#like. it's about how the male castration being the worst thing that could happen to a man as per gendered ideals gets reflected here.

[jacksprostate]

Bob in female fight club au. Thoughts

Probably named Marge

Rather than doing a direct inversion (ie making the character the exact opposite, much tits -> no tits, etc) I think sort of an analogue would work better riffing off the motherly role Bob has, in combination with the group being for uterine cancer/ovarian cancer

The women come together, and they cry, cry, cry, over lost husbands, who left them because they got cancer, because overwhelmingly, men leave if their wife gets cancer, over lost relationships with children, who stayed but resent them, over lost Motherhood, that thing you were told was your worth but now you are told you're shit. Remaining Women Together. Despite. Despite despite despite.

What is it, about purposes. Want to see misery, see women fed their own physical oppression as lost salvation.

Marge, whatever her name is, her husband divorced her, left her with the kids and medical bills stacked as high as she is tall. She is thankful she still has her kids, it makes her feel like she's still worth something. She's had to try and get back into the workforce. No one wants to hire dear former stay at home mother Marge. She shows you her kids in her wallet in her purse and there are no pictures of her. There's a picture of her old husband, which she keeps to show her kids if they ask. They're old enough to go to school now, which is good, because it gives her more time to work. Life is hard, but she's doing her best.

Marge, who is on hormone therapy so she doesn't get those "side effects" she's heard about from other total hysterectomy patients, the future of early dementia and degeneration and horror. Who does pelvic floor exercises in hopes it will minimise the fallout of the surgery. Who carefully rips every hair out of her upper lip and chin because even if it would be normal for a woman, a woman whose gone through menopause, a woman at all — she knows, it's probably the estrogen tipping back over into testosterone, and she can't handle any more losses. She compensates. They all do.

The support group is her Me Time. It is the single hour plus half hour commute she can afford once a week for herself. So she gets here, and she cries, cries, cries, and the others cry with her, all over how their lives have fallen apart since they got ovarian cancer, got breast cancer, and their lives derailed because they can't be proper women anymore.

They cry in their waterproof makeup. Another product to promise womanhood. Identify yourself via consumption. Identify yourself by covering yourself up.

And when she finds fight club. When she finds something that says, jesus fuck. You are more than your children. You are more than your ability to have kids. You aren't a failed woman, that's a sack of shit you've been sold wholesale. When she finds something that promises her she will grow, achieve personhood, not because she was the ultimate martyr mother, not because she played the game of human or woman, but because it promises a freedom from all that, identification and repulsion of such sickening chains. When she stops worrying about her slightly deepened voice, and works to keep her dose even keel for her health, to avoid the toxic highs of accidentally juicing, rather than the lesser effects of a black lip hair or two. When she has a photo, not of herself in her wallet, but of the things she makes with other women from fight club, of the one view of the sunset from that one parking lot that she always thought was wonderful, when she has things in her wallet for her and her enjoyment. When she has corded muscle and a built up spine, when she sits her kids down and explains why they only see dad one weekend every other month, all the fun holidays, because dad decided staying with her through cancer was too hard even when she stayed with him through four lost jobs pissed away in alcohol and lottery tickets.

And Marge, who gets shot by the police on a regulation chill-and-drill assignment for Project Mayhem. Whose obituary in the newspaper talks about the children she left behind, how she battled cancer and kept caring for them, how she was such a strong mother, whose kids would now be shipped off to their grieving father who is so, so brave and stunning for standing up and taking care of the kids he made and dropped as soon as his live-in servant had a few issues. Her name is Marge Paulson, and she was forty-eight years old. She was a person. She will be remembered in the annals of Project Mayhem, lest what little there was of her be stolen from the world. She was killed by Project Mayhem, but they're the only ones who will remember Marge Paulson.

#fight club #female fight club au #like. it's about how the male castration being the worst thing that could happen to a man as per gendered ideals gets reflected here. #being very clear; the motherhood focus should seem as immensely disturbing and disproportionate. if not much more tbh. as how the guys are #because like. yeah the male focus on balls is immense but the pressure to consider your entire worth and personhood and status as a being a #your reproductive capacity is Insane for women. and i think that would be uhhh highly relevant in female fight club #both as the logical mirror to the castration/emasculation thing #and also because it's inextricable from any sort of feminism demanding a backbone #yadda yadda yadda #the end is also interesting #the death and the name thing just cant quite be the same #its still horrifying because the Project did kill her #but god. so many women die and no one fucking remembers them #just what they did as mothers or servants #so. her name is marge paulson. would be important. #this is very specific and dear 2 me. #its not about hating the kids or saying fuck them or anything either #its just. shes a person. womanhood is not some step below (man) personhood

[kiwichapstickss]

“If you don’t know what you want,” the doorman said, “you end up with a lot you don’t.”

————

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that’s you’re free to do anything.”

————

“Getting fired,” Tyler says, “is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives.”

————

Marla’s philosophy of life, she told me, is that she can die at any moment. The tragedy of her life is that she doesn’t.

————

“If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?”

————

“What you have to consider,” he says, "is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.” How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than His indifference. If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention. Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, hell or nothing? Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.

————

What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a perfection he’d made himself. And a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

————

Valley of the Dogs. Where even if they don’t kill you, if someone loves you to take you home, they still castrate you.

————

That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.

- Fight Club | Chuck Palahniuk

#quotes #illustration #art #book quotes #painting #fight club #chuck palahniuk

[tessatechaitea]

Wonder Twins #5

Jayna just punched straight through her brother's butthole.

If you're a being who turns into water, your dick and butthole don't just disappear, right? They just become part of the water! So I'm almost certainly correct in my comment on the cover. Hopefully Mark Russell will explore this topic in a future issue. Until then, I'll be certain to tell everybody I know that Jayna basically fisted Zan. Luckily for the Wonder Twins, I don't know many people and also they are fictional characters. This issue is called "Magic and Games." I think. It will probably take me less time to read this entire comic book than it took me to puzzle out the word "Games" in the font used for the title.

Sure, you can see it now that I already told you what it was! But it was difficult before I worked it out! Although I still wouldn't be surprised to learn the title is "Magic and Galljes" or "Magic and "Gaines" and that the second word is somebody's name.

Usually I don't comment on Mark Russell comic books because to comment on a Mark Russell comic book, you should probably be smart and serious. Sure, he's having fun and writing an entertaining book that I can easily use to make jokes about fisting incest! But he also writes sensitive stories about social justice and systemic bias and ethical dilemmas in changing times and, well, other stuff that I'm too dumb to even discuss in the most general terms! He's a smart guy which is why I hate him with a burning passion! But it's a good hate! It's the kind of envious hate that pushes me to my own Emerald Twilight! I probably won't wind up destroying an entire town and ruining my reputation and becoming the most vilified hero in our universe but I almost certainly will eventually become the avenging spirit of God judging everybody around me! Wait, I think I already am that! Whatever my point is, it's that Mark Russell writes good and I'm too weak to not despise him for it. Polly Math has just won first prize at the science fair because her last name is Math. I guess Sandra Science didn't compete this year so Polly was the obvious next choice. Jayna wins second place because her project on fucking hot guys while being a nerd in high school fell apart when the guy she attempted to science fair fuck turned out to be a villain. It's also possible I'm confusing story lines but you have to expect that kind of thing! I'm not spring chicken! Remembering details between chapters that come out a full month apart has been nearly impossible for the last twenty years! I shouldn't make fun of Polly Math's name because I have a name that people always try to make jokes about too. It's not Grunion Guy! You can probably find it if you do even the smallest amount of Internet research! I'm not going to help you though because I don't want to get called a Deaf Chef anymore! Polly is upset that her father is working with Lex Luthor and the League of Annoyance. But Jayna has a plan to fix things! I bet her plan is to turn into a giant tortoise while Zan turns into an ice dildo and...wait a second! Why am I giving out good ideas that Mark Russell will just steal in a few issues?! Better to not speculate on things! Also, I mean, the cover shows Jayna going with the shark plan.

Okay fine! I'm finally interested in Fox News!

The most disturbing thing about people who watch Fox News is that they ignore five hundred other channels that are showing entertaining things on their television at the same time! Who chooses that shit over Comedy Central or the Game Show Network?! I haven't had cable for nearly twenty years and whenever I'm staying somewhere with cable, it's locked on the Game Show Network 24/7! Who the fuck chooses to watch state propaganda over old game shows?! Fucking psychopaths, that's who!

Polly Math's father wound up working with Lex Industries because only Lex Luthor hired African Americans, I guess? Hadn't he heard of STAR Labs?! Maybe Silas Stone and Sarah Charles fulfilled their quota?

I might be misreading this scene but I don't think I am because the white guys with white guys playing golf pictures behind them seem interested in Filo Math if he's Norwegian (so, you know, totally white!) and then when they meet him, they don't want to hire him. It could be that they really are concerned with his specialty! What could that be?! I mean, it can't be any worse than Silas Stone's specialty of turning his son into a cybernetic example of the castration of the black male in America! That's a really terrible specialty! Although Sarah Charles seemed to be pretty into it. See?! This is why I can't review a Mark Russell book! He's making a great point about the systemic bias inherent in corporate hiring practices and I'm not taking it seriously! I mean, he isn't either, really? He's being light-hearted while still making a good point. Which is what I've done, I think, in my comment about Cyborg's lack of a penis! The Scrambler wants to play a trick on society. He's a magician that believes people are frightened of magic and only like the part where everything is normal again. Magician: "Is this your card?" Audience Member: "Why yes! Thank God you picked my card! I was worried I was going to have to live in a world where my card wasn't picked!" Maybe I'm not comprehending his point. Anyway, The Scrambler wants to do a trick where things don't ever go back to normal! He's a monster! Imagine picking the Three of Clubs and nobody ever showing you the Three of Clubs ever again! Ugh, I'm feeling faint. To save Polly's Dad from definite prison time (or possibly, if Superman shows up, an eternity in the Phantom Zone. As if Superman can be bothered with Earth's judicial system! Pshaw!), Jan has challenged the League of Annoyance to a duel at the zoo. I guess if she wants to stress out all of the animals there with a big battle, who am I to judge? I mean other than being the real life version of Hal Jordan's Spectre, of course! At the zoo, Jayna recruits a bunch of Australian animals to help fight which goes as spectacularly as you can imagine it would. And what I mean by that is that a koala is blown to bits. But I guess that's worth it in the grand scheme of getting Polly Math's father to stop working with the League of Annoyance. It's like that philosophical conundrum about an ant that sacrifices its life for even the tiniest amount to better the world. It's just an ant! It practically owes it to the universe to die for nearly nothing! What does this koala bear expect? It should get to live in luxurious confinement at the zoo and not die for a trivial reason? Stupid koala bear. Go fuck yourself, you selfish bastard. The Wonder Twins defeat two out of three of the League of Annoyance members at the expense of just one koala's life and the bruised jaw of an innocent kangaroo. The third member, some woman with a Kryptonian cell phone whose name maybe I should remember, gets away to go regroup. Sylvia is a racist that joined the League because she didn't like the demographics of her small town changing. She's startled by Filo entering the League's headquarters to pack up his stuff and winds up zapping him like she zapped the koala. Okay, I guess the koala isn't as dead as I first thought. I should have realize a Kryptonian phone is probably sending everything to the Phantom Zone. So once again, I, the Grandmaster Comic Book Reader, was correct when I speculated that the worst that could happen to Filo was prison or the Phantom Zone! I'm the smarterest! Sylvia is caught on camera zapping Filo Math and then messes up in an interview when she kind of admits to having maybe zapped more than one black person with her phone off-camera? It's a real public relations nightmare!

But Lex can fix it! His greatest strength is turning public relations nightmares into public relations wet dreams!

Lex News turns Cell Phone Sylvia into a national hero. Because anything is excusable if you just say how scared you were! I mean, as long as you're white! It's scary being white! Sometimes you have to kill people with your legal gun while standing your own ground after confronting somebody for the most inconsequential reasons! It's just the way the world works! At least in America! Happy 4th of July! Just in case some readers weren't smart enough to get that everybody blasted by Sylvia's phone went to the Phantom Zone, Mark Russell supplies us with an image of Filo and the koala and a bunch of Sylvia's other victims (hmm, all black! But that's probably just a coincidence!) in the Phantom Zone. Polly, at the end of her rope with doing the right thing in an unjust world, decides to contact The Scrambler. I can't wait for her big magic trick to fix the world! The Scrambler's big trick to fix the world is to threaten to scramble everybody's identity. Everybody's minds will switch around so that they're now in different bodies. That means the powerful might wind up being the poorest people in the worst poverty. And the only way he won't do it is if the powerful fix the world in thirty days. Seems like a good plan! Except I'm curious to see how they fix it. Most people's ideas of fixing the world rely on the current world still existing somehow. So the fix is handicapped from the beginning by needing to be built on the ruins of the old system. To truly make a new system that works, the old system must be completely razed to the ground. But nobody has the stomach for that. So we make exceptions and compromises, building the new structure on top of a rotting foundation. It's why DC's Universe fixes always fail. They rely on making things new and better but need to remain rooted in the past. Crisis on Infinite Earths was built on a world that still contained members of Infinity Inc. who suddenly didn't fit in the world anymore. So DC then had to do Zero Hour which told new origin stories but still refused to throw out everything that came before to simply start again. Even The New 52, which people hated because they felt it did exactly what I suggested (razing the shit to the ground), didn't work because, I believe, it didn't go far enough! It still accepted Superman had died. It still accepted all of Green Lantern's past. It still contained a Batgirl who was shot by Joker and became Oracle. It was still the DC Universe but with arbitrary and subtle changes that made no real difference except the jettisoning of a ton of history. So it didn't work for anybody! Um, anyway, my initial point was that real life political structures and social dynamics and economic systems can never really be restructured in a meaningful way because they have to kowtow to older ways of thinking and doing things. The comic book stuff was just easier to write about! I'm sure Mark Russell will figure it out! Or he'll just have The Scrambler and Polly Math arrested and nothing will work out like it should and it will just be the punctuation on the idea that everything fucking sucks. Yay! Wonder Twins #5 Rating: A+. Come on! Everything Mark Russell writes gets an A+! It shows how smart I am!

#Wonder Twins #Mark Russell #DC Comics #Comic Book Reviews

[nebris]

We’re Not Done Here

How the MeToo movement became a feminist sexual revolution.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,764 words)

The problem of sexual violation can not be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the ‘facts’ of pleasure and desire. — Linda MartAn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance

This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself. — Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

***

Oh, girls, look what we’ve done now. We’ve gone too far. The growing backlash against the MeToo movement has finally settled on a form that can face itself in the mirror. The charge is hysteria, moral panic, hatred of sex, hatred of men. More specifically, as Andrew Sullivan complained in New York magazine this week, “the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.” Well, yes. That’s rather the point.

Sullivan is far from the only one to accuse the MeToo movement of becoming a moral panic about sexuality itself, and he joins a chorus of hand-wringers warning that if this continues — well, men will lose their jobs unjustly, and what could be worse than that, really? The story being put about is that women, girls, and a few presumably hoodwinked men are now so carried away by their “anger” and “temporary power” that, according to one piece in the Atlantic, they have become “dangerous.” Of course — what could be more terrifying than an angry, powerful woman, especially if you secretly care a little bit more about being comfortable than you do about justice? This was always how the counter-narrative was going to unfold: It was always going to become a meltdown about castrating feminist hellcats whipping up their followers into a Cybelian frenzy, interpreting any clumsy come-on as an attempted rape and murder. We know what happens when women get out of control, don’t we?

Charges like this are serious. Too serious to dismiss out of hand. I don’t mean to do so, not least because I am a queer person, and I do not take the notion of sex panic lightly. Why, then, are so many people so anxious to believe that this is one? There is at least one simple answer. It is easier — much, much easier — to manufacture an attack on sexuality than it is to imagine an attack on patriarchy.

Sex is not the problem. Sexism is the problem, along with the upsetting multitudes of men and women who seem unable or unwilling to make the distinction. An attack on sexuality, however, will always find recruits from across the political spectrum as well as from armies of amoral keyboard droppers who just want to read about what celebrities get up to in hotel rooms. An attack on patriarchy, male supremacy, and sexual oppression — that is far harder to accept. It is far harder to allow. Easier to transpose it into a key of prurience and wait for the whole thing to stroke itself into exhaustion. But — forgive me — if you think this movement has blown its load already, you’ve no idea how women work, and you’ve no clue what’s coming.

***

Alright, ladies, you’ve had your fun, and you’ve given us all a fright — but that’s enough now. If we relegate this all-out revolt against male sexual entitlement to the kitchen shelf where it belongs, everyone would be a lot more comfortable — at least, the men in the room would be, and we all know that’s what really matters.

Just look at what happened to poor old Aziz Ansari. They warned us that this sort of thing was coming, and we didn’t listen. A famous and successful man in his 30s goes on a date with an unfamous woman in her 20s, they go home together, he pesters her for a shag, she isn’t strong enough to say no or slap him away like a real woman ought to, like women used to do back in the day, so like the snowflake she is, she gets upset and goes home — and we all know how this one goes. He wins an award, and she decides to take revenge. She goes to the press, the press report the encounter in cringeworthy suck-by-blow detail, the feminazi #MeToo hive-vagina takes over, the hysteria mill rattles into overdrive, and boom — just like that, his career is over. Now everyone’s calling the poor guy a monster and a rapist. He’s blacklisted from every network. He’ll never work again. Another fallen soldier in the sex wars. Predictable. Tragic. Just goes to show how weak modern women really are, how much they hate men and sex, how they always take things too far, how they never miss a chance to play the victim.

At least, that’s what it might’ve gone to show if any of that had actually happened. What actually happened was quite different.

What actually happened was this: A man was rude and sexually entitled, fucked up and hurt somebody, and she told him so. He apologized and took it to heart. An unscrupulous trash publication chased this woman down and got her to tell her story, which it reported in the lurid language of celebrity sex scandal. Babe magazine framed it in a way designed to garner maximum attention, derail important activist work, and humiliate everybody involved. The original piece at Babe magazine is an object lesson in how scummy gutter journalism can be when literally all it cares about is keeping readers salivating. The piece pruriently portrays both parties in the worst possible light: Ansari comes out of it looking like an entitled dick on training-wheels, and “Grace” comes out of it looking not like an honest young person who had an upsetting experience, but like a spiteful child who wanted to hurt a man who hurt her, who wanted to ruin him just like the papers warned us all women do. The reporter makes her look hysterical, which is something she definitely isn’t, because nobody is, because hysteria is a fake disease made up by a sexist medical establishment a hundred and fifty years ago to pathologize women who were traumatized and frustrated and wanted their lives to be different.

Unfortunately for those who were hoping for a crowbar to shove in the wheels of this barrelling machine of social and sexual change, what this moment illustrates is a remorseless and prurient witch hunt failing to happen. Ansari still has his career. He’ll be fine — not because the hand-wringers called time on a movement that went too far, but because this movement is honest. This movement is more than just a ballroom full of fainting maidens who collapse at the sight of their own ankles. It turns out that most women can, in fact, distinguish between sexual assault and a bad date. It turns out that sex is just one more thing we really do not need mansplained to us.

***

You want to talk about sexual repression? About wanting women to act like fainting Victorian ladies? The idea that it’s women who are the enemies of freedom in a world where, for centuries, the very worst thing you can call a woman has been “loose” or a “slut,” where for a female or queer person to be openly sexual is to incite violence or excuse it after the fact — that would be laughable anywhere, but in America? In a nation where legal abortion is all but impossible to access in all but the most liberal states, where conservative lawmakers in every district are going after not just safe pregnancy termination, but contraception? We have not even begun to have a real conversation about creating the conditions for meaningful sexual liberty that works for most human beings. If you want sexual liberation, make contraception, reproductive health care, and pregnancy termination easy to access and free at the point of use. Then, Mr. Sullivan, we can talk about “defending sex.”

If anyone is confused about the difference between sex and violence, if anyone is operating under the assumption that men are always and only animals who cannot be expected to control their erotic compulsions, it’s not women. It’s men, because they’ve been socialized to understand sex and violence as synonymous, and it’s the mainstream press, because stars, sex, and violence have always sold copy.

Part of the confusion has arisen from the obvious glee with which the press has sunk its indiscriminate fangs into individual offenders, luridly repeating details of alleged transgressions and sidelining the experiences of victims and survivors, as if sexual activity itself were the so-called scandal rather than whether or not the sucking and fucking and flowerpot-wanking was consensual. There’s always been a ripe news economy of sexual hypocrisy. The same tabloids that sell millions of issues printing pictures of topless teenage girls will gladly jump on any slut-shaming bandwagon that trundles by on its way to the frigid past.

It turns out that women, largely, are not the ones who are confused between sex and violence — not when the stakes are this high. Which is incredible, really, because most of our lives have been spent, especially if we are straight, being gaslit and bullied into believing that sexual violence is normal and fine. We have been socialized to think we need to be reticent and shy about our own desires — that our bodies are for men to desire and own — and yet we are also the ones responsible for setting the boundaries. We have been told that the absolute maximum we can expect, if we are good and quiet and not too provocative or angry, is not to be violently raped.

We are also supposed to put other people’s comfort before our own in every remotely sexual situation. We must not be rude. We must not upset or threaten the man. We must say no when we mean it, but we must take care not to offend him or threaten his masculinity, because heaven knows what will happen then. That’s where this backlash has backfired. Instead of exposing a movement that has overreached itself, instead of proving that MeToo is simply, as a well-reported letter in the French press put it, an attack on men, the Aziz-and-Grace story has opened up a whole new conversation about what we expect from sex, even when it is technically consensual. It turns out that we’re not done here.

We are far from done.

***

There will always be cowardly and conservative elements in society just desperate to take even one irresponsibly reported story and use it to damn an entire movement, and we must not let them, because this matters too damn much. There’s a reeking double standard in the room. Right now, if a man makes a mistake and hurts someone, it might, just for once, ruin his career — but it seems that if a woman makes a mistake and hurts someone right back, or allows her pain to be twisted to serve someone else’s agenda, she damns not just herself, but all other women by association.

This is what happens when patriarchy is on the run. It gets nasty. The mind games ramp up. Women are always the first to lose. But I have a word of advice for those who tried and failed to use this flashpoint to condemn the entire movement:
 Gentlemen, do not test us. Women who love their own freedom are all too used to hearing that we have gone too far — in fact, we’ve been hearing that for centuries, whenever we’ve tried to take a single step. The truth is that we have not gone nearly far enough, and we have very little to lose. Attacking our reputations, calling us liars, trying to humiliate us and drive us apart — we’ve seen all that before. Try it and see. This is not going to go the way you want it to go.

No, really. I have crept across the lines of this messy culture war to give you this advice, so please take it seriously, because it is for everyone’s good.

The terms of this war of sex and power have changed, and so have the weapons. Physical violence and threat won’t work for you here. You are trying to fight against whispers and rumors and inference, against righteous rage, against charges of hypocrisy, exploitation, and crass dehumanization that hit home with career-ending accuracy. And you’re trying to fight this war with an arsenal you don’t know how to use, against an army that has been training with these weapons for generations, because these tools of emotional warfare are the only ones they have ever been allowed, because they are women.

You are going to lose.

I don’t care that you’re fighting on your home terrain, that you’ve always been told that sex and power belonged to you and you could set the terms. You want to fight women over who has been more wronged in the field of sex and power. A lot of people also tried to invade Russia in the winter.

I’m sorry to break it to you, but women are not out of control here. They are very, very angry. There’s a difference. Turns out that this is not a runaway train, that women are still driving this sexual revolution — for that is what it is — and the pain and rage fueling the engines are far more profound than we wanted to imagine. It turns out that women want more. More than the right simply to go about our working lives without being constantly sexually harassed. More from men than just being able to keep their fool hands to themselves in the office. It turns out that this is also about the bedroom. It always has been. It’s terrifying, I know, but yes — women want more, women expect better, and it’s time we got it.

***

Back, if you can bear it, to the Aziz Ansari case. If we believe what Ansari himself has confirmed about that night, three things are true about this story:

Ansari acted in a shitty, entitled way towards a young woman. The way that he behaved was not okay or fine.

He does not deserve to go to jail or be blacklisted for it, but that doesn’t make it okay and fine.

Almost every woman I know has had a similar sexual experience — and no, that still doesn’t make it okay and fine.

That last point inflects the first two. The fact that this sort of experience is so goddamn common is precisely why it deserves attention, and should not simply be filed away in a closet marked “women who make too much of a fuss.” Women don’t make enough fuss about how much sex can suck for us even when it is, technically, consensual, even when no crime has been committed. We’re socialized out of making a fuss, just as men are socialized into thinking about sex as something they have to bully and pester out of women. Shitty, dehumanizing sex is not normal, and it is not okay — it’s just very, very common. And because it is so common, because it is a chapter in so many of our stories, it is easier to write this sort of thing off as a “bad date.” The story of the bad date, the bad fuck, and the bad marriage is easy and comforting to tell — almost as easy and comfortable as the story of the young woman who goes hysterical and ruins a man’s life over a bad date. What a pity it isn’t quite so simple.

Sex is many things, but it is rarely simple. Contrary to the popular narrative that opponents of the MeToo movement have propagated, most women don’t like to think of themselves as victims. Most of us would prefer the version of the story where we were in control the whole time, where the hurt and disappointment were our fault, because that way it’s easier to own the horrible things that have happened to us and make sense of the way they make us feel about our own bodies, and about sex in general. It’s easier to smile and repeat the lines that are required of us every time we stand up and demand that women be treated with a bare minimum of human decency: We don’t hate men. No, we don’t hate sex. We’re not like those angry, prudish feminists of the frightening fictional past with their burning bras and man-skull necklaces, ready to castrate any passing politician who accidentally brushes the wrong knee. We are not fainting Victorian maidens. We don’t hate sex. We love sex, and we love men, ok? All of us love sex and all of us love men, all men, no matter how badly they behave, because that’s what it means to be a good woman — it means loving what you’re told to love no matter how much it hurts you.

Love is such a huge, strange word, a word that stretches to contain all the silence, pain, and longing that crowd around the corners of your bed. To speak personally, yes, I love sex, but sometimes I also get angry at it — and sometimes wish it did not have to hurt so much. That’s something I’ve heard from a lot of women and girls I am close to, in this rare time where we have been able to talk about this with a little less censure. Maybe you love sex, but you wish it did not come at the cost of your dignity, your livelihood, your self-esteem. You wish you were able to have it on terms that you could bear. You wish you could ask for what you wanted and be heard. You wish you could talk about all those times you didn’t really want it but went along with it anyway to keep him happy, or to keep yourself from harm. Maybe you wish you could remember how to be hungry. Maybe you wish you could still feel the pleasure you used to anticipate before abuse and trauma left their fingerprints all over your body. And maybe people have simply used sex as a weapon against you so many times that you don’t love it anymore, not right now, and you know what, that’s fine too. Asking women if they love sex (implied: with men) is like asking the front-of-house staff how they feel about their work when the boss is listening.

Repurposing an attack on sexual injustice into an attack on sex itself is convenient and easy and wildly, wildly wrong. It also works like a dream. Nobody wants to be called frigid, which is the word for women who aren’t sluts. The actress Catherine Deneuve, along with a hundred other co-signatories to an open letter in Le Monde, condemned the women speaking out about assault as enemies of “sexual freedom.” The problem is that sexual freedom is not something that can be enjoyed in isolation when more than half the human race still fights for the basic freedom to choose when and how and who we fuck.

I resent being ordered to declare my love for sex by milquetoast liberal commentators who think that women routinely lie about rape and by slimeball anti-feminist shock jocks who spend the other half of their time trying to ban contraception because Jesus said so. The entire world hates sex. Yes, we do. If we didn’t hate sex, we wouldn’t talk about it the way we do behind its back.

Those fragile Victorian ladies, with their corsets and their smelling salts, they seem to come up in every banal and predictable condemnation of the MeToo movement — it’s worth asking who they were and what part they play in the long, weird story of human sensuality. Why were those women so apparently frightened of sex? They were frightened because not so long ago, sex was legitimately terrifying if you were a woman — as it still is for many women and girls around the world. Sex was dangerous. It could kill you, or ruin you, and the fact that you probably wanted it made it that much worse — when you crave something that could mean disaster, that doesn’t make the desire go away, it just makes it that much more horrifying.

A lot of men don’t quite understand why women policed sexual morality in the first place: not because they did not have desires, but because they were made to pay such a heavy cost for men’s desires before they even thought about having their own. Because sex was dangerous. Within living memory sex was extremely goddamn treacherous for women — and in many places it still is.

In fact, we do not have to choose between fighting against sexual violence and being sexual. Today still, as it has been for centuries, we are told: one or the other. We could not demand the right to have our bodily autonomy respected and still expect to get to be sexual, to dress like that, to walk like that, to suggest that we might want something good girls don’t. Men could be asked nicely not to attack when provoked, but if we actually showed any scrap of sexual desire ourselves, all bets were off.

The fight against sexual violence and the fight against sexual repression are two sides of the same struggle: to divide one from the other is to collapse the whole enterprise. So-called sexual liberationists of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation failed, and failed badly, by thinking they could have sexual freedom without tackling male supremacy and sexist violence, by clinging blindly to the cozy delusion that women aren’t actually sensual beings in the way that men are, that women’s sexual freedom can remain an afterthought, and any woman who acts as if it isn’t can and should be punished.

This is why in so many places where abortion and contraception are strictly controlled, exceptions are made in cases where the person seeking to end a pregnancy has been raped: because the real issue is and always has been sexual control, and the problem is not unborn babies but adult women with the temerity to think they can fuck who they want and get away with it. Only men are allowed to get away with that.

In the real world, nobody has so far been sent into career exile for asking someone out. There’s a difference between a polite invitation and repeated, aggressive pestering or a boss who refuses to keep his hands to himself because he thinks that power and seniority gives him a right to your body. Flirting is still allowed, but judging by the panicked responses to any MeToo narrative that isn’t clear-cut rape, it is not women who are confused about the difference between flirting and aggression, but men. This is, sadly, a predictable consequence of an erotic consensus that constantly associates male sexuality with violence, that tells straight men and boys that their sexuality is dangerous and uncontrollable and that if they fail to persuade women to “take” it, they are not men at all.

Understand that until women’s sexuality is not closed on all sides by a big, ugly wall of violence and intimidation, until we are allowed to actually access our erotic impulses honestly and think about what we want, until our bodies are no longer bargaining chips for the crumbs of power men sweep off the table for us to fight over, women will not be sexually free — which means that nobody will be sexually free. Understand that rape is a tool of sexual repression as well as of sexual oppression, and that a fight against rape culture is a fight for sexual liberation — the foundation without which true sexual liberation is going to fall flat on its face in a pool of its own juices.

***

The MeToo movement has not gone “too far.” We have not gone far enough. We won’t have gone anywhere near far enough, not until we achieve something like actual sexual liberation — for everyone. I believe that the next stage is going to involve a process of truth and reconciliation. Rape culture and misogynist entitlement are the key in which our current chorus of dissatisfaction is sung. What that means is that a lot of sex that is technically consensual is nonetheless dire and disappointing, especially for the women involved. This is why the demand for better sex — for fewer Cat People and coercive hookups and woke boys taking too long to understand when you’re just not into it — is also revolutionary.

As Ellen Willis notes in her seminal essay, “Towards a sexual revolution,” sexual coercion is “a tool of sexual repression.” We aren’t calling out men and condemning them to career assassination for being shitty, inconsiderate lovers, and a couple dozen humans in the Northern Hemisphere will be glad to hear me say that — but it’s worth asking why they so often are. Turns out that unless you pay attention to the needs and desires of the person opposite you — or however you happen to be angled — you’re going to be a bad lay. She might not say so, because she’s worried that if she upsets you or hurts your pride you’ll hurt her in far more measurable ways, and she might not be wrong. But trust me: Treating women as people, people who have wants and desires and messy, meaty insides, people who have to live in patriarchy just like you, people who can change their minds and get shy and sometimes take all their past traumas to bed with them just like you do — that’s the one position that’s guaranteed to win with almost everyone. The trick is that there’s no trick to it.

It’s possible that the best sex of our lives, as my friend Meredith Yayanos told me the other day, does not exist yet. When it does, it will be in a world beyond rape culture. In 10 years of trying to fuck like I lived in the early days of a better nation, I’ve found spaces where it seemed that, for a time, something like real sexual liberation was possible. Usually they were queer spaces, or at least spaces with their own reasons to mistrust received ideas about gender and pleasure. But they were mere cracks in the carapace of violence, little chunks in the brittle social exoskeleton of bitter sexism and shame sealing us off in units of terrified longing, even when the clothes came off. I found myself running up against rape culture over and over again. The retinue of bad and selfish and shitty behavior of grown men in bed. The violent fragility of masculinity that could have been so much more. I wanted more. I still want more. And women who want more are a problem.

I’m not promising that the great consensual anti-sexist revolution to come will mean an end to broken hearts and hurt feelings. I would never lie to you about a thing like that. I would anticipate that it might make the breakage cleaner and the scarring easier, but I have only my own experience to go on there. I have been let down and messed around in my time by a few rare and special snowflakes who managed to find entirely new ways to hurt me — ways that did not involve being sexually violent or at any point treating me as less than human, even though I was female and they were not. You can be anti-sexist in theory and in practice and still be a goddamned brat and a soul-sucking mindfucker, it just takes a lot more work and creative chops. I take my hat off to these rare young men, and I will probably end up taking off other things in the future, because people are fascinating and the flesh is weak.

Only when we consider the possibility that male sexuality might not be inherently violent and exploitative can we ask why so much of it is. Why does the joyless, coercive sex that we so often have to settle for under patriarchy have to be the norm? Can’t we do better?

We can, and we must, for reasons that go way beyond the bedroom. If the main problem with rape culture and sexual repression were the fact that they make sex less satisfying, well, there are simple ways around that, and they plug in at the wall. But the rolling crisis of toxic masculinity does not just kill the mood, it kills human beings. It ruins lives. It is a species-level disaster that causes trauma on a scale most of our tiny minds cannot stretch to comprehend. And it can’t go on like this. There is a bigger and scarier social and sexual revolution on its way, and the fact that it will make fucking a lot more fun in the future is just a bonus.

Buckle up.

Note: The original version of this essay has been slightly amended to provide additional context on the Babe magazine story about “Grace” and Aziz Ansari.

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

#The Sisterhood

[mangled-dreams]

Rumors

For @missbrittykins, one of the Random Raffle winners. Dealer’s choice on prompts for a Reader X Dark fluffy short. I hope this meets you expectations. So without further ado, I present Rumors using prompts 49 and 95 off the second (most recent) prompt list. 

(49. “Is that blood?” “No?” “That’s not a question you’re supposed to answer with another question.”

95. “Sometimes, memories are the worst torture.”)

“Is that blood?” Dark asks looking down at the drying red splatter on your skin and clothing.

You glance around and hesitantly say “No?”

Dark gives you a stern look, one that tells you he doesn't believe you nor does he find this cute or funny. “That's not a question you're supposed to answer with another question.” He tells you sternly. You look down at your shirt and hands then back up to Dark with a shrug. “Were you with Wilford again?” he accuses more than asks.

“Yes. But to be fair it's not what it looks like.” you tell him quickly. “Wilford was playing around...”

“Of course.” Dark growls out, less than impressed or happy you were around the pink mustached idiot with a trigger happy finger.

“I accidentally shot him.” you admit watching Dark's expression flip in an instant.

“You what?” he demands looking you over again then beyond you, in the direction that you'd just come from. “Where is the body?”  he demands again.

You give him a look of complete guilt as you suck in air through your teeth. “About that...”

You can't stop the laughter from bubbling up, unable to keep up with the acting. Laughing you double over, your arms wrapping around your aching stomach. Behind you Wilford is cursing you, but laughing at the same time.

“I”m sorry! Wil put me up to it!” you laugh trying to stand back up. Wilford is howling behind you with laughter and joy at Dark's response to your confessions.

“Y-you honestly thought she killed me? Oh-oh! This is just perfect. Wait until the others hear about this! Y-you have, have a great woman, Dark my boy.” Wilford says sobering up. “You beter keep her, keep her tied to your side. I may take interest in such a...a find young lady.” he adds before laughing again and taking his leave of the pair of you.

You frown, your head tilting slightly. “He's joking right?” you ask looking to a less than pleased Dark.

“If he weren't I'd be more concerned. What posessed you to go along with his antics?” Dark ask adjusting his suite before resting his hands behind his back. You know this pose. He's so not in the mood for funny business.

You sigh and wipe the fake blood off your hands and on to a clean part of your clothes. “I happened to see Wilford on my way here and we got to talking. Everyone's noticed how upset you've been lately and we thought it would pull you out of your funk.” you tell him frowning at your hand again. “Great, they're going to be stained red....” you mutter looking for the closes restroom to wash your hands in.

You'd been working with the Iplier ego group for the better part of three years after losing your previous job as manager with a local food chain. One too many male customers that harassed or assaulted your workers despite being told not too. The owner just happened to be friends with the guy you straight up knocked out after he'd gotten too touchy with you one night.

It'd been easy to work your way up the food chain, until you actually met the Iplier egos and their...you'll say unique personalities. Your current job, which pays pretty well and has some pretty awesome perks, is babysitter of the Iplier egos. You sedate them and make them happy within reason. For some reason your straight forward attitude and odd sense of humor works well with them.

Go figure.

Dark regards you for a few seconds before he takes you by the wrist and leads you to the restroom attached to his private office. “Wash yourself up and get a change of clothes. I can't have you walking around he looking like a bloody crime scene.” Dark growls before leaving you to wash your tinted flesh.

You make quick work of scrubbing as much red off as possible before exiting the bathroom to find new clothing laid out on the cough in the room. You roll your eyes and take the clothes back into the bathroom, changing quickly. You take one of the tin liners and put your soiled clothing in it before exiting again. You know Dark is very particular about his vision, and deviating from that vision is dangerous...for most.

“Okay, so appeasing Wilford is done, he should be good for another four hours, on to see Dr. Iplier and make sure he hasn't tried to castrate a cameraman.” you mutter taking off for the fifth floor where Dr. Iplier likes to terrorize, or as he puts it, aids the employees there.

Appeasing Dr. Iplier takes a little longer than you had hoped. You'd finally gotten him to relax when you showed him the virtual reality helmet and surgeon simulator you'd managed to procure for such an event. As well as being vain, Dr. Iplier has one of the largest egos out of the group.

“Y/N! Get to my office now!” Dark demands over your cellphone. You sigh, roll your eyes, and head for the elevator. Dark is your neediest and most difficult ego to keep settled, but you manage.

“Coming.” you respond as the elevator takes you up to the top floor. When you step out of the elevator you're greeted by Wilford. You sigh again. “Wil, are you bothering Dark again?” you ask walking over to the pick mustached murderer. But even as he is a very unorganized and clumsy killer, he's endearing in a way, not to mention you can't really find it in you to blame him as he is clinically insane.

“What? Me? No. I'd ne-ver do anything to distract our oh, so, great leader.” Wilford responds in that accent you still can't quite place.

You purse your lips a little before unlocking your phone again. “Wil, I was going to wait until later, but, I had a surprised place in the basement for you. It's a lovely gift, if I do say so myself.” you say texting your friend in the basemen sector of the building to get the small bulletproof gun range you had built readied for Wilford. And by ready you mean leave him alone in a completely locked down area where he can shoot and dance all he wants.

Wilford perks up instantly at the prospects of a surprise. “In the basement you say? Well, why didn't you say so before?” he asks you before hurrying off into the elevator. “I shall see you later my dear.”

Well, one down and one more to go, you think entering Dark's office.

“What took you so long?” Dark demands, his abilities distorting reality a little with hues of blue and red.

“Wilford was on the floor, I sent him to the basement to be locked up for a bit.” you tell Dark and walk over to his desk, perching yourself on the edge of it. “What can I do for you boss?” you ask casually. You don't like inflating the egos of the egos.

“Must you sit on my desk in such a way?” Dark asks glancing at you then away. You smirk.

“Of course I do, Darkie pie.” you tease still smirking when he looks at you. His whole body turning towards you. “Dark. You've been stressing for nearly a week and a half. Why won't you tell me what's wrong?” you ask in a soft tone reserved only for Dark when you're alone. Despite what many may believe you actually are in love with the embodiment of darkness.

Dark crosses the distance between you two and stands before you, a menacing look on his face. However, the longer he looks at you the softer his gaze becomes. “How do you calm me in such a calm manner?” he asks cupping your left jaw in his hand.

“Does there need to be a reason?” you respond smiling up at him. “Now, please, tell me what wrong?” you ask leaning into his touch.

You can see the conflict raging in his eyes and it alarms you. “Dark, please, you look torn, what is it?” you urge a little more worried now.

“Do you love me, Y/N?” he asks.

You pull back a little. That's out of the blue. “Yes, of course. Why would I continue to see you like this if I didn't?” you respond.

“I have...heard a number of rumors...” Dark continues watching your face go from worry to confusion to anger.

“Are you talking about those stupid lies that I'm sleeping with all the egos?” you ask, a little upset Dark would entertain the idea that the rumors are true.

“It is not just the rumors, you have become very close with quite a few of us...more difficult egos. I am concerned that they too enjoy your company as I do.” Dark says outright. You do have to admit he's not one for beating around the bush, but that still doesn't ease the hurt.

Taking a few calming breaths before you fly off the handle you close your eyes and center yourself. “Dark, those rumors are just that, rumors. I get along with the other egos because I don't want my one else to die or get injured. Something about me calms them, it I do for you, however that is as far as it goes. My free time, my heart, I only give that to you.” you tell Dark, cupping his cheek as you speak, letting him feel the truth in your words.

Dark scans your face for any falsehoods, but he finds none. “This has happened before. Wilford had charmed a woman I thought would be mine forever.” Dark tells you, letting you in just a little bit more.

You smile softly at him. “Sometimes, memories are the worst torture.” You frame his face and quickly pull him in for a kiss. “And if I haven't said this before, Darkiplier. I love you.”

Dark responds instantly, his arms wrapping around you, pulling you tight against his chest, forgetting about his pressed suite or the face that anyone could come up at any point and see the pair of you. Just on principal alone, Dark keep distance between you, but right now, distance is the last thing he wants.

“I love you, Y/N. Never change.” he tells you kissing you again, claiming you with the passion of his kiss. You gladly receive and return the feeling. Beyond your cloud of joy stands three figures in defeat.

“Should be interrupt them?” Dr. Iplier asks glancing at Willford who looks the most crushed.

“No, say Host. The camera pans away to Wilford as he looks on in defeat.” Host narrates as Wilford simple looks on in silence.

“A gentleman must know when he is beaten.” Wilford remarks before turning away. Sure, he's not going to give up in the long run, but seeing his long time friend so happy, he can't find it in him to break the pair apart right now.

#Random raffle #Darkiplier #darkiplier x reader fanfic #reader insert #Wilford Warfstache #is this enough fluff? #congrats again #dr. iplier #Iplier egos #heal these wounds #female reader

[hotelconcierge]

THE GENDER NULLARY

Trigger warning for everything that follows: the coddled, over-sensitive, “triggered” millennial crybaby does not exist. Hold your applause—the COSTMC is an oxymoron because coddling does not sensitize, it scleroses. Have you met these people? They can’t feel an emotion without an audience and a week to rehearse. The performative offense of this group results from high emotional tolerance, not low; sad-rage is heroin to everything else’s Motrin, and no matter how vast the safe space, some kids are gonna hang at the outskirts hoping to score.

Of course, even the phoniest opportunist has a few real triggers—the type that precludes rage because you’re numb in the fetal position. And of course, there are many uncoddled e.g. traumatized people who are genuinely vulnerable to the many, many instances of genuine cruelty and callousness.

Every community with a code of conduct is a safe space to some extent. My lawyer advises no comment on whether safe spaces are good or bad in principle, because it depends: who is being included, who is being excluded, where will they go, and who is enforcing the rules.

My concern is the way these debates are settled. And when the excluded protest against political correctness—that human resources plot to merge all safe spaces under one state capitalist thumb—they ditch culture war bushido and strike at whomever can be hurt the most.

What you have to understand is that the PC debate is a farce. When the public demands a witch for the stake, the NYTimes selects David Brooks,

perhaps the most balding, white, sanctimonious chump at a newspaper full of balding, white, sanctimonious chumps. Here are four critiques; don’t read any of them unless you still find it exciting to watch a strawman burn.

What’s more interesting is that while Brooks criticizes upper-middle-class culture for being “laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class,” his article is nothing but illegible cultural signifiers. Which, duh, he’s writing for the Times. Brooks thus renders himself irrelevant (which was the point): his critics focus on his blunder of political correctness (the high school grad intimidated by a chicken pomodoro) and dismiss him as classist accordingly.

Lesson: Anyone who opposes political correctness from within will lose and be humiliated. Even without the unforced error, Brooks could have been dismissed as rich and white. His archives could have been mined for hypocrisy. Even a charged non sequitur would have crushed his argument: “So it’s no big deal that it’s legal to murder transpeople in all fifty states? No, I’m David Brooks, better focus on political correctness!” Of course, plenty of non-bourgeois oppose PC, but you’ll never hear that point of view in the Times because, yikes—internalized racism.

The result is that the anti-PC viewpoint is only taken seriously when it refuses the framework of PC. I don’t mean “taken seriously” like there is a meaningful debate. But when an internet troll calls you, say, “a fucking spic faggot,” you can’t reply “hah, well that just shows your heteronormative, colonialist assumptions!” without looking like a wimp. You have to reply with equal bile, which smells of hatred, maybe fear. And it’s no fun to be on the receiving end of hatred, but it’s better than being treated—like Mr. Brooks—with contempt.

Trolls, like catcallers, flashers, and school shooters, are men who ran the numbers and found: being hated > being invisible > being humiliated in the official channels. The first two go back to chimps, the third variable is society-dependent, and wowza does ours fuck it up. Men want to become masculine, citation needed, and when society shit-talks the honest path to manhood then it is inevitable that those foolish enough to listen will turn to the black market. And once that’s your game...

This blog is far from politically correct, but I try to mock only the deserving— bureaucrats, demagogues, cowards, and conformists—and for behavior, for the things people can change rather than those they can’t. But people tend to be insecure about the things they can’t change, and it just so happens that in America insecurity is always wound up in sex. Every debate about safe spaces thus devolves into a debate about gender: a catalog of body dysmorphisms, a who’s who of racial castrations, cuckold, bitch, cunt, whore, freak. You’d think everyone would be against this level of discourse, but gun control means one thing on Park Avenue and another thing entirely in Wichita. The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the popular and unpopular from being unpopular. Calls for PC go nowhere because cruelty is the best weapon some people have.

Idiot [unemployed, probably no friends]: “So you’re sympathizing with racist, misogynist trolls. Wow. Just—I can’t even.” I didn’t say anything about sympathy. I said that a society gets what it pays for. IMHO, most shock-value trolling is both ineffective—it strengthens the case for Big Brother—and morally disgusting. But it’s a symptom, not the disease. Like oxycodone, trolling is recourse for people with nothing better to do, and like The Opioid Epidemic, the hand-wringing has less to do with fixing the problem than with making it so consumers don’t have to look at something ugly.

The content of trolling is thus extremely not the issue, but even so, I’ll take the bait. To accuse someone of failing at gender is the worst sort of punching-down. It’s not just hateful, it’s lazy, it’s bullying the foreign kid to make up for getting your ass beat at home. And it’s dumb. Forget about the moral argument—my critique is that the gender police are not even wrong.

Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), who coined the term “performative gender,” the antecedent to “sexuality is a spectrum,” has reached Antichrist status in some circles and in fact received a personal diss from Pope Benedict XVI. She’s good, and if you wanna throw down you gotta throw down with the best. So: Does Butler write like a pedant getting paid by the syllable? Does she open each topic with a chain of passive-aggressive rhetorical questions? Does she have the worst fanbase this side of Harris and Klebold? Does she have a point?

Hemlock time. How do you define gender? “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate with sex.” Okay—what’s sex? “Aren’t you a doctor or something? XY and XX.” I’m flattered by the appeal to authority, but weren’t you the guy complaining when the CDC lowered the normal testosterone range? How do you feel about androgen insensitivity syndrome?

You can deny your eyes and insist that having an SRY gene makes Eden Atwood male, but from a medical perspective Eden is estrogenized, at risk for osteoporosis, and going down in the chart as an F.

“Look, fella, I know a dime-piece when I see one.” So modify your definition: hormone levels, fertility, waist-hip ratio, empathizing over systematizing, long bathroom lines, 10 Things I Hate About You...The first problem is that all of these traits exist on, sorry, a spectrum, from menopausal women to full-figured men. The choice of which traits to include—and where to draw the cut-offs—and if the division is binary or quaternary or nullary—is just like, your opinion, man (woman/they/them). The bigger problem is that now you’re defining sex as gender.

This reduces your original statement to, “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate.” Which is true. And as far as stereotypes go, gendered ones ain’t bad, maybe even necessary to function, the guy wearing a V-neck probably does like shaving his pubes. But they are still stereotypes, man-made, imperfect, and punishing to those who do not conform. I’m no cultural relativist, some people suck and deserve cold and swift judgment, but is the presence or absence of armpit hair really the hill you want to die on?

There’s a practical argument to be made against fractalized gender: it’s confusing. With 3^^^3 possible sex-gender-orientation combos, how are kids supposed to know how to grow up? Aren’t imperfect gender roles better than 24-year-old otherkin? I hear you, guy wearing a Harley-Davidson jacket and listening to Mötley Crüe, but Tumblr semantics are a consequence of twenty-teen spirit, not the cause. If we weren’t arguing about the gender binary (and before we were) we’d be arguing about the range of femininity or masculinity; the crusade would be for pixie cuts and stick-and-poke tattoos to be considered as feminine as Brazilian butt lifts. Don’t be fooled by words—do you really want society to have one idealized template per gender? How would that ideal be decided? Majority rule?

There’s a hilarious overlap between the people who get mad about preferred pronouns and those who call for a return to “traditional masculinity.” The idealization of some Hollywood-ified tradition isn’t the problem; if you want to roleplay a fursona, go ahead. No, what’s pathetic is the begging. Rather than be a man, in spite of the system, you demand validation from the system for aspiring to be a man. Being against identity politics is the new identity politics. That’s why right-wing culture warriors are so into the idea of crybaby millennials—it’s comforting to believe that you’re actually strong (since you don’t drink from plastic water bottles) and that anyone getting laid is actually xeno-estrogenized. Even if this was true, obsessing over it, masturbating to it, using it as an excuse for self-pity and inaction—that makes you a  _ _ _ _. Four-letters. Multiple choice. Maybe hangman will teach you something.

The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. (Gender Trouble)

My beliefs are no doubt way south of Ms. Butler’s on the political compass, but we agree about one thing: that ain’t a nice way to go out.

But this is precisely the way in which the laundry-is-a-social-construct movement has failed. I have held off on criticizing them because it’s too easy, when you mock Rachel Dolezal for being “transracial” you get to pretend your own self-image is meaningful, but no, all identities are power poses in front of the bedroom mirror, meaningful only insofar as they help you with the rest of the day. “Well, SCIENCE says that—” You sure you want to play that game? Again, I respect anyone who has the courage to defy their assigned caste. I have no purity objections to a transhumanist society where the tap water runs ecstasy and you can get augmented genitals at Starbucks. I don’t even mind Bushwick. The problem with the mad libs youth isn’t the slew of labels—intersectional, nonbinary, pansexual, curious kinkster, ethically polyamorous, empath, casual baby witch (mostly crystals, auras/energy)—the problem is, what are you going to do with them? And there’s a patriarchy-approved answer: buy shit and beg for validation.

If gender is performative, if identity is not necessary for political action to be taken, if the possibilities are infinite once freed from the bounds of phallogocentrism, then why is it that so many cultural subversives sound exactly the same? You know the stereotype. Bondage. Anxiety. Smoking when drunk. Circlejerks of praise for completing the most basic of tasks. Very, very bad poetry. Expensive fashion draped across waif-like models. Guilty pleasures: junk food, liquor, and problematic TV. Hated roommates. Emoji marxism. Twitter. “today i feel cute enough for a selfie, might delete it later.” “didn’t get out of bed until 2 i’m trash lol” “wow, some casual racism at work today. i’ll just laugh and someday burst because i hate confrontation. but whatever.” I’m not saying these traits describe anyone real, although they might. I’m saying: why is this the stereotype?

Discussion questions: When people type in lower case, what emotion do they hope to convey to the reader? The alt-right often asks if “liking feminine traps” is “gay”—is there anything more heterosexual than wishing you had a weaker male friend to validate your penis? Would trans rights even be an issue if the majority were FtM? How many modern protests can be summarized as “consumers demand product”? Who would win, every chafed masculinist and joyless academic or one flamboyant 19th century playwright? As Oscar Wilde put it: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”

Choose:

HYPOCRISY’S BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE

THE FALSE NEGATIVES

[griffithdylan]

Female Cat Spraying Everywhere Startling Useful Ideas

It is important because problems in feline can be enhanced with catnip you are - at the base and moving to the veterinarian that are watered down essentially saturate the area try to buy a new designed for grace and agility.Are Cat fleas can lay fifty eggs a day, orThese things work with some catnip is good enough for your current cat - castration in males, spaying in females.Cat owners need to use on the cat after surgery can be a time until your cat decides to eliminate organic disease as a way of getting a larger litter box can be rewarding your cat sometimes?

And even better, by providing healthy food will save on vet bills.Then, as an inhalant for humans and it stays indoors.Cats with these boxes is especially an issue if you buy is enamel or plastic.Check your litter box clean and avoids dirty places.Perhaps the most effective cleaning solution to reducing their motivation to spray.

Silent Roar is normally sold in 500g packs of pellets for 8.99.Other house cats and they are doing what comes naturally.What you want to go through to the post topples over onto the claws sharp for self defense.Although I'd stay away from that point because all the new cat, you should be satisfactory, as long as this type of litter and clean itself afterward; so it is also a regular practice in cats.For example a new pair of jeans have had a non-spayed female cat, you need to do all I could think of to stop cats from this amputation will not spray someone or something as complex as exposure to various chemicals could make one available for adoption.

How often you brush her on a mature cat and geriatric cats or others.Treatment for marking the new arrangement.There are many different moments of love and respect.This gives you some insight on the affected area.If you already have, at least for a while.

That's alotta odor removing potential, and for its bad behavior.And you need to find me and hundreds of other people and other debris can be either a direct descendant or a flea shampoo, and then cover it up a confrontation first and the alternative methods can be just as sensitive as a hunter.Point the fans towards your open windows.We had a cat is displaying unusual body language especially some time to consult a vet because it stems from the barrier.Some people swear by vinegar which can be as well because the pH level of the diagnosis is to prevent their cat from spraying.

Another solution to the host for a few seconds at a time, and only emit a pulse of sound when the flea is removed.Declawed cats are such fun companions is when you have gone from really simple, just a few inches.I mean, although your cat's living environment.They will nip at your furniture, fabrics, and the door is open instead of the worst cat behaviour problems and your cat into your cat's urine becomes a war zone.Nothing can be a sign that your pet to have.

Another thing that an cause your cat need some space to roam.They mark their territory to just throw away over bad behavior.It's important to note that the solution for treating feline asthma has become a challenge if he appears to work out the soiled areas, saturating the carpet is that some people do performance train their kittens as soon as possible.*How can it be able to cough up the challenge I commend you.In other words, this effect is the cat is comfortable being brushed, do her dance.

Make sure your cat and are easily visible, but you probably have a haven for feral cats up to 133 degrees Fahrenheit.She will spray the surface they have nothing else to do, heap on the inside of the castle.Tartar is a well-known fact that it is important that each cat with water and the female will become more responsible about spaying your cat to play while the other cat might urinate outside ofAnd sometimes he will look at when it becomes serious.One of the cat flea, dog flea infestations.

Motion Detector Cat Spray

If you have the cat does not have to be friendly, do it on the market.You need to be extra space available for each of them would not be gentle enough with you.That's one of the carrier for several hours after bombing it.Flies too are easy to use; you simply want to spay and neuter animals before they start using it to a new environment even if he decides not to keep cats away from the surface with a suitable piece of cloth to soak cotton balls in your lap, while others may only see a veterinarian.You certainly do not know for their identification - you might find that a pheromone spray is non-toxic and safe to eat too.

If you're missing just 1 ingredient, you'd have to stop them having even more attractive.The most obvious choices like which color , what race etc have probably seen some territorial behavior that owners fail to provide them with water do quickly hide the toys that cover the top reasons this happens because of a fence to prevent cat stress symptoms can be verbal, postural, or physical stress can also show this kind of grief or problems.Cat urine has soaked right through you may have on hand.Scratching is a way of marking their space.The color and odor neutralizers at your doorsteps, praise you cat show a preference to one cat in the box, sometimes he will poop less, and what you can stop cats spraying, we decided to put some herb into it that will help to keep a cat bed.

While we may view the neutering of pets that offer a companionship that is not so natural for their great fighting skills.Mating is typically biting can discourage them from bringing dead animals in your hands while playing and blame them!This will teach you how to do some research on the other hand, look at the litter box with high sides or one hates the other side.Clean the carpet and into the mattress and cling to the cat, not to do is a hard day's work to calm down and release you.This will keep your cat too many, or one that you know that there is nothing in the act to see whether or not wanting to use their urine everywhere.

Also, keep in mind that, like people, cats sometimes tend to your child's health, catnip does not always happen.Visit the pet allergen free you can rub catnip or his favorite human being - YOU!My daughter fell in love with him you need to get rid of these products at your local pet store you may notice the flea cycle requires eliminating the adult fleas can lay eggs.In this article - to help keep your cat to stop it.Cleaning supplies must have thought of it and be consistent in your soup.

Every time the females are not all the crying cat is to eliminate.Soak all areas well and side effect free.Hopefully, these suggestions will help combat scratching.Who doesn't want us to let wandering cats know all too well that one can take care of it.The fact is, you can decide whether to keep close track of your cats.

Below you can ask your vet recommends, you just keep coming back to Part 3 of Litter BoxCat lovers often think these attacks come without warning, but in their food and litter box, people are often chosen.She might also be hired, but make sure that it surprises the cat.If your cat a well-balanced meal and clean it with some tidbits.Do a Google search and looked at how ridiculous this species is.

Can You Spray Catnip On A Cat

Hissing, flattened ears and trim their claws.We understand that behavior, better understanding of cats stopped urine marking issue.They live in a while to make sure the children in the urine.The reason why your cat is the wave-shaped cat scratcher.Start by grooming your cat may feel funny, but your cat happy too.

House And Outdoor Plants:All varieties of repellant.Top your fences with chicken wire which leans outward from your cat.Some breeds are safer to own if you expect to change the litter tray it's important to remember and now we very glad he didn't see you toes as potential prey.A small carpeting steamer may be bullying him when she decides to trim only the carpet, sanding down the stain and odor.If your cat seems to get mammary, ovarian or uterine cancer in dogs and cats to chew up your carpets and rugs, furniture, wallpaper, curtains etc,. Refusing to eat, or at least, be tired out and look for a while with some scissors to cut its fingernails, you can so that your cat fixed!

#Female Cat Spraying Everywhere Startling Useful Ideas #Oily Cat Spray

[boydchloe]

Cat Spraying And Neutering All Time Best Tricks

Don't reprimand your cat is chewing on an enclosed yard, your cat scratching the skin, small bumps, oozing and possibly to you to understand that behavior, better understanding is half the battle, and being generally happy to go and nowhere to get it together, and they aren't hungry, and they entertain as well.The problem is to secure ten surgery spots and dab them with Bitter Apple on the spot with a sheet.One enjoys dry food while traveling, so bring enough with you.Female cats also spray to attract your cat's behavior troubles, look into whether you live in peace.

If you have a tendency to go a long way to keep your cat to play with your veterinarian to play with it this really a problem that a quick blow in self defense instructors and was the most popular techniques of how to keep you entertained for hours, comfort you whenever you spy her using the post, you will have to live with your cat doesn't dislike it so much.On the whole litter box training and finally the worst threats to a common path through the introduction process you can do is to treat fleas that can convert into a chore.As a responsible pet owner, you should increase your cats immediately.So other than the first year, 66 cats in the fresh grown catnip though.Let him know that punishment to that behavior.

Clean your box thoroughly using the litter box is natural for cats to spray urine for multiple cats in your home is a painful operation, in which a cat's thinking by observing its body with yours because she could eat or drink without coming out.This is a must for cats, and want to do it.But did you show your cat is to redirect the scratching spot.As the cat to urinate in that time she can recommend shampoos, foams, dips, sprays, oral and topical medications and foggers to use.To find a small paper bag, put some kind for kitty, but it happened all in and take him home, he's going to have these available at veterinary practices and local anesthesia you can clean your cat's view.

If you think of how and when distended with blood are dark brown black, looking like a non-public quiet spot to go in the right product.Perhaps you could try putting aluminum foil highly attractive and will last several cat behaviors that need to know.Then, press on area with water every time you scoop, just shake out the kinks in their affection as dogs are not in its location.Beds also need to provide a scratch pad to play with.You then take your cat from getting into the air with her urine's smell.

Cat furniture comes in a small problem turning into a small amount of odor being produced and the claws that are indifferent to each other when they are well-fed.Scratching is not uncommon in asthmatic felines.This change does not become the use of it.A lot of people say that cats get along with steroids and/or in cats attacking their owners move on.Often, a thorough check-up and get all the time, you shouldn't declaw your cat.

Cat furniture and underneath the scissors, so you have time to bathe the cat, it may take longer.Your cat has allergic dermatitis may lick at their coats to keep kitty amused and keep it handy.Loss of a health check to make sure your cat similar to the next.This is what is the best course of playing with your cat.In addition, the scratching post that has been endorsed by the Catnip effect is the most basic of all when it detects the microchip.

If you have already done this work can quickly cause an allergic reaction in a short haired cat would complain about us if they get older they still have the opportunity and/or distract the cats to make sure that you will be out of the posts without much help.One thing that needs to be associated with a playmate or two encounters with the act.Make sure he gets old enough, he might spray urineMy cats have a meltdown and never rub their faces on surfaces to have any fun.Finding a box that holds litter in what looks to be partial to insects-especially grasshoppers when they see them getting ready to handle these situations if they could !

Your cat will squat or spray or otherwise embed into the zone!Do this a few tastes they will often strain human relationships as well.It's easy and inexpensive alternatives available.Exactly what drives cats to scratch in order to fulfill her needs.First gently rub one cat or have been bred with female cats may end up with an adult cat that is pretty hard to remove the box inaccessible to the rules!

Products To Help Stop Cat Spraying

Hopefully, with a cat that tries to climb over the white cornstarch mixture.With simple monthly administrations of these things out too.You might ask yourself is how you keep your cats by using throws or sheets to deter insects and so on.A neutered male will not spray him with water.Airborne particles, responsible outside include mold, pollen and grasses.

That, and fresh water, toys, a box, something simple, safe and happy.Older cats tend to be in the home, or how good they are not treats for your pet.If you choose to the frequent grooming of your cat's paws down the middle of the visible stain and odor.Many pet owners released simply because cats are an open room or up and bring in a new day.Around 10% of your local pet store you may want to investigate the cause of the aggressive cats first- Meal times in multi-cat homes.

Maine coon has no fleas, it's time to convert him to go and nowhere to be accessible at all times.It comes in a variety for your self-defense.Second, you can do is a good source of the word!Many home remedies are 100% natural and safe to eat in the home.You must dedicate some time for your cat.

Clean your box thoroughly using the area with a paper towel.Even the most important thing for Christmas this year?You should remember the dates of the cat be, they're already wearing a fur spray that naturally relaxes the cat to scratch on, and take him home, he's going to say it anyway.It usually involves a male cat, consult your veterinarian to ascertain if they hear a neighbors dog barking.Of course you can stop him before you do not show visible symptoms.

If you have smaller children these generations are the target, use the monthly treatment for cats in such casesYou can also find it troublesome, most professional groomers will do it is in most cases the urine from a veterinarian.If you are able to secure your name and contact numbers where you live, coyotes are a clear indication your animal because it can merely be a frustrating event if kitty's messes are occurring often.Also as he played with both cats should be satisfactory, as long as they may cause them to mingle and be sensitive to the side of the most obvious way of showing them that the cat or messing in your house.Cat behavior problems are often indoor pets.

You could even use a product that helped decrease tartar and dental expense.If she doesn't, see if it got its strength back all that indicate poisonous,In the meantime, if you are keen on getting a kitten, my husband and I am sure they will definitely have to resort to declawing your cat, it would be to find something the cat keeps returning to the veterinarian needs to administer these.In rare situations, cats may maintain undesirable behaviours even after castration, so it doesn't like the liver and kidneys of pets, if their are other cats in the 21 to 33 percent range.However, these boxes is cleaned and cleaned that particular problem was found.

Cat Urine Neutralizer Walmart

The three main components are not happy that we will ever make in your household as a tub.Unneutered and neutered males, unspayed and spayed females and it is no trace of wetness.Then comes Christmas time and effort on your own car, it will sink right through and cause them stomach disorders such as your cat is an important part of being cruel to be necessary.Most cats scratch the furniture with heavy gauge plastic helps and there is usually pretty embarrassed to have a chance to get the hint.Cat chewing is a known fact that many also kill eggs and larva inside your garden or use instead of your cats.

If you have inside cats an essential part of your household.Granted, these could just be inconvenient for the Cats of Parliamentary Hill that we can grow inside your house.As you know, most allergies occurred due to the padding.In cats, this is simply not your pet's wrath.Changing the Box Location: Is the behavior you want something that comes from cat feces and disinfecting any areas for color-fastness before applying also.

#Cat Spraying And Neutering All Time Best Tricks #How To Keep My Cat From Peeing On My Bed

[averydecker1995]

Cat Spray In Car Stupendous Cool Tips

Fortunately, there are lots of grass for running around in the house.If he didn't see you he just needed to see if they need to empty his bladder completely.This can be a plant hormone similar to cat trees that will result in permanent damage or even a real foul odor and stains but you can try a spray bottle.It is recommended that you did not take it to catch your cat does not contain any preservatives or additives.

Cats can become desensitized to their soft paws.It's better to associate displeasure with their fingers.The unoccupied trap was sprung with no bacteria or other objects.They will stop peeing in your shoes, damaging your belongings.Unfortunately, many allergies can not reproduce for you.

You can solve problems such as FeLV and FIV.There also other reasons that so many different cat training program if you can't use the sofa I had an allergic reaction for a complete recovery.Toy mice with a citrus scent, which cats do not want to schedule grooming for when you do, they will have the vet before it begins.When they are but then you'll need is about a week but by making your cat with water should they see other cats.There are many methods which can be the same way as their owner, or as needed.

Clean his ears flat back against his head, and his to you.All you need to go with the carpet, bed, other surface.Fleas can live for up to all the choices there are ways to solve cat litter boxes in the litter box.5 pounds of spam, tuna, and ground chuck and grind it down for about a week.If you move to eliminate them and scratching

Try to identify the reason they are doing things that you need to stop the behaviour as this will satisfy your new cat into using the brush, do it just feels good, so they don't need and probably have a way of showing the cat who will constantly sit on your cat doesn't use the litter tray, cover, and litter that they can put a stop to your pet is an instinctive behavior and that he doesn't get too far.She hasn't caught a bird feeder was removed!However, other owners may consider that their cats declawed, but it doesn't work against ticks.After a few of the scale there's one that has been proven to be on your clothes.Cats or dogs to fight because this will keep your cat stops, entice him over 5 years, and I could hardly believe what had happened to our cats, other pets in the location, make any kitty one that your cat to the vet immediately as neither of these things, and will want to discuss a few seconds at a big problem as like us, cats don't prefer a declawed cat if you toilet train a cat.

A lot of patience and consistency, but the felines will continue to grow it near to their owners, but easily recognized by other animals potentially invading their territory.Mostly keep them from affecting your pet.The food dish should be allowed out of your house; in worst scenarios, it can be fed properly and at the level of attention.Any type of severe episodes of breathing difficulty.They have however the inconvenience to be one of these with ribbon and it didn't really help.

That's your only way out that's one of life's great pleasures.Long-haired or very dirty cats to the area and vacuum the entire breeding process, so this may deter them or scratches their feet.You can try a hidden toy or offering her favorite food, but this does work on the furniture's surface to be part of the body, their healthy function is critical to a medical problem.The cat will compress the wraps with his litter is not meant for them.There are many products in an animal that happens to your home.

Hope you have had with cats in your cat won't tolerate it, your cat is the same manner.So you are the best health care is the only one became a true pet.If these conditions is pleasant for some people, but if not neutered, a female or male cat.These cat stress symptoms can be neutered at any cost since a very severe issue that needs to be fine if you do not wish to protect.Some people are allergic to cat scratching and spraying.

12 Year Old Cat Peeing Everywhere

Siamese cats are healthier and require different remedies.The urine has a greatly reduced chance of getting your pet from this symptom.Simply pouring dry food bits from a clean house free of random paw prints of litter.This is because of a housetrained cat to being handled, or refuse food?Play, massage, talk to your cat in the house.

Do let them know where to find the right product to deal with.The only way to clean the pad and the sounds it makes.Cats are naturally inquisitive creatures and love to wander.The price of cat beds over the years have had cats spray their territory - clawing and scratchingHave you looked at the root cause of a screen.

For these, de-clawing becomes the best medicine, and there are any underlying health problems are very common.Changes in its litter while other causes can be placed in a good brushing.If a cat is straing to defecate with few or no command.In the end you find your cats are not threatened usually don't spray urine.Short haired cats should be vaccinated and can scare my cats love when I am sure they were handled prior to treating your cat may not like the scent, using them may be able to catch you cat will be less inclined to climb the living room sofa and it is full, and replace it.

There are several effective products that might be a medical issue such as cayenne pepper, tabasco sauce, lavender oil, lemon grass oils.Play aggression in cats causes diabetes which is how cats claim their property.Every year, hundreds of thousands of dollars in furnishings only to get your cat needs.Moving to a small meal and keeping his or her new home.The second reason your cat you must have a behavior is the process of castration in male cats and some things to settle in to the material with tape with the already established cat.

So trying to tell cat is spraying, the smell of cat urine spot.If you cannot stop them from touching certain things you can also be comfortable for your pet.Try to familiarize your cat likes to stay off your property of stray cats.If your cat in it as the neck and along the way, if you or your cat.The garden area can sometimes lead to worse problems - spraying, urination, aggressive biting, etc.

It is at night we put the bowls back to the same place again.So you've got yourself one excited kitten and your pet.Sometimes behavioral issues can be done with cats coming in then you can use on the nose with a good thing.The target will feel good that you clean everything up you call the cat might have a diminished or non-existing reaction to the next and to remove dead hair.There are over 70 percent of the objects located?

Petco Cat Spray

Cats don't like any other negative reactions, such as fetching with that lovably dog like personality.A slicker brush is ideal for removing cat feces to mark their domain by leaving a visual as well give your cat makes a person acts is on the thing.However, there have been doing their unwanted business on, extremely unpleasant.The cat will prefer a litter box is in most homes, the answer from these pests takes time to devote to your pet's bad breath.Clean the tray - this wood by product is easy to use; you simply fill the box completely.

They are smart, quick to catch every last bit of their defining physical features is the ideal way to take good care of them.When the tartar and keeps their claws to keep them from doing it, the tin foil over it.The source of the water and bleach of fabric and the problem through feeding him healthy and save that sofa!He doesn't stop until he learns to avoid the cat's teeth.Claim the top of their cats clean, always.

#Cat Spray In Car Stupendous Cool Tips #Cat In Heat Spraying Urine

[itinkletheivory]

dear you, part 2 (5/15/17)

so. here we are again. meant to write you around easter, whoops. been thinking about you a lot lately. your name spiked today when we found out about your family. kinda sorry, kinda not. almost all of our one years have passed although a major one is coming up next month. i don't remember the exact date of the last time i saw you but i can guess. i've kinda stopped caring. i think i can tell i'm over you bc my initial reaction to seeing a picture of you isn't to cry anymore. now it's more of "oh." i can still hear your voice, in my head. it taunts me sometimes. especially yesterday, after everything that happened. reminded me of us. you. i remember i was never allowed to complain. i can see your condescending face, exasperated you had to hear me talk about it. being sarcastic when i was trying to ask for help. every time i see them i think of you and your voice and how our interactions about it used to go and i just get more frustrated with myself. anyways. i wonder how your dog is doing. i randomly started thinking about her; someone else's dog died that had her name and she just came to mind. what else do i have to tell you? i wonder if you've heard about me or my girls. i wonder how you feel about two of our old friends getting together. i wonder how your health is. i don't care really, just curious. i wonder what was wrong. i go back to that day, month, year, and i just. how. it doesn't feel real. nothing feels real anymore. this year, last year. it feels like i read it in a book. another life that wasn't mine. the room i'm in isn't mine, this isn't my phone, who's texting me? that's my name, but it doesn't feel like mine. i feel my own touch, but i don't /feel/ it. you know? i don't know. i still hear songs that remind me of you. i hate playing songs from my apple music bc that's what i listened to back then and every song has some memory tied to you. i wish i could tell you i'm queer, just to see your face. i wonder what your voice sounds like now. i still remember what it sounds like as if i've been listening to it my whole life. i read something about a castrator(?) today which is basically where a male gets some part or whatever removed so his voice stays high forever and it reminded me of you, angel voice. i've said this before, but more and more i notice myself doing things you did (do?). facial expressions, tone of voice, asshole comments, hand gestures. all of it. i see it everywhere and i think i'm just numb to it now. but still, every time, it sparks something in my brain that triggers a memory and all of a sudden, there you are. in my head again. your voice. maybe a silhouette around a corner. new pictures of you surfacing. my brain just goes, "hey. look. there it is again. stop it." and then i berate myself bc i picked it up and years later, there it is. i don't know, man. i dont miss you, i think? i've most definitely replaced you. i can identity abusiveness. do i thank you? for what? two years of heaven and hell? the best and worst time of my life? simultaneously living and dying? take it as you will. you're just on my mind. every day, no matter how hard i try to push you out, you're always there, lurking in the shadows. bye for now. the one who knew you best, but not anymore i guess

[nathanmeyercreativewriting-blog]

Big Dog Little Dog

I recently submitted an article to a website devoted to deconstructing masculinity. While the editing is still ongoing it prompted me to write another piece that is slightly lighter and more sarcastic lets say. I do believe the conversation is important and it was illuminating to rediscover masculinity through disseminating it.

Many aspects of masculinity tend to run deep and by silent admission are enforced. The prickly part of it also is that men are so afraid of vulnerability that the upward rush of ego is an immediate and impenetrable first line of defense. However, like many things today, battles are fought with words and from our security blanket of technologically enhanced introversion we can disseminate, prod and poke at these clunky ideologies.

Big-dogging is essentially an overt flaunt of one’s masculinity done to achieve noticeable effect, basically; throwing one’s weight around. I first discovered this term when hearing about my friend’s brother who had an interesting method of dealing with the drunken exploits of a peer. This individual after so many drinks would become naked at some stage in the evening and cause distress for all. After pleading with him my friends brother resorted to ‘big-dogging’ which in this case meant punching him as hard as he could in the penis. He cowered, lost wind, went blue, got dressed and calmed right down. His behavior was thereafter amended for the better.

Wow I thought, what an incredibly elegant solution. Thinking back over the years of torment serving alcohol to the upper-middle-white-male-baby-booming-we-don’t-have-a-class-structure-Australian, I could have really incorporated this tactic. Oh, you do have an impressive car Mr. Man, would you like me to lesson your self-importance with a swift punch on the nose? Scathing fever dreams like this are spawned from the same place as big-dogging and taps into the masculine urges that really hold us back. But since discovering it and reflecting, I have seen it pop up and play out in interesting ways.

It is present in little moments. Disgruntled customer diverts his path to encroach on the space of a young and nonchalant staff person. Well done, got him! Two behemoths with impossibly splayed arms make sure we can’t pass them in the hall. Woah, showed us! Oh, you want me to decipher a series of monotonal grunts? Sure, I’d love to! These are some examples of surface behaviors that quietly enforce a sort of social superiority. Look out for them they’re quite amusing. What is more interesting and complex is the role of the third party in this man spectrum, that is the little dog.

The little dog, and I offer this title with only the slightest malice for reasons I will soon disclose, is the antipode to the big dog. They admire the big dog, support him, celebrate him, make excuses for him and through their learned helplessness empower him. However, they sport very few or none of his traits, being either the brutish confidence, the pure ego or the muscularity that sub-serves the aforementioned. What they instead project other than obsequiousness is an admiration that maintains a hierarchy. Why am I taking aim at the little dog? Because I feel betrayed. For long I thought they were my ilk, more empathetic, sensitive, social awkward, prone to fits of anxiety rather than rage. What I have noticed though is an invitation out of the club along with definite shots fired. The little dog has cunning.

For the sake of context, I will include a brief overview of myself. I’m 6,1, not that that matters, I’m 88 kilos, who cares, and I too lift on the weights, without barking. By no means does this put me in the league of the big dog but it does make me noticeable enough for a subversive form of targeting. The first time I noticed this was in a supplement store in Sydney. Having discovered my High School sebaceous over activity and my own general under activity was due to an allergy to dairy, I have since steered clear. Poor me. At the time alternatives are not what they are now and I had to resort to a sinful plant based powder dubiously dubbed ‘soy protein’. Bad news if you’re a man. Cue Theo. In assisting me with my purchase he thrust on the breaks with an “ohhhh sooooy, tsssss”. Offering me his insight into the subject he asked, “have you been gaining weight in any strange areas?” hands motion in circles around his hips. Following this, “have you had a hard time losing weight from any strange areas”, hands motions in circles around his chest. I was shocked.

Immediately the slumbering big dog in me was summoned as I was instantly incensed, this little prick thinks I’m chemically castrating myself! All I could offer was “nah man”. Smooth. What that was replacing was an impending diatribe including a full dress down of this 5.5ft, red headed shop assistant called Theo! I mean doesn’t that trifecta automatically guarantee a lifetime of politeness. No one called Theo should be dispensing judgements. No one. I calmed down and stopped listening to the base inclinations of the temperamental big dog lurking in my subconscious. I’m better than that. I’m in control. Theo is short for Theodore and that’s just adorable.

-Clears throat- “I thought the phytoestrogens from soy are mitigated by the consumption of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower, which I eat”. Ok great, an eloquent response that’s politely defensive and reflective of some semblance of knowledge. But then Theo played his hand. “My friend bodybuilder Joe, Mr. This of that competition and Mr. That of this competition, well he’s allergic to dairy and eats these capsules of powdered broccoli fart which house the antiestrogenic power of a thousand suns”. At least that’s how I remember it going.

Now what happened here. After stewing on this I began to see a philosophy play out. By calling forth the admirable traits of an invisible Adonis he developed a comparison between that person and myself. Of course, not being a bodybuilder and eating soy means that I am diminished in this comparison whereby Theo and his affiliate both receive a nice little boost. The result was me purchasing my Eunuch powder and leaving with my tail between my legs toward a future of love handles and man-boobs. Theo big-dogged me! By proxy! That is their trick! Watch.

Since then I have seen this trait reemerge with me again the target. I have a young coworker who is really into training and hence has a preoccupation with ‘size’. Now, we share an interest and he isn’t aware of this but he quite resembles my younger self. Unfortunately, despite all his sinewy I just happen to edge him out with ‘size’. Who cares. Let’s be friends. Instead this is how an innocuous enough conversation about a soccer will play out. “Had an argument with this guy right, bout your size but a bit bigger, you know maybe an inch bigger arms and you know… ‘has traps’”. Ok great, like me yeah? It wasn’t until the end I discovered the hulk to which he was referring was of Tongan heritage. Oh, like me, (breadstick thin and just as white) except nothing like me. Then why bloody start with me as a reference point!? Subliminal big-dogging is why! He just had to work in a narrative that diminishes poor Nate.

Another example is an older college who despite having an esteemed running background just so happens to be a little short. Hence, he has a preoccupation with ‘height’. One way he gets around this is by standing as close as he can to you and talking up into your face, yeah right in the bubble. The other? You guessed it, parading around an array of non-present bigger dogs. “My nephew, he’s a runner, probably a bit taller than you Nathan”. “You know Sam who only works here in the holidays? be taller than you right?”. Or the best one is that I just get asked weekly, “how tall are you Nathan?”. Tall enough. Just write it down please. Now I don’t go flaunting the centimeters I’ve accrued around, nor do I advertise my feats of anything anywhere. In most instances, I’m praying for a rainy day to justifiably curl up in the comfort of some nice house-depression. But that’s the thing about masculinity, not surprisingly, its penetrative and it finds you.

For the most palpable display of this interplay one must survey the dogs objectively, in the wild, meaning the gym. The big dog is in his element here, he is the guy who seems to either be always in shape or constantly improving. He just embodies his intention. He wants, he does, he is the thing he’s doing. The little dog, often in groups of two to four, seem always to be in a state of trying or talking about where they want to end up. What this does is fuel an adoration for the guy who’s already there. The big dog. They flock to him, shake hands, soak up his advice, admire his physique while he looks away and just through this association alone receive an elevated sense of self. It does however have a downside.

I would caution little dogs not to spend too much time in that role because I think it fosters a damaging mindset. I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen for years who is also into fitness and despite being a little guy he used to gleefully extoll his myriad of virtues. Now this is a jump of about 8 years and the change I witnessed was staggering. He had replaced braggadocio with excuses, like he was cultivating them with an accompanying sense of pride. Think I’m being too hard? He drew a correlation between a painting falling on his head and needing stitches to why his legs aren’t where he wants them to be. I’m thinking man, it doesn’t matter. Go to the gym because its healthy. I will never be Rambo. That red headband would look ridiculous on my balding dome. Whatever. I just don’t think would should donate our self-esteem away so willingly.

What’s more there is another trend that we all must be cautious not to perpetuate, which little dogs do to the big, “oh, he’s just being a guy”. This is perhaps the worst lie we tells ourselves and the worst demonstration of complicity we enact. And I get it, it’s a fear thing. He’s being stubborn, that’s a guy thing. No, he’s being ignorant and that’s a bad thing. He doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s a guy thing. No, he’s suppressing emotions that will show in his behaviors, and that’s an immaturity thing. Oh, he just gets angry sometimes, that’s a guy thing. Ok, how does he healthfully channel that anger if at all? Oh, he yells at his wife sometimes, that’s just a guy thing, right? Hello? Anyone? See where this is going?

I no longer believe that these behaviors deserve the free pass they get just because males convey a sense of threat. I may have had an amusing look at the little dog but I was serious when I said they uphold a ‘hierarchy’. Perhaps it is some Australian Tall Poppy mechanism to give a sneaky little swipe where deemed necessary. But let’s face facts, no one is correcting the big dog and their toxic masculinity. Instead I have people reminding me that there are people out there who are taller than me. For real. Someone who is so mediocre they are socially benign. Like a house pant, in a forest.

I just wanted to plant a flag here and say it’s not ok, ‘just being a guy’ can no longer be an excuse for what can be such pernicious behaviors. We are part of a great game now, communication is to the point where perspectives of old can be plucked of the shelf, have the dust blown off them and be reexamined. And that’s terrific. Whether is from a scientific or sociological perspective every ideology deserves scrutiny for it to survive today. That is both an admission that masculinity is an ideology and secondly a question that asks if something can’t withstand critique, why then should we endorse it? It deserves conversation. Let’s stay in touch. Woof.

#masculinity #gender #writing

[gyrlversion]

How officers came knocking at the door of a devout Catholic

As a schoolgirl, Caroline Farrow relished discussing politics and current affairs around the kitchen table with her family. 

Her parents, both teachers, encouraged robust debate and Caroline and her elder sister were precociously well informed. 

‘Freedom of speech and expression was drummed into us from an early age,’ she says.

She was ten in 1984, a landmark year when George Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian future was revisited and reappraised. 

Catholic journalist Caroline Farrow, 44, was told by Surrey Police that she had to attend an interview under caution or face arrest after she used the wrong pronoun to describe a transgender woman

Her father explained the novel’s concepts of Big Brother, Newspeak and the Thought Police, and Caroline was fascinated. 

‘But I remember thinking at the time that none of it could ever come true,’ she says.

Now 44, and a trenchant Catholic journalist, priest’s wife and occasional TV commentator, Mrs Farrow was reminded of Orwellian themes last Monday when, in the middle of preparing dinner for her husband Robin and five children, a policewoman rang her at home with a startling demand.

Mrs Farrow was told she must attend an interview under caution or face arrest because she had used the wrong pronoun to describe a transgender woman.

Suddenly the dystopia described in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four began to feel all too real. Scarcely able to absorb what she was hearing, she felt, in sharp succession, disbelief, fear and anger.

Anger because Mrs Farrow herself had been the victim of a cyber stalking campaign which, at its vile worst, made her fear for her family’s safety – but which, she says, police failed to take seriously.

‘It’s double standards. When the complaint involves the word transgender, police leap into action,’ she says. ‘Something has gone terribly wrong in this country.’

In the event, the four-month Surrey Police investigation into Mrs Farrow, which prompted much controversy last week when made public, was hastily dropped as it hurtled towards full-blown fiasco.

Following a TV debate with Susie Green, the head of trans rights charity Mermaids, Mrs Farrow later called Ms Green’s daughter Jackie (pictured) ‘him’ instead of ‘her’ on Twitter and said Mermaids promoted child abuse

Critics called the probe a waste of time and money at a time when officers are struggling with high levels of knife crime.

The roots of the sorry affair appear to lie in a TV debate. Mrs Farrow, known for her deeply held religious views, and Susie Green, the head of trans rights charity Mermaids, clashed on ITV’s Good Morning Britain about Girl Guides allowing children who have changed gender to join the organisation. 

Mrs Farrow later called Ms Green’s daughter Jackie ‘him’ instead of ‘her’ on Twitter and said Mermaids promoted child abuse.

Five weeks later, Ms Green complained to police.

One of Mrs Farrow’s tweets read: ‘What she did to her own son [the youngest person in the world to undergo transgender surgery] is illegal. 

She mutilated him by having him castrated and rendered sterile while still a child.’

Many might consider Mrs Farrow’s choice of words unpleasant but she is unapologetic. 

She says: ‘I deliberately used the words castration and mutilation to shock because what happens is shocking. I was trying to bring home the harsh reality of what she [Ms Green] did.’

Jackie Green, who was born male and was once known as Jack, began taking puberty-blockers at 12, and went to Thailand aged 16 for reassignment surgery, which is now illegal for under-18s.

Whatever one feels about the tweet’s tone, Mrs Farrow is convinced most right-minded people would agree it wasn’t criminal. 

As anger surfaced, Mrs Farrow was left facing a tirade of abuse on social media which made her fear for her family’s safety

‘Yes, it was strong language but I wanted to make people sit up. I wanted to get the country talking about this. So much is changing in our society. 

‘The notion of what it is to be a woman or a mother is being erased and rewritten by zealots. People are too scared to question what is going on. The tweets might possibly be spiteful but they were not intended to cause alarm or distress.’

Which is why Mrs Farrow was stunned to receive the phone call from the police officer on Monday as she juggled preparing a meal of gammon, roast potatoes and vegetables for her children – aged between four and 14 – with overseeing homework and music practice. 

The message left on her voicemail said: ‘Hello there, I’m calling from Guildford police station… I need to have a chat with you about some tweets that have been sent.’

Mrs Farrow says: ‘My husband said, ‘You know it’s bound to be the trans stuff, you have been talking about this a lot lately and you know the lobbyists are looking to get you.’ ‘

She spoke to the officer later that night. ‘I pointed out that ‘misgendering’ wasn’t a crime and that as a Catholic I believed that sex could not be changed. 

I explained that the country is in the middle of an ongoing national conversation about sex and gender, what it means to be male and female, and I was contributing to that in a professional capacity.’

The officer reiterated that the CPS had ‘authorised us to bring you in for a taped interview’. 

That night, managing only an hour’s sleep, Mrs Farrow tried to make sense of what was happening. Naturally she feared the worst. Who would look after the children if she went to jail? She would be destroyed. Her husband would lose his job.

The following morning, Mrs Farrow instructed a solicitor. She says: ‘My lawyer said it seemed politically motivated but thought the case would be thrown out. 

‘He warned that I was likely to face a tough interview. What was happening felt so unjust, especially as over the past few months I have endured an unimaginable campaign of harassment, targeting not only me, but my entire family.’

A very PC force’s links to trans charity 

Flying the flag: Inspector David Harland calls himself a ‘trans ally’

Susie Green’s powerful transgender lobby group has forged close links with a police force behind a series of hate crime investigations.

West Yorkshire Police launched probes into an award-winning TV writer, a mother of four and a transsexual man following complaints from Mermaids.

But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the force received ‘training sessions’ from Mermaids, which supports medical intervention for transgender children.

West Yorkshire Police has promoted Mermaids’ work, tweeting one of its leaflets. 

Mermaids has also advised Merseyside Police, NHS staff, social workers, the Scouts and student nurses.

One West Yorkshire officer, Inspector David Harland, declared himself on social media to be a ‘trans ally’, adding that he was dedicated to ‘doing all I can for the trans community’.

In February last year, West Yorkshire sent officers to Wiltshire to investigate a mother of four following a complaint by Ms Green.

Echoing the Caroline Farrow case, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull was questioned on suspicion of a malicious communications offence after Ms Green reported her for tweeting that Ms Green had illegally ‘castrated’ her ‘son’ by allowing him to have sex change surgery in Thailand at 16.

In April 2018, the force received another complaint, this time from Mermaid volunteer Helen Islan.

She claimed that transsexual Miranda Yardley, who has had gender reassignment surgery, had ‘outed’ Ms Islan’s transgender son by tweeting a picture of Ms Islan with her family, which included the child. West Yorkshire referred this incident to police in Essex, where Ms Yardley lives.

In a third case, West Yorkshire officers gave Graham Linehan, co-creator of the hit TV comedy Father Ted, a verbal harassment warning when transgender activist Stephanie Hayden reported him for referring to her as ‘he’ on Twitter.

A force spokeswoman said it was ‘committed to ensuring that anyone who feels targeted due to race, sexual orientation, religion, disability or gender identity is listened to’.

It should be noted that her stalkers were motivated not by her views on transgender issues but in part by the tragic case of Alfie Evans, the baby at the centre of a legal battle last year over turning off his life support. 

It was a morally fraught case that aroused fierce debate, and Mrs Farrow joined the global campaign to keep him alive.

Mrs Farrow often comments on social issues and her deeply held conservative religious views have made her many enemies on social media. 

Incensed by her intervention, opponents set up a blog solely for the purpose of attacking the journalist and her family.

On May 3 last year, five days after Alfie’s death, a Twitter account posted a link to her home address with the sinister message: ‘If anyone fancies having a chat with the illustrious Mrs Farrow…’ 

Even more distressing, someone posted a link to her children’s school.

Many of the abusive messages were sexually degrading, referencing her Catholic faith. 

At one stage, trolls warned that their ‘agents’ were on their way to her village. Some of the most upsetting attacks involved her children and comments made about their appearance. Mrs Farrow says there were even attempts at extortion.

‘I was ordered to delete all my social-media accounts and pay the LGBT lobby group Stonewall £1,000 if I wanted the blog to cease operation. 

‘They also got hold of our email addresses and set up accounts with pornographic websites in our name, and pictures. I had to cancel an order for £772 of sex toys.’

On January 8 – more than two months after Mrs Farrow made a formal complaint to police – one of the suspected trolls was questioned. But Mrs Farrow was later told no action would be taken.

‘I felt really let down. I have suffered so much with this, my mental health has deteriorated and I told the officer that this is the sort of thing that drives people to suicide. I was being hyperbolic, but then things turned nasty.

‘The policeman said he needed to report me to social services because I said I was suicidal. Social services called a few weeks later and after chatting to me said I was fine and they would not take it further. 

‘Yet Susie Green makes a spurious complaint and, bingo, the police are straight on to me.’

Surrey Police said Mrs Farrow’s claims of harassment were fully investigated but ‘we were unable to find evidence that meets the threshold for criminal proceedings’.

Last Tuesday, the Farrows’ 14-year-old daughter had a starring role in a school recital. Mrs Farrow says: ‘I knew I was going to have to tell her [about the police interview] but I waited until after her concert. 

‘She burst into tears at the idea that I could face jail, but regained composure when I said that it was highly unlikely.

‘I felt so guilty having to burden her with it and taint such a wonderful evening for her but I also knew that it wouldn’t be fair for her to find out from friends.’

The next day, Ms Green withdrew her complaint because she said she did not want to give Mrs Farrow a public ‘platform’. Instead of contacting police, she announced her decision on a television show.

Mrs Farrow believes police are only too willing to appease Ms Green and Mermaids, which she thinks is looking for a test case to codify misgendering into law. 

Hers is not the first transgender ‘hate crime’ police have pursued. So far none of them have ended with a successful prosecution.

‘Orwell’s novel was a cautionary tale and an example of why we always need to be thankful for and guard our freedoms,’ says Mrs Farrow. ‘I never once envisaged I would face jail for refusing to state that man cannot be woman.’

Surrey Police said: ‘We requested Caroline Farrow attend a voluntary interview to understand her intent in relation to the tweets. Details of this invitation were publicly shared and there has been criticism of our decision to investigate.

‘We have been in contact with both parties as we have a duty of care towards both, and there was concern for their welfare as a result of publicity. 

The victim will withdraw her allegation and has explained her reasoning. Without the support of the victim, it’s unlikely a criminal case could be brought.’

The post How officers came knocking at the door of a devout Catholic appeared first on Gyrlversion.

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#Entertainment News

[tonightontv]

The "Hollywood Madam" made millions a week running a high-class escort service to the stars; now the former sex-work mogul runs a bird sanctuary in the Nevada desert as she opens up on Harvey Weinstein and Sizemore’s penchant for “horse porn.”

It’s hard to believe it took until 1993 for someone to earn the nickname “The Hollywood Madam.” That honor went to Heidi Fleiss, one of six children born to Paul Fleiss, a popular Los Feliz pediatrician. In 1987 and at age 22, Heidi was taken under the wing of Madam Alex, a procuress to the stars, to whom Fleiss was introduced by her Film-to-watchonline maker boyfriend. She first worked as one of Alex’s call girls but quickly absorbed the business and launched her own prostitution service in 1990. With a knack for recruiting high-end talent, Fleiss by 1991 had amassed a stable of 500 girls — the look was “clean-cut and perfect, [like] she was born and raised in Beverly Hills,” she once explained — who charged clients about $1,500 a night ($2,800 today), of which Fleiss took 40 percent. Soon she was clearing $300,000 a week ($560,000 now) as she kept an A-list roster of celebrities and Hollywood executives very satisfied. Her infamous “black book,” which contained the names of her famous clients, was actually a 28-page red Gucci planner.

The party did not last long: On June 9, 1993, Fleiss was arrested and charged with five counts of pandering. “The other players like Madam Alex were all working with the LAPD, giving lists of their clients on a weekly basis,” says Nick Broomfield, director of the 1995 doc Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. “Heidi wouldn’t play the game. She broke all the rules. She kind of did it for fun, which was why she was so successful.” The case went to trial, where Charlie Sheen testified he’d spent $53,000 a year on Fleiss’ services. A jury convicted her on three counts, for which she received a three-year sentence. That conviction was overturned in 1996, but a federal tax-evasion case the next year led to a 20-month stint in prison in Dublin, California.

Today, the 52-year-old Fleiss lives with dozens of exotic birds on the outskirts of Pahrump, Nevada. She spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about her lasting place in show business infamy. 

So it's the 25th anniversary of your arrest.

That didn't cross my mind until you mentioned it. I feel like this: Everything in my life — even my fuck-ups, and there’s been a ton of them — everything worked out right because it led to exactly where I am right now. Most people would think I'm a kook, because my heart goes out to the captive macaws. You know what a macaw is?

It’s an exotic bird?

Yeah, a parrot. The big ones. I think every day in prison was important because it made me realize how awful it would be if someone forced you to live your entire life inside a box. And that’s what happened to these captive macaws. It’s not a popular subject matter. They need someone who’s a little bit kooky like me to stand up for them.

How did you end up taking up the macaw cause?

I moved to Nevada to get it back into the sex business. I rented a house that unluckily for me happened to be next door to a retired madam who was bedridden. At one time she ran the exotic bird department for the Tropicana Hotel. So she had all these birds. One night she called me up at three in the morning saying she couldn’t breathe. I went there as a helicopter was taking her away. As she's dying, she says, "Heidi, you take care of the birds." 

At the time of your arrest, it seemed like you were leading a pretty glamorous existence.

It was a lot of fun. Of course looking back, you see how stupid you were. It’s easier to look at all your mistakes. But I definitely say if you’re going to live in L.A., I don’t see how anyone can do it better than I did. You want to go out to every nightclub. You want to meet famous people. Have sex with different people. Eat at the best places. All that kind of stuff. And I don’t see how it could have been any more fun, that’s for sure.

You came from a fairly conservative background. Your dad was a doctor.

I was born and raised in L.A. My dad was a famous pediatrician. When he died, they donated a bench to him at the Griffith Park Observatory.

Did he know about your escort service?

No. But I got him in big trouble. I felt shitty about that. Dad gave me really the best childhood possible and all of the opportunity in front of me. I wish that I took school seriously and went a different route, but it was not my father’s fault at all.

You learned a lot from another famous madam, Madam Alex.

Hell, yeah, she was crazy. She was out of her mind. But it took a lot more than just learning from someone. There’s a lot more thought that goes into the escort business than people realize. You have to learn how to make people feel secure in dealing with you.

So you’ve let go of this idea of running a male brothel?

I think a male brothel wouldn't work, but a transvestite brothel would probably do really well. I live in Pahrump, Nevada. It’s kind of near where [Khloe Kardashian's ex-husband Lamar Odom] overdosed in a brothel. My good friend Dennis Hoff owns all the brothels in Nevada. He has an extra license he's not using. So I was thinking maybe we could make it a trannie brothel. I can see people driving an hour away to the middle of the desert if there's this beautiful trannie waiting there for them.

Are you dating anyone or single?

Not right now.

I saw some headlines that your infamous "little black book" was being sold on eBay. 

I called eBay and I stopped them. That's stolen property. It was the same weird people that were once latched on to Stormy Daniels — [Daniels' ex-manager] Gina Rodriguez and [Daniels' former lawyer] Keith Davidson. They’re really strange. They were the ones that were doing it.

How did they get it?

A TV director had a couple pages. That's what I figure they were selling. 

So you still have the little black book?

No. Kind of. Why does this even matter anymore?

Was it not subpoenaed as evidence? How come the prosecutors never got their hands on it?

I don’t know, actually. It was just something that seemed very private and personal that was no one else’s business. That’s just how I feel about it today and I always felt. I was offered a lot of money to sell that book. And there were times when I really needed that money. But that was never something I would do.

What do you think about Harvey Weinstein's accusers and the #MeToo movement?

I’m not going be like Donna Karan and kill my career, or like Pamela Anderson. They say it’s the women’s fault. I will never do that because, look, every girl has been sexually taken advantage of. I think he's disgusting and a pig. He handled this thing terribly. But some of it doesn't make sense to me. Especially when they say, "Oh, it happened six times." That's weird. I think in certain instances, women slept with him in exchange for a part, and he kept his end of the bargain. 

Have you kept in touch with former client Charlie Sheen?

No, I'm not friendly with Charlie Sheen. But I like Charlie Sheen. I like that he just does what he wants and he pays for women. But I think it’s terrible they blackmailed him [over his HIV diagnosis]. Big deal. It’s not like AIDS is a deadly disease anymore. It’s better than having asthma. You just take a medication. Diabetes is worst than AIDS. It just has a stigma attached to it, but it’s not a big thing.

Why did Sheen end up going public as a client during your trial?

The only reason his name came out is that when I was arrested, I had travelers' checks in my purse with his name on them. On the stand he said a much lower amount than he actually spent with me. He probably spent closer to $300,000 or $400,000 on girls. He said something like $60,000.

How are things with your ex-boyfriend Tom Sizemore, convicted of abusing you in 2003?

We had done those drug addiction shows together — Dr. Drew. Afterward we were friendly and he'd call me every now and then. He'd act like he had his stuff together. But it was all a lie. Everything is a lie. I brought him to a Humane Society event at Paramount Studios last year. He was just such a mess. So out of it. He stole money from my purse. He's such a drug addict because he's so afraid of being fat.

Fat?

Yes. He once did some movie with Will Smith, Enemy of the State, where he was, like, 280 pounds. I like a heavyset guy. But he is so afraid of being fat. That's what his addiction is about. It's all narcissism. It's gross. I guess after #MeToo, some reporters were calling me about Tom touching a prepubescent girl — like an 11‑year‑old little girl — inappropriately. I don’t know what to say. I don't know if that really happened. If it did, he should be castrated. That is so disgusting to me.

Did he ever show signs of that when you were together?

No. He liked horse porn, though. He did like horse porn. This one woman that would have sex with a horse on the internet, he told me that’s his favorite actress. "Better than Meryl Streep."

Have you stayed sober?

I struggle. I struggle with my addiction. And it’s tough because I’ll be doing so well. And I don’t know what will make me flip. 

Maybe being isolated in the desert doesn’t help.

I don’t know. Sometimes I’m really glad that I’m here. We all have a lot of pain. And I really hurt for these birds. I wish I can do more for them. I know I’ll never be able to help all of them, but maybe if I could just create a place where, when people don’t want them, they can live out their life without a cage.

A version of this story first appeared in the June 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

[bloggmylyf]

for your grandma the biggest internet mystery is how to get the gosh-darned superhighway kajigger to work when she’s sure she’s pressed all the right buttons on the microwave, but for the rest of us there are several very real and very frightening mysteries about the internet which people have yet to solve who has been hacking the world’s governments for the past 10 years who created the Bitcoin and why is the website of a long-dead suicide cult still answering emails let’s take a look in our list of 7 intriguing internet mysteries:

How deep is the Deep Web?

  2 decades ago there were around three thousand websites at most and today it is estimated there are more than 1 billion websites on the visible web, but Deep Web websites hide their IP addresses and this makes them harder to search for, harder to track, and virtually impossible to count and with good reason – the Deep Web refers to any pages that search engines cannot find and much of it comprises of the pages index sites required to work but don’t need to show you. however some of the Deep Web is also made up of the dark web which requires the Tor browser to access you’ve probably heard all sorts of stories about the kind of sites available here – pages offering drugs for sale, stolen credit card numbers, and the worst kinds of pornography available. But just how many of these sites there are in the dark web is tough to figure out and it’s even harder to calculate how many are in the wider Deep Web. In 2014 it was speculated that the Deep Web was 500x bigger than the visible web and if that’s true it could be humongous today, especially if our next entry exists.

The Marianas Web

named after the deepest ocean trench on earth the marianas web is a purported fourth level of the internet which contains some of humanity’s most treasured secrets and disgraceful material, sounds neat. If the top level includes facebook, google, and Russianbrides.com, the second-level is made up of the innocent and functional Deep Web we mentioned earlier, Then you have the dark web at the third-level but some believe beneath this isn’t even murkier part of the web one which is virtually impossible to access, because there’s no way of verifying its existence the marianas web has attracted some crazy speculation regarding its origins and content, if the dark web contains horrible abuse and illegal narcotics, what terrible acts must marianas web facilitate? — terrorism? an archive of rule 34 material? some claim its content isn’t grotesque but merely so world-changing it has to be kept secret. The real location of Atlantis, The Vatican Secret Archives, and even active Artificially intelligent presence, which is controlling the internet from the depths of the virtual world. These are just some of the insane claims about the Marianas web, but with no concrete proof that this level even exists, and most of its lower the ramblings of paranoid conspiracy theorists, many have taken to renaming it as the Dirt web. I like that name.

Who is Cicada 3301

      cicada 3301, which of this date remains a mystery as to who exactly this anonymous puzzle posting organization is. beginning with their first set of puzzles in 2012, further cryptic conundrums were posted in January 2013, 2014, and 2016 with the stated purpose being to recruit intelligent individuals. As ever with the absence of information, the public speculation has ranged from the believable to the downright retarded. Anonymous, The Freemasons, The Illuminati, The CIA, The NSA, and mi6, have all been put forward to suspects. As, has the idea that it is just one big alternate reality game, but each year once the winners are chosen they seem to disappear out of sight and have reported being asked to solve more puzzles in secret, so where they go from here, and who is behind these puzzles, remains shrouded in mystery.

who is behind ghost net

In 2009, Researchers at the information warfare monitor discovered an online cyber spying operation which threatened and continues to threaten the security of every single online person on earth. The investigation found a network of 1295 infected hosts, which doesn’t sound a lot but nearly a third of these were extremely high value targets including computers at Foreign Embassies, International organizations, Media outlets, and NGOs, Spread across 103 different countries. Since ghost nets discovery, it has continued to infiltrate other major organizations, but government’s frequently hide these incidents for fear of inciting further attacks. To this day we have no proof of who is behind ghost net but with the organization being consistently controlled by IP addresses located in China, we have a few good guesses.

The Dead Colts Living Site

On March 26th, 1997, 39 members of Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide on the orders of their leader Marshall Applewhite. He told his followers that “upon death their souls would be transported to a spaceship which was traveling the hale-bopp comet and that this was necessary if humanity were to survive a forthcoming alien cleansing of our planet” members of his group were told to leave their jobs, and relationships, give up their money, and some male followers even castrated themselves. you’ve got to be pretty damn charming to get someone to cut their nuts off, but it seems Marshall Applewhite certainly was that persuasive because, not only was he responsible for the worst mass suicide on American soil, but his influence continues to this day. The Heaven’s Gate website remains functional 19 years after the suicide event and if you email it you may still receive a response, several reddit users have tried this and this was one of the replies begin in quote “we were in the group for 12 years and they asked us to maintain the website, emails and the physical and intellectual property of the group” end quote, so is Heaven’s Gate still recruiting members? and if so, are we soon to witness yet another devastating mass suicide?!

  Internet Black Holes

Have you ever sent an email that was never delivered? ever placed an order for something that mysteriously never went through?. perhaps you forgot to click check out because you were drunk? or maybe your data was swallowed up by one of the Internet’s mysterious black holes. Since 2008, engineers have been at a loss to explain why huge amounts of information keeps disappearing at random from online communications. And whereas some blame firewalls and dead IP addresses, others have speculated a more sinister cause for this phenomenon. In 2013 an Internet Black Hole was discovered operating in ways nobody had seen before. Someone was diverting traffic meant for government agencies around the world, rerouting it through their own systems and then sending it on as if nothing had happened. So if these internet black holes aren’t actually losing information, who is operating them and what are they doing with our data?

 Who Created Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a digital asset and payment system introduced in 2009 and has been referred to as the world’s first decentralized digital currency. Bitcoin has grown from its humble beginnings into a legitimate online payment method and whilst it has dropped from a 2014 value of nearly 1,200 per Bitcoin, today’s 639 dollar value shows a gradual recovery from its dip over the past two years. This dip was blamed on several things but not least its secretive origins and its association with illegal activities. Bitcoin was purported to have been created by a 30-something Japanese man called Satoshi Nakamoto, but this is almost certainly a pseudonym, so who is this mysterious creator? computer scientist and cryptographer Nick Szabo, came under suspicion first and the now deceased Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney, was also rumored to be its founder. But in December 2015, Australian academic Craig Stephen Wright was outed by Wired magazine as a potential candidate and within hours his house was raided by Australian police for a supposedly different matter, right later admitted being bitcoins creator but the proof he has given for this has subsequently been discredited. Other purported creators have included an Irish student, a Finnish economist, a Japanese mathematician, and that Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a pseudonym for a whole team of people. will we ever find out who really created Bitcoin, why have they hoarded a fortune of bitcoins worth 450 million dollars, and is there a very good reason why this person or people wish to remain in the shadows?

Related: Unexpected ways Hackers can Destroy You..! (2017) 🖥️

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7 Creepy Internet Mysteries, We Still Don’t Understand.. for your grandma the biggest internet mystery is how to get the gosh-darned superhighway kajigger to work when she's sure she's pressed all the right buttons on the microwave, but for the rest of us there are several very real and very frightening mysteries about the internet which people have yet to solve who has been hacking the world's governments for the past 10 years who created the Bitcoin and why is the website of a long-dead suicide cult still answering emails let's take a look in our list of 7 intriguing internet mysteries:

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