women's rights Archives

Exulansic And The CAIS Of The Phantom Censor

February 19, 2022 by Brazen She

Recently, the Gender Critical community was rocked by the sudden removal of a prominent voice from a prominent platform.

Can’t you just leave us alone??

“I do plan to keep making this content, because it’s more important now than ever to keep speaking out.”

The Case Against The Case Against CAIS

Exulansic made her well-considered views known regarding whether individuals born with the anomaly of sexual development known as Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome should be counted as women. There was some passionate disagreement, but she stood her ground and even won over a few people.

Debate sputtered when a newcomer to the fray stepped in and dragged it to a grinding halt – Someone who had to make sure everyone knew the Intersex Truth.

His response video makes up fifty percent of the content on Intersex Truther’s brand-new channel. Blowing through the studies Exulansic cited with, “Gish gallop!” guarantees him a spot in the Mansplaining Hall of Fame. Still insecure in his infamy, he also commissioned a rap song calling her a bigot. And an unflattering caricature. Just normal Alpha Male stuff, you know.

Exulansic responded promptly with an analysis of the caricature, tracing echoes of classic anti-Semitic propaganda. YouTube shut her down a few hours later, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Personal Bias And Image Management

Don’t worry, I’m not going to offer my personal opinion on the intersex debacle. I believe it’s a distraction that’s taken time and airspace away from our real fight. It adds nothing to the immediate debate surrounding women’s rights, and has the Gender Critical community taking sides over something irrelevant to most of us. It has served as cover for the sabotage of our movement, and I am not going to add fuel to the pyre in the form of my two cents.

My personal feelings are beside the point!

I won’t be naming the highest-profile person involved, either. Whether you agree he has the kind of clout to take down entire channels, this person has absolutely zero flotsam online. None. I’ve been researching all kinds of people for these posts for years, and everyone over 30 with any clout has some random articles from ten years ago. A couple awkward photographs. At least one snarky, dissenting op-ed.

Not this guy – I searched through eleven pages of Google results. Make of this what you will, but I’ll be referring to him as Benedict Arnold in the hopes of avoiding digital oblivion.

But the basis for Exulansic’s video – The one that triggered Intersex Truther and sparked the whole chain of events – was a Benedict Arnold interview featuring an intersex individual.

He threw some strong words at anyone stepping up to support Exulansic, and she has said she felt threatened with cancelation. But he’s also been known to sling slurs, then laugh off anyone reacting seriously. Karen Davis over at You’re Kidding, Right? has provided receipts for his free-wheeling language. However interesting his interview choices, I don’t think Old Benny is a friend to women’s liberation.

But I don’t think he’s responsible for the demise of Ex’s channel. For one thing, he’s interviewed her more than once and they seemed to get along. Karen Davis is a big proponent of this idea but, if Benedict could do such a thing, seems to me she would have been first in line during the Great Whore Debacle of Summer 2021. Mr. Arnold seems to roll on from our criticism just fine.

Rise Of The Machines

YouTube, on the other hand, will censor certain words without notifying anyone not to use them. One of my first videos – A takedown of medical professionals attempting to discuss the affect of COVID vaccines on menstrual cycles without saying the word ‘woman’ – was itself taken down. The V-word keyword has become common knowledge, but how many words do you suppose we don’t know about?

Some people are just ruthless!

The increased prominence of extreme right-wing groups has reminded us that anti-Semitism never really died, and I suspect YouTube (among others) has set up bots to squelch any mention of it outside official sources.

Ex is a rabble rouser, her channel ruffled many delicate feathers. Before her Patreon was also taken down, she told her patrons YouTube removed her for ‘inciting violence.’ I must have missed that bit listening to her caricature video while making dinner that night. But the invocation of anti-Jewish hatred – and actual Nazi propaganda – may have just been the massive final straw.

The case for a political hit job is compelling – Karen and Ex discussed it explicitly. Karen has stated many times she believes Benedict Arnold is responsible for the whole mess, and Exulansic supplied incriminating details. Cluniac makes his own argument for sabotage, pointing the finger at Intersex Truther. Both assume an organized team of trolls behind the scenes, and it’s not hard to imagine in our age of the Twitter Mob.

But it’s too easy to explain too much using only YouTube’s mindless self-interest. Association with Nazis is bad for market share, and my embarrassing depth of experience tells me this topic is essentially absent from the platform.

That Feeling Of Being Watched

But can so many intelligent women be seeing a phantom? Why does Exulansic’s cancelation feel so targeted?

The online world can be a tricky thing; Digital engineers have spent the past decade completely remaking the back end, meanwhile the interface remains largely unchanged. Your old friends look the same, but they’ve all defected to the other side. It sounded paranoid 20 years ago, but everything we do is tracked and logged in some massive mainframe… for some reason. Uses for this level of information and technology are limited only by the imagination.

More mundanely, the Trans Femme are extremely over-represented in tech. Even I have a former in-law who fits this trope perfectly. It’s not hard to believe they would rig their own platforms in their favor, just like they try to tilt everything else.

Can we just get this over with, Gary?? You look absolutely ridiculous!

I’m not a programmer, but I know enough about computers to know I don’t know that much. Most of us don’t really know how all this shiny shit works, but we shouldn’t have to – Modern society encourages individuals to specialize, reaching new depths in a narrow field of focus. A high population ensures a cornucopia of topics in development. I don’t know how to fly an airplane, either, and I shouldn’t be expected to.

I may not be a pilot, but I can recognize a dangerous trajectory. Ignorance of flight protocol doesn’t mean I can’t see a crash coming.

Haters Gonna Hate

Just a few years ago, with #MeToo in full swing, even the passing thought that women were being targeted and censored for stating banal facts would have felt absurd. Now, we have Slightly Twisted Female and others pleading for the community not to fracture further, as we frantically hunt down the source of our anxiety.

Supporting Exulansic and anyone like her is important enough to venture into new platforms, but I worry about stretching ourselves too thin. I can hardly keep track of things as it is, and I don’t even have an Instagram!

Seems to me that any organization of any decent size is bound to have a mole. I’m not ruling out Benedict Arnold and his freaky-clean vibe, but I’m content to leave him to his trolling. Focusing on supporting those whose work I do admire and appreciate will help build momentum towards the liberation of women from the rule of men, and anyone who joins me is welcome.

Presenting a united front on this point is absolutely vital, because there does appear to be a guided effort to fracture and discredit Gender Criticism through stoking in-fighting and paranoia. Just like so many radical and leftist groups before us. But women know who we are.

And we know that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. But if they’re coming for us, let them find us hard at work.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Wokism, Women’s World Tagged With: Anxiety, Espionage, Feminism, Gender Ideology, Networking, Opposition control, radical feminism, Sabotage, Women's liberation, women's oppression, women's rights

Men-Only Spaces: Patriarchy’s Next Gambit

December 30, 2021 by Brazen She

“I just don’t want men in women’s spaces, and I don’t care how those men identify.”

Geez, Gary – I’m not gonna marry you just because you say so!

The clip is Kellie-Jay Keen (AKA Posie Parker) attempting to converse with someone called James Max, “It’s up to everybody however they want to live their life, but when it impinges on my life – ”

“How does it impinge on your life?” Jim is cavalier in his home field advantage.

“If I want to go into a female-only space and there’s men in there who decide that they’re women, then it’s no longer a female-only space, is it?”

I snagged this one as it floated by, so jam-packed with goodies I knew I could pull something out of it. But, beyond that, this guy is so busy being arrogant he forgets to stop running his mouth!

He’s so convinced Kellie doesn’t understand the game he’s playing that he shows most of his cards: “But then, men were told that. They wanted to have men-only spaces and then they were told that was discrimination. They weren’t allowed to do it.”

Right, because everything used to be men-only! – Education, commerce, Law, the Clergy, everything. From at least the Middle Ages until within living memory, people felt sorry for a working woman because it meant her husband was failing to support her in focusing on the homestead. Working women were a manifestation of poverty, of cutthroat economic forces.

Outside of learning a trade to support her family, women were excluded entirely from huge chunks of society for centuries.

When we did venture out, Man’s World was a hostile place. The amount of hard and soft pushback has been completely out of proportion to the threat men face in recognizing women as equals. This scenario where equality means obliterating all boundaries also means scrubbing the record of how overwhelmingly one-sided the threat really is.

Oh shit, did I get played??

Kellie recognized this, of course, “So, men are more unsafe now that they can’t have their golf clubs?”

“It’s not a question of safe. It’s cake-and-eat-it, isn’t it?” Jimmy’s smugness betrays a deep ignorance of a life where you’re romantically and sexually attracted to people who could easily kill you, should the mood strike them. He comes across as one of those guys who thinks a broken heart deserves a broken arm.

“It’s a question of safety for women.”

“So, all men are predators?” This is absurd. But all men are male, regardless of any medical intervention.

“No, not all men. Some are, and we don’t know which ones they are. That’s why we have segregated spaces.”

Everyone knows this. Even if Time started over in the year 2000 and Kellie, Jim, and I all forgot the first few decades of our lives, the story continues – Sarah Everard was killed by a man she didn’t know, distracting from the thousands of women every year murdered by someone they trusted.

But Jim blithely assumes a paradigm that finds equality a great loophole for shoving these skeletons back in the closet. He literally shakes his head as he says, “Right. I mean, isn’t it better that we train all people to be a bit more respectful to each other?”

Can’t we all just get along? I dunno, Jimmy, can women just have some privacy?

“Well, when we don’t have any men committing sexual assault, rape, and domestic violence, then I will totally agree with you. But, until that happens, I’m afraid…”

“So, women don’t commit those crimes as well?” Interrupting her to accuse women of violence without evidence. Is there some kind of Man-Splaining award he’s going for?

“Not at the rate of men, no.” Not by a million miles. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark, in the same town, in the same fucking country, dude. This has been known since the beginning of time, it was the rationale for women being kept at home – To keep us safe! You know, from men.

No, really, that’s what he said – I need a man to defend against men!

“Right. OK. I am slightly staggered by your views.” He stammers theatrically for a moment, as if she’s just told him men should be exterminated from the face of the earth.

“That biological sex exists?”

“I may have to change my mind – Maybe it was right that, if you take those views, maybe you should be canceled.”

“Wow.” My thoughts exactly. Kellie doesn’t get defensive at this incendiary statement. She brings her tone down and takes a breath. “You’re on talk radio, right?”

“Yes.”

“OK, and you think people should be canceled for – “

“No,” He cuts her off several times through this exchange, “I don’t think people should be canceled, and I would like people to have different views, but – It’s just – I find it staggering that you would want to have this kind of discrimination perpetrated against people who are born different from you.”

Those poor, beleaguered transwomen! Stuck in private spaces with pigs like Jimmy here, that’s gotta be a bitter pill to swallow. If such a creature existed, they would inspire great pity for such a predicament.

But Kellie isn’t distracted, her sights fixed on calling out this rhetorical imposter.

“No, I want men out of women’s spaces. That’s not ‘born different.’ That’s a biological fact, and that biological fact determines whether someone is a risk to women.“

And, just like that, we watch him drop the pose of Concern for Transwomen as soon as she calls out their real name! His direct response to this is, “So, is it OK if men said that they wanted women out of their spaces?”

And what would you say qualifies as ‘Men’s Spaces,’ Jimmy?

No crystal ball required to see where this is going!

“Do you mean like private spaces, like toilets and places where men might undress?”

He gives a coy little shrug, “Might be.” Might not be. Might be Parliament. Jimmy can’t tell the future.

“Absolutely, of course women shouldn’t be in those spaces.”

“OK, and what about other places?”

“Like what?”

“I dunno – Bars, restaurants, or anything else. I mean, can we just go back to segregated society?” Then we can stop wasting time talking to women.

I think Kellie gets a bit flustered by this idiot so boldly talking out both sides of his mouth. She kind of fumbles the next part, failing to concisely convey how the world used to be a men-only space, and why that had to end.

“The reason feminists of old decided that they wanted to eradicate some of those men-only spaces is because, in those corridors of power, that’s where important conversations were taking place. And women, by not being allowed in those spaces, were out of the conversation.”

Government made decisions effecting women’s lives all the time, usually with no input from us at all. We were bound by rules we had no hand in making and, eventually, we had enough. This is why suffrage was the first organized push of Women’s Liberation – If we’re not in Government, we’ll never get anywhere else!

Jimmy doesn’t bring this up directly, but his angle is understood. Jangling this old chain rattles Kellie a bit, and she doesn’t call him on essentially admitting that transwomen are men with his if you can keep us out, we can keep you out maneuver.

“That is a very different thing than wanting to keep men out of women’s spaces, like where women are undressing.” It sure is! How did we get here, anyway? He was arguing for men all along, and we’ve gone from poor transwomen using the Ladies Room to men-only clubs in a single step.

Refocusing, Kellie returns to the center of her fight: “Does my 15-year-old daughter have the right to go in a female-only space and expect there only to be females?”

And Jimmy, for his part, returns to Start as well – “If somebody is, or if they have transitioned, then they are a female.”

No. That’s the simple answer here. No, they aren’t. Kellie humors him with some stats before getting there: “Well, ninety percent of men who say they transition have no intention of taking hormones, or losing their genitals.”

Not the point. A man can have all kinds of surgeries to look like anything his heart desires, but those desires betray their source. A man madeover into a woman is only and forever that, nothing more. Full stop. How many of which surgeries he’s had is irrelevant.

I’m sorry, Reginald – I can only see you as a pigeon!

“And so, as far as I’m concerned… You don’t transition anyway, there’s no such thing. Nobody ever changes from one sex to another.”

This is where this ploy ends. And Jimmy was kind enough to tip his hand and show us what this Male Supremacy movement’s next move might be.

But Kellie is thrown off by the cocky gamesmanship, “What we’re talking about, predominantly with men, is men over the age of forty deciding that they want to dress as women. It’s what we used to call transvestites.”

She tries to bring it back together as the segment ends, “This whole ‘transgender’ [thing] just totally loses the fact of what’s really going on. Most people who call themselves ‘trans’ are not transsexual, they’re transgender. They’re transvestites, in old language.” But Jimmy’s only too happy to cut her off.

“Right. Ok. Well, then, let’s leave the old language.” You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It’s amazing how redefining everything manages to erase so much progress.

This short video speaks volumes, most of it not from our side. I don’t fault Kellie for anything she said, she was factual and goal-oriented. It didn’t matter anyway, Jimmy blocking her with the customary accusations of bigotry.

But the arrogance on display here is truly next-level. He didn’t just dismiss her outright – He toyed with her like a sneering, spoiled child, before tossing her away as she sputtered. I’m not sure what Kellie expected, but our pal Jimmy obviously never had any intention of engaging with anything she was going to say.

His argument boiled down to, Women shouldn’t have private spaces away from men. And, if they do, men should get whatever spaces away from women strike our fancy. You want private bathrooms? We want private clubs.

And, again, the subtext is clear – Let us in, or you will pay dearly.

The male ego will be appeased!

And when Kellie discarded the ‘True Trans’ ploy, sweeping away the whole argument and clearing the board by insisting they’re all men anyway, Jim didn’t demure like he was supposed to. Instead of retreating to the fallback stance of Trans Advocate, he went in for the kill. That’s masculine aggression for you.

Writing afterwards in The Spectator, Kellie quotes Jim as saying, “I just get the impression she hates men.” She explains this away as sleight of hand, to cover his lack of rational arguments for the destruction of women’s rights.

I think it’s more devious than that – Some men yearn for the good old days. They hate our independence, blaming us for a lack of control in their own lives. By smearing that hatred onto us, they can destroy us and pretend they are justified. Burn the witch!

To claim a woman married to a man hates men carries an insurmountable burden of proof. Kellie just isn’t worried about protecting transwomen, the ultimate straw man. She wants those men out of what were once women’s private spaces!

Jimmy Max acts like his world is ending and Kellie has her finger on the button, just like any child throwing a tantrum and blaming his trigger. She made me do it! Cancel her!

The recent boldness of smug men like Jimmy is frightening. But if we listen to him where he refuses to listen to us, we won’t be surprised by the tricks up their sleeve.

Filed Under: Feminism In Action, Wokism, Women’s World Tagged With: Culture, Feminism, Free speech, Gender Ideology, Politics, trans rights, Transgender, Women's liberation, women's rights

How Feminism Fails

November 27, 2021 by Brazen She

“Among the ‘strong-minded women’ who met to attend the convention was Amelia Bloomer – The lady who goes in for breeches and buncomb.”

Sir, thou dost wound me mightily!

Dress historian Abby Cox quotes a catty article from 1853, describing feminists as women who subscribe to pants and nonsense – You know, that crazy stuff about women being full people who deserve rights.

“I didn’t actually wanna bring it up, because of some personal biases towards it. It gets brought up a lot when people talk about feminism and clothing in the 19th century, so [it was] kinda me being like, ‘Ugh!’

“I also just kinda hate the 1850s as an aesthetic period, so I’ve never really been interested in studying it.

“However, for this discussion, it is important. It was a brief moment in sartorial history. It happened in the United States, it was tied into women’s rights at the time. However, it was a failure.”

Learning from feminism’s failures will keep us from repeating the past. No one remembers the 1850s for the drastic shift in women’s attire. Women’s pants came almost 100 years later, modeled by movie stars during the Great Depression.

Abby’s flustered, but she tries to explain why Bloomers didn’t change Victorian fashion, “They were too contrarian. They were too shocking, and so people didn’t take them seriously.

“By not operating within a broader social acceptability, how can [they] make any sort of progress towards equality?” Dropping out doesn’t solve anything – Just ask your nearest Baby Boomer.

Well, my bottom line is doing just fine!

But in the 2021 hustle economy, everyone’s a salesman. We’ve learned to sell ourselves to college admissions boards, to employers, to potential clients and subscribers, and to each other. Branding is the name of the game, and Bloomers were terrible branding.

We can do better.

The Medium Becomes The Message

“I’ve been reading news articles from the 1850s, and what’s interesting is that when these newspapers are talking about Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony, and this reform movement, they don’t ever actually talk about their points – The messages that they stand for.

“What they talk about is what they’re wearing, specifically the Bloomer outfits with the tunics and the trousers. So, they’ve gotten attention, but it wasn’t the attention that they wanted. It wasn’t the attention that worked.“

My heart ached for the sweet Aussie lady in my video this week, pleading for empathy from Katy Montgomery. She spoke from basic truths but stumbled defining her terms, and Katy’s fidgety obfuscation was a perfect example of the kind of willful misunderstanding we’re dealing with.

The kind of willful misunderstanding that broadcasts ulterior motives.

To actually make progress toward the liberation of female people from invisible cages, we gotta sell it: “Susan B. Anthony stopped wearing this outfit. It was distracting from the actual message and what she wanted to promote.”

Flexibility of method is imperative in support of the message, because context is queen. We gotta know our position backwards and forwards, but we can’t assume that being right is going to be enough!

But it’s not fair!

Style Over Fashion

When we come prepared, the debate is short – Bad behavior follows the exposure of logical inconsistency, and the reasonable party becomes readily apparent.

“This whole contrarian idea, it doesn’t work in this society – You have to fit in, and then make changes. This whole Bloomer thing is a perfect example of that. These clothes turned them into, for lack of a better term, a bit of a freak show.“

Abby means this quite literally. She quotes the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 4 February, 1853: “During her stay in the Capitol, she called on a tailor and got measured for three pair of tight-fitting cassimere trowsers. The tape with which he took her dimensions is kept in a glass case, and exhibited to bachelors at a shilling a sight.”

Nothing if not for your pleasure, right fellas? Gross.

Abby argues for practicality, “The original idea of creating the Bloomers could have come from this very genuine place, and I can see where, initially, getting the attention could be a viewed as maybe a good thing.

“But then, when they’re not making headway and people are not moving past their clothing, then the message of equality is lost. Susan B. Anthony made this realization, and she stopped wearing the outfit.

“She started wearing a red shawl, and she became known for that, that was how you recognized her.” Ironically, it was Contrapoints who I heard say something about creating the taste with which you are to be enjoyed, something like that.

Refusing to accept the cover story we are fed is not enough. We must create our own context for our side of the human story. We can shift the angle by keeping our balance and refusing to be moved.

You Catch More Flies With Honey, Honey

“The Bloomers thing is something a lot of people like to hold onto because it’s this interesting thing, but I think it just doesn’t fit into the context of the female experience.” The strongest forms of feminism grow from the seed of women nurturing ourselves, rather than the embers of our patriarchal trauma.

…Did you say something, Gary?

Abby tells us the story of the Pattle Sisters, “Notorious for their artistic and eccentric friends. They wore clothing they created themselves that went against standards of the time.

“It wasn’t masculine clothing that they were wearing, they were just designing their own kind of scandalous dresses. And they pursued their own artistic and creative endeavors,” such as early fantasy photography.

As a bonus, she also explains away the bogeywoman of ‘White Feminism,’ apparently without realizing it – “Their social position gave them the space to be this way. Historically, we see women in higher social positions having room to be more eccentric, and pursue progressive agendas. Once the upper classes accepted these ideals, acceptability would trickle down to the middle and lower classes.”

Today’s scandal is tomorrow’s old news.

Context Is Queen

Looking through the lens of Class is illuminating, but the lesson these stories teach us defies social hierarchies. It might be easier to shake things up using your social clout, but sometimes an idea just doesn’t fit.

Akhenaten was Pharaoh of Egypt when he launched his new monotheistic religion, but his ideas were buried after his death in 1334 BC.

Divers pulled the first computer from an Ancient Greek shipwreck, its devastated designer’s name long forgotten.

There are piles of good ideas whose time or place had not come, dooming them to history’s trash heap.

And women are not ideas!

“Forty years later, we have split skirts for sport. It’s not like women didn’t wear bifurcated garments in the 19th century, it was the context of how they wore them that matters.”

Exactly. Feminism should be built in the context of women’s needs, not as a reaction to men.

Women Are Not Men

The Bloomers Revolution was undercut by the very notion that imitating men would bring freedom. We still seem to buy into the inherent assumption that women should be more masculine to be taken seriously. Many sacrifices have been made pursuing men’s vision of freedom, precious skills and knowledge wasted on a fundamentally flawed goal.

This brutal (and, again, seemingly willful?) oversight is not some historic relic. There are destructive consequences when the gaping holes in current feminist philosophy become doorways for those curious enough to go looking for them. Waiting on the other side are some pretty savvy right-wing weirdos, ready to validate whatever instinct is bothering you.

The Prattle Sisters’ fairy pictures are more fun than Suffragettes in their underwear – And they don’t force you to into awkward situations! The humanity of women is a basic truth, and it should be an easy sell.

Feminism should be piecing together women’s vision of freedom, but we have lost the thread in the hustle and bustle of the larger cultural argument a long time ago. Many of us aren’t even sure exactly what we’re fighting for, but we’ll know it when it’s gone.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Women of History, Women’s World Tagged With: Abby Cox, Amelia Bloomer, Culture, Feminism, history, Networking, Suffragettes, Suffragists, Women, Women's liberation, women's rights

Female-Presenting People: What Leftism Isn’t

October 30, 2021 by Brazen She

“We define our sexual orientation as one thing and you’re changing it to another, and that’s the issue.” Self-described “old-school lesbian YouTuber” Arielle Scarcella sits stubbornly at the center of our cultural confusion.

I shall not be moved!

“Now we have people telling us things like we have ‘complicated relationships’ with genitals? I don’t think me being a lesbian is a complicated issue. I think it’s just me being attracted to females,

“…Or female-presenting people.”

Posted back in December of 2019, Arielle becomes unusually quiet here. She hangs her head and mutters, “There’s nothing complicated about the fact that I like – that, that I’m attracted to boobs and vaginas. I mean, it’s that fuckin simple sometimes.”

She tries very hard to keep it that simple.

I don’t mean to imply that Arielle is somehow not really a lesbian. I was touched by her confusion and pain – It’s a pain straight women have been feeling for a long time: I’m attracted to men, I just don’t like them very much!

Arielle wants to see her sexuality as straightforward – Being attracted only to other women makes her a lesbian. We’re about the same age, I remember when this was assumed. Homosexuality was a fact of life, and female homosexuals were called lesbians. A straight man being a lesbian inside was nothing but a cheap punchline.

Although she’s been on the scene since 2009, Arielle is fairly new to politics. She built her personal brand on frank talk about lesbian sexuality, assuming a liberal social environment that’s beginning to dry up. After making waves when she “left the Left,” she still spends a lot of time critiquing them. The ‘Woke Left’ is the ex that Arielle just can’t get over.

I wonder what Bernie’s doing right now!

Which is weird, because she doesn’t seem to know who she’s talking about.

Which Way Is Left?

According to Brittanica, “Left, in politics, the portion of the political spectrum associated in general with egalitarianism and popular or state control of the major institutions of political and economic life. The term dates from the 1790s, when in the French revolutionary parliament the socialist representatives sat to the presiding officer’s left.”

Fun fact – It’s not random, arbitrary directions or concepts!

But Arielle talks about ‘The Left,’ ‘The Woke Left,’ and ‘The LGBT Community’ interchangeably as she describes distancing herself from all of the above: “I don’t think like these people, and I no longer want to be associated with them.”

Fair enough, right? But then she says things like, “The Left is so far left at this point that they are suggesting conversion therapy,” such as insisting anyone with a sexual orientation is a ‘genital fetishist,’ “and hiding it behind the idea of ‘queer progressiveness.'”

…The egalitarians are so egalitarian, they’re using social pressure to enforce conformity? You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means. And she is far from the only one I have heard use it this way.

Britannica continues, “Leftists tend to be hostile to the interests of traditional elites, including the wealthy and members of the aristocracy, and to favour the interests of the working class. They tend to regard social welfare as the most important goal of government.”

Taking a Political Compass quiz, Arielle and of one of her new ‘right-wing’ friends casually agree that taxes are useful because they fund government programs. Arielle says she supports things like publicly-funded museums, because “Art is important.”

Sage wisdom, indeed. And upon discovering she qualifies as a ‘Left-leaning Centrist,’ Arielle still fails to find any definition for any of these words!

The book matches my dress! Cute, right??

She also glosses over the binary axis of the quiz – Social is laid across Political to arrive at a grid point, allowing extremes to cancel each other out. Someone who wants to drown Government in the bathtub but doesn’t give a shit who you sleep with comes out as a moderate on tests like this, too.

No True Authoritarian

Arielle repeatedly ignores giant clues that she’s not dealing with Progressives at all – “Why is it that the only things required to include all people start out female-based? ‘Feminism’ equals ‘equality for all,’ and women are expected to just sit back and take what’s given to us.”

“Shaming women for their sexual choices is not activism,” Depends on what you’re agitating for. “And it’s certainly not progressive.”

Ding ding ding!

But Arielle resists making inferences about the movement she helped build, “I don’t think the trans community at large is doing this, it’s the loud extremists. But those are the ones being heard, unfortunately.” She doubles down on the ‘few bad apples’ hypothesis before admitting it’s taken her a decade to speak up about it.

As for why that might be, she answers this in a video from a year earlier, in 2018 – “What other lesbians, and even gay men at this point, aren’t telling you is that they are fucking terrified to even touch on any trans topics; How often other LGBTQ YouTubers agree with what I’m saying but avert their eyes and don’t say anything, because they’re terrified of being labeled a transphobe.“

But in taking the long way around, Arielle seems to have missed this connection. She claims, “No one wants to talk about the fact that trans activists are making shirts with slogans like, ‘Kill All TERFs.'”

…There are evidently some corners of cyberspace Arielle has yet to discover – Plenty of us are talking about it!!! But that Cancel Culture censorship your friends are all terrified of keeps most of us from ever being heard at all.

Female-Presenting People

Navigating by instinct, Arielle seems to be caught in the false dichotomy of Right vs. Left, conservative vs. liberal. These simplistic labels blur social and political concepts, turning social liberals into political conservatives when Gender Studies overtakes Poli Sci.

I’ll be good, I swear… Just let me sit down!

Arielle’s relaxed social views are intact, but she only has her own perspective to defend them with. Underneath all her steadfast posturing, Womanhood for Arielle is determined by her own impression. This reasoning falls apart under the slightest pressure – It’s very White Feminism to insist you support transwomen, so long as they spend thousands on hormones and surgery!

Arielle’s impassioned defense of ‘gatekeeping’ and boundaries is undermined by her self-serving adherence to presentation. If you pass, you get a pass!

She even pulls Rose of Dawn in to tell us why the female gender role doesn’t need redefining – A hypothesis that any brand of Feminism would disagree with! Liberation of female people from our oppressive social role was the whole point of all this, remember??

But Arielle is happy to let Rose cling to the very traditions that oppress him, because Good Trans keep the questions at bay. She seemed to be on the edge of something in December 2019, right before she ‘left the Left.’

But she hasn’t changed her views much, remaining pro-choice even as she grows more pro-gun. She just stepped back from the community she helped build, filling the space with criticism. Arielle is reinforcing a refuge of reasonableness for herself as the stability of her position is assaulted from all sides.

Having founded her identity on her membership in the LBG(TQI+) community, she’s tethered to the sinking ship. Deeply enmeshed in the performance of her sexuality and unwilling to face her own contributions to the current situation, Arielle is still following the will-o-the-wisp that found her surrounded by “the mentally unstable.”

But if she admits that even the most attractive transwomen are men, Arielle has to ask herself some uncomfortable questions. Her advocacy will always be shallow because she contradicts herself on a fundamental level.

Some men have figured out a way to get at women like Arielle, to cloud their vision with the smoke and mirrors of ‘gender reassignment’ – Some men have learned to present as female. This disquieting spectre, and her own complicity in creating it, keep Arielle cuddled up to the pussy where she feels safe.

She’s naturally protective!

Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off

The Left ‘left the Left’ a long time ago, and anyone who stumbles into material analysis gets mobbed. Arielle could be a powerful advocate for women if she hadn’t been betrayed by her government and her community. Watching her struggle to make sense of it all reminds me of the importance of definitions.

Identity Politics has flipped the script, enforcing an oppression hierarchy and placing transwomen – Men – at the top. Those with clout have used it to create an illusion of oppression.

Arielle Scarcella is a perfect example of how entwining politics and identity leaves us vulnerable to manipulation. If she could loosen her grip on that one word – Lesbian – just enough to admit there’s no True Trans, she could become the spokeswoman lesbians deserve.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Politics, Wokism Tagged With: conservatives, Culture, Feminism, Gender Ideology, liberals, Politics, trans rights, Women, Women's liberation, women's rights

The Veil: Civilization Isn’t For Us

October 2, 2021 by Brazen She

We are taught that Ancient Greece is the foundation of modern civilization.

All you other civilizations are just imitating!

Politics, Philosophy, Law – even Democracy itself was supposedly invented there, and we are still living in the paradigm created by the likes of Aristotle. We still discuss the Great Thinkers, offering reverential deference to the first glimmer of our present culture.

Enter: The Veil

Thing is, this seminal societal flowering was misogynist as all hell! These precious pillars developed during the first methodical clamping-down on the agency of women.

That’s right – Ancient Greece invented the Burqa.

They called it the Tegidion, meaning ‘little roof.’ In her BBC program The Ascent of Woman, Dr. Amanda Foreman describes how it served as a symbolic extension of a father’s or husband’s house, which gave women official protection.

From other men, presumably.

Veils were first popular in Assyria as ancient virtue-signaling among upper-class women. The Greeks adopted and adapted them in reaction to, as Dr. Foreman says, “a deep phobia of the female body.”

This profound revulsion came from, “the idea that women’s inferiority wasn’t Man-made, but rooted in Nature.” As the lesser human, Woman had to be controlled.

Aristotle, as the Father of Philosophy, saw women as just another topic for his intellect. Dr. Foreman has Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones of Edinburgh University summarize Aristotle’s foundational sexism – “Basically, women are imperfect men, they haven’t quite reached perfection, because they haven’t had semen to create what is the essence of Man.”

Leave it to a man to figure his ejaculation as the source of rational thought!

The thinking goes that, since women only grow life with the addition of semen, semen is the source of life. Woman is just the vessel.

By about 500 BC, veiling was common practice for women in Athens – The cradle of modern civilization.

Does this make you feel like a Big Man??

They were the ones who codified the idea that women are inferior, and wove it into the foundation of our society. And for them, the veil symbolized that Woman was never really allowed out of her husband’s house.

Reflecting on a collection of small votive statues draped in various styles, Dr. Llewellyn-Jones is moved to say, “Women’s lot in Ancient Athens was closer to a woman’s lot in Afghanistan under the height of Taliban rule than anything else.”

How Far Have We Really Come?

Broadcast in 2015, the title of Dr. Foreman’s miniseries is bittersweet. According to both Vogue and many recollections, 2015 was also The Year of Trans Visibility. It was the year Jenner became Caitlyn, Laverne Cox was People’s Most Beautiful Woman, and TLC introduced us to Jazz.

In the few years since, it’s been tempting to think Woman’s ascent has ended. But, contrary to her pithy television header, Dr. Foreman stresses the point, “The simple truth is, our story has never followed a straight line from darkness to light.

“The real history of women is full of swings and reversions, with liberties gained and lost from one era to the next.

“You can judge a civilization by the way it treats its women.”

Add this to the list of tests our society is badly failing. But the misogyny we’re fighting is nothing new. Its littermates are important things we now see as neutral, such as Politics and Art. The same men who decided women were lesser beings also bequeathed to History stuff like Democracy and Theater.

But it’s been demonstrated many times over that these things are not inherently misogynist. Men and women are not so different that a system created by one can’t be mastered by the other.

And never forget, that goes both ways!

Compare Greece to Egypt, where a parallel framework developed emphasizing equality for the masses – Even the occasional female Pharaoh! Dr. Foreman cheerfully describes Egyptian art, “replete with couples lovingly holding hands, even wearing the same clothes. Ancient Egypt embraced both the masculine and the feminine.

“A shared life, rather than reproduction, was the purpose of marriage.”

These two interpretations of relations between the sexes have existed in tandem forever. One reliable signal of how things are going is how free women are with their clothes.

Clothes Express The Woman

I wrote this Summer how clothing has long been a source of power, authority and even income for women. The Industrial Revolution took this out of our hands, imposing a sort of postmodern conformity and creating a paradox of choice – Too many options make deciding on one impossible, so we stop trying. We think about other things.

Like new social media, which is training young women to hunt down and eradicate whichever part of them doesn’t look like a Kardashian.

Then there’s the makeup all serious women are expected to wear, to the point we don’t even know what a natural woman’s face looks like. We laugh when men are clueless or surprised by our body hair, but we can’t lay all the blame on media. Too many of us are following these practices if these men don’t know better from their mothers, sisters, aunts and friends.

Patriarchy has continued to evolve as its defenses have been torn down. These days we’re playing Chess, not Checkers. I don’t expect Western policy to insist on anything so obvious and easily-resisted as the Burqa any time soon.

Y’all just love getting a peak so much!

But as we have gained hard autonomy, soft power has congealed to control us in other ways. Our apparent freedom disguises the box we still live in, our private lives shrinking more and more as we come to understand that we aren’t really allowed to leave Big Brother’s house.

We know in our gut that none of us is really safe. We see the Taliban reigning terror on the women of Afghanistan and feel it deeply, viscerally, perhaps in the quiver of the source of all this insanity.

Pandora’s Jar

Despite their obsession with male honor, Ancient Greek myth features many powerful goddesses. Pandora, famous for her box, was their First Woman. In her curiosity, she couldn’t help but open the box, unleashing all pain and suffering onto the world.

Dr. Llewellyn-Jones, reading from Greek, tells us, “What she comes with is a ‘pithos’ – the Greek word for a jar.

“The Greeks had a thought that a woman’s womb was shaped like a pithos. So, really, Pandora, being made the first woman, comes with the first womb.

“And when, inevitably, that womb gets opened, what flows out is all the evils of the world.”

These men always tell on themselves, don’t they? They created the Polis – the State – for themselves and put women in charge of the Oikos – the Homestead. The Greeks drew a hard line between women and the world, which they insisted was their domain.

So, Pandora unleashed all the evils of the world – The men of the Polis!

The heaping of blame for all the ills of the world – that men themselves were perpetrating – continues today. Don’t forget, Dear Reader, that four months ago we all had to sit through the ‘If-you-don’t-like-it-don’t-look’ defense of a sexual predator! If you didn’t want to be part of some man’s fetish, you should have just stayed home.

Hey, this isn’t what I ordered!

We feel our sisters’ struggle because, on some level, we understand that civilization as we know it was explicitly not made for us! It was made by the flourish of Man ascendant, standing on Woman’s back even as he denigrated her.

And the old No Girls Allowed! sign is still on the wall!

We are all victims of this system, in one way or another. Vengeance is not the answer, or we risk becoming what we hate. But the urge many of us get to just walk away is probably based in something more than apathy.

We should be shouting our story through a bullhorn! Feminism must be the custodian of women’s history, and Dr. Foreman has done us all a great service.

I look forward to a time when all veils come down, and we can go back to sharing life instead of fighting over it.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Fun Facts, Women’s World Tagged With: Greece, history, Women's liberation, women's oppression, women's rights

Only Women Can Be Feminine

September 4, 2021 by Brazen She

In an act of pure desperation, I gave in and finally just Googled ‘femininity.’ Turns out, the definition and example are both very interesting:

Girl, get a load of this!

“Qualities or attributes regarded as characteristic of women – ‘She alternated between embracing her femininity and concealing it.'”

Who among us doesn’t relate to that, right? I can only assume this definition remains so straightforward because it doesn’t offend Wokeness – So long as you assume a woman is anyone who identifies as one, of course.

But Wokeness is only concerned with women as commodities. As the movement dedicated to our needs, Feminism should have the final word in defining who and what women are!

The longstanding trend, however, is to harp on all the ways we are just like men. This afternoon in the check-out line, my gaze wandered across Strong Is The New Pretty – A Guided Journal for Girls. The dated, inappropriate pop culture reference of this Self-Help For Kids is bad enough, but strong and pretty are not simple shades like orange and black. And they are not mutually exclusive.

It feels very misogynist to insist that everything traditionally associated with women is shallow and fake. Society wants women to be men, and Feminism isn’t standing up for us.

This accusation is a long time coming. Femininity’s cumbersome impracticality never really sat right with me. Idgie Threadgoode was my idol growing up, but I could not pull off that look, either. Being short and rounded at the edges, androgyny was just another unattainable ideal.

I can be big and strong, too!

And no amount of rumination stopped people telling me I was bossy. Abrasive. Brash. Opinionated (as if this is a bad thing!) Mouthy. Didn’t stop male acquaintances taking things out of my hands because, “girls don’t carry things.” Seriously.

Gradually, I became quieter. Softer. I reached for fewer things. In my 20s I even developed that girly habit of reflexively apologizing, in an effort to get out in front of my bad behavior.

This didn’t stop the TA from putting me on the spot in Lab one day, then refusing to speak to me after I got it right. It didn’t keep the Sound Director from screaming at my very pregnant self over the phone for spacing a run-through, and firing me on the spot.

He had already tried to tell me harmony didn’t belong in Punk music, so, bullet dodged, I guess.

None of my efforts at butching up and quieting down prevented me getting pregnant, of course. This was when the bulk of it hit me all at once – Regardless of anything I did, certain things were just immutable.

But the cultural paradox around giving birth shows us the lie – The perversion of our words. ‘Femininity’ as all things dainty and delicate is totally disconnected from the primeval fortitude of this most uniquely female act.

I’m not saying giving birth makes you a woman, but no man will ever do it. And it’s extremely indelicate! Not a ruffle to be found, but I do remember seeing a lot of blood.

Dainty and delicate have their place, but they do not define us. They never have.

And outside of the birthing room, women can do, express and embody just about everything men can. This begs the question – What makes something ‘feminine,’ anyway?

Seems to me, any time someone has perceived a strong woman as ‘manly,’ that was their internalized misogyny flashing its ugly grin. Likewise, males can only be ‘feminine’ through imitation. The whole trick requires both parties to play along to some degree. The gender is in the eye of the beholder.

But a rose by any other name will still snag your clothes, whether or not you acknowledge its thorns.

And dandelions are cute, but tough as nails!

We often sense a difference between male and female behavior. Sex-segregated spaces don’t exist because men and women need different facilities to do their business. They exist because females tend to be much less predatory!

Exact numbers differ from study to study, but the overwhelming majority of violent and sexual crime is committed by males. Despite recent efforts to obscure the clear, long-accepted patterns, the stats have always been pretty shocking.

However we explain this, officially-sanctioned and enforced single-sex spaces enable women to take charge of our own safety. Initially instituted out of paternal protectiveness, they created an environment conducive to our personal independence.

Whoopsie!

But our massive failure to differentiate ourselves as equal to but different from men has allowed patriarchy to continue telling the story. The unexpected, visceral grief at the loss of these public-private spaces is hard for many to take in. So we rationalize it away, brush it under the rug and ignore it, as is our habit.

Facing up to these failures is a jagged pill to swallow. But where does patriarchy end and women begin? Why doesn’t Feminism spend any time answering this question? I suspect it’s related to the soup of Woman Bad we all swim in.

Since I keep finding myself facing this wall, I’m gonna offer my opinion – If the only way to be a woman is to be female, then the only way to do as women do – ‘Femininity’ – is also to be female.

It’s time to get down to the nuts and bolts!

We tend to get flustered when we start seeing patterns, but female behavior patterns do exist! Just like our capacity to create life has been recast as a liability, these differences have been painted with a broad, negative brush. But they form the outline of a different perspective, one rooted in and informed by life in a female body.

And they can also be our strength. We just have to accept the idea that female psychology is real. That female behavior is not just elaborate Stockholm Syndrome.

This week’s video is what finally pushed me to take all this on. Responding to a self-styled Femininity Expert whose working definition was nebulous at best, I had to throw my hands up in exasperation and throw down the gauntlet.

All those supposedly ‘feminine’ traits, mannerisms, behaviors, hobbies, items of clothing and personal presentation – Everything coded ‘feminine’ needs to be put under the microscope. Humans are actually pretty good at telling who is whom, we really don’t need a lot of showy displays.

So, what is female behavior? How much of it comes from patriarchal trauma? What are the things that define women as a social group?

I will be diving into these questions next week. This has been a sort of introduction to why I think these question need answered. I’m hoping to fill in some gaps in our philosophical foundation.

Looking forward to hearing what you all think!

Filed Under: Unpopular Opinion, Women’s Interests, Women’s World Tagged With: Femininity, Womem, Women's liberation, women's rights

Men’s Ignorance Is The Devastation of Women

August 18, 2021 by Brazen She

The moment I opened my mouth to talk about what’s happening in Afghanistan, someone was kind enough to remind me that, “It’s happening to most women in the world, as a majority of the population is in such countries.”

How uncouth of me to comment on something currently happening without including everyone on earth!

Giving others the benefit of the doubt saves a lot of time, but even assuming this PSA is earnest still feels less than helpful. More and more of us are speaking up, and this is a good thing.

Speaking for myself, I usually focus on things at home because that’s my area of expertise. I don’t presume to speak for women in faraway countries.

And I don’t need to, they are eloquently articulate in their own right. In a widely-shared Guardian article, our unnamed author tells us about the Bachelor’s degree she had almost finished, and the devastation of her sisters and classmates, in her own voice.

A voice we may not hear again.

“All I could see around me were the fearful and scared faces of women and ugly faces of men who hate women, who do not like women to get educated, work and have freedom.

“Most devastating to me were the ones who looked happy and made fun of women. Instead of standing my our side, they stand with the Taliban and give them even more power.”

No amount of explanation, be it cultural, religious, economic, patriarchal, whatever… Nothing makes this make sense to me. There’s a certain sick logic, but none of it passes the gut check. These men must be out of their minds. Their reaction reminds me of an addict at a party, tenuous sobriety flipped to hedonistic glee. I’d even go so far as to say these men are addicted to misogynistic power, to where overdose has fallen off the radar.

Our frightened guide overhears some of the jeers: “Meanwhile, the men standing around were making fun of girls and women, laughing at our terror. “Go and put on your chadari [burqa],” one called out. “It is your last days of being out on the streets,” said another. “I will marry four of you in one day,” said a third.”

In my country, we thankfully still prosecute and persecute men like this. Wanting more than one wife is not a sign of a sound mind. Women are not action figures.

Each of the three men close to me had a pretty similar initial reaction to my righteous fury – ‘Nothing much we can do about something so far away…’ Because charity is cheaper than umbrage, I’ll say this is a habitual reaction of most Americans to the name ‘Afghanistan.’ One guy was pretty offended when I suggested he didn’t understand, and they were all fairly convincing.

But it’s hard not to be afraid for all of us. For a while there, it looked like the forces of evil were in retreat. But, as recent rollbacks in healthcare show, women’s cultural gains of the past 100 years are still taking root. We are vulnerable to changes in the wind, and a cold breeze is blowing.

I don’t suppose a burqa is very warm…

But after I was done spazzing out and yelling at my friends, I thought about my sons.

Considering some of my own experiences, the Universe demonstrated its sense of humor giving me sons. I’ve worked very hard not to take any of this out on them. My hope has been that if I treat them like whole, individual people, someday they would return the favor.

What I know about developmental psychology backs this up, and it seems to be working so far. But all of developmental psychology was conceived and written by Western academics whose work would be a joke to those men in Afghanistan.

I have to wonder – Where were those men while our anonymous author was being educated? Were they in the classroom next to her?

I do believe these destructive practices can be brought to an end. Other barbaric things, like human sacrifice, used to be done all over the world. These days just about everyone, everywhere agrees that’s not the way to save the harvest.

Feminism is devoted to the liberation of women and girls. We often shun men, and with good reason. We tend to forget about little boys altogether.

And, sometimes, we speak from our anger: “Women won’t be free until men pay for this.”

But for every one of those assholes in the street, there’s a little boy just as scared as his mother. We are connected to each other and, in hurting us, they hurt themselves. The men described here are obviously too far gone to see it.

It’s true – I do have it significantly better than many women in many places. I don’t need to speak for them to do what I can to elevate all of us.

One aspect I don’t talk about much is the education of my sons. I’ve been told no mother can hope to even begin to counteract the siren song of patriarchy, but I have to try.

Recently I have talked a lot about taking identity out of politics, about being women first and everything else second.

Above that, we are human first. Men and women are two sides of the same coin, and women won’t be free until all men know this from their first breath.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Fight Despair Together, Politics Tagged With: Afghanistan, Education, Kabul, women's rights

“If Cis Women Stop Wearing Makeup, I Will Never Pass”

July 24, 2021 by Brazen She

A powerful tool in our fight to preserve women’s rights may be staring us right in the face.

The answer was inside me all along!

It’s easy to take the obvious for granted, and confronting this social norm is a flashpoint for many of us.

But why is makeup mandatory? It’s obviously a holdover from older, stricter ideas of what women should be. What a corset does for the waist, contouring does for the face. And we all know it’s at least as bad for us.

I’m not going to lecture anyone about harmful chemicals or animal testing. There are plenty of other people more qualified to take on these very important issues.

I want to talk about Womanface, and how we begin taking back our identity.

In one of her many excellent videos, Vanessa Vokey spotlights an episide of a Jubilee video series called Middle Ground. Her featured episode showcases a diverse panel discussing makeup, the pressures, practices and their personal feelings.

Vanessa points out the clear double standard: “Both of the males, even though one is presenting as a man and one has altered his body to appear more like a woman, they still have basically the same attitude toward wearing makeup.

“And it’s almost a childlike attitude, this idea that putting on makeup is sort of like dress-up, putting on a costume, putting on a cape like a superhero would.”

Vanessa cuts to a woman who says she felt sorry for people having to see her bare face. Her cognitive dissonance is clear: “Makeup makes me feel very empowered and beautiful, but then I resent myself more when I take it off.”

Radical feminists in South Korea have it right: “I realized that the makeup and outfits [were] not my decision and I do not actually like it, so I choose to take off the corset.”

Their Take Off The Corset movement rebels against a culture of unattainable goals so intense, it’s driven some to take their own lives. Western culture is trending in similar directions, but circumstances have given us a moment to step back and ask ourselves if this is what we really want.

Hey, this wasn’t part of our agreement!

2020 brought many lessons, like how lipstick is completely pointless behind a mask. Foundation is invisible over Zoom and contouring looks heavy in bad light.

Masks aside, no one should be ashamed to show her natural face. We are pushed to conform and given short-term rewards if we do, but it’s time to coordinate for the long game.

Everyone everywhere has been forced to reevaluate our priorities at the same time, and we should take advantage of the chaos.

Through the new tears in the social fabric, we can glimpse strange new possibilities that were unthinkable even a few years ago. Maybe we can bring back cloaks. Maybe we can be more self-sufficient. Maybe the consumerism we were raised with is toxic bullshit.

Makeup is a multi-billion dollar industry that supports child labor, which Vanessa also covers. If we all abandon it together, we can hit capitalism and the trans movement at the same time!

It would be so simple to demonstrate that women are whole individuals. Female impersonators of all shades rely on us perpetuating the impersonal stereotypes that they steal.

If enough of us stop adhering to the standard, it’s no longer standard. Normalize your real face. Peoples’ perceptions will adjust. Challenge them to see you as you are.

The Bareface Challenge is especially harrowing for those of us who like our War Paint, but you only feel naked until life distracts you. You don’t need the Painted Veil to be presentable.

Let your presence as a woman in the world speak for itself. It’s something no man can imitate or own.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Feminism In Action, Queer Ideology Tagged With: Culture, Feminism, Gender Ideology, Makeup, patriarchy, radical feminism, trans rights, women's rights

Tempest In The Wi Spa: A Case Study In Mass-Gaslighting

July 17, 2021 by Brazen She

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

As if we could have one conversation that doesn’t somehow come back to your dick!

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.”

“Treatment at the Spa is by appointment only, and a source at the Spa told the Blade there’s no record of any of its usual transgender clients on its appointments guest list on the day in question.”

But I hear so many of them pass so well! Maybe no one noticed, right?

“Cubaangel’s Instagram account is almost exclusively Christian memes, which begs the question why she chose to go to a spa well known for being LGBTQ friendly.” This doesn’t neccessarily follow. Some people cite their Christian faith as their motivation for being more tolerant – imagine, following Jesus’ example! And this woman lives in LA, not exactly a conservative town.

But her religion and her failure to film inside a nude sauna means we can disregard the whole thing. “No transgender person can be seen, and no other witnesses have come forward to confirm the allegations made.”

To obscure the very similar and more detailed story another woman wrote in 2018, the Blade throws the link to her complaint in here: “It’s also not the first time Wi Spa has been targeted for catering to transgender people.”

Let’s see what ‘catering to trans people’ meant in 2018.

“I would give this place five stars a week ago but…. Last night I had the most disturbing experience in the women’s locker room.

“Upon checking in, the clerk advised us that “there was a transgender male in the women’s locker room” … Ok… No problem, I’m not the type to discriminate people, but once in the women’s area, I saw the mentioned “transgender” individual naked in all his glory, and he still had a male organ hanging there…ok…no fuzz… That surgery is very expensive

“Anyways, so I go on my routine and I get to the shower room, he was almost next to me showering too when I start to overhear hearing the conversation that he is having with a lady that was also in the shower area.

“I clearly heard him say that he has had sex with probably one hundred women and that he was looking for a female girlfriend to share his time with…. He also mentioned that he uses cocaine and LSD to “relax” … Ok…not my business what he uses to relax…”

This woman wrote this in a Tripadvisor review, and doesn’t mention informing the police. The man in her story acts totally inappropriately, but his behavior just triggers the No True Trans subroutine in her programming.

I feel a presence watching me!

“But hey, a transgender person does not act like a guy around women nor they state how much they like women nor how much they like having sex with them! This guy is Not transgender, he seems to be just a “pervie” and given his accent he is from another country, Europe I believe.”

Oh yeah, those dirty Europeans, amirite? American snobbery aside, this man’s bad manners are what qualifies him as male in her eyes.

“I heard from other ladies there that he goes there quite often.” They must feel like the luckiest ladies in LA!

“I have nothing against gay people or transgender etc. but every gay guy I know uses the men’s locker rooms when in the spa.” Most female impersonators are straight, just twisted.

“Management said that according to the Law there was nothing they could do.” And this is where we find ourselves in 2021. “Yes, they can reserve their right to provide services to anyone, that’s not against the law. They can deny entrance to this person based on his behavior, not on his gender.”

How exactly this Picasso portrait of the Marquis du Sade doesn’t get him the boot I can’t quite wrap my head around. Our intrepid author has a hard time with it, too.

“I enjoy going to the Wi Spa and it is not fair to me or other women to be put in this position where you basically have to leave the Spa because you feel uncomfortable in such situation. I wouldn’t have minded the situation at all if that guy was really transgender, but obviously he is not.” Because transgender people are all delicate flowers!

But isn’t gatekeeping transphobic?

“I’m concerned about my safety and the safety of other women in the spa.” TERF! “Like I said, I wouldn’t have minded if he was really truly transgender, and preferably without that wig he took off to wash…

Oh for fuck’s sake. That man had no right to make those women watch that.

“This is a call to the owners of the Spa to protect their valued customers, thank you.” They have apparently less than zero interest in doing this.

And the Blade has no interest in objectivity: “After the alleged, unconfirmed incident, Wi Spa was deluged with 1-star Yelp! and Trip Advisor reviews.” Oh, the humanity! This writer takes great pains to downplay any possibility of such a thing having ever happened, anywhere, ever.

But if this is what qualifies as ‘catering to transgender people,’ it’s obvious why women are upset!

Unfortunately for us, since white nationalists are also angry about the trans movement for their own reasons, no woman has any reasonable objection, ever. “The video quickly made the rounds in far-right, and Trans-Exclusionary Feminist (TERF) sites. Anti-trans ‘feminist’ websites like Mumsnet, Ovarit, and Spinster were sharing content by far-right provocateurs known for disinformation, like Ian Miles Cheong, by June 27^th.”

The shoutout is nice (complete with links!) but I spend probably too much time on Ovarit and ‘TERF’ Twitter and have no idea who this person is.

However, a few prominent feminists have been getting chummy with the right, home to fundamentalists of every flavor. In a game with only two teams, falling out with liberals doesn’t make flirting with conservatives suddenly a good idea.

He says he’ll keep me warm!

Because those people are still nuts! When a suspect in the latest incident was floated, the worst elements took aim: “She received multiple death threats and harassment, including a picture of a masked man brandishing an assault weapon threatening to shoot her.”

And this is where hanging with conservatives comes back haunt us. The picture and accompanying caption are terrifying, a lot like things I have received from self-appointed TERF-hunters. The line between Mainline Republican and Conservative Nutjob has been washed away in wave after wave of corruption and pandering. Is this who we want to be seen with??

“All of this fits into an emerging pattern of the alt-right, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists,” Woa, where did this come from? I have dug into how they connect the dots from radical feminists to white supremacists, but the logic is strained and this reference comes out of nowhere.

And our Blade writer runs with it. “Violent far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the religious right, and anti-trans ‘feminists’ are collaborating and coordinating as they share the same media streams.”

As evidence for this, the Blade links to a Dame Magazine article, The Far-Right And Anti-Trans Movements: An Unholy Alliance. This in-no-way-clickbait title heads a pile of interesting data points, such as, “violent white nationalists are separate from, but adjacent to, the Christian right.” I think we’ve all seen enough evidence in the past year’s news cycles that they are two sides of the same coin. They’ve been pretty blatant about it for a while now.

Then there’s this chestnut: “At the 2017 Values Voters Summit hosted by the Family Research Council, Meg Kilgannon outlined the religious right’s plan to co-opt anti-trans feminist groups, and use their feminist-sounding language to seem more secular while hiding the true motivation behind their animus.”

This is an unflattering paraphrase of a mutual agreement. But has it ever occurred to us that the religious right are not coming into this blind? Those who tend the flame of Colonialism are not the simple folk they present themselves as.

Considering how anti-religion radical feminism is, and its absence from pretty much all radfem spaces, it doesn’t seem like this has had much internal, practical effect. But when the opposition stubbornly refuses to look into things, optics become vital to communication.

Back to the LA Blade: “Rhetoric against transgender people in popular right-wing media like Fox News has grown both more frequent, and more extreme. In April, Tucker Carlson (who serves as a gateway to the far right) declared that transgender people are a threat to the “perpetuation of the species.”

Tucker Carlson’s populist gibberish is only a gateway to anything if you pretend he’s not heir to the Swanson’s Frozen Foods fortune. And it’s recently come out that he’s a well-known source for dirt on his colleagues, apparently an open secret among reporters.

Snitches get stitches, right Tucker?

Most of the radfems I know are leftists, and not the kind of person who watches Fox News.

But the LA Blade quotes Dr. Joe Mulhall, head of research at the UK’s anti-extremist watchdog group Hope Not Hate, “If you talk about trans issues it opens the doors to the mainstream.”

Who knew you could run a watchdog group from under a rock? Fox may have the best ratings in cable news, but that’s the penthouse of a burning building.

Feminists appearing on right-wing platforms to defend women’s existence only to be undermined and reinterpreted shows how the left has abandoned us. These days, speaking up against anything Trans is the fastest way to lose your job, your friends and even family members.

Still, Dr. Joe insists, “The far-right are saying things they know will be echoed in the comment pages of the right-wing press.”

Plenty of things in this situation are still confusing, not least of which is this comment. Since when is there a right-wing press? What happened to the liberal media??

Rich governments, Amazon, The New York Times, The LA Blade, the World Health Organization, The Olympics, GLAAD, libraries and school boards and the stuffy old BBC are all behind this. Still, they see enemies everywhere.

Regardless of right or left, things are moving forward quickly: “Flyers are circulating online advertising a second protest against Wi Spa on July 17^th. “

Hey, that’s today! Police are mobilizing to prevent a repeat of last time, and I’m still not convinced that the first protest wasn’t a TERF trap.

But we can all look forward to continuing unbiased coverage in the LA Blade: “Robert Lansing is a pseudonym for a long-time investigative trans researcher and writer-journalist.”

I have my own biases, of course, but sharing a sex phenotype with half the planet is not a mental illness. Biases born of material reality are stubborn things. They don’t stop being true just because you don’t like them.

Such as women’s objection to males in our private spaces.

“It does not matter AT ALL if the person peeing next to you is doing so with a penis. If you are concerned with other people’s genitals, that is a *you* problem.” How we wish this were true! Right ladies?

If only the world were perfect!

It would be wonderful not to worry whether any men were around. To just go about our business and pay them no mind. What bliss!

But of course, we’d have to be ignorant of all of human history. How men decided their penis was a weapon and wielded it to terrible effect. How they systematically raped us, locked us up as broodmares, and killed many who disobeyed.

Ignorant of how, to this day, night jogging is not a good idea. How the leading cause of death for pregnant women is murder. How ‘rough sex’ is a common defense for it.

To suddenly insist that an uninvited penis is not a flashing neon warning sign is to deny the entire history of civilization. And the most ambitious gaslighting play of all time.

Filed Under: Politics, Queer Ideology, Women’s World Tagged With: Culture, Feminism, Gender Ideology, misinformation, patriarchy, Politics, right-wingers, trans rights, Wi Spa, women's rights

Women Out In The Cold: Hey Ohio, You Decent?

June 26, 2021 by Brazen She

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

A classy dame like me? Weird, I know!

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.

She was given the floor to introduce an amendment called the Save Women’s Sports Act, “a fairness issue for women to be able to achieve their dreams in athletics in our state, and is crucial to preserving women’s rights and the integrity of women and girl’s sports.”

As she talks about the girls losing out on opportunities across the country, the first objection is heard from the room: “Point of order!”

Before she finishes her sentence, someone begins banging loudly, could be a book on a table.

“This amendment will require schools that are part of the OHSAA – “

More shouting, each word punctuated with another thunderous bang, “Point! Of! Order!”

” – to designate separate teams – “

The shouting and banging become continuous, making Jena fight for every word.

” – for the biological sex. No school inters…” She only pauses briefly, long enough to shoot a withering look at whoever is interrupting her. “No school interscholastic conference or organization – “

The banging continues, but I guess he needed to catch his breath.

” – that regulates interscholastics shall permit biological males – “

The banging quickens, the same voice braying over it now in short, wordless bursts.

” – participate on an athletic team or in athletic competitions designated only for biological female participants.”

The howling carries on, there’s some shuffling and maybe one or two others begin banging on tables. Eventually, the Chairman is forced to stop her and address the issue.

The grownups were talking, darling! What is it??

The video isn’t very long and cuts off before we learn more. What was the Point of Order?? I need to know!

Extra info is scarce but, according to the local ABC affiliate, Representative Powell tacked her amendment onto a bill that had already passed the State Senate. Their bill was aimed at giving college athletes the right to profit from schools’ use of their likeness.

Jena’s amendment looks a bit out of place, but her own bill has been stalled in committee. And time is running short.

ABC says the Ohio Senate went around her the very next night, attaching the college profit scheme as an amendment to an unrelated bill. I guess they can’t be mad at her for that! But shouldn’t legislators be expected to show relevance like lawyers do? This kind of agenda-juggling erodes a lot of confidence in government.

And the sound of the baboon-level freakout coming from the State Representative off-camera is harrowing for a couple of reasons. The mental image is conjured up of a red face, gnashing teeth, books and papers flung here and there as you listen to them thrash around.

Aside from the unhinged nature of this performance, it’s even scarier if this is coming from the so-called ‘liberal’ party. All because a woman spoke up to defend our rights!

We know we can’t depend on conservatives to stand firm for women outside of our right to do Girly Things. Their moral panic working in our favor for once doesn’t mean they will suddenly support our bodily autonomy.

Hey Judy, how you been? Still chasing that fantasy, I see!

The fight over abortion and birth control is still raging, and Ohio is one of the worst offenders. Abortion is illegal in Ohio before many women even know they’re pregnant, thanks to the infamous Heartbeat Bill.

Representative Powell might want to ask them about that, too.

Because with Dems completely beholden to gender activism and few progressives in sight, being a woman is a pretty embattled position at the moment.

We’re going to visit family in Ohio over the July 4th holiday. It’s been a while, the kids are in for a treat. I’m nervous for lots of reasons, but that’s nothing new. It’s strange to be going home and leaving it at the same time.

Beyond politics, life goes on. A lot has changed in the last six years, but some things never do. As the culture war imitates the Summer weather, checking in with a few of them is sounding better all the time.

Filed Under: Politics, Queer Ideology, Women’s World Tagged With: Culture, Feminism, Gender Ideology, liberals, Politics, women's rights

Brazen She