“If you are concerned with other people’s genitals, that is a *you* problem.”

So concludes a response to women’s discomfort with men in our spaces. This was the first justification I saw trotted out in the aftermath of the Wi Spa viral video. Since then, the narrative has hopped from victim-blaming to saying the incident was staged, and finally to insisting OP made the whole thing up!

The latest coverage in the Los Angeles Blade wants to be conclusive: “Anonymous sources within the LAPD tell the Blade they have been unable to find any corroborating evidence that there was a transgender person present on that day.”

As much as I hate to admit it, I grew up in Ohio.

For a long time people called it America’s Weathervane. A hub of midwestern culture, Ohio picked the President every election from 1960 until this last one.

Despite my six years in Tennessee, I watched with great interest as  State Representative Jena Powell spoke before the Ohio Legislature in defense of women’s rights. She’s a Republican, of course. Representative Powell may not be the best feminist spokesperson, but the aggressive, frightening reaction she triggered made my blood run cold.

There’s been a lot of discussion in Radfem spaces about whether cooperating with conservatives is a good idea.

Plenty of writers and activists have stepped up to remind us why conservatives don’t make good allies. Just because Sky Daddy agrees the sky is blue and talks real sweet, doesn’t mean we need to go back to him. He’ll only hit us again sooner or later.

But with such a complete media blackout, with social platforms banning us for nonsense like ‘misgendering,’ it’s not hard to understand why some feminists choose to take advantage of the few opportunities on offer to get the word out.

If Marion Millar’s case were getting any real press coverage, feminists of every shade would be spazzing out over it.

One young Englishwoman stumbled upon it, and her conscience demanded she say something… Even if her understanding of politics obscured exactly what.

The Authentic Observer is my new favorite YouTube channel. YouTube has pretty much become my TV, I’ve somehow even managed to recreate my middle school viewing habits of bouncing between The History Channel, VH1 and A&E.

The Authentic Observer focuses on literature and culture. Galatea – TAO‘s young writer, director, editor, costume designer and star – gave herself burnout at the end of last year birthing a Halloween video that is truly a work of art. Her posts have been pared down and less frequent since then.

Something wicked is brewing in conservative America.

The same culture wars that birthed incels have impacted the girls who won’t date them just as much.

Our refusal to draw mothering into the fold leaves a lot of girls feeling conflicted. Feminism fails them as long as it ignores the more nuanced questions of many women’s lives. 

Jen at Fundie Fridays knows a lot about it, “The misogyny on Caitlin’s channel is rampant and direct. She often uses the same talking points as incels when expressing her worldview.”

The current model of Choice Feminism is riddled with problems.

In radfem and GC spaces, we take them as a gimme. We understand that many of the alternatives we throw around are older than any of us, that radical feminism is not a reaction to Choice Feminism.

In our sheltered enclave, it’s easy to forget how confusing it is out there.

French YouTuber Alice Cappelle takes on some meaty subjects with a laywoman’s perspective. She lays out details and liberally quotes others, while admitting she doesn’t always know where she stands on things.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I had no idea what separatism was.

Doing some long-overdue digging, I learned it’s at the root of the weed that’s choking modern politics.

Research Is Safe And Fun!

I quickly found myself lost in a dense, dry old bramble. Kathy Rudy’s tale of joining a ‘radical feminist’ group is littered with breadcrumbs along the trail into the political wilderness.

She describes the lesbian community she joined in North Carolina in 1980. They put separatism first, theorizing among themselves about an ‘essential female nature’ that inevitably reflected their own experience.

Bill Maher makes a great Boomer spokesman.

Sitting halfway between Bill and the Young People I think he’s yelling at this week, I remember his firebrand image from 25 years ago.

He’s always spoken for that segment of liberals who fancy themselves independent thinkers. They made a big splash as the new kids in town, when I was a kid. But the turmoil of the past quarter-century hasn’t triggered any growth as they became the dominant force in American liberal politics.

Think of them as liberal Libertarians – People who are Democrats because they want to avoid the Right’s racism and sexism, even if they’re not really interested in social programs. Identity politics is the perfect strawman they can slay over and over to avoid doing any collectivism. And it has many forms besides Wokism.

The other day, I was reading that same discussion again.

“I can’t wait till the tide finally turns and all these loudmouths on the Trans Train will get their just desserts!”

“Yeah, I think about that, too. But I’m afraid the world will just pretend it never happened.”

This goes against the gut feeling of Justice, but the pessimists have a point. How many times have we had something completely off-the-charts insane splashed across our screens, only to have the News Cycle churn onward and nothing really happen?

Tribalism has really gotten out of hand, hasn’t it? Everything must be on one side or the other in the Culture War, no front line is too remote.

But tossing everything in two huge piles throws together things that have no business anywhere near each other.

The simple dichotomy of Conservative = Republican / Progressive = Democrat has shown itself inadequate for a while now. For one thing, a ‘conservative’ is someone who wants to conserve things as they are. But this makes the Biden administration’s Back-To-Normal schtick a little weird, doesn’t it?

Ever wonder why so many of the people arguing with you seem brainwashed? Wonder no more!

Gabriel Rockhill lays it all out, but his article isn’t getting the attention it deserves. That’s probably because it’s a slog to read, but it’s as important as it is wordy.

He tells us about a declassified CIA report that describes exactly how the Agency helped to mastermind the current mess:

“In recognizing it was unlikely that it could abolish [the left] entirely, the world's most powerful spy organization has sought to move leftist culture away from resolute anti-capitalist and transformative politics toward center-left reformist positions that are less overtly critical of US foreign and domestic policies.”

Hey guyns, get this – Abortion is trending again! Zipidee-do-dah!

Ovarit’s comments on my post this week took a discouraging turn. Alongside a lively discussion of Mitt Romney’s Child Allowance Plan, an unexpected consensus emerged that abortion protections at the Federal level are basically gone.

The Sad State of Women’s Rights, US Edition

“It’s just a matter of time. It’ll be off the table soon, and it makes moderate Republicans a lot more appealing to me.“

This sounds reasonable until you remember that all Romney needs to look like a hero is a little integrity. 

This world just keeps on getting weirder! Today, I found myself sobbing with relief over a bill introduced by the man I voted against in 2012.

Saagar Enjeti over at The Hill explains how Mitt Romney’s Child Allowance Plan “Would almost single-handedly cut child poverty to the lowest level in decades.” 

He also reminds us that the United States is facing a real fertility crisis  – My generation is not having enough kids to replace ourselves. It seems many Americans don’t understand why this is important.

“When I praised this publicly, I was hit with unsurprisingly skeptical takes around, ‘Why do we even need more kids…? Doesn’t this discriminate against people who don’t have kids?”

“America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic; what it is to educate a child; what it is to foster justice; what it is to express oneself properly; what it is to be a nation – all is being refounded upon a religion.“

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But Professor John McWhorter was writing this week about race theory in America, not gender.

He is talking about the same thing we are, without knowing it.

Last week, I pointed out that Kyle Kulinski over at Secular Talk had stumbled upon the same issue we in the feminist community have been wrestling with for years – That lots of so-called Liberals really aren’t very. 

The story of the Reddit attack on Wall Street is being twisted in some strangely familiar ways.

Today on Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski shows us how tech companies and publications are working together to paint the Redditors as right-wing extremists.

He pulls headlines from Business Insider describing Discord banning r/Wallstreetbets for “hate speech”, and Newsweek claiming it’s all a cover for recruitment.

Kyle points out Discord’s convenient timing, “It’s not a coincidence that the day they took them down is the day that they were bankrupting hedge funds and taking down wealthy and powerful people.”

Democrats in the House of Representatives are going stir-crazy, held captive by Republicans who plainly state they have no intention of working with them on anything, ever. 

Apparently, their self-awarded consolation prize for failing to do much for the American people all through one of the worst years on record, was to make their paperwork More Inclusive.

The changes themselves aren’t all that crazy actually, quite a few ‘men’ are being removed – ‘Chairman’ becomes ‘Chair,’ ‘Seamen’ becomes ‘Seafarers.’ ‘Submit his or her resignation’ becomes ‘resign.’ Pretty straightforward stuff, it seems.

Pornhub recently changed its rules in a big way.

No more downloads! I guess the wanking public will have to make do with bookmarks. Only verified accounts are allowed to upload anything. This will probably make the biggest difference to the women and girls commodified without their permission.

And more moderators, of course. What credentials do you suppose they look for?

Saagar Enjeti at The Hill continued drifting leftward last week, disappointed that these changes didn’t come from years of conservative agitation. 

Sitting with mixed feelings tonight, after learning how a feminist icon threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Ruth Bader-Ginsburg was a hard-hitting civil rights lawyer in the 1970s. Her mission was to take on sexual discrimination, one example at a time.

She argued before the Supreme Court for the American Civil Liberties Union. She won Social Security survivor benefits, she won women a place on juries. Appearing in six cases, she won five.

One day, her secretary remarked, “I’m typing these briefs for you, and there’s the word sex, sex, sex on every page! Don’t you know those nine men to whom you’re arguing, when they hear that word, their first association is not what you want them to be thinking about!“

Hey everyone, 

A harried BrazenShe checking in real quick, because I think I’ve solved a little mystery. 

There’s this idea floating around that radical feminists are conservative. More than that, I have seen us called white supremacists with all the authority a Tumblrite can muster. 

At first blush, this confused me immensely. I’m from Cleveland Heights. Racism does not compute for me. 

Ok, some of us have made appearances next to conservatives recently. Scratch the surface and you’ll find a frustrated liberal abandoned by her friends. 

Born to a wealthy Russian military family at the height of the Victorian era, Alexandra Kollontai rejected the upper-class life.

Opinionated and intelligent, she dove into politics young. Driven by the conviction that “bourgeois feminists” could never really understand the plight of The People, at 21 she ran away from her army officer husband and married a poor cousin. But it was the dangerous conditions in a local factory that caused her to snap. Devoting herself to Marxism, Alexandra left her second husband and made the acquaintance of the important men in the revolutionary Bolshevik party.

What do words like ‘freedom’ and ‘liberal’ actually mean?

Hong Kong has been in the news for a while now. Many of us will have at least a passing familiarity with the fact that the Chinese government is experimenting with various methods of running them into the ground.

But a more long-standing problem – in the country deemed 2020’s Freest Economy by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal – is the spiraling price of real estate.

Vox recently published a video addressing the issue. Land scarcity, the obvious suspect in an island nation of millions, is not the problem. Only about 3% of Hong Kong is zoned for urban housing.

It’s been a very long year so far. Between disease, financial crunch and political upheaval, it seems like the world is just plain confusing, if not actively out to get us.

In times like these, it’s important to occasionally take time out for something majorly positive.

Today’s installment of Something Positive features climate change. I know that sounds weird, but bear with me.

Women in underdeveloped countries often suffer the most from the personal and economic effects of climate change. So it was with no small relish that I learned how successful (and cheap!) the Great Green Wall of Africa has been so far.

Just popping in to bring attention to something I noticed in the news this morning.

This weekend was Father's Day in the United States. Usually, this holiday passes with little more fanfare than some cards at the drugstore and persistent Home Depot commercials.

This year, as we will all have noticed by now, is unique. This year, Father's Day was marked by random outbursts of violence across the country.

I'm not even talking about the protests. Or the riots. Or the looting. Or the brutal acts of political pageantry.

Chicago had it worst, with 60 people shot across the city. Nine of them have died, in unrelated situations where someone decided to start pulling a trigger. New York City has seen 18 shootings this weekend.

We have all developed our little quirks in dealing with daily life during lockdown. Your faithful writer has been vacillating between following the pandemic and its politics like a sexy murder trial, and avoiding anything remotely topical to cover the smell of my brain sizzling. Last night I was pulled from panicked reverie by the compulsion to respond to an article on Medium. 

We’re Watching An Economy Die is one of those rare treats that is both inescapably enjoyable and deeply disturbing. Umair Haque goes to great lengths to convince us that we are seeing the death throes of democracy in the United States. That the inevitable, eternal outcome of widespread poverty is a hard turn Right. We will blame minorities, elect fascists and become “the world’s first poor rich country.“