lesbian podcasts and materials. He was taking a lot of flak from others for his views and multiple sex transition back-and-forths. It’s a shame because he struck me as a genuinely, biologically gender dysphoric person, set apart from the old, overweight, suspiciously fetishy autogynephiles. We need to make a place for people like Aaron, and even for those who aren’t particularly dysphoric, but want to experiment with gender fluidity. There’s a place for that , too, and the young’uns today are hardly the first to cross gender lines. Our grandmothers or great-grandmothers strapped down their breasts with binders a hundred years ago. They made their bodies more like boys’. Later, Boomer and Gen-X rock musicians like David Bowie, Boy George, Mick Jagger, Prince, and Annie Lennox caused others to whisper, “Is he or she gay?” “Who cares?” others responded. Indeed. So what? Support for gay marriage and rights has slipped a little with the American public and I wonder if it’s because progressives refused to stop the slippery slope. The all-too-inclusive Pride movement has clearly gone several bridges too far after many great successes. Conservatives who initially resisted gay rights came around once they realized gay people aren’t anymore a threat than straight people. In Canada, it’s not an issue for the Conservative Party and its leader, Pierre Poilievre, who’s made it clear eliminating gay marriage isn’t in the policy platform. He fully accepts his gay father-in-law. Not all conservatives embrace these rights we consider a given, but neither do all ‘progressives’ . Homosexuality is real. Except for a very small percentage of cases, ‘gender dysphoria’ is not. Instead of teaching children it’s okay to be gay and it’s not okay to hate others, Pride breached the respectability dam and opened the floodgates to what looked an awful lot like heteroseuxal male fetishism. I support gay kids, but there’s no such thing as ‘trans’ kids. There just isn’t. Progressives manufactured them. There’s nothing wrong with sexual fetishism. Just keep it away from kids. Children can be happy in their own bodies. If you let them. My problems with drag It would be incorrect to believe that children aren’t sexual at all. They are. Romantic stirrings start young. I remember a very strong inclination for boys when I was a child. I chased little boys around on the playground trying to kiss them. Yeah, I was That Annoying Girl. Ewwwww! Children explore their own bodies at around ages 4-6. Some experiment with masturbation. Kids play doctor. Boys and girls sometimes dare each other to expose ‘wee-wees’. Human sexuality is ever-present. Fetuses have been observed playing with themselves . We explore that wonderful thing between our legs even before birth. But dudes who express comments like the one below are why so many normies distrust drag queens. From Twitter Little girls are NOT ‘kinky’. That’s a male sexual fetishist projection. The queen is right that kids might not be as ‘straight and narrow’ as we think, but it doesn’t give him permission to expose them to inappropriate conduct. It’s pretty creepy on multiple levels. Not only does he suggest little girls are ‘kinky’ but addresses the fear some adults have that pedo men in the ladies’ room might harm children. Instead of refuting it, he subtly suggests they might like what this theoretical pervert does to them. Pedophiles justify themselves that way, too. I do, actually, understand why kids like drag, for the same reason they like belly dancers. I can imagine some kids just eat it up, but others, I wonder, might be quietly creeped out. Old fat guys dancing around like clowns appropriating womanhood; what’s all that about? Funny how few drag shows ever feature crossing the other way. I’m leaving up my original drag article but I’m adding a proviso about how I’ve changed my mind. Somewhere, two years ago, deep down in my liberal soul, I knew it. What it comes down to is this: Recruitment and indoctrination. ‘Drag story hour’ and shows reek of both; belly dancing doesn’t. Probably because it’s a mostly female activity and profession. The trans movement supports a mostly manufactured pseudo-marginalized group of men. It’s about rolling back women’s rights and, I’m sorry, I have to say it, sexualizing children. It is, as always, biological males at the bottom of this. When men push for something as violently and aggressively as transactivists have for access to women’s private spaces, sports teams, and children, the real motivation is pretty certainly to be found between their legs. Even if they’re not pedos themselves. Even if they have no desire to expose children to them. But will they stop the pedos who are quietly awaiting their moment with the Ado Annie left? I believe they won’t. I’m calling BS on drag queens for children. Call me a conservative, a MAGA, a Christian nationalist, a Trumper, or as my progressive Koolaid-drinking college friend accuses me of, a Fox News Koolaid-drinker. I’m none of the above. I’m just a liberal normie trying to be as true and level-headed as I can be about the values and beliefs I’ve held all my adult life. I was wrong to make the half-assed defense of kiddie drag shows that I did. Sincere, but wrong. I have ‘flip-flopped’ as George W. Bush would have put it. Or maybe I just evolved. The Hideous Authenticityphobia Of The Left’s Body-Modders What Would A ‘Christian’ Pride Month Look Like, After June’s? ‘Saving Normal’ Describes How Transmania Evolved, Before It Started What If The Trans Movement Evolved More Honestly? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Have we still not learned how to get along with the boys? I don’t think I could find anything more ridiculously archaic than this. Public domain photo “Hey, you want to join this?” my boss emailed me a few weeks ago. It was a women’s online networking group for IT services professionals. I checked my calendar. No, it was not 1972. “Is there a professional networking opportunity?” I asked. “We want to sell more managed services. Do you think I could find leads?” No, he just thought I might be interested. I wasn’t. Sex-segregated spaces put my brain to sleep. What’s the point? What are these gals afraid of? Mansplaining? Inappropriate comments? Andrew Tate aggressively flexing his tattooed muscles? Some dude Zooming off on-camera? I believe in only a limited need for sex-segregated groups, for trauma or emotional support. Trauma victims sometimes need a man-free safe space. Others need to just bitch. So do men (more on that shortly). Otherwise, I prefer my gatherings and groups sex-integrated. It’s 2025, girls! In a progressive world mad for ‘inclusivity’, there’s grand irony in excluding half the human race. Public domain photo from Pxhere Woman up, ladies! Radical Radha and I have written before about how diversifying the workplace is one thing, but then everyone has to get along. Especially women and men, who constitute the world’s first division of Us vs Them. Better DEI Will Teach Women How To Handle Conflict With Male Colleagues I don’t see how we can do that when we refuse to network with each other. Our polarized world has taught us to stick to our own and not even bother trying to understand someone else’s perspective. Judging males via one’s own experiences as a female, or vice versa, is ignorantly sexist. We are different, with psychological sex differences. A quick look at the headlines on gender difference articles at Science Daily indicate the many differences between men and women: How they respond to stress , that women talk more than men ( but only during certain life phases ), that the ability to better negotiate for more resources starts early with boys , and that women deal with significantly more body issues and feeling judged at the gym ( did we really need a study for this? ). Is it real or is it all in her head? Zen koan: If you’re trying to lose weight or get in shape, why aren’t you focusing on your workout rather than Barbie McPerfect and Ramboner? Several years ago I joined a women’s-only group for aspiring entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. We met at various restaurants, and the camaraderie was friendly, warm, and female. It wasn’t especially business-oriented. Frankly, few of us knew what we were doing. It was the blind leading the blind. Radha had a similar experience. Her group tended to turn into emotional support sessions. These aren’t business-related. What many self-starters need to talk about is understanding the best practices and processes for starting a business, whether they’re selling coffee online, as twin sisters in my group were doing, or starting up her own employment agency, as the leader was attempting to do. Self-starters often tend to bumble along, learning as they go, which is easier if you have a business or financial administration degree. You already know you need to develop a business idea; study the market to make sure you’re fulfilling a genuine need; create a business plan and choose a business structure; research the product or service you want to provide, and develop a business strategy. Everyone else doesn’t know this. I don’t remember what we talked about, but we didn’t talk about those things. If we had I would have stayed. It would have been relevant. I stopped going. I wondered how much more productive we’d be if men were part of the group. In the corporate world, women who want to succeed, whether to start their own business, become self-employed, or just move ahead, simply must engage with still-powerful men. They possess much of the knowledge. Many are willing to share it. Men have created the world we live in, for better as well as for worse. We often forget the first part. Radha pointed out that men in men-only groups may exclude women not because they’re trying to cling to power but because they’re afraid female joiners might be ‘woke nazis’, a not-unreasonable concern. As a result, men consolidate their power, intentionally or not, with unintentional collaboration with women. No one wants the Language or Microaggressions Police present any more than women want private Zoom messages informing them how pretty they are while they’re trying to focus on new business best practices with the IRS. Confronting conflict A couple of years ago someone asked on Reddit: The querent notes that she ‘feels more comfortable’ in a group of all women, ‘freer in her expression, more emotionally open’, and with an ability to connect better. Other responders complained about couples tending to socialize with each other in mixed groups, or having to deal with “harassment, belittlement, and mansplaning [sic]’. Or misinterpretations of friendly behavior as an invitation for a come-on. Or men not understanding that women’s experiences with work and family obligations are just different. Third-wave feminism (it should be called third-rate feminism) has taught women not to take responsibility for themselves, their feelings, or how they handle others. Men are the way they are; communicate as they do; don’t take feelings as seriously as we; don’t understand the subtle signs that a woman isn’t interested just because she smiled vaguely at him. Handling it rather than running off to your ‘safe space’ hidey-hole with your girlfriends teaches both sexes how to modify their behavior or their responses to take into account how others understand communication and respond. It opens the door for men to do the same: To politely handle misunderstandings with women, including those not caused by themselves. Women must be open to learning and modifying their behavior, too, to interact with men more effectively. It’s not all about our comfort, either. The women-only hiking group could encourage everyone to engage with everyone else on the hike, not just the folks who are like them (single, married, gay, etc.). In their community guidelines, they and business professionals could state how to comport oneself with the opposite sex to reduce the likelihood of romantic misunderstandings. To remember that this was a business group, not a dating service, so tread very, very carefully. And women need to speak up. I speak as a mouthy old broad. I’ve written about how even I, an old lady over sixty, who’s supposed to be invisible because I’m not the wank fantasy I once was, who should STFU because no one cares what an old lady thinks, is still heard whether people want to hear me or not. I make people hear me, and others can too. They can talk over and shut down mansplaining. They can learn to hold their own debating a man. They can be firm and clear about their lack of romantic interest without dragging #MeToo and the U.S. Supreme Court into it. No means no. Every single Canadian man knows what that means when he hears it. We can pass the stick or stitch ‘n’ bitch in our own groups, and after we’ve spoken with our own frankly about our fraught relationship with our father, or whether our spouse is supportive enough or not, then we can perhaps one day integrate and listen to each other with open hearts, without all the sex-based defensiveness. Richard Reeves argues in in his article The case for male spaces that feminist fear of the ‘Old Boys Club’ harms males. Women are afraid of men-only groups, he says, fearing they’re inherently sexist, when males do in fact need them for reasons other than as mini-Davos summits for Da Patriarchy. He says men-only groups function to help men develop better friendships, to support each other, and to combat loneliness. He notes that can benefit women by relieving them of relational emotional support which is still primarily female-borne. Although benefiting women is not the point, he says. This isn’t about women’s needs. For a change. Sex segregation does make sense for emotional support groups. But I still ask both parties: What about later? How about non-segregated groups so the enlightened can now hear much different stories and experiences from the other side? Just a thought for the future. Tear down the social and professional binary Radha has written extensively about the workplace problems she’s encountered that came from other women, not men. On Radically Pragmatic she’s written about accusations of being a ‘pick-me’ girl; of women undercutting her ; of how DEI ignores the many ways work colleagues can harm, discriminate against, abuse, and malign their co-workers even when they’re not white, male, or both. Pandemic isolation degraded everyone’s social skills and many of us were isolating long before COVID made it cool; the rise of sophisticated pocket phones and algo-addicting social media apps had already turned us into a nation of cell zombies. The pandemic made it much, much worse. The recent federal election illustrates just how far we’ve grown apart: Young white women continue to vote Democrat while young men of all colors moved toward the GOP, many of them citing how fed up they were with male-demonizing feminism. Random Stuff Men Say That Make Me Go, ‘WTF, Feminists?’ It doesn’t matter anymore that women were never given a fair shake to contribute, develop, produce, or co-create for thousands of years. History, oh that’s interesting. But that was then, this is now. We can’t change the past but we can change the present and future. Success coaches tell you to hobnob with the already successful. (This was what was wrong with the lady entrepreneurs group). Seek out all the accomplished , not just the ones who look like you. The professional world is highly competitive, but as Radha has written, women are no less competitive–mostly with each other–and nothing would change if men disappeared tomorrow. Let’s tear down the social and professional binary. Several years ago I was in a women-only Pagan Facebook group where I had stopped engaging because it had gone so uber-lefty. I wanted to stay, but not at the expense of shutting up to keep the peace. I tested them with an article I’d written questioning the value of women’s-only groups and whether this one should desegregate. I knew it wouldn’t go over well but I was surprised that no one liked it. Not even my privately heretical long-time Pagan friend. “I need my safe space to fight the Patriarchy,” a Pagan lady snarled. I envisioned an older woman hiding in the gutter under the sidewalk, slapping at men’s ankles as they walked by. When I finally returned to leave the Facebook group, they were planning a witchy weekend and a transwoman was complaining she didn’t feel ‘included’ in a planned ritual honoring female fertility and menstruation, since she was incapable of neither. How so like a narcissistic man to make it all about him, I thought, considering that there would be prepubertal girls and post-menopausal women taking part. But still, there he was! A man! Apparently not violating any ‘safe spaces’ or regarded as a member of Da Patriarchy! Well done, Monsieur, well done. These ladies need some male energy, and this might be a good, gently challenging start. Undercover disruption of the binary paradigm. I like it! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

There's progress in the chaos. You can see it, if you don't drink ideological/party Kool-Aid. Trump Deux is all part of The Purge. There’s much danger in the next four years, but also a lot of potential too. Photo by Mike Ribeiro at Pexels The emergence of TrumpinSloMo began days after the election. Since I didn’t vote for either party, I was disappointed in accordance with the plan. My inbox immediately filled with Substack newsletters commenting, observing, and speculating on the national mindshift. It was Morning in America again, which usually only dawned on new Democratic administrations. Even us ex-pats felt it. Though we knew the Republicans had taken both houses, that Project 2025 was devised by Christian crazies, that the malignant psychopath with no concern about re-election would be a thousand times more dangerous… January 20th seemed a very long time away. Once you move past the OMFG in the unconstitutional maelstrom Trump has wrought, you find a glimmer of hope—for down the road. Way down. TrumpinSloMo Woke had finally broke, like a high fever. The sharks circled, sensing weakness. Even before Trump began conveyor-belting executive dis/orders to restore ‘free speech’, women’s rights, plastic straws, English, et al, we normies reclaimed our power from the woke. People spoke out and praised Trump and the Republicans, even those who hadn’t voted for them. “I’ll restore women’s rights to all-female sports teams,” he promised, and we cheered. That was the 70%’s hope for Trump II: That he would at least dial back the horrific excesses of ‘progressive’ authoritarianism. Fascist, indeed. It takes several million to know one. He vomited Executive Orders. He unleashed a rabid Muskrat on the federal government chasing waste in the blindest, most unstrategic manner possible. The Medicaid system failed , briefly. Thousands of federal employees hurriedly updated their resumes. Trump started speaking first sort of jokingly, then more seriously, about taking over other countries. Image by Rebekah Wilce at Sourcewatch . Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike It’s been mass chaos, and abjectly terrifying for those already suffering from hardcore TDS, especially the low-information kind . For the nuanced who look for multiple views, who want to know if Trump is really that bad, if he’s really serious about this or that, or if he can really do what he says he’s going to do, we look for the good that comes from any of this. Often, the discoveries are slow-moving. Trump expresses or does something batshit crazy, and we’re horrified. OMG he can’t be serious about that, can he??? Then later you find the shitbar that makes you smile. That’s the TrumpinSloMo. “Wait for it!” The TrumpinSloMo of Gaza One night I checked CNN just before going to bed—always a bad idea. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “He’s gonna do WHAT with Gaza? Is he trying to start World War III???” The next morning I woke up, knew that dumbass Mar-A-Gaza plan was never going to happen, and then thought, “Hmmmm. Trump’s right about the real estate. It’s beautiful, or it would be if Hamas wasn’t there to schedule regular death and destruction with or without IDF help. Why don’t the Gazans do that themselves? Maybe not turn it into the French Riviera but as part of the Holy Land they could build a huge tourism industry. With yeah, great hotels and swimming pools. They get to make the rules, decide whether to allow bikinis or serve alcohol. If only—” —If only they weren’t batshit crazy themselves, with too many unwilling to share the land with Israel and handle their own state and affairs, but if they did it right they could become self-sustaining. The Gazan shitbar was Trump’s perfect point that the Gazans are sitting on a gold mine. He doesn’t want them to run it, of course. He wants the riches for himself. But point taken. He revealed the question we all needed to voice: Why don’t the Gazans do this? Apparently, Trump got the Egyptians a-thinkin’ the same thing . They’ve proposed their own very rough draft for Gazan self-sustainability that doesn’t include Hamas or Trump. The Arab League likes it. We’ll see if it goes anywhere. But it’s a good start, and it started with Trump. The Trumpenfreude When Trump realized who he was dealing with— the Gazans, ffs!— he spoke vaguely of moving them somewhere, location unspecified, where they’d build a beautiful new place for them, it was gonna be the best, like no place anyone had ever seen before, and they’d be very very happy there. This was his Plan B since Egypt and Jordan were like, when he suggested they take them in, Are you out of your fucking mind? Those people are big-T Trouble wherever they go!!! The Gazans, he planned, would be rounded up like cattle in cars (yes, deliberate Holocaust imagery) and taken off to—someplace else. “Ethnic cleansing,” his vehement critics called it. “Not genocide,” he insisted. The smile returned to my face. How does it feel to be on the other end of the ethnic cleansing wank dream, habibis? “From the river to the sea…Ahhhhh—” Trumpenfreude. There are two kinds. One is when ‘progressives’ find themselves—or their highly questionable friends—treated the way they’ve treated others. Like when their free speech is suppressed. Like when they get cancelled for saying something fascist. Mar-A-Gaza Trumpenfreude is when antisemitic progressives and their single-mindedly violent Islamofascist friends are made to feel the fear they’ve caused so many others. The other kind is when Trump supporters get what they voted for. Breaking down the DOGE shitbar Trump designated Deputy DOGE to run his Muskdozer through the federal government. It’s been horrifying, except for the part where they eliminated DEI. That was no shitbar, that was a nice yummy go-fuck-yourselves-you-blacksplaining-racist-grifters chocolate-and-vanilla ice cream dessert that said, “You’ve already got lots of equality and diversity. Now go update your LinkedIn profile, Sparky!” My fellow ex-Dem rebels and I smiled to think of DEI ‘experts’ on the unemployment line, finding there are no longer any positions available for professional bigots. After the shock wore off, I saw the glimmer of the objective underneath: Increasing government efficiency. Bear with me here, because I don’t justify how they’re doing it. I asked myself, What would the Democrats have done if they’d won? You know the answer. Fuck all. Cleaning up government waste has never been a priority for them, and had the voters named it as their top priority for the next President, the Dems would have done a one-twentieth-assed job at best. They’d have politely approached, trimmed the rainbow-frosted doughnuts budget for privilege acknowledgement diversity sessions with their manicure scissors, and called it a day. “Nothing more to see here! Behold our sleek and svelte operationally-efficient federal government!” The Democratic bloat reduction project before and after. "Fixed it for ya!" Public domain imag e from Pxhere In many of Trump’s craziest acts, and his looniest suggestions, and his most deranged plans dreamed up in that suspiciously overcooked brain, there is almost always something that makes us normies smile, even as we feel horror and anxiety at the way he’s destroying what’s left of America and democracy. So what has Trump’s Fearless Weeder found so far? We don’t know much. Musk doesn’t document well, and many of his fraud claims have already been debunked , or put into context, by fact-checking organizations. We don’t know. The ‘savings’ we allegedly have come directly from the White House and DOGE, and without documentation, they could be fiction. They found waste and fraud, for sure. But they’re breaking everything in the process. Chainsaws aren’t any better than manicure scissors. Elon Musk Archives - Factcheck.org Elon Musk Articles - Snopes.com We’ll only find out later, probably much later, exactly what they got right and wrong when and if adult supervision ever returns to the U.S. government. DOGE doesn’t even know when to stay put and handle a big fat enchilada when it sees it. The Muskrat’s Bratzkrieg mucked around in the U.S. Treasury Department for about fifteen minutes and got expelled from the databases, quite rightly. They moved on to less combative quesadillas. But Treasury is the hugest enchilada, whose fraud and waste the GAO (Government Accountability Office) estimated costs taxpayers an eye-watering $233B to $521B in taxpayer money every single year. Instead of doing some real good, Musk prefers to Trump-et the nonsensical Pride and DEI expenditures he found. Many good agencies and departments in the government exist for very good reasons but have become bloated and definitely need some Jenny Craig. Musk doesn’t know how to conduct proper cost-cutting efforts; look at the mess he made of Twitter. He and Trump are men of action; not rational strategy. Trump needs results now, to show his base he’s not some stinking Democrat who can’t get anything done—a not-unrealistic perception based on a lot of historical Democratic inaction, incompetence and inability to make hard decisions because someone, somewhere, raises a fuss . But there’s the TrumpinSloMo. As poorly implemented as it is, the TrumpRat is exposing a lot of fault lines in the federal government. It may take years to fix but it’ll probably work much better. The Trumpenfreude will arrive shortly when Americans begin to see and feel the pain of the ridiculously irresponsible way these two are destroying highly complex service systems that many Americans don’t realize how much they critically depend on. If the MuskRat MAGAs succeed in cutting Medicaid, millions of Americans, already budget-strapped and suffering from tariff-induced Trumpflation will have to scramble to keep their parents and other aging relatives off the street. Many of them will have voted for this. The plan could be to privatize everything, the ultimate historical Republican wank dream. Democrats have been warning for years that government-provided services are much cheaper. Republicans have denied that, saying privatization is cheaper. Who’s telling the truth, the bureaucrat-pushing Democrats or the pro-capitalist Republicans salivating at raising service prices on a whim? Hope you can afford fire department and police services. The Trumpenfreuders won’t let the chumps who voted for it claim they didn’t know he’d lie to them during a campaign which will be his last. They all knew exactly who they were voting for. They boasted about ‘voting for the convicted felon’. They rubbed it in libs’ faces. MAGA voters are Trump’s bitches. Trumpenfreude. If you’re a Dem who’s sitting there with your arms crossed with an unpleasant smirk on your face experiencing Harrisfreude, just remember: You campaigned hard for this, too, with the worst candidate and campaign platform in several epochs. To sum up We’re in a Crisis, and it’s actually—natural. The TrumpTrain and similarly wider anti-immigrant election victories in Europe and elsewhere signal a global change—a purging, if you will, of the old guards. It’s beginning to make sense, as I work my way through Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End. This is the most recent edition of the book, in which Howe describes a time period called a saeculum, which is roughly a human lifetime, 80-100 years. It’s divided into four orderly eras or ‘seasons’. Each season takes 20-25 years, the length of a human generation. Howe traces this evolution through the last 500 years of history. He claims we’ve completed High, Awakening, and Unraveling, and have already entered the Fourth ‘Crisis’ Turning, a highly dangerous time of civic upheaval, traumatic and transformative. I’m about two-thirds through. According to the inside blurb, the book states that the “polarization, the growing threats of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even ushering in America’s next golden age.” The last great Crisis was the world war in 1945. Then we entered a period of growth and stability (High). Then Awakening and unrest (the Sixties and Seventies). Then the Unraveling, when individualism triumphs over institutions (!), and now—the purging of the old ways. Do the math. I suspect it’s a mass purge of the failures of both liberalism and conservatism, capitalism and socialism, a bitch-slap to everyone who thought the problems were brought by others, not themselves. Some or none may re-emerge in ten years. Whatever does won’t look the same. What we’re seeing now is the worsening, and it will get much worse before it gets better. And it may be global. I’d like to think if we just sit tight for 7-10 more years this will all pass away like the world’s worst collective food poisoning, which would be comforting except that few lived comfortably through the horrors of World War II, when they hadn’t even processed the collective mass trauma from World War I, and now we have the potential for nuclear war. Maybe Trump is the purge we need. Or the poorly chosen road. It helps to understand it’s all kind of cyclically reincarnative—‘This shit has happened before and it will happen again’. Trump, Putin, and JinPing may be our historical Ex-Lax, or they may be writing humanity’s concluding chapter. We’ll have to wait and see. Keep watching for the TrumpinSloMo, which may be the harbingers of better times. Here’s a final TrumpinSloMo. Trump just offered us normies a new yummy dessert not unwrapped in shit: He’s threatening to cut off $5B in aid to the antisemitism factory Columbia University if they don’t knock it off with all the Jew hate. He’s fighting antisemitism, which the Democrats would NEVER have done. I can’t find a goddamn thing wrong with that. Hamaslove is why we hate the progressives. Purging. Trumpenfreude. TrumpinSloMo. It’s good for you, but it also may kill you. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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What I learned with my top-performing Substack article is many expect me to loathe and detest all Muslims uncritically. I'd rather my loathing be justified . Am I supposed to hate these Muslims too? I know, there are no women in the picture. They may be off-camera. But it's ballsy of them to challenge their religion like this. It's a start. CC-BY SA 3.0 image by Alif Laam Meem on Wikipedia A month ago my article 2025 Is Not Shaping Up To Be A Good Year For Muslims became my top-performing Substack, in which I noted that with the rapid decline of woke progressivism in the face of a wildly un/popular new President, we now have the freedom to publicly discuss what was once verboten in polite progressive company, if that’s not already an oxymoron. Which is that the religion of Islam, and its well over two billion followers, are seriously lagging behind the rest of the, frankly, more civilized world, and we need to start dissecting it publicly because Muslims are never going to change their reactionary, tribalist ways until we grab them by the short ‘n’ curlies. I wrote at length about the UK’s hardly-new ongoing Pakistani Muslim rape gang scandal, regularly flaring up like a bad case of genital herpes. I spoke of Islamic-supported global antisemitism, ongoing terrorist attacks in democratic countries, sometimes but not always perpetrated by immigrants. I addressed whether we need to be stricter in our immigration standards for people from a clearly highly volatile part of the world. One of my readers, YourUnclePedro , summed it up: ‘Someone once likened Islam to the dumbest kid in class who lags behind everyone and vents his frustrations through violence and simply causing problems wherever he goes.” The most interesting comments came from the blanket-haters. The subject of Islam generates extremely strong feelings including some obviously justified fear, and my critics were many. But as I repeatedly pointed out, there are over two and a half billion Muslims in the world and they’re not all sex trafficking little white girls, convening to discuss how to impose Shariah law on Wisconsin, running over partygoers with cars or blowing things up. Muslims, like all other groups of people and cultures, have their good folks and their bad and every shade in between. What was most notable about my negative commenters was how we mostly agreed that Islam has a serious violence problem and Muslims overall need to be held accountable for problems rooted and codified in their religion. My article was 80% critical of Islam and 20% praiseworthy or just a reminder that not all Muslims suck. What outraged the outraged the most was the 20%, not the 80%. What is Islamophobia, and why are people so fearful? Wikipedia describes Islamophobia as, “the irrational fear of, hostility towards, or hatred against the religion of Islam or Muslims in general.” It further remarks that it’s “primarily a form of religious or cultural bigotry; and people who harbour such sentiments often stereotype Muslims as a geopolitical threat or a source of terrorism.” I purposely chose Wikipedia’s definition because it’s famously ‘progressive’ left. I agree with calling Islamophobia ‘irrational’, ‘hostile’ and against the religion and its practitioners ‘in general’. This is what I found not only in the comments on my article, but in a separate non-related Notes thread in which I got challenged by many Islam critics. But, Wikipedia ignores how pervasive Islamic terrorism has been throughout the world, so one must question whether fear of it is a ‘stereotype’ considering how much Islam has earned it. However, it’s important to note (Trigger warning for woke righties: I’m about to say something nice) that many Islamic states have joined the effort to reduce or defeat Islamic terrorists. As CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) notes, it’s mostly a problem in places where the government is unable or unwilling to meet their population’s critical needs. Donald Trump’s brilliant idea to cut foreign aid means ISIS or China will be the good guys feeding poor families, not the United States. Oh, that’ll work out great for us geopolitically. It’s interesting, though, that religiously-motivated terrorist acts seem mostly motivated by the Islamic faith. Christianity stopped being the scourge of Europe hundreds of years ago. Hindu violence is primarily regional, based on Hindu nationalism and mostly targets Muslims. The ongoing violence in Israel is also regional, although strong feelings about which side is ‘right’ are universal. Gazan complaints about ‘genocide’ and casualties come from primarily Muslim Gazans, pretty famously terrorists themselves , alliance with Hamas optional. At any rate, only Islam exports terrorism globally. Many of my critics, Islamophobic or not, pointed out how the faithful are commanded in the Koran to commit countless violent acts and other human rights violations. They’re correct; too many Muslims today subscribe to those ugly and barbaric human violations. So, if Islamophobia is an irrational fear of Islam and its adherents, what would you call the rational fear of it? How about Islamojustifobia: The justified fear of Islamic extremism. The fuzzier terrorist-ish types The fuzzier terrorist threats come from Muslims who say nothing or financially support it, even if they never trigger a suicide bomb. Muslim lesbian feminist Irshan Manji details the Muslim ‘buts’ in her book Allah, Liberty & Love: The Courage To Reconcile Faith and Freedo m. The Muslim ‘but’ folk are the kind of people who say they don’t support some bad thing “but….” signalling they’re about to support that bad thing. “I don’t support terrorism BUT….” They can sort of, you know, sometimes see the point? The exceptions? Like for the Gazans? Or against Americans? Or, of course, need we even say this, Jews? They make excuses. The ‘buts’ are ‘fuzzy terrorists’. Islamojustifobics differ from Islamophobics in that they can distinguish between the ‘good Muslims’ and the ‘bad Muslims’. They recognize the bomb throwers; the rogue drivers; the global recruiters; the ‘good Muslims’ who emigrate to get away from their own crazies but who may still raise children who aspire to be terrorists—perhaps by teaching them to hate Jews from birth as is common in many of their cultures, or whose children are radicalized by friends; or ‘progressive’ anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-West education. The pre-requisites for the terrorist profession are low: All you have to do is hate Jews, the West and its freedoms. Bonus: Maybe you ideate suicide. You can no longer detect an Islamic terrorist by their skin color or telltale keffiyeh. They come in all colors and may not tote a gun, and may be much prettier. The radicalization of antisemitic college students by October 7th has been heavily organized and facilitated by female students. Oh, the irony for a famously misogynist religion. Or, what patsies for Islamofascist extremism those little ‘antifascist’ girly-boos are. The ‘progressive’ left has long had a hard-on for Islam, despite its infamous misogyny and homophobia. But, you never know what terrorism your other neighbors support. Whaddabout the non-Islamic fuzzies? Many Irish-Americans who don’t identify as terrorists or supporters nevertheless financially supported the IRA during its heyday. Black Lives Matter supports Hamas. Your ‘anti-fascist’ teenage headcase neighbor across the street might be building bombs in his basement or ordering weaponry to blast the local mosque or synagogue. Or, maybe your neighborhood terrorist is that creepy dude down the street who pays especial attention to small children. The difference between Islamophobes and Islamojustifobes Anti-Muslim incidents have risen around the world since 10/7, but nowhere close to the level of anti-semitism (Thanks, Islam! Not.) But the backlash has begun; several European and the United States have voted in anti-immigration leaders. There will be plenty of talk about what to do about Muslim immigrant wannabes. Or what to do about the ones already there. I wonder if Trump will try a Muslim ban again; he might succeed this time in a more broken, more lawless America. Islamojustifobics, though, always remember that people are individuals. Islamophobes, on the other hand, read the Koran, or read about the Koran, or believe what their friend told them on Twitter about it and think they know the religion when in fact what they know is what someone else says about it, factually or not. They ignore (or are ignorant of) progressive Muslims and their non-profits encouraging adoption of progressive Islam. To be fair, we don’t always see them. It’s not as safe to be a public Muslim as much as it once was, either. Progressive Muslims may be hiding in greater numbers than we know because now they don’t have only their own crazies to worry about, but the far right’s too. ‘Progressive’ lefties are useless, openly justifying and collaborating with Islamic terrorism. International students now face potential deportation from a Trump Executive Order. I have to admit: Cry me a Jordan river about how your free speech is being shut down, bitches. Trumpenfreude. Frankly, I want these holy terrors gone, too. These particular Muslims aren’t civilized enough to live in a free, and, at the moment, still democratic country. Enough is enough. Countries have the right to decide who to let in, and keep in, their countries. I said that even as I waited on my Canadian immigrant application. I would never have snuck across the border. Islamophobics want to eliminate all Muslim immigration. I want to eliminate or prevent only the obviously bad guys. I favor much stricter immigration requirements for Muslims because of their clear violence and radicalization problems. They need to be scrutinized much more closely and if we can’t be sure about a particular immigrant— REJECTED. This will send a very clear message to the Muslim world that the West is sick of their shit. That we’re tired of Muslim immigrants coming to our countries and radicalizing others. You MUST be willing to adopt and live with our democratic values or stay home. They demand exactly the same of us when we move to their countries. Trump has emboldened the UnWoke to step out of their hidey-holes and make their opinions known. The wokies no longer have the power to shut down Islam critics, even though it’s only a short-lived honeymoon as the MAGAs are blanket-hating Islamophobes and we may all have to return underground soon. It may be rooted in Islamojustifobia, but rank, non-discriminating fear is always simply—phobic. What to do Moderate and progressive Muslims can join their non-Muslim allies to fight Islamic extremism in their communities and the greater MAGA threat on the outside. We’ll also need to address our ‘progressive’ terrorist collaborators. While Muslims need to own their members’ misdeeds, the rest of us must hold the far left accountable for its willful blindness against crimes planned or perpetrated by Muslims. You can’t be a #MeToo feminist when you’re collaborating with some rapes. We need to directly confront progressives’ racist willingness to hold only white men accountable for sex crimes. We need to hold them especially accountable for their own terrorist crimes and acts against Jews. Progressives fancy themselves warriors against divisive societal evils while perpetrating those exact same evils themselves. We have to go after their teachers too, and the education system that indoctrinates children with Israel-erasing, anti-white, misogyny-apologetic nonsense. We must call out their performative outrage every time a Trumper shoots the Nazi salute, while waving their ‘I Stand With Hamas’ signs at the ‘pro-Palestinian’ rally. A quick way to identify an Islamophobe is by her support for her own side’s terrorism or potential for it. Many of those fearful of ‘Shariah’ law are those who tried to impose ‘Christian’ law on America during the Reagan-Bush years and who are behind Project 2025. Does the suspected Islamophobe fear all religious authoritarianism, or just someone else’s? Because true anti-authoritarians fear all of it, and the rest are blind to their own dictatorial impulses. I prefer to be Islamojustifobic. I live in a neighborhood full of Muslims and I walk around fearlessly. I probably couldn’t in their own countries, especially as a blonde white woman. But they accept they can’t act like that here. I won’t be able to expect that level of non-violence the next time I visit the Ignited States, if I even do in the next four years. Goddess knows I won’t be flying anywhere there. Islamic extremism is a genuine threat, but any ideology taken too far is, too. Like woke progressivism. And now, TrumpMAGAism. Let’s resolve to be Islami justif obic so we can fight the right Muslims and leave the rest alone to live their lives like the normal people they actually are. Yes really. Regardless of what you hear on your favorite Islam-hysterical podcast. The decent ones don’t make the news because they’re too busy being all normal and shit. Just like us. Be Islamojustifobic rather than Islamophobic. Fight all extremism. Because if your kid is blown up on a bus your kid’s going to be dead regardless of whether the terrorist hates Jews, Americans, ‘libtards’ or ‘fascists’. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! 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Radical Radha and I radically look at TDS: Who's got it (almost everybody), how badly, and most importantly, what you can do for your mental health CC0 public domain imag e from Pxhere Radical Radha at Radically Pragmatic , who did something truly radical this week (I’ll let you find out in her piece) radically doesn’t read the news which is why her Trump Derangement Syndrome is markedly lower than mine. Let’s let her speak first since she’s the Voice of Reason. If you want to know how you can keep up on the news without going all Hulk Smash on the latest outrage du jour, check out my thoughts after hers. RADHA: If you live in the U.S. post-Trump inauguration, chances are you’re either livid or ecstatic. But there’s a Third Way: Don’t give a f**k. Those of us who refuse to watch the news are the true radicals because we’re not giving in to the attention economy. You think the #Resistance media is angry about Trump? No, they’re excited to have glued eyeballs for another four years in a time of audience erosion because of Substack and other platforms. The Resistance feeds on manufactured outrage as Trump feeds on trolling them. It’s a truly symbiotic relationship. When they opened the last administration by banning Muslims, they masterfully trolled the left. I fell for it and protested at an airport where zero Muslims were being detained. I still have an embarrassing picture of the sign I made to remind me how much of a sheep I was back then. So, don’t fall for it. I recognize you are probably worried about your 401k. Harris was the perfect Sacred Victim for the left to put up for sacrifice and then crow about how she was a victim of racism and sexism. It was a masterful trolling of those who think immutable identity isn’t a qualifier for a job, much less for the most power ever. The left now has the perfect victim narrative to fall back on whenever you criticize them or Trump. If you criticize the Democrats’ choices leading up to the election, you are deemed ‘unhelpful’ at best and racist/sexist at worst. If you criticize Trump, you are admonished for not supporting Harris. But what if you called their bluff and resisted their enforcement of feminized managerial capitalism? But what if you called their bluff and resisted their enforcement of feminine behavioral norms on the public sphere? Could the culture change? The woke are going to double down on their version of reality: That women are victims and Trump is the ultimate bully. Don’t let that fool you. They depend on the presence of a boogeyman like Trump to claim victim status. They will be even more zealous in their policing of manners and speech like women have done since the beginning of time; indeed, feminism isn’t a break from the way women have evolved but a logical development based on the mass entry of women into the workforce. Managerial capitalism needed an ideological mechanism of sustenance, and work-as-feminist-liberation provided it. This regime is held up by ideological purity tests to enforce group loyalty. Such movements intensify in times of cultural and economic turmoil. Now would be the time to delete your Twitter profile and get off social media. It is the provenance of the rigidly ideological professional class woman. Social media is symbiotic with modern feminized managerial capitalism. White-collar women on Instagram and Twitter are just waiting to burn heretics at the stake; don’t let it happen to you. The bullies will intensify their social policing, and you don’t want to be around for their antics. However, now is the time to insist on intellectual honesty and independence. There will be much pressure to conform to the commands of the mean girls of fourth-wave feminism. But they depend on us all backing down because of reputation destruction. What if we were to refuse? What if, when they call us racist and sexist, we choose not to care? What if we recognized their arguments as fallacies that have no place in the public sphere? What if we told professional-class women that they were wrong? Oh, I dream of such a world. I stopped being anonymous this week because they don’t have power over me. Yes, we may have an economic downturn. Some of us are better positioned to weather that than others; an unfortunate truth. I don’t want to pretend everything will be fine when it likely won’t. But, this happened because enough people decided to punish the moralizing wealthy women who attempted to impose their views on society. To turn the tide, we have to depose them. Also, don’t read the news. It’s bad for your mental health, you can’t do anything about it, and your time is better spent trying to create the kind of world you want to live in. Volunteer, run for local office, talk to people and try to change their minds (the most difficult of the three). We will survive this as we survived last time, and after this he can’t be president again. We hope. Free for commercial use photo by Martin Vorel at Libreshot GSL: Whether you’re a liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, an ex-Democrat, or living in North America (yes, Canada too!), you’re probably just as tired of dealing with Trump Derangement Syndrome as we are. You’re arguably Trump-deranged yourself unless you’re mega-MAGA. Neither of us voted for Trump although Radical Radha has a somewhat higher opinion of him than I. I occasionally suffer mostly private bouts of TDS when I’ve spent too much time on ExTwitter (10+ seconds) but then I shut it down and remind myself: This is the cesspool of humanity. The digital Australia degenerate dump. (Sorry, Oz, I know you’re a lot more than an ex-repository for criminals today! You’re descendants of degenerates, and your land is populated by vicious baby-eating dingoes, killer snakes, giant spiders, and flowers that can kill if you look at them the wrong way. But we will always love you as long as you continue to speak so adorably!) But similarly, there are people on ExTwitter who want to kill you because you don’t agree with them on absolutely everything they have an opinion about. The worst of the insanely poisonous wildlife found on social media are those infected with TDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome. Know Your TDS! Political derangement syndromes have been around since the beginning of democracy, and probably before. In 46 BC, the Roman senator and statesman Cato the Younger committed suicide after descending into alcoholism caused by Caesar Derangement Syndrome . In a story you’ve probably heard before, he couldn’t stand the leader who he and his buddy Marcus Tullius Cicero believed had ‘bamboozled’ the lower classes and waged warfare on open government and even worse, getting himself appointed, literally, ‘dictator for life’ (dictator perpetuo) . And we all know how that ended. Cicero, too, considered ending it all— what was there left to live for??? ROME IS F**KED! --but the adherent to Stoic philosophy rethought his position and went on to produce great works including Julius Caesar Was A Big Fat Idiot before Marc Antony put out a hit on him. Okay, I’m kidding about the book. Before today, we all knew people with Harris Derangement Syndrome, Clinton Derangement Syndrome (1992-2000, 2016 campaign) and Bush Derangement Syndrome. My mother and uncle warned us never to mention FDR in front of my grandfather as he still had, thirty years later, then-undiagnosed Roosevelt Derangement Syndrome. I believe there are two kinds of TDS: The justified, and the over-the-top. There’s genuine justification for fear of the Trumpocalypse, Part II. The man is the Lord of Chaos. He’s done exactly what his terrified mostly left-leaning critics claimed he’d do, work towards becoming a dictator perpetuo . The Constitution, democracy, and law be damned. The need for well-designed and informed strategies to clean up what is admittedly a mismanaged federal government be damned. Trump and his evil henchman Elon Musk are ripping through undocumented government ‘waste’ like Grant took Richmond. Let’s not forget Project 2025, the Christian Nationalist manifesto to create a religious dictatorship where the progressive left failed. Some of what we’ve seen so far is straight out of the document Trump claims to have known nothing about. Although many of Trump’s actions hail straight out of Batshit Crazy Central, with zero prior mention in either Da Project or his campaign promises. Mostly, his threats to conquer everybody in a 19th-century-reminiscent orgy of manifest destiny. His previously unexpressed desires to Make America Great Again include turning Canada into a 51st state, taking Greenland from Denmark, reclaiming the Panama Canal and turning the Holy Land into a haven for the super-rich when they get bored with Dubai. So yeah, there’s some real justification for a fearful TDS, especially if you don’t live in America. The other kind is what might be termed Low Information TDS, characterized by people whose opinions are formed by questionably factual sources, hysterical podcasts and ExTwitter, from which Trump pinched his Evil Henchman Da Muskrat. These TDSers are the folks who make less of a rational case for why Trump is going to destroy democracy and quite possibly bring about the Big Crunch/End Of The Universe early. We’re not saying Trump won’t do that, you understand, but we think it will take longer than four years, and we prefer our TDS highly reliably-sourced. If your Trump-deranged friends and family are getting their information from Alternet , Huffington Post or MSNBC , their assessments are probably about as politically realistic as Cato Junior’s rants on a massive mead bender. Unless you’re a billionaire or a homeless dude, you probably have some skin in the game if you live in Trumptopia. You’re probably, if you’re being honest, a bit TDS-y yourself, at least sometimes. And you may have very good reasons for wanting to keep up with the news, which means we might as well make it the most accurately-sourced TDS we can. Here’s how: Recalibrate your news consumption Consume your news from the most reliable sources you can find. I like the source aggregatror Media Bias Fact Check . They have a ‘Bias Category’ menu item. Click ‘ Least Biased ’ on the dropdown menu for a list of what is, at the moment, the most opinion-free sources MBFC finds. Never assume just because your source passes muster that it will forever; during Trumpocalypse The Prequel I fired CNN and adopted Associated Press , which today has slipped a little on both bias and factualism. Although they’re an IFCN (International Fact-Checking Network) fact-checker, MBFC notes the AP uses somewhat more left-loaded language and dings them for failing a fact check. I myself will ding MBFC a bit for stating IFCN utilizes “pro-science sources such as the American Academy of Pediatrics ,” which I can tell you is still pushing science-free gender transition nonsense for children. So even MBFC can get it wrong. Another bias-control website that claims to “break free from algorithms,” is Ground News . It comes as a basic (free) and ‘pro’ (fee) app you can download onto your mobile to check for bias and receive multiple perspectives on stories and issues you won’t get from most single news sites. And as for the IFCN, it’s a ten-year-old fact-checking site that’s considered one of the best, part of the Poynter Institute which is a non-profit newsroom and journalism training center that strives to promote highly factual news reporting eliminating whatever bias one can, including with chemotherapy when necessary. Human-run organizations, though, are never 100% bias-free and that includes the IFCN, so never rely on one particular fact-checker to get everything right with zero bias. I also like Snopes and Politifact . One last thing: The Low-information TDSers ignore the checks and balances in the government, however crippled they’ve been for many years, not just from the TrumpRat wrecking ball. They ignore stuff like: Wiser courts are already putting the brakes on some of Trump’s Executive Disorders. Ending ‘birthright citizenship’ ended like a day later, ruled by a federal court as unconstitutional. Others have been put on hold, like his orders to return transgender prisoners to male prisons. The Muskrat and his cybercherries have been ordered out of the Treasury Department datacenter like naughty ‘90s teenage hackers. The LITDS’s also fail to understand the GOP isn’t monolithic in its support of Trump. While Trump meets with Putin to ‘solve’ the Ukraine crisis sans Ukraine, Europe is meeting similarly to discuss the US’s place in the world without the US. Canada is doubling down and even the seals in Greenland have donned frickin’ lasers on their heads. Much can happen and much will in the next few months. The highly discerning TDSer should wait and see. Julius Caesar was assassinated by others afraid of his power gluttony, his self-created dictator perpetuo and the fear he might crown himself king of Rome (wouldn’t that, though, be overkill at this point?) Someone else might well heed that lesson. The funeral pyre upon which the dead Caesar burned. Roman forum in Rome. Photo by the author Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Not all progressives are narrative-bound wokies, clinging to clearly wrong-headed policies to avoid being 'wrong'. Some are simply--newslessly clueless Listen, dude. Left-wing hate speech is so over. Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels I learned something interesting recently about certain progressives. They’re not always willfully ignorant, like the diehard allies of the dudes-in-dresses set, currently rending their robes and gnashing their teeth over Trump’s much-needed rollback of The (Democratic) Patriarchy . (Oh, the irony.) Sometimes these progressives can’t fix what they can’t see. The willfully clueless carefully avoids certain sources of information lest he start thinking too much, and then expressing thoughts that won’t them get invited to the good parties anymore. Wokeness is a problem on the right too, with the rise of their accompanying snowflakes. But not all progressives are insulating themselves, necessarily, from challenges to their belief system or are rigid dogmatics. Some avoid the news, period. Because they find it all depressing. So, I called my old college buddy the other night He, like myself, has always been reliably liberal. We dated, then continued to hang out together during the Reagan years, and we weren’t fans. We lived where Christian fundamentalists were constantly accosting you to get you to accept their personal Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, as your own. That’s the way they always phrased it, “Our Lord and personal Saviour, Jesus Christ.” I always thought it made Jesus sound like the ‘personal pan pizzas’ Pizza Hut was advertising at the time. Every time they said ‘personal Saviour Jesus Christ,” I got hungry for pizza. Sometimes we’d visit a beer dive in town dating back to the hippie days, which looked about 392 years older. We’d get drunk on cheap beer, scrutinize the ancient graffiti carved into the wooden tables, benches and walls, and bitch about Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Ed Meese, Nancy’s largely laughable Just Say No campaign, and Bill Bennett, the dumbass Christian head of the Department of Education, purporting to improve American ejimakation with Personal Pan Pizza Jesus. Or whatever cockamamie new idea the sorta fuzzyish President championed, and whether Nancy cleared it first with her astrologer . I could always count on Dean to be liberal, and he was when we reconnected on Da Internetz twenty years ago. Now we bitched about Bush The Sequel and his dumbass war with Saddam, long-distance. We weren’t fans. In recent years, though, he’s pushed back a little. Not because he got more conservative, as many people do as they move into and beyond middle age, but because he seemed sort of vaguely woke. But not crazy-ass. That would be his woke fanatic friend who was my friend too until she defriended me over an article she called ‘transphobic’. It was pretty arguably one of the least-critical arguments about transgenderism I ever made—in fact, I claimed it could be a force for good. What’s So Terrible About Race-Changers Like Rachel Dolezal? But you know how the indoctrinated get, MAGA or Loony Left. In the course of our more recent conversation—and since November 5th, for Americans, it invariably centers around OMFG! —I came to realize why Dean sometimes went a little quiet on me when I espoused liberal-but-not-woke ideas. He hasn’t been keeping up with the news. For years. He’s not completely blind but he’s missed a lot of the culture war nonsense. To his credit, he’s spent his time much more productively than many retired people. He reads beaucoup books. Good ones too, usually on politics and history. And not pop-political everyone-is-right-wing-except-us crap. He delves into subjects like how various wars started, and biographies of people he finds interesting. So his liberalism is, I now recognize, where mine was about 5-7 years ago before the progressive left went so undeniably wonky. When we had to address the growing cognitive dissonance we felt talking to people who expressed ideas we liked and were usually in sync with, but who now seemed a little weird and ‘off’. But we couldn’t quite put our finger on why. Like when I first learned about transfolk but didn’t know enough about them to do anything other than accept them. I accepted gays, lesbians, bi’s, polys, and friends with weird sexual practices as long as they didn’t talk to me about them, so, if someone wants to be the opposite sex, yay for you! It seemed weird that it turned into a thing, where, like, everyone and their brother (or was that originally his sister?) were ‘transing’, but I didn’t care until progressives insisted I go along with things I knew to be untrue, like that transwomen are the same as biological women. I sort of half-assed went along with it to be inclusive, like a good liberal; after all, the right couldn’t stand these people and some of them still hadn’t gotten over gay marriage, a law that doesn’t force them to marry gayly. I still value inclusiveness, but it was the gender identity movement that ‘woke’ me to the realization that inclusivity requires boundaries. This, and other out-of-date beliefs Dean still held, like that only the right censors and bans books, that authoritarianism is only on their side, and What do you have against Kamala Harris anyway? Whaddaya mean you didn’t vote for her? clarified to me that Dean wasn’t woke, he just had no idea what our side had been up to for the last fifteen years. Identifying your own dumbassery Dean doesn’t follow the news anymore because “It’s too depressing.” I get it. I stopped following the news for awhile years ago for the same reason, especially during Trump I: You Had No Idea This Was A Prequel, Did You. Also, Dean’s gotta live there in Fundamentalist Republican Hell, not me. He is, like most of us, just a person wanting to live his life without drama. He’s retired. He doesn’t have to deal with a soul-sucking job anymore and now he gets to do every day what he loves, reading and watching movies. He’s not watching Fox News, listening to the manosphere, and jumping on X, Outrage Central, to freak out about the latest fake or wildly exaggerated news (No, Trump never suggested feeding migrant children to alligators). I’ve got two countries to keep track of so I don’t spend as much time on American media, but I’m not retired. Also, I’m not sure who to trust anymore because mass media has gone from superficial and biased during Trump I to being unable to tell the difference between a real news story and the Babylon Bee today. Dumping unwilling Gazans somewhere else and turning their land into Mar-A-Gaza sounds like satirical fake news. Dean agreed to let me send him a whack of my articles specifically addressing the issues I felt he was misinformed about, and I did, expecting he wouldn’t read them, but he did admit at the end that he hadn’t researched our previous conversations before because, “I don’t know, maybe I just don’t want my beliefs challenged.” That’s more integrity than you customarily find with most. I didn’t handle my end of the conversation very well. I had that I’m so tired of educating people moment, and sighed kind of condescendingly sometimes. Later, I reminded myself this was exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, educate people, and it’s never effective when you put other people down or make them feel lesser than you. (Raise your hand if a DEI workshopper has ever convinced you that you’re a supremacist white devil.) I sent him an email several days later, apologizing for my attitude and explaining more plainly, and with less superiority, what he’s been missing and how what he thinks is liberal is no longer anywhere close, and it sounds like maybe he just needs to update his information. I’m not sure how much his friend, my ex-friend, is discussing these issues with him as I’ve lurked on her Facebook account to see how she’s doing and she doesn’t seem to be posting much about politics these days. I know she’s endured a recent deeply disturbing family tragedy. Here’s the thing: I think people like Dean are, well, reclaimable. He’s not an ‘activist’, married to beliefs it would be too painful to abandon if he acknowledged he was wrong. More importantly, he admitted, without my prompting or asking, that he might be afraid of the cognitive dissonance. We’ve known each other for a very long time, and were in a relationship for a year, and we’re too old to defriend each other over this disagreement, since neither of us are fanatics. Perhaps a better approach, when we meet people who embrace illiberal ideas or values (on either side), is to ask, “Why do you feel that way? Why do you believe that? What do you think about critics who say….” I’m not as good as I’d like at challenging people with, erm, challenging beliefs. Like most of us, I often slap a mental label on someone based on something they say. There’s still that petty little piece of me that wants to put others down for not seeing things my way. I have a friend who does what I should do. “Why do you feel that way?” with an open tone, inviting an information exchange rather than a challenge. Even if she doesn’t like their answer, she keeps probing to get a better understanding of why they believe whatever it is she disagrees with, without challenging them. That’s definitely an option I don’t exercise much, and should. There are people who are fanatics about whatever they believe—their religion, their politics, their position on abortion or guns or that transwomen are women. Others aren’t as fanatical as we assume, based on the simple fact that they believe something we don’t. We can’t open dialogues with hostility, patronization or condescension. I know Dean is an evidence-focused guy. He and I have always asked, “Where’s the proof?” He’s an atheist. I don’t think he’s given up on the Enlightenment values that fueled the growth of classical liberalism, unlike, I’m afraid, our mutual acquaintance. I got a response from my second email. I think it's a pretty safe bet to say we're very divergent in our political views. I'm not likely to change your mind on anything and, while I am open to new data, my core beliefs are also not likely to change. So, it's safer if we don't discuss politics. I still love you too… So much for being willing to challenge his beliefs. But, maybe his mind clamped shut due to my condescension and snarkiness. That’s my continuous fault. I still think he’s ‘one of the good ones’ on the left. His heart is in the right place. We often go many months without connecting, so his mind and heart may need more time to process what I’ve said. Maybe the next time we connect he’ll think differently. Or maybe he won’t and we’ll talk about our other fave topics, books and movies instead. I may put a note on my knee as I recline on the couch to talk: Be kind! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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What do those rationalizations sound like when a man says them? Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay Guys, you don’t understand. Melissa checks my [credit card] statements. — Dr. Stuart Price The first time I watched The Hangover (2009), I thought to myself, Damn, every abused woman needs to watch this. She needs to see what it looks like. One character is an unaware domestic abuse victim. Dr. Stuart Price, derided as ‘Dr. Faggot’ by his sophomoric friends, lives with a deeply unpleasant control freak who controls and monitors him, who once hit him, and on one memorable cruise at which Stuart was not present, had sex with — some cruise member. No one can seem to remember his occupation. If you’re not familiar with the movie, it’s funny as hell and one of the few original movies Hollywood has managed to produce in the last twenty years. Which means there are no heroes in rubber muscle suits saving the world from improbable villains, no monosyllabic he-men inflicting far-right values and toxic masculinity on indigenous people, nor does it pretend to any deep meaning. It’s a hilarious whodunit in which they try to piece together what happened in Vegas during a bachelor party gone awry when one accidentally slips them roofies in Jagermeister. Stu has to lie to Melissa, his partner, to get permission to go on this weekend, because it’s easier than fighting with her over Vegas. He tells her they’re in Napa Valley. When he announces to his friends what he intends to do when they get home, they explode with disbelief, particularly Phil, a frat boy type unhappy with his suburban life and job, but he’s the genuine voice of reason when Stu shows them the ring. Phil : If it’s what I think it is, it’s a big fucking mistake! Doug : She’s not that bad. Phil : Doug, she beats him! Stu : That was once, and I was out of line. “Wait, have you not listened to anything I have ever said?” Phil asks. Clearly, he’s spoken to Stu many times over the three years he’s been with Melissa. Stu tells him it’s time, (for getting engaged), and ‘this is how it works.’ “A, that is bullshit, and B, she is a complete bitch,” Phil says, voicing what the audience thought when first introduced to Melissa, who reminds Stu to pack his Rogaine because she can always tell when his hair gets thinner (with a look of disgust) and hectoring him about not going to any strip clubs in case Phil should happen to ‘sniff one out’ in Napa Valley. She won’t let him kiss her goodbye; she’s miffed he even dared to go on an excursion without her. Maybe she’s afraid he’ll fuck the bartender, or whatever, too. “She beats him,” he reminds his friends. Stu tells him Melissa is ‘strong-willed,’ and he ‘respects that’. “Wow. Wow. He’s in denial. Not to mention, she fucked a sailor,” Phil states. There’s no difference when a woman says these things. It sounds no less ridiculous. Phil may be an annoying juvenile pig, but he talks real turkey with Stu and lets him know Melissa’s treatment of him is not okay. Melissa is a bitch and although no one ever utters the abuse word, it’s what we’re all thinking. He sounds and acts exactly like an abused woman. Except he gets less acceptance from his friends who care about him, who don’t want to see him ruin his life. Like many women, Stu doesn’t listen to those wiser than he. Years ago, when my father was still working, he told me about a young woman who worked in their office who came in with a black eye, and her co-workers asked her what happened. She admitted her boyfriend hit her because she’d refused to smoke marijuana with him. “You need to leave him,” my father said, in a position to know about such things. He told her about a relative who was in an abusive relationship and how she found it difficult to get out. How the partner showed no respect for her and hit her repeatedly. How it only gets worse, not better, no matter what he says afterward. “Why do you stay with someone who treats you like that?” Dad asked the young woman. And he related the line I knew was coming next. “It’s because I loooooooooooove him!” I told my then-boyfriend my father’s story. He was a kind, decent Pagan guy, the sort who would no more hit a woman than he would shoot a dog. He knew someone who’d been abused, and he couldn’t understand why she put up with it. He screwed up his face in disgust when he said it: “Because I loooooooooove him!” Male or female, Dr. Stuart Price is what someone looks like when they’re abused. The difference is, I don’t know, maybe male friends are more likely to tell you in plain speaking you need to dump the abusive asshole. There’s a bigger, more critical problem with female abuse victims. When they tolerate abusive partners, there may be putting their friends and family in danger. Far more often for women than men, their abuse isn’t, strictly speaking, a private matter. Because Melissa, if Stuart leaves her, isn’t likely to stalk him or try to kill him. That’s a real possibility for women — in fact, the most common way by far women get murdered. In a smaller number of cases, aggrieved dumped husbands and lovers will go after her family, and sometimes her friends. Texas man shoots his ex and her family Brooklyn Dad shoots his daughter’s mother and her sisters Ohio guy kills his ex and her family, with help from his own Guy kills family to get to ex-wife he wants to kill, also with help from his family It’s everyone’s business when a woman won’t leave an abusive man. Here in Toronto, I used to work for a company where, prior to my joining, they were forced to shut down the office one afternoon because a crazy ex was coming to kill one of the administrative staff, and police warned he might show up at the office. She put her entire office in danger because of him. I wonder if her friends and family said much before he went off the deep end. My family didn’t, when our relative was in that situation. Neither were we in much danger, since we weren’t immediate family and we lived in another state. We hardly ever saw her because — well, you can guess. Women are way too nice about abuse. We tolerate it far too much, whether it’s happening to us or to others. I’d like to see us find a medium somewhere between Stu’s friends — who are too derisive and condescending — and the rest of us who STFU and assume it’s her business. On perhaps some subconscious level, we acknowledge the dirty little secret about abuse: She’s letting it happen. I’ve been the warning someone ignored. I used to work with a very pretty married young woman whose husband was hitting her. She left him. He did exactly what my mother warned me abusive men do when she leaves: He apologized profusely, made a date to take her out to dinner at a nice restaurant, and surprised her with a chauffeured limo and flowers. She came in the next morning like a young girl in love. “He’s going to do it again,” I told her. I related my mother’s insight. “Oh no, it’s going to be different now,” she said. Photo by Julia Avamotive from Pexels I wonder how many more beatings it took before she left. Or if she ever did. I don’t know how it turned out as she left the company shortly after. I don’t know why. She made the choice to listen to him. She was young and inexperienced and we didn’t know as much about abuse as we do now. Women had a lot less financial power then. She made a bad choice, perhaps an uninformed choice, but it was still a choice. Life is all about uninformed choices. We all do it every single day because we can’t look into the future and see how things will turn out. We can’t know what we don’t know. She also made the choice to not listen to me, and possibly others, warning her this was a dangerous path to take. I hope her (I expect) ex didn’t go after her friends and family too. Or maybe she made too many choices to stay and then one day, she no longer had one. She was a co-worker, not a friend, so I couldn’t say too much. I’ve never been in a position where I had someone in my own circle actively talking about domestic abuse. It might have been happening quietly, but I suspect it wasn’t happening much. The kind of woman who don’t question abuse, or even recognize it, aren’t the sort of people who become my friends. Probably we have little in common. I wouldn’t want my phone number in the mobile of someone I know is being abused. I don’t want her crazy mofo to find it and decide I’m too good a friend or I was likely the fucking c—t who persuaded her to leave. I don’t want that sort of drama in my life. If a friend confessed her partner was abusing her I wouldn’t turn my back on her, especially if I didn’t think he was the sort to take out a family barbecue in revenge, but I would be stronger in my language than many women would be. I mean, we’ve been understanding and non-blamey and non-judgemental for like fifty fucking years and women are still getting assaulted, raped, beaten, put in the hospital, and often killed because they made a lot of really bad decisions all along the way. And clearly, they don’t fucking listen when people do speak up. We need to be less tolerant of abusive men overall, stronger with our language with friends and family and make it clear they have choice. And the longer they wait to choose to leave, the harder it’s going to be. And maybe even, if they don’t fucking leave him, you don’t want anything more to do with this shitshow because you don’t need him coming after you. Doing the same thing over and over is the definition of insanity, n’est-çe pas? The Hangover ’s Phil is an asshole — they all are — but I loved his reaction in the fancy Vegas suite when he told Stu in no uncertain terms what a big fucking mistake he was making. He removed a little of Stu’s future victimhood. He made it clear it was a choice and he stated the truth — Stu was in denial. I don’t like the other ways they treated him — calling him Dr. Faggot, ‘correcting’ him in public for calling himself a doctor when he was ‘just a dentist’. But I get their impatience and disgust with him. Why didn’t he fucking listen to them? Melissa needs Stu to call her as soon as he arrives somewhere, and one doesn’t get the impression she wants to make sure he’s safe. She gets really pissy if he doesn’t — like when his plane arrived late and he was the keynote speaker. She tells him she’ll kick his ass if he goes to a strip club, and she might mean it literally. We know she’s hit him already. He agrees with everything she says in a way suggesting he’s trying to keep the peace. He makes excuses for her sexual infidelity — She was wasted! And if you must know, he didn’t even come inside her! — and later she throws a loud expletive-laced tantrum at the wedding. Stu is in an abusive relationship, and his friends are a lot less tolerant than female friends are. We need to woman up. We need to hold ourselves, and others, to a higher standard than we have. It’s not 1988 anymore when my father told his story. We have more economic, financial, and political will, not to mention more power. But do we have the willpower to truly put an end to abuse? This first appeared on Medium in July 2021.

...Let's talk about how no prisoners, male or female, should ever be subjected to prison rape. Including the victims no one cares about: Male inmates. Photo by Ron Lach on Pixabay I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that the Regressive Left, for now, has won a round for violent convicted males’ rights with a US judge who temporarily blocked Trump’s Executive Order to return female-identified male convicts to the men’s prisons where they belong. It was ruled ‘unconstitutional.’ I’d like some legal beagle to point to me where in the Constitution it states that men have the right to declare themselves women and be believed by any human being with an IQ above a leopard slug, but we live in strange, evil times and not all the cognitive underachievers are on Team MAGA. I will remind ‘progressives’ that fake-female bepenised sex offenders were bound to result in real female inmates getting raped, as one lawsuit against the State of New York demonstrates. If you’re a woke progressive who needs further persuasion that putting convicted sex offenders and sadists in women’s prisons is the most colossally bad idea since a real estate developer said, “Let’s build mega-expensive homes here in Pacific Palisades!”, here’s my running list detailing men committing crimes against women before transition, after transition, and in prison. Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces Prison rape: It’s still a cinch Inmates of both sexes live constantly with the potential for rape and sexual abuse. Prison guards, male or female, often just can’t resist; one guard at the Central California Women’s Facility was called a ‘serial rapist’ by his nearly two dozen victims, and he was convicted for 64 counts of sexual abuse in mid-January. It’s no secret that rape is as common as worm-infested food in prisons, although it’s far worse in male ones, and it’s one of the many reasons the number of ‘transgender’ prisoners has skyrocketed to an estimated 1,500-2,000. New convicts customarily ‘realize’ they’ve ‘always felt like a woman,’ right after conviction, since in women’s prisons a man will rule the roost as no one is going to rape him , and if he so desires, he can even continue raping with the blessing of the state since accusing a ‘transwoman’ of rape is ‘transphobic’. It’s a huge misogynist miscarriage of justice and further dishonor on the Democratic/woke progressive record for allowing cross-dressing sex offenders into the ladies’ at all. Justice systems around the world haven’t questioned or fought it very much either. But, this article isn’t about transgender prison rape per se. It’s about how no one took notice of prison rape until a few high-profile ‘transgender’ prisoners were reported allegedly raping, molesting, intimidating, threatening, or otherwise making life even further hell for female inmates. The 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) has been less than a resounding success. According to an overview published in November 2024, “PREA 2003 has not been implemented accurately due to practical problems related to it, such as limited staff, financial constraints, overcrowded prison conditions, and failure to build separate spaces for transgender inmates .” (Italics mine) It’s hard to blame male convicts for not wanting to go to a male prison, but, yeah, they should have thought about that before they committed their ‘special crime’. The first male prison rape victim to publicly recount his experience was 1970s political activist Stephen Donaldson, whose hellish experience was detailed (excruciatingly) in The Punk Who Wouldn’t Shut Up . (You’ve been warned.) Here’s what we don’t think about, talk about, or mention even in impolite company: Why prison rape is allowed to exist at all. Sympathy for the devils I’ve written about how I think the horrendous way we treat prisoners will be future generations’ shame the way the history of slavery in America is today. The moral blot of slavery wasn’t readily apparent in human history, anywhere, until 19th-century Western abolition movements. What the hell were they thinking??? future generations always ask. When we speak sympathetically of prison rape, it’s almost certainly for female prisoners. When we speak of it for men, it’s a laugh; a joke; a punchline; a jeering threat. “You’re going to jail for this one, bitch! They’re going to LOOOVE that pretty little ass of yours!” Very few have sympathy for male prisoners, who, granted, didn’t get there because they blew up a mailbox. Female prisons are brutal, and feminists and women’s rights activists express more sympathy for their prisoners, pointing out that many have suffered abuse and trauma in their past, sometimes from childhood. The not so subtle implication is to excuse whatever her ‘special crime’ was that landed her in Big Girls’ Prison, and to argue prison wardens and other staff members shouldn’t be able to get away with raping female prisoners. It’s a fair point, but few ever ask about the backstory of the male prisoners. No one asks how traumatized they are when they come to prison, or speculate on how they may have been abused before incarceration, which many of them certainly were. Some, as recorded by New England prison psychologist James Gilligan , have endured such hellish existences before entering prison that it’s a wonder they’re still alive. Yeah, they don’t usually look this sexy. Judging by the condition of his fancy shoes, this guy’s been In Stir for no more than fifteen minutes. And was arrested for being criminally hot. Image by Frank Davis from Pixabay And they have been traumatized. One black male prisoner’s story starts when he was eight years old and sent to live with his father for a year. He came back a broken child, having been sexually abused. The typical story proceeds as customary—drugs, crime, poor grades, and eventually prison. One study on male prisoner trauma exposure found their subjects had experienced “near universal trauma exposure in adolescence with the most frequent exposures involving witnessing or being proximate to violent deaths of family and friends.” It cites previous research showing that between 62%-87% of incarcerated men experienced it pre-prison. It notes national survey data showing one in six suffered physical and/or sexual abuse as children. Female prisoners aren’t much different, experiencing pre-prison multiple forms of trauma including intimate partner violence. It’s bad enough to come to prison and be raped by your fellow inmates or advantageous prison staff, and it’s worse to be incarcerated with convicted rapists who faked their way into girl jail and have a real hate-on for women—who now can’t run away or fight back. Why can’t we acknowledge that prison rape isn’t supposed to be part of the criminal justice system? When are we going to learn that throwing abused people into highly abusive environments is barbaric, and not exactly conducive to producing less violent ex-cons? We can cheer Donald Trump for ordering men back to men’s prisons - and he deserves our kudos for trying - but we need to express as much outrage for male prisoners trapped with rapists and vicious sadists as for women. Trauma is trauma, and male safety isn’t any less important. It’s easier to feel sympathy for female convicts, most of whom haven’t committed acts as violent as their male counterparts. Theirs aren’t as often featured in true crime books; and when they are, their stories are usually less dramatic. Male serial killers or gang assassins pull off wildly violent crimes; murderesses are more subtle by necessity—violent crime is more difficult for them so they quietly poison or over-medicate medical patients or the men in their lives . There’s also, undoubtedly, gender stereotyping breaking switches in our compassion circuits—men’s need to appear strong and manly, especially when they’re in prison, as well as a hyperfocus on female victimization. But rape is a horrifically violent act that has to be even worse when a penis is stuffed into an orifice that wasn’t built to take one. The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, at 1.8 million in 2023, and our treatment of them is infamous. More than half suffer from mental illness. Sixty-thousand are kept in solitary confinement, which can be the worst form of torture. Mental health services are poor in many prisons although better in others. It doesn’t bode well for those of us on the outside, either. U.S. recidivism rates are atrocious; one Department of Justice analysis showed that 82% of people were rearrested at least once in the decade that followed. Within one year, 43% were back in the bighouse. After a life of trauma and more of it in prison, ex-cons find it exceedingly difficult to find a job and often commit new crimes just to stay alive. They’re difficult on their families and they can’t maintain stable romantic relationships. They reoffend. Everyone knows the prison system needs a massive overhaul, but no one ever does anything about it. I hope that some future judge who can read the Constitution will rule that female inmates will no longer have to deal with the incredible and unnecessary stress of sharing cell blocks and sometimes even cells with violent men, but I also share sympathy with anyone housed in a male facility, trans or not. Because prison rape isn’t part of our criminal justice code and neither is extended solitary, or lousy food, or kicking a man with a protruding hernia in his stomach, simply because he asked for medical attention. Every year, 650,000 inmates are released from prison. One hundred twenty-nine thousand will be back inside in a year. There should be no tolerance for rape, anywhere. Men aren’t somehow more deserving because they’re responsible for most violent crime. Not all prisoners are convicted of such. If they weren’t violent when they got there they may be unpleasantly trained. The problem is too often politicized: Conservatives want this oversized punishment for their crimes, and liberals’ compassion ventures too often into the realm of idiocy. Or prisons are simply overcrowded and the system has to make room for the never-ending conveyor belt of new bodies. Male prisoners’ stories are no less horrific than womens’ stories. If female prisoners are worthy of our reasonable compassion, then so are male inmates. They’ve all suffered enough, and made others suffer as well. We can keep them locked up with the acknowledgement that they’re still human beings. Even the most vicious animals are treated better than vicious humans. Is it in any way humane to torture them further? We’re not, after all, like them. Or maybe…..we are. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! 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Marilyn Manson's #MeToo moment has arrived, but his victims have nothing new to offer about how women get sucked into these abusive relationships Do NOT date someone with a 'bad girls room'. CC0 3.0 photo by Rockman on Wikimedia Commons You don't have to be Marilyn Manson to abuse women the way he's accused, but it undoubtedly makes things a smidge easier. Last year ex-fiancee Evan Rachel Wood outed the previously alluded-to 'powerful' man who cruelly abused her for years. She was 19 when she met the 36-year-old Manson at a party while he was still married to burlesque queen Dita Von Teese, whom he divorced the same year. Wood told Insider that they looked into each other's eyes and 'knew'. Whatever she 'knew' wasn't much, because she says she went through several years of hell and still doesn't appear to know why. She walked into a relationship with a man almost twenty years her senior, young and headstrong, telling her mother she was getting on a tour bus to see the world with Manson for eight months and if people aren't okay with that, well sorry, she can't live her life for others. Sounds like some may have been warning her it was a bad idea. That's one of the first things you do when you're entering a bad relationship: Don't listen to wiser voices. What do old people know? If anything was less than happy-happy-joy-joy after that, Wood didn't mention it. She spoke fondly of Manson until the mid-teens and prior to that, she publicly commented favorably on their relationship, and then former relationship. Today she details horrific tales of rape, abuse, degradation and humiliation, echoed by several other former partners and lovers who've stepped forward, empowered by her bravery, to tell similar stories. Manson, of course, denies it all, offering the same tired typical abuser explanations: They're lying, they're doing it for gain, they're trying to ruin me. That last allegation might arguably be true, but no one seriously believes anymore that women get rich lying about famous men raping and abusing them, and the 'attention' is often doxing, swatting, rape and death threats. Wood's documentary, Phoenix Rising , about her abuse by Manson, just premiered at the Sundance Music Festival, re-opening examination of her and others' abuse allegations. I'm glad she's finally calling him to account, and has decided to stop lying. The long hard road down to hell Ex-fiancee Rose McGowan and Von Teese weighed in last year, both stating they didn't have abusive relationships with Manson, yet they were supportive of the women. Von Teese, who says she ended her two-year marriage over Manson's drug abuse and infidelities, states he never treated her that way and she wouldn't have married him if he had. "Abuse of any kind has no place in any kind of relationship," she stated on Instagram and encourages "those of you who have incurred abuse to take steps to heal." It's almost like they don't think it's beyond him to behave like that. Worst of all for Manson, even men support his accusers. Nine Inch Nails frontman and former Manson mentor Trent Reznor hasn't hesitated to voice his dislike for Manson, with whom he severed ties 25 years ago. He's also still pissed about a story Manson told in his autobiography that he and Reznor raped a groupie, which Reznor vehemently insists is fiction. Reznor supports the women's allegations with his own testimony of abuse, misogyny, and Manson's violent, dark personality. Former Limp Bizkit guitarist and Manson collaborator Wes Borland said on Twitch, "Every single thing that people have said about him is f---ing true. So relax about the allegations towards the women. Like when people say these women are coming after him right now… f--- off, they are speaking the truth." The 'worst-kept secret' What's always missing in these #MeToo moments for soon-to-be-formerly rich and powerful men like Marilyn Manson is anything more than a cursory look at the deeper meaning of their victims' testimonies. It's extremely unlikely Wood and the others are lying now; three have filed lawsuits against him, and you don't do that unless you're willing to go through the hell of the backlash, including genuine fear for one's life and personal safety. This ain't some immigrant Uber driver you're accusing, it's Marilyn Manson. There's always an unaddressed deeper credibility issue in these stories that doesn't concern whether they're lying about the abuser now, but when they were, or maybe just being highly disingenuous. To the public eye, for Wood's entire relationship with Manson, she made out that they were happy, described their relationship as 'healthy', bristled at the criticism she got for being with him, and never indicated publicly she was unhappy, depressed, or frightened. That's typical for abuse victims, to deny deny deny until one day they tell the truth. For about eight years no one who didn't know the couple had any reason to believe they had anything other than a healthy, functional relationship. Young women who desired a life like Wood's - beautiful girlfriend to a globally-recognized rock star - were encouraged by her seemingly fabulous life. Wood and her compatriots in victimhood presented one view to the world while suffering in silence, while others looked on and did nothing. Then again, neither did any of the others until now. Meanwhile, Manson's abuse of Wood and others has been described as 'one of the worst-kept secrets'. Men like Manson persist because it's a collective collusive effort, including his victims, to enable them by remaining silent. As Kory Wood and James Newman detailed in their Rolling Stone article about Manson, he was The Monster Hiding In Plain Sight. When we dissect the abuser/victim dynamic we ignore how many others are adversely impacted too, whose lives may also be put in danger because of the relationship. Like children, of course. How to learn how to mistreat women, like the example Manson set. Impressionable teenage girls and young women watched Manson's public appearances with glamorous young women beaming in the spotlight on the arm of their freaky-looking Bad Boy. While lights flashed all around them, they gushed to reporters about how Manson was such a wonderful, great guy. Each woman was accomplished at something in her own right, but none were as famous or powerful as Manson. Don't you wish you were me, girlfriend??? You can be someone important if you nail a rock star! That's what Manson's pretty little liars taught girls all over the world. The explanations why they did it, the Stockholm Syndrome, the brainwashing, the cult-like control over them only go so far. These women sought fame, on their own terms and then Manson's, and held themselves up as role models for others, consciously or not. I'm glad they're finally telling their truths, but I'd like to see them undo the damage they've done by telling their fans the whole truth. Like how this happened to them, without mention of anyone else. The 70-year Golden Age of Grotesque There's probably no industry worthier of a glaring #MeToo misogyny-hunting spotlight than Planet RockMusician, where men still rule and women with less power do what women have always done, used their bodies to get a status guy. The problem with Manson's victims' #MeToo stories is that for anyone who's been around for more than a few decades, they sound awfully same-old same-old. Manson claimed in a 2015 Guardian story that he was with his then-unnamed girlfriend "because she is willing to do whatever it takes to be with me." I think he's referring to photographer Lindsay Usich, who he married in 2020. She's not one of his current accusers but is accused by some of them of attempting to silence them. One of Manson's former personal assistants claims he's witnessed Manson abuse Usich on several occasions , and threatened to kill her. So the cycle of abuse by women perpetuates itself: Lindsay Usich shuts the hell up and helps her hubby like a good little collaborator until one day, almost certainly, she will stop lying to herself and the world. Rock 'n' roll is nearly 70 years old, and allegations of sexual wrongdoing, misogyny, abuse, and retaliation against young women and girls have been there from the beginning. Rock pioneers Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley also pioneered sexual abuse of women, especially underage girls. So what have we learned, children? Seventy years of rock 'n' roll have taught us that boys aspire to become rock musicians so they can have unfettered, unquestioned access to naive girls and women who think they know better, who think they know what they're doing, who think they're in control of their sexuality--except they don't and they're not. We learn nothing as each generation passeth away: Every year, every decade the cycle repeats itself: Older, wiser women call out some celebrity who abused them for years and get lauded for being brave and 'telling their truth'. Yes, they're brave, but they're also complicit in perpetuating the cycle of abuse. When they complain, 'Many knew but no one stopped him,' no reporter dares ask, "Did anyone warn you, and did you listen? What kind of example did you set for other young women when you repeatedly lied about what happened to you until now?" Silence is violence, isn't it, gender theory feminists? When will we acknowledge that with celebrity comes a certain level of responsibility to one's fans? To be honest about what the industry, your career, your partners are really like? When you're 'willing to do whatever it takes to be with him', there's an internal power greater than concern for one's personal safety in play. No woman wants to be abused, but it's sometimes the price you must be willing to pay to stay with him. We don't acknowledge that for some women, it's a profit/loss calculation. How much of his shit are you willing to put up with to be with him? We never learn the deeper truth these women really owe their fans, the ones who supported their idols in their careers, and support them now as they crawl out from under a very sick man's rock. Why did you allow this? It's no longer enough to speak out on what happened and take the kudos for being 'brave' and 'honest' and finally bringing on a much-needed takedown of a deeply misogynist artist. They need to do some introspection, a post-mortem, and tell the truth about why they took the step down that long ugly staircase of abuse. They need to talk about the weaknesses in their psychology that permitted someone like Manson into their lives. They need to address why the well-established, no-news-here serial predator grooming tactics worked so well on them, and really be honest about who warned them about him and why they didn't listen. That's the funny thing about serial celebrity secrets: While the world at large may not know them, absolutely everyone in the industry does. Only people who weren't in Hollywood in the '50s were surprised when classic masculine movie sex symbol Rock Hudson outed himself as a lifelong homosexual by dying of AIDS. My mother learned about it from a friend who'd grown up in Hollywood, played with Loretta Young's daughter, and was friends with Elizabeth Taylor. Everyone knew how many movie stars were homosexual back then, but only whispered. There's no way Manson's maidens hadn't heard the rumors, and the warnings, and seen a lot of shit with their own eyes. If 19-year-old girls can still see vaginas on the walls, swastikas everywhere, be personally acquainted with a 'bad girls room', and not realize this is not a boy you want to take home to mother, we're not doing a good enough job raising young women to not know misogyny until it's chasing you with an axe. In the HBO trailer for Phoenix Rising , someone comments that it customarily takes many victims 7-10 years to recognize they were abused, which in Manson's accusers' case means any alleged crimes are outside the statute of limitations. In 2016, Wood testified in front of government committees in support of bills to raise the statute of limitations. "Something needs to change" I applaud Wood's and the others' efforts and agree with them that something needs to change. In addition to making it easier for domestic violence victims to seek justice, what would help most is if they could offer insight into what permitted them to get into such a relationship at all. How did they not get blown into the next county by all the violently waving red flags? We're not learning anything new with each new tedious story. Abuse, brainwashing, gaslighting, yadda yadda yadda. Young women don't pay attention because they don't think it could happen to them. Where victims can add REAL value to the conversation and reduce the mistreatment of women is by helping young women understand how this can happen to them by addressing the common gaps in female psychology. Like: How easy it is to be impressed by a rich powerful man. How older men like younger women not just because they're young and pretty, but because they're so much easier to manipulate. Especially when they look to a man to define them, and especially a celebrity. How easy it can be to be dazzled by the classic manipulator's move, 'love bombing,' to suck you in so he can groom you to do what he wants and put up with his shit. How partner rape is a real thing. How you can have clear good examples of healthy, functional relationships (they must have seen some, at least) and not want the same for themselves - or wonder if perhaps love doesn't mean tolerating the vile abuse they're subjected to. Most importantly, can they PLEASE tell young girls and women to listen to older women who know more than they do? At least some of them will listen . I did. I thank my mother. What would be most valuable is better understanding how you can see swastikas, knives, an unused Zyklon B gas container from World War II, listen to the misogyny expressed at Manson's concerts, and hear a song you know was written about you, I Want To Kill You Like They Do In The Movies , and still think it's okay to be with this guy. I want to know about every Manson woman's first two weeks with the guy, before the serious brainwashing started, because I really want to know what some women are completely missing. Today, black people of all ages are hyper-aware of racial hostility and slights, but somehow women see rank misogyny hitting them in the face (literally) and blithely walk Manson's long hard staircase down to hell. The point is not to beat themselves up for cluelessness at 19 or 20 back then but to help young women understand today how they can avoid the mistakes of the past. Not looking within and asking one's self the hard questions without finger-pointing is what permits the cycle of abuse to perpetuate generationally. Feminism isn't ready to examine and analyze what psychological weaknesses we all have, as women, that allow men to exploit and abuse us. These time-dishonored techniques for controlling and grooming women have been utilized every day by countless men for thousands of years because they work. Manson won't likely be held legally accountable for any of this, but his victims can push this aging, pudgy, slightly less relevant rocker into has-been oblivion. All the hand-wringing and worry from celebrity men about #MeToo 'lies' come mostly from those who lie awake at night worrying about who from their own past might be the first woman to break the silence about their own behavior. Après moi, le déluge. Many won't mourn Manson's faded passing. But what about future targets who might listen if Manson's victims, and others after them, tell the truth about themselves about why they succumbed to his predations and what they'd tell their younger selves? While we're trying to fix the ones who were broken, what can we do to educate the young and naive, so they listen now, because they're hearing something new, so they can avoid the ugly web the Marilyn Mansons of the world, celebrity or not, draw some of them into? Not every teenage girl is so naive Indie rock musician Phoebe Bridgers recounts a story when she was a teenage girl and went to Manson's home with a few friends. He joked about a 'rape room' in his house which she chalked up to horrible 'frat boy' humor, but that day she 'stopped being a fan'. And that was the end of that. Knowing that is more valuable than anything Manson's victims have offered thus far. This article originally appeared on Vocal.media in March 2022. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Smith's WTF moment encapsulates how badly Americans need a time-out. Everyone go to your room and take ten years! CC0 Creative Commons image from PeakPX WTF happened at the Oscars? Right now I feel like an exasperated mother who wants to send Will Smith and Chris Rock to their rooms so they can both think about what they did. And the rest of us too, as this story unfolds. The exasperated American in me understands, if not condones, how Smith felt, because frankly, I'd love to bitch-slap some sense back into a country backpedaling to the maturity level of a sandbox brawl. Both of you! Go to your room! Image by rickey123 from Pixabay Smith demonstrated even the nicest Hollywood stars can lose their damn minds in the moment. I'm disappointed in him. I think we all expect better from one of Hollywood's most well-loved stars. Where did his out-of-the-blue moment come from? Not truly out of the blue. An unkinder, darker Hollywood I didn't understand why Chris Rock's 'G.I. Jane 2' joke was supposed to be funny until the camera cut to Pinkett-Smith rolling her eyes, clearly unamused. Okay, she was bald. A fashion statement, right? Lighten up, girlfriend! I bet Lupita Nyong'o would have laughed. I didn't understand Smith's anger until the backstory. I hadn't known Pinkett-Smith suffered from alopecia and that black women are especially at risk. Any woman can relate. Black women may have a very special relationship with their hair , but we all get the emotional devastation of alopecia. Hair is our 'crowning glory', as the Book of Corinthians, Oliver Swinburne, and others have noted. It's been deeply traumatic for Pinkett-Smith, and going bald illustrates a milestone in her journey of owning her condition, encouraged by her daughter. Rock says he didn't know about her alopecia. If so, he thought he was making a fair-game joke. Had her baldness been a fashion statement, I'd have expected her to suck it up. She's not, first and foremost someone's wife, she's an established actress in her own right, and Oscar fashion is fair game. At the time of this writing Rock hasn't apologized to Pinkett-Smith but he sure owes her a public apology. His unintentionally cruel joke ridiculed her in front of millions. Hopefully he'll be man enough to do so, and soon, because Smith has already apologized to Rock. Rock has known Will Smith from his Fresh Prince of Bel-Air days and there's existing friction. Several years ago Rock joked it wasn't fair about Jada Pinkett-Smith not getting invited to the Oscars, and that it also wasn't fair Will Smith got heavily paid for 1999's Wild Wild West , not exactly his greatest movie. Comedians make fun. It's the intrinsic nature of humor, pointing to egos and the hypocrisy of life. But humor has gotten a lot nastier in the last twenty years, particularly in Hollywood. Unkind digs received a rocket boost from Ricky Gervais, who slaughtered Hollywood celebrities at the 2020 Golden Globes. One watches, cheering him on for rooting out Hollywood's ugliest hypocrisies, like how Jeffrey Epstein was their 'friend' - touché! - and LOL when he eviscerates them with a verbal machete: "Well, you say you’re woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you? So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg." Simultaneously, I cringe when he leverages nuclear-level cruelty, calling some actor I never heard of a 'fat p--sy' and 'jokes' about a venerable actress 'licking her own minge'. So, blame Ricky Gervais too. But why did Gervais think he could do that? On social media people freely utter much worse, often behind anonymous accounts, with little pushback from platforms who only grudgingly step in when enough politicians ponder aloud about 'potential legislation' and the public accuses them of altering the course of elections or prolonging a pandemic. So, blame Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Let's turn our attention now to Kanye West ruining Taylor Swift's big moment at the 2009 Video Music Awards, except at least he didn't slap Swift for getting an award he thought should have gone to Beyoncé. Blame Ye, or whatever the hell he's calling himself now. And we can't forget Donald Trump, encouraging and further normalizing violence, laying the groundwork for a future riot when for four years he chronically vomited a constant twitstream of hate speech, slurs, violent musings, bald-faced lies and insults. No one was safe, not even a journalist with cerebral palsy or the family of a gold-star military veteran. I'm glad Rock and Smith didn't meet on the street, or they might have settled their differences the Wild Wild West way, with Rock bleeding out his life on the curb. Will Smith is 100% responsible for his lack of self-control. Guaranteed he wouldn't have smacked a female comedian. Maybe he would have yelled at her, even challenged her on stage, but I'll bet he wouldn't have hit her. Not in the #MeToo era. He. Was. In. Control. #WeAreAllWTF Smith's moment encapsulates how crazy America has gotten. An Insider writer who attended Vanity Fair's Oscars after-party describes encountering an unnamed famous comedian who mentioned how 'thin-skinned' celebrities have become and compared Los Angeles, currently experiencing a spiraling crime rate, to Gotham City. He may well have a point; stress levels have risen even for tony, celebrity neighborhoods experiencing brazen home invasions and stick-ups, and Angelenos calmly stand on line at the Rite-Aid while smash-'n'-grabbers take what they please. Smith exhibited the worst excesses of 'honor culture', where a man is 'compelled' to violently defend himself and his family from insult. In our Founding Fathers' time, (white) men settled these differences by dueling. Smith felt his wife was dishonored and his emotional hijacking dick-tated his behavior. Any of us would have gotten as angry. But no one, even celebrities, has the right to lash out. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of Americans disagree. When they have a 'bad day' they feel entitled to grab the nearest firearm and blow away as many innocent people as they can. Or they 'pop a cap in someone's ass' when they feel 'dissed'. Or they storm the Capitol because an election didn't go their way. I'm glad Rock isn't filing charges against Smith, and I'm gratified Academy board member Whoopi Goldberg says Smith won't lose the award he received 45 minutes after going all Sean Penn. I hope this will be a learning moment for Americans. I'm not real hopeful, but an ex-pat can dream. I hope Rock and Smith both lay low and think about what they did. Just because Smith reacted like a spoiled, entitled child doesn't mean Rock shouldn't think long and hard about the way he treated Pinkett-Smith, whose accidental humiliation he prefaced by saying he 'loves' her. We've all been overreacting to slights and insults for much longer than our emergence from what may or may not be a post-pandemic world. Our human connection skills have degraded for decades thanks to digital technology, near-psychopathic social media, coddled self-esteem-addled Gen Z-ers taught to believe any opinion they don't like is 'violence', growing income inequality, cruel reality TV shows, police violence, and a state capital resembling Israel and Pakistan more than Washington D.C. Only animal life and the environment have benefited from the pandemic; with humans off the streets the Himalayas re-emerged for Indians and the Bay of Pigs has been invaded again; this time by crabs. Mass shootings, rare occurrences beginning roughly forty years ago, are today a daily occurrence, often with multiple separate incidents in a single day. Blame also the descent of trust in the government, politicians, the justice system, the '1%', and journalism, from which arose the monstrous plethora of conspiracy theories, fake news, ungated bloggers and the demonization of those who don't think, act, look like, or share the same political opinions as you. Will Smith is all of us, yes, even us 'decent' folk who would 'never do that'. We just haven't each had our Chris Rock moment yet when we decide the hell with it, and chuck civilization aside to whack someone else who crossed us, like our cave ancestors with clubs. Maybe it's time for all of us to take a timeout in our rooms and think about what we've collectively done. Not ten minutes. Ten years. 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. 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Trevor Noah's tribal whataboutism sparks my own. Whatabout your own moral blindness, Trevor? Ukrainian refugees crossing into Poland. CC0 4.0 image by Міністерство внутрішніх справ України on Wikimedia Commons I'll call what Trevor Noah expressed at the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine 'tribalism'. He accused both journalists and news consumers of racism for viewing the war differently from wars in other parts of the world. He isn't wrong, but he blithely ignores other important reasons why the West is more het up about an illegal invasion by a fading superpower of a prosperous, democratic, and yes Trevor, civilized country like Ukraine. Gas prices didn't shoot up when Rwanda broke out in massacre. Maybe we paid more for coffee for awhile. We're about to pay a lot more for wheat-based food since Russia is the world's largest wheat exporter and Ukraine, until the war, was the sixth-largest global and a top producer of rye, sunflower seeds and barley. Rwanda wasn't producing much of anything except drought and internal tribalism. More critically, cultural differences help explain the concern disparity. "And beyond the war itself ... there's a really interesting thing that I learned. And that is: A lot of people on TV didn't expect a war like this to happen in, let's say, certain neighborhoods." You're right, Trevor, we didn't. To put it into perspective for a New Yorker like you, this is like a crack gang war in the Hamptons. "You do realize that, until very recently, fighting crazy wars was Europe's thing? That was Europe's entire thing. That's all of European history." Yes, it was, and it's why the United Nations was created. One of its primary raisons d'être was to prevent another world war, as the last two had been exceedingly brutal, and the next would be nuclear. Today, less than a century after the end of the last world war, western Europeans have conspicuously been not killing their countryfolk for many decades. (Eastern Europe is another story.) The Middle East and Africa, on the other hand.... Noah played clips in his viral rant in which various reporters and commentators said things like, "...Ukraine is not a place—with all due respect—like Iraq or Afghanistan," and "This is not a developing third world nation—this is Europe." That didn't play too well with our man. "What were you going to say if you weren't choosing your words carefully? 'I just hope the next time this happens, it happens back in the Middle East where it belongs.' No, more like, we hope one day they'll decide to stop murdering each other over political and religious ideologies. You know, the way Europe once did. Maybe the Middle East could form their own United Nations, or something. "Now people are going to be like, 'Ugh, to see this in Europe!' To see this, I don't know about you, but I was shocked to see how many reporters—around the world, by the way—seem to think that it's more of a tragedy when white people have to flee their countries. Because, I guess, what? The 'darkies' were built for it?" No, because...that's how certain non-First World cultures do, in the 21st century. Like mass shootings is how Americans do. Like blowing things up with your body is how Middle Easterners do. Like gang rape is how Indians do. Like mutilating baby girls' genitals is how Africans do. FGM (Female Genital Mutilation FCC0 3.0 image by Nederlandse Leeuw on Wikimedia Commons Whatabout everyone's misogyny? I agree with Noah's racism charge. Racism is one of many tribalisms: My people before yours. Black Lives Matter formed in response to high-profile killings by white police officers of often unarmed, sometimes innocent black men. Of course, who knew back then that cops kill unarmed, sometimes innocent white men more than black men? Noah watches the West rally behind the uber-white Ukrainians with a tribalist eye as the conflict re-engages old Cold War enmity, making the left blush and wonder whether ol' semi-senile Ronald Reagan was right about that whole 'Evil Empire' thing. After all, thirty years ago we had better things to do when one set of Rwandans began hacking up another set of Rwandans and the latter fled the country in droves. I don't think we'd have been quite as sanguine had it been, rather, the French filleting Germans, but that's because frankly, we expect better from them now. France and Germany haven't gotten along since at least ol' Caesar's day, back when they were known as the Gauls and the Germanic tribes. This ain't the first century BCE, mes amis! Public domain cartoon by John Tenniel, Punch magazine, August 6, 1881 from Wikipedia. On the other hand, I don't know how sanguine I'd have been had Kim Jong-Un invaded South Korea, for the same reasons I'm outraged by Russia's naked attack on Ukrainians: South Korea is a prosperous, civilized country, dammit, and they're total technology geeks! And the North Korean government is a totalitarian nightmare run by a fat psychopathic dictator who starves his own people! That is NOT how the South Koreans do. Social media critics, drunk on critical theory about racism, oppression, and Western ethnocentrism kick-started directly into whatabout mode: "Where was your concern for the Palestinians? The Rohingyans? The Chechnyans? The Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenians?" Yeah, let's--talk about those folks. When I listen to Noah and his supporters whatabouting, I respond as a woman and look at the always-overlooked victims of those same conflicts: Women. Those victimized cultures are, well, problematic. I wasn't happy when my prime minister, Justin Trudeau, vowed to bring in 50,000 Syrian refugees after the shock and awe of the famous rescuer carrying drowned toddler Alan Kurdi. It wasn't that my heart wasn't moved by the photo, or the plight of Syrian refugees-- Bashar Assad, for Darwin's sake! --I just didn't want all Syrian refugees. RIP. CC0 3.0 photo by Defend International on Wikimedia Commons Most specifically, their misogynist men. Gender-based violence is rife all throughout the Middle East, where women have fewer rights and recourse to escaping male violence. Syria had a high rape rate before the Syrian conflict , and as is the case for any woman living in a truly patriarchal culture, they don't report not only for fear of not being believed, but of being murdered in an 'honour killing'. Spousal rape isn't a crime in Syria, and a rapist can escape prosecution by marrying his victim, which relieves the family of the inconvenience of murdering her. And of course you can always count on terrorist groups like ISIL to wield sexual violence as a weapon. "Can we allow in 50,000 women and children, not including boys over, say, ten or twelve?" I thought. You know, after it's probably too late to cleanse them of cultural toxic masculinity. Chechyna? Same ol' story, different part of the world. Wahabbism, an 18th-century Islamic movement to restore 'purity' to Islam and behind pretty much every extremist Islamic government today, also infected the Chechnyans leading to little bon mots like this from president Ramzan Kadyrov in 2011. "I have the right to criticize my wife. She doesn't [have the right to criticize me]. With us [in Chechen society], a wife is a housewife. A woman should know her place. A woman should give her love to us [men]... She would be [man's] property. And the man is the owner. Here, if a woman does not behave properly, her husband, father, and brother are responsible. According to our tradition, if a woman fools around, her family members kill her... That's how it happens, a brother kills his sister or a husband kills his wife... As a president, I cannot allow for them to kill. So, let women not wear shorts...". Yeah, that's the ticket. Make sure she doesn't make him kill her. Ban shorts. The Rohingyans? When mass rape by an invading army occurs , Rohingyan men do what patriarchal men do, blame the victims . My heart was hardened to the plight of Rohingyan men when I read of one who castigated his wife for 'not running away' when the soldiers came and raped her. She was eight months pregnant with a terrified toddler wrapped around one leg as her husband took off with the other children. The Palestinians? They want freedom, a country of their own? Freedom for whom, exactly? I'm guessing not their women, for whom it will be brutal business as usual. Afghanistan? Women's rights predictably slid right back into the medievalism of their pre-9/11 world. It's only because of 9/11 that they were granted a twenty-year respite. Iraq was a totalitarian mess under Saddam and remains a violent and unstable part of the world. The US's illegal invasion didn't help, most specifically because countries have to fix themselves. It's like Alcoholics Anonymous: They have to want to change. You do realize, Trevor, that even before European contact, African, Middle Eastern, and most other human societies were a patchwork of raiding, massacre, sexual violence, slavery and oppression? That was Africa's thing. That was the Middle East's thing. That was all of humanity's history, with the only exceptions a half-handful of societies so remote they didn't have anyone else to fight with. Oh, and they all demonstrated how much they hated women. Revolutions aren't for girls Revolutions are first and foremost for men, who don't give a fig about women's rights until forced. The American women's liberation movement emerged directly out of the New Left in the '60s and early '70s, once the chickie-boos realized their part in the democracy and civil rights struggle was to fetch the coffee and part their legs. I'm reminded of revolutionaries' blindness to women's lives as I read Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk To Freedom . Inspirational for his civil rights fight as well as his insights into power--over one's self and from where it derives--it also starkly highlights how obliviously he ignored African women, especially South Africa. (Listen up, Trevor!) Mandela only cursorily mentions women's rights, mostly references to how his wife Winnie fought against the system and paid for it with constant harassment, banning, arrest and occasional imprisonment. He acknowledges how his struggle, and his 28-year imprisonment, were far harder on her than it was him. But otherwise, so removed from women's concerns was Mandela that he pondered what an 'odd sensation' it must have been for his mother to show up at his sentencing at which he was expected to get the death sentence. "Try 'emotionally devastated,' you emotionally constipated twit," I thought. 'Odd sensation', indeed. Mandela divorced his wife three years after his release, citing infidelity. He was still married when he met and fell in love with her at a Soweto bus stop. Would he have remained faithful for 28 years if the roles were reversed? Nelson Mandela was utterly blind to his male privilege. CC0 2.0 image by Archives de la Ville de Montréal on Flickr South Africa has made a lot gains in equalizing women yet remains a frightening place to be a woman, regardless of color. It's no picnic for children either. Child murders have climbed by 'nearly a third' . Rape and domestic violence are up, and have been described as 'like a second pandemic' . One of the vilest rape-murders I've ever read was the horrific case of Anene Booysen in Bredasdorp on the Western Cape. ( WARNING: Extremely graphic content.) According to the African Health Organization , "Femicide is five times higher in South Africa than the global average, with South Africa having the fourth-highest female interpersonal violence death rate out of the 183 countries listed by the WHO in 2016." Noah's yardstick for measuring the civilization of a culture may be how it treats its minorities, particularly its darker-skinned ones. I accept that. It's a good yardstick, but it's not the only one. My yardstick compares one half of a so-called 'civilized' society to the half that almost always gets thrown under the bus when the cow patties goes down. Mahatma Gandhi's yardstick was how a society treats its animals. We could count many more moral progress measures, extending beyond other species to how we treat our environment. Sadly, we all fall short at some point. Whatabout what's right about whataboutism? Europe's nearly century-old commitment to end intra-continental violence is still in its infancy, and may be sorely tested in the coming years with the far right's global rise. The United States, a country coming up on its quarter-millennial birthday in 2026, is arguably flirting with a second civil war as the identitarian far left and right work to divide America further. To be honest, Trevor, I don't really think of my mother country as very much civilized anymore. And certainly not Russia. I consider Canada a civilized country. For now. First World countries fall short for the same reasons others do: Hatred against colors and ethnicities, hatred against women, an increasingly violent society. Europe has spent most of its existence fighting each other. Other parts of the world still haven't won that precarious battle. Like Africa. Like the Middle East. Like Russia. Like the United States. 'Where were you when...?" is a fair question we should ponder and discuss. Why didn't we care as much about the Rwandans? Or the Chechnyans? Or the yadda yadda yaddas? More importantly, why don't we care--or not--only when we frame it in identitarian terms of how much the victims look like us? And how much 'my' tribe is victimized by 'your' tribe? Regardless of what color they are, what part of the world their ancestors initially invaded or what's between their legs. Why do I consider Ukraine--or South Korea--more 'civilized' than South Africa or most parts of the Middle East? It's not like racism and misogyny don't exist there. Ukrainians themselves demonstrated racism trying to cross borders. I don't like how the latters treat one-half of their population. We can't move forward as a global order until we abandon our tribalisms. One reason why I don't support slave reparations for African-Americans is because they only help one small group of Americans, and it's hard to see how handouts for grievances they haven't themselves suffered will 'help'. A more balanced, just, equitable society benefits everyone , not just black Americans. It's nothing but tribalism, as has become the #MeToo movement which ignores women's grievances when they happen to men (domestic violence, abuse, custody battle child abductions, rape, sexual harassment). Whataboutism is annoying to those trying to fix a problem - like the swift destruction of Ukraine - but it forces us to think about our own biases. Trevor Noah is biased towards darker-skinned people. I am biased towards vagina'ed people. Others are biased towards marginalized groups like transfolk, religious communities, the disabled, or people in certain age groups. Our biases serve real purposes. I thank Trevor Noah for making me think a bit about my bias regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war. Revolution: It's best when it's personal I know people affected by the current war. A good friend and my neighbor's families are Ukrainian, with family members there. My cousin's children are half-Ukrainian. And, I live in Ontario, with Canada's largest Ukrainian community. We have a Ukrainian festival every summer not far from my home. We have Ukrainian banks and credit unions. Ukrainians, literally and figuratively, are my 'hood. So's everyone else. My street is a United Nations of humanity. I care more about today's war than I did when the Rwandan conflict occurred, because I hadn't yet become friendly with a Rwandan refugee I worked with years ago and with whom I maintained a friendship until we grew apart. I care more about Rwanda, I know more about it now, because of her. It's personalized. I think of South Korea as more 'civilized' than North Korea, but but forgot about my niece when I first pondered the question; I don't think of her as South Korean, she's just my niece. Racism against Asians in America seemed remote to me last year until weeks after the infamous spa killings in Atlanta. After I remembered the family Asian. Point taken, Trevor. I need to think about my own moral blindness, but I hope you and your tribe will ponder your own. African men, especially black Africans, have a lot to answer to women for, and I didn't even get into how Africans likely invented female genital mutilation (and I can't imagine it was originally a female idea). The true path to progress, like all revolutions, is a long walk to freedom, but if we can move beyond our own personal identitarianism, we can make it revolution for everybody, not just the white set or the guy set. It'll be a huge improvement for everybody. Yeah, even for white guys.

I didn’t get raped, but I sure made it easy for them Photo by Jody Halsted on Flickr I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can protect ourselves better against sexual assault, particularly young girls and women. Especially what us older and more experienced women can offer, because the earlier you teach women how to take charge of their own safety, the less likely they’ll be sexually assaulted. An ounce of prevention, etc. Female psychology, some biological, some socialized, makes us vulnerable to male predation. We want to be liked. We want to be nice. We value relationships. We’re good at communication. We recognize an actual feeling when we have it. I wrote something a few years ago about how you shouldn't do dumb shit, evidenced by some whiny female celebrity who got hacked and her nude photos seized, then cried publicly when Whoopi Goldberg informed her quite clearly that you can’t do dumb shit. I guess being scolded by your symbolic mother in public is worse than having your nude photos stolen. I don’t know how many times this has to happen before young women come to understand that just because you have a right to privacy doesn’t mean others will respect it. You don’t have to be a celebrity; teenage girls have been ‘slut shamed’ and sometimes committed suicide over such events. If someone can violate your privacy, they will. It will probably be a man. My mother raised me to not do dumb shit. She taught me some great lessons about how not to become victimized. She drilled into my head that if I had sex, I was the one who’d get pregnant, and the man had the option of skipping out on the whole thing and leaving me holding the baby. I could handle it however I wanted, Mom said, except for one unavailable option: Living with my parents and the baby. “I’m not going to raise your child for you,” Mom told me. “I did my bit raising you and your brother, if either of you have children they’re you’re responsibility.” My brother’s non-option was skipping out on the girl. “If you get someone pregnant,” Mom told him, “she makes the decision and you will support it. If she wants an abortion you help pay for it. If she wants to keep the baby, you either marry her or you pay child support.” Neither my brother nor I made any little bambinos before our time. Mom, who said neither her ex-husband nor my father ever hit her, also taught me never to let a man abuse me. She made it perfectly clear I had a lot of say in the matter. She said never let him hit you a second time. If he hits you a first time, there WILL be a second time, and many more after that. She said the sooner you get out of a bad relationship the better. Point taken. I’ve never been in an abusive relationship and I recognized early on where the potential abusers lay. Honestly, I don’t know where my Depression-era mother got this stuff. Her generation was raised to be good little helpmeets to their husbands. Maybe it was marrying the wrong guy at 19, a manchild who couldn’t handle the responsibilities of adulthood and marriage, despite having survived one of the toughest outfits — the 82nd Airborne — in World War II. When the American soldiers parachuted down from the sky the Germans made a game out of trying to shoot their legs off. Mom’s ex escaped from the war with his body, but not his mind, intact. Nevertheless, sometimes, despite Mom’s best advice, I did dumb shit. I did things that she warned could get me raped and/or murdered. Sometimes it was a mental lapse, or an unwarranted opinion of my own good judgement. Sometimes, I think, I was lulled into a false sense of security because I did have pretty good judgement overall about men. I avoided the ones that created trouble for my friends and came to recognize toxic male subcultures before ‘misogyny’ became a household word. I made mistakes. We all do. I got lucky and nothing bad happened. “Don’t get in a car with a strange man. Never hitchhike!” Before I could read, Mom saved Ann Landers articles about young women who came to a bitter end because of bad judgement. It might be drinking and driving; excessive speeding; not watching your drink at parties; drug-taking; and one of her favorites, the perils of hitchhiking or otherwise getting into a car with a strange man. Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker — 1979 TV movie Mom told me absolutely never to do this dumb shit. I never did hitchhike until one extremely rainy evening I ignored Mom’s warnings, and all the 1970s TV movies too, and I did some dumb shit. My uncle had just passed away and I needed to drive down to Long Island for the funeral. A nor’easter was blowing up the East Coast and making the drive quite miserable. I drove carefully, but traffic was horrible on the Merritt Parkway (as always) and at New Rochelle I had to rethink my route as the Merritt had flooded under an overpass and there were cars stalled in the middle of the mini-lake. (Never try to cross a very deep highway pool with your car. That’s some seriously dumb shit.) I pulled off to a diner, grabbed dinner, and got directions on how to re-route myself (this was in the days before GPS). All was fine until I pulled off somewhere on the Long Island Expressway for a potty break and to gas up. When I was ready to roll, my car wouldn’t start. I accepted a ride from two brothers from Guatemala who were also headed out to my end of the island, against my best judgement. They seemed nice. I didn’t want to spend the money on a motel. And, to be perfectly honest, I’d always felt a little bit invincible. Long Island is well-named and to drive it takes even longer in a nor’easter in the dark. I sat in the back, with the two brothers up front. Almost immediately, one of them began trying to get a date. I kept hearing how beautiful I was. How he wanted to see me again. How he wanted to see me again. How he wanted to see me again. How he wanted to see me again. I explained I had a partner in Connecticut. I told him about my uncle’s death and how I was down here for the funeral. I said I’d be very busy and couldn’t meet up with him. But I was so beautiful. And he really wanted to see me again. I was so beautiful. I was so beautiful. I was so beautiful. I was patient, didn’t lose my temper, realizing that being dumped by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere was one of many bad possible options. I don’t remember being terribly scared although I knew I was in a bad situation. I knew I needed to keep my cool and act ‘nice’. I know women chomp at the bit at having to act ‘nice’ to get out of bad situations but that’s how the world works when men are bigger and stronger than you. It’s not a particularly female thing. Smaller men confronted by bullies and other ass-kickers often have to rely on their wits, too. I remember being mostly annoyed that I had to put up with this shit for hours because Mierda -For-Brains wasn’t gonna let it go, no matter how much I tried to turn the conversation away from my alleged beauty. When we got to Southampton I said just drop me off at a popular diner on Route 27. I’d call my cousin and he could pick me up. They insisted on taking me all the way to East Hampton. First we were going to their house where we’d switch cars; the driver wasn’t going with us, and we’d switch to Romeo’s car. Oh yay. This was turning into the longest night of my life and I was well aware that it might be my last. We loaded my shit into Romeo’s jeep and headed out, even though I kept trying to talk him into just dropping me off at the diner. No no no, he insisted on taking me all the way to my cousin’s house, presumably so he could spend another half hour nagging me for a date. You’re so beautiful, if you say it often enough eventually she’ll wear out and spread her legs for you! Every man knows that! It’s never failed in the history of the world! I did some quick risk calculations in my head and realized I had a near-zero chance of getting raped although murder was still a small possibility. There was so much shit in the jeep there was barely any room for either of us to sit, much less sexual assault. And outside, it was so cold and raining so hard I found it highly unlikely he could keep it up long enough to rape me. Dumb shit I did: When we finally got to my cousin’s house I kissed him as thanks. I figured it was the least I could do because he did, in fact, get me to my cousin’s house and saved me a motel bill and didn’t rape or murder me. And because I was nice. Far nicer back then than I am today. “I want more,” he growled in what I think he thought was a sexy come-hither tone as I pulled away from him and grabbed my suitcase. I wanted to yell at him, “YOU’VE HAD YOUR FUN, ASSHOLE!!! YOU’VE NAGGED ME FOR THREE FUCKING HOURS ABOUT A DATE WHEN I’VE SAID REPEATEDLY I HAVE A PARTNER AND I’M OUT HERE FOR A GODDAMN FUNERAL! YOU SCARED ME AND I THINK YOU KNOW IT! NOW FUCK OFF AND DIE!!!” But of course I didn’t. Because I was nice. And because I was hoping he wouldn’t shoot me in the back. That was one of the worst nights of my life because I did Dumb Shit. Don’t get in a car with a nearly-strange man, Part II This was the event that made me seriously question just what the hell is wrong with female psychology because, well into middle age, I put myself in danger because I wanted to be liked by a guy who I frankly found kind of boring. I’d met him a week or so previously when I’d walked into my apartment building and he greeted me and told me how pretty I was. Thank you, I said, and went on my merry way. He followed me down the hall and asked if he could get my phone number. He was tall and cute and several years younger and, well, I have zero problem with younger men, so I gave it to him. We talked, we agreed to meet at a coffee house. We spent about a half hour there, although talking wouldn’t be the way to put it. We made some small conversation but he didn’t seem to have much to talk about. He was from Italy, and I would be visiting in a few weeks. So we talked a bit about Italy and then there was nothing much more. He was cute, but boring. “C’mon, let’s go take a ride together,” he said. No, I said, I think I’m just going to go home. I’ll drive you home, he said. I can walk in less than five minutes, I said. He pushed, c’mon, just for a few minutes, so I did, even though I didn’t feel comfortable about it. We drove around for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and when I asked him to take me home, he did. Customarily a drop-off happens at the entrance of my apartment building. But he drove down into the dark parking garage. “Hey, not here,” I said. He parked the car. Photo by Chris Cagle on Unsplash He started kissing me, and I obliged him a bit. He was much bigger than me, and I felt nervous, so I opened the car door a little. He didn’t object. Then he lunged for my breasts and I jumped out of the car. “Gotta go,” I said. I was rattled when I jumped out, but in the three minutes it took me to get to my apartment, I was really pissed. When he texted me he wanted to see me again I told him no and why. And he texted back, ‘But I want 2 see u again,” and I didn’t respond. He knew where I lived. I can’t remember if I’d told him my full name, but I was cautious for a few days after in case I ran into him again. I still blame myself, because I did Dumb Shit There was NO excuse for his behaviour. But…I did dumb shit. I put myself in danger. Well into middle age. I didn’t have the excuse of being a clueless ingenue. I was old enough to know better. That was actually the third time I’d gotten into a car with a stranger. The second time was several years prior after I’d moved to Canada and no longer had a car. I was waiting at the bus stop, some guy offered me a ride. I said no, I can wait for the bus. He asked where I was going, I said the mall up the street. Come on, I’ll take you there, it’s on my way, he said. So I got in, and he took me there, and he bugged me for a date. Fortunately it was only for a few minutes. I got out, thanked him for the ride, and that was that. But I noted to myself: No strange man offers to give you a ride who doesn’t want something. I put myself in danger three times. I made the same goddamn mistake. I Did Dumb Shit. I didn’t listen to my mother, and I’m pretty damn lucky things didn’t turn out way worse in any of those scenarios. I DO NOT now get into cars with strange men, or men I barely know anymore. Ever. Men are responsible for their own behaviour, and must never be excused from harassing, abusing, or attacking a woman. Feminists are right to keep hammering this lesson home because some of these thick-as-a-brick dimbulbs just don’t get it. Or, they do but their dick takes over and makes them do dumb shit. Aziz Ansari’s dick made him do dumb shit but at least he stopped when ‘Grace’ asked him to, who also did dumb shit by going to his apartment. Doesn’t matter if he was a celebrity. I think it’s a bad idea in the age of #MeToo ESPECIALLY if he’s a celebrity. Fox on Sex: It’s A Fact, Sex Makes Us Dumb I considered myself a pretty smart cookie back in the day, and still do today, although I find, ironically, the older I get and the farther past the rape demographic I get, the more cautious I am about strange men. I offer my dumb shit stories because there’s a pervasive trend in feminism in the last twenty years or so that holds that women are never responsible for getting sexually assaulted. Which is true to an extent — there’s simply no excuse for sexual assault, boys . But. Women still have to take charge of their own safety. We may never completely eliminate the possibility of getting raped or otherwise sexually assaulted but we can reduce — perhaps greatly — the likelihood. All it takes is one lapse of judgement. I got very, very, lucky with three of them. If I could do dumb shit like getting in a car with a man with all my years of experience, the temptation will be even greater for younger women with less experience and feminine wisdom, with their own overblown opinion of their own good judgement. “I can handle myself!” Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. But do your very, very level best to not do dumb shit. Because bad judgement can happen at any age. And ruin your life. This first appeared on Medium in June 2019. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!