It’s all part of growing up…

The man never enters the frame, but we can tell he is older, and he must be much bigger than she is: the girl, still seated, cranes her face to look up at him. The calm confidence behind her large glasses snuffs out; her shoulders tense up, rising toward her ears….“I see your hesitancy,” he says…“I’m just doing a live and talking to some people,” she says, and glances towards her phone. That’s when he finally leaves her alone: not when he notices that she’s uncomfortable, but when he realizes that he is being watched.

The video (in two parts), posted to TikTok by the teenage user @maassassin_, immediately goes viral. Women, young and old, saw in the exchange a microcosm of their own experiences of being young girls, and of being approached, harassed, groomed or merely leered at by older men in ways that scared them at the time, and which they only later learned to put into context. The video blasted into the public consciousness on the heels of two high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by adult men towards teenage girls: first that of the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who allegedly paid a 17-year-old for sex, and second that of Blake Bailey, the Philip Roth biographer who is accused of paying untoward attention towards his middle school students, and of sexually assaulting some of those students, as well as another woman, after they became adults. Gaetz and Bailey both deny wrongdoing.

It’s easy to “deny wrongdoing” if you don’t believe your doings were wrong, and it’s clearly way too easy for way too many men to think they have every right to predate on girls and women.

The incidents have prompted a miniature reckoning, with women reflecting on how much of their teenage years were spent navigating the sexual attentions of men many years their senior – and what it means when teenage girls’ experiences of male mentorship, early romance, and their own emerging adulthood is filtered so heavily through the lens of male desire and power imbalance.

And also of just plain creepiness. Of men in movie theaters, on subways, on park benches – being creepy. What does it mean that teenage girls’ experiences are filtered through that? It doesn’t seem altogether cheerful.

Those early experiences of male sexual aggression are maybe one of the most reliable rites of passage for female children. It’s more common than any of the other rituals that signal impending adulthood, more universal than the bat mitzvahs, or quinceañeras, or sweet 16 parties, or proms. By the time a girl reaches any of these milestones, she has likely already developed a skill set for navigating the unwanted attention of adult men…

Or maybe not so much a skill set as just an aversion. Just a fuck off go away leave me alone. I don’t remember it as anything to do with “navigating,” frankly, but rather as rage-fueled avoidance. That’s not a particularly good thing either.

The message that all of this sends to young girls is that womanhood is a state that consists largely of receiving unsolicited male attention, much of it benign but much of it threatening, exploitative or hostile, and that their ownership over their own bodies, their ability to peacefully occupy public space…can all be abridged by the whims of a man’s desire.

Can and will. Count on it.

Confirmation that we saw what we thought we saw – that what we saw is what we thought it was.

Allison Bailey says a thing, and guess who comes along to say “Nuh-uh.”

The trouble with that is, Robin Moira White is opposing counsel in Allison’s case against Stonewall. White should not be messing with Allison on social media.

It’s as if the normal rules just don’t apply.

It’s so bad that people don’t even believe it when you tell them.

And people don’t believe it’s happening, and people who warn that it’s happening get silenced and punished.

In cheerier news – Randy Rainbow has outdone himself.

Happy…Confederate Memorial Day?

South Carolina state government offices are closed Monday to mark Confederate Memorial Day.

Really. State government is on holiday to commemorate treason in defense of slavery. Cool that it’s the same state that is denying its citizens federal unemployment benefits because the state wants to force them to work in hotels and restaurants for shit pay in shit conditions…which is not as unlike slavery as it might be. It likely affects the same category of people, too.

South Carolina is among a handful of states in the South with such an official holiday. State offices in Alabama and Mississippi closed for their Confederate Memorial Days late last month.

Aka the Deep South aka the cotton belt.

Now let’s talk about girls and shared public spaces.

It’s all the same shit. Those girls jostled and blocked and spat on and kicked and knocked onto the track are the same category of human that was locked up in Magdalen laundries and imprisoned in industrial “schools” that were slave labor camps not schools, and now they’re fodder for adults preening over their infinite supply of solidarity with…boys who say they are girls.

I’ve watched this clip multiple times since yesterday – there’s a lot going on and it’s not possible to take in all of it in one viewing.

One boy kicks a girl as she runs past, one spits on a girl as she runs past, they all spread out over the platform so that they’re in the way of anyone who is trying to get on the train.

Cis female privilege in action yeah?

Catherine Belton, Nick Cohen tells us, has written a book about Russian plutocrats and their ways, and they are flocking to London courts to sue her into oblivion.

The former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times now faces a pile-on from Russian billionaires on a scale this country has never witnessed. Rosneft, the Kremlin-dominated oil producer (market capitalisation circa $75bn) whose chief executive, president and chairman, Igor Sechin, began his rise to power as Vladimir Putin’s secretary in the 1990s, has lodged an action for libel. No further details were available at the court at the time of going to press.

Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea football boss (estimated net worth $15.3bn) is suing because of what he says are “false and defamatory” statements about his purchase of Chelsea FC. Mikhail Fridman, owner of Russia’s largest non-state bank (net worth about $15.6bn) is suing for libel. Fridman’s business partner, Pyotr Aven, (net worth a paltry $5.3bn) is suing for breach of data protection. Aven and Fridman told the Financial Times they “had no contact with, and did not co-ordinate a legal strategy with, the other plaintiffs or their lawyers’’. Finally, there is a legal action by Shalva Chigirinsky, a former property tycoon (net worth unknown) with no details on record.

That’s a lot of billionaires suing.

Last week, Raab promised to fight “with the staunchest resolve” Russia’s “malign activities aimed at undermining other countries’ democratic systems”. If the foreign secretary is serious, perhaps he should take a look at London’s high-class service sector for the super-rich. He is unlikely to be able to rely on the legal profession to ask the hard moral and political questions for him.

I learned that in 2013 when I sat through a libel case arising from the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a foul Moscow prison. He worked for the Hermitage Capital fund and died suffering from horrible illnesses after he showed how former Russian officials and gangsters (a distinction without a difference if ever there was one) stole about $230m from the Russian taxpayer. His friend and boss at Hermitage, Bill Browder, began a successful global campaign to freeze the western holdings of corrupt Russians.

One official, Pavel Karpov, sued Browder for libel in London. Browder won, but Karpov stayed in Moscow and refused to pay Browder’s costs of £600,000. In other words, Russia, an actively hostile foreign power, appeared able to use the English legal system to impose the punishment of a huge fine on one of its most effective critics.

Slapp suits much?

[T]he EU is under pressure to act against what Americans call strategic lawsuits against public participation. Slapp actions grant access to the courts to powerful individuals or organisations that are less interested in actual verdicts than the prospect of extraordinarily expensive legal costs browbeating critics. My friends at Index on Censorship tell me that Britain has shown no interest in following suit.

Jobs for the barristers is it?

But have we been paying enough attention to the nons? People who aren’t a thing are people too you know! The BBC helps out by paying deep solemn reverent attention to those thrilling misunderstood long-neglected insufficiently advertised people the Aze.

In the UK, our awareness of asexuality – the experience of not feeling sexual attraction towards others – is still low.

Well it would be, wouldn’t it. It’s not generally something we need to know about other people, nor is it generally something other people need to know about us. Not feeling X towards other people is mostly just a personal [whatever] and thus not of general interest.

I really can’t stress enough how important it is to grasp that our personal tastes or habits or quirks or indifferences are not of general interest. They’re not the kind of thing you can build a politics around, even an identity politics, and they’re not the kind of thing you can build a news story around, either. They don’t make a “community.”

A poll of over 1,000 UK adults in 2019 suggests that three-quarters of them were incapable of correctly defining asexuality.

And that doesn’t matter, because there’s not really anything to define. Lack of interest in sex is just that.

So what is asexuality?

It’s a spectrum of experiences and identities. Some asexuals don’t experience romantic feelings, but others do.

What is the BBC doing publishing this teenagery nonsense? Nobody cares.

We get a whole tedious list of definitions, as if we were leaving for Camp Wokamonga tomorrow and needed to know what to pack.

￭ Gray-sexual: Someone who identifies with the area between asexuality and sexuality.

Oh shut up.

For the AVEN [the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network] though, it is clear that the number of people identifying with the term worldwide has been growing. “The most noticeable thing is that new communities are emerging all the time,” says Michael Doré, their spokesperson.

Because people like you babble about this horseshit and because adult institutions like the BBC for some reason publish your babbling. It’s not because there’s anything there.

“Today, the online ace community is represented on social media, Facebook and Discord. There are organisations in many different countries around the world, including outside the Anglosphere. Year on year, we’ve had a steady increase of members joining AVEN.”

Then we get three people’s self-admiring accounts of themselves, which I didn’t read because I want to continue to have the will to live.

A senior Sun reporter has died and tributes are pouring in.

There’s just this one tiny thing they’re forgetting to mention.

He murdered his wife.

Sharron Davies isn’t fooled.

Sharron Davies has hit out at [criticized] the decision to allow transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard to compete in the Olympics, describing it as ‘another kick in the teeth for female athletes’.

Parenthetically: I hate that UK metaphor of “hitting out at” for criticizing, and I think journalistic outlets should never use it, seeing as how it thoroughly poisons the well.

‘Sport is for all but it must be fair,’ said Davies, who won a silver medal in the 400 metres medley at the 1980 Moscow Games. ‘I am pro everyone doing sport but I feel sex, not self-identified gender, should be how we compete.’

And that’s not just a feeling, it’s a thought based on facts – obvious facts.

‘I speak out because of personal experience of the East German doping programme when illegally-added male levels of testosterone cheated women out of success for years, unstopped by the International Olympic Committee or any other sporting bodies. It was a shameful period.

‘We were as aware then as we are now that it was not fair, cheating hundreds of people [specifically, women] out of their rightful medals and rewards. It can’t happen again to even one female.

‘Women’s sport has made such strides and we still don’t have equality with airtime, coverage, sponsorship, awareness or prize money. But this is another kick in the teeth for female athletes. Sadly, I think people will only see how unfair this is when it happens in front of their eyes.

‘Some young females will lose medals, places and success before we do something about the obvious, which is males are stronger and faster. It is a biological reality every single Olympic event shows.’

But, who cares, it’s only women. The IOC certainly doesn’t care.

Davies, two-time Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes, former marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe and 60 other top-class athletes wrote to IOC president Thomas Bach expressing concerns in 2019 but did not receive a response.

Yeah, what do they know. Stupid bitches.

The New Zealand Olympic Committee said: ‘The team has a strong culture of inclusion and respect for all. We look forward to supporting all our athletes selected in Tokyo.’

That’s just meaningless pufflegab. They’re not “supporting” their female athletes by doing this.

Several female athletes share the view of Davies but are told to stay silent by sponsors to avoid controversy and a potentially toxic fall-out with the trans community.

Tracey Lambrechs, who competed for New Zealand in weightlifting at Rio 2016, said: ‘I’ve had female weightlifters come up to me and say, “What do we do? This isn’t fair”. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do because every time we voice it we get told to be quiet. We’re all about equality for women in sport but right now that equality is being taken away from us.’

Oh just shut up about it, you’re only women.

Dr Nicola Williams, director of British campaign group Fair Play For Women, said: ‘Female sports category exists so women have the chance to win. Here’s a person who was never internationally successful as a man, who can come into women’s competition and be an Olympic contender at 43. If you’re wondering if transwomen retain their male advantage, here’s your proof.’

But it’s trans-cheating so it’s virtuous and noble.

The Times reports that employers punish employees who fail to parrot the dogma about trans people, which means that employers are punishing their employees for failing to tell stupid lies. That’s not a fair or reasonable setup.

Dozens of women have faced disciplinary action at work for offences such as saying JK Rowling is not transphobic, asking a question during equality training or requesting female-only lavatories, according to 40 campaigners on free speech.

In a letter to The Sunday Times, the campaigners say that the employers of a quarter of UK workers have signed up to a Diversity Champions scheme run by the LGBT charity Stonewall. It means if people question what the campaigners refer to as “Stonewall law” — that “trans women are women; trans men are men” — they risk punishment.

Has this ever been the case when it’s a matter of hostile or contemptuous remarks to or about women?

The rise and fall (or fall and rise? or rise and fall and rise?) of an “influencer.”

Like cult-leaders, Instagram influencers must navigate a complex symbiosis with their followers to remain popular. Unlike cult-leaders, their lives are often funded by a commercial system of sponsored posts, a practice which Caroline abstains from. Instead, in March, as the world shut down, she started making money from selling topless photos on the platform ‘Only-Fans’.

So, photos with the tops cut off so that you get trees lopped in half or people whose faces stop at their nostrils? Doesn’t sound all that lucrative.

I tell her the way she uses Instagram reminds me of how Sylvia Plath wrote poems: art as an act of confession.

Or attention-seeking, or both.

But Calloway wants to chronicle her life more traditionally too. Her book, called Scammer, will come out next year – if she finishes it. I tell her (she is the kind of person you want to confess everything to) that I want to write about myself, but I feel like a narcissist when I try to. She tuts, “that’s so sad!” Does she ever feel the same? “No, no, no! I think British people see memoir as something so fundamentally guilt inducing, it’s something you should be shamed for, it’s just so fucking English, it’s so fucked up!”

She insists that the English “see a woman who wants to write about herself and the first word that slaps their frontal cortex is narcissism.” I’ve proven her point for her. But the accusation is thrown at Instagram Influencers as much as writers. The act of sharing yourself is easily perceived as obsessing over yourself.

Caroline thinks it’s different in the US. “Something America has that Britain doesn’t is a tradition of white male memoirists. Ernest Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast, Nabokov…with Speak Memory, George Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London. All these famous American men left this long legacy for American women to pick up and hoist on their backs that I don’t think exists in England. But I think,” she hesitates, deliberating “I always think your own story is worth telling.”

Heeheeheehee.

They’re bound to fix it eventually, so I’d better do a screenshot just for safety.

Your instructions:

In other words it’s about women. Women are women. It saves a lot of trouble. Women who call themselves “trans men” or “nonbinary” are still women. Intersex women are women. The word “women” is all that’s required, and trying to delete it from the language is not a good idea, given the subordinate status women have had imposed on us.

You mean women planning “to hand a baby off” – which itself is a description that should get more careful thought than how to justify deleting the words “women” and “mother” from the language.

No. I’ll go on calling women “women,” thanks, and you don’t get to tell any of us not to.

For a few minutes there most Republicans in Congress accepted that the insurrection wasn’t the best idea ever. They’re back to normal now though.

Odds are that the erstwhile Republican party comrades of Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming will soon vote to purge her from the ranks of their leadership. Cheney, who occupies the third-highest position in the House Republican Conference and is the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, survived a similar removal effort in early February, after she was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach former president Donald Trump. At the time, House Republicans decided to retain Cheney as conference chair by a 145-61 margin, while the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, told reporters that “Liz has a right to vote her conscience.”

But that was three months ago, when even Republican leaders like McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell acknowledged that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” (in McConnell’s words) for provoking the mob that stormed the Capitol on 6 January in an attempt to overturn the election. 

Three months = plenty of time to decide that it’s better to stick with Trump and his lies about the election, because [???].

Since then, however, the Republican base has continued to uphold Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him and have pushed to remove any party officeholders who say otherwise. A recent CNN poll confirmed that 70% of Republicans say Biden did not win enough votes to be president and half believe (without evidence) that solid proof of Trump’s victory exists.

So congressional Republicans, always reluctant to stand up against Trump and his supporters, are edging toward the view that Cheney must go. Her crime, as they see it, is that unlike McConnell and McCarthy she did not fall silent about Trump in the aftermath of impeachment and publicly declared that she would not support him if he were to run for the presidency again in 2024. As Trump has howled for Cheney’s political demise, internal Republican criticism of her has mounted.

In short, the Republicans are determined to be worse and stay worse. Interesting choice.

When in doubt, shaft the workers.

South Carolina will leave the federal unemployment programs providing extra money to jobless residents in light of “unprecedented” workforce shortages across the state, Gov. Henry McMaster announced on Thursday.

The state will opt out of the coronavirus pandemic assistance programs beginning June 30. The federal benefits include an extra weekly $300 to unemployed workers that was scheduled to run through early September.

States’ rights! States’ rights to starve their workers into accepting crap jobs with crap pay and crap conditions.

The labor shortage has affected all areas of the state’s economy, state government officials said, with the hotel and food service industries especially hard-hit. McMaster claimed the shortage was created in large part due to the supplemental federal payments.

Ah yes hotel and food service, where the pay and conditions are notoriously bad. They could always pay more and mandate better conditions, but nah, better to starve the workers and pocket the money yourself.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Non-binary in Huddersfield.

The media outlet reporting this story has included a helpful glossary of genderist bullshit to indoctrinate (or at least confuse) its readers. Let’s play along!

Terms you need to understand

I seriously doubt it.

There are a lot of words used within the LGBT community that you may need help to understand. Here are some of the key definitions you may not know, as explained by Stonewall.

I might not know them because they’re wrong or made up. The likelyhood of anything from Stonewall leading to an improvement in my “understanding” is close to zero..

• Non-binary – the term used to describe people who don’t feel they comfortably identify as a man or a woman

Perhaps this should have started with definitions of “man” and “woman.” It would clarify whether the discomfort has anything to do with sexist stereotypes. As it is, I’m with Jesus & Mo’s barmaid: we’re all “non-binary.”

• Bisexual – a person who is attracted to people of more than one gender

WRONG. LOOK AT THE WORD: BI= two. SEXUAL = sex. That means “people attracted to both sexes.” “More than one” only insofar as you mean TWO, like it says in the “bi” part of the word. And sex, NOT “gender.” How can you be trusted with words if you can’t even get the fucking syllables right.

• LGBT – this is an acronym for lesbian, gay, bi and trans

As far as Stonewall’s activism is concerned, “T” is the only one that counts, but if they were to be honest and dropped the other letters, they would no longer be able to benefit from its parasitism of the gay rights movement, nobody would know what they were talking about anymore, and they would lose even more support.

• Gender Dysphoria – this is when a person feels discomfort or distress because they feel there is a conflict between their sex assigned at birth and their gender identity

Damn those doctors, nurses and midwives for failing to see the Magical Gender Essence in the delivery room. It’s all their fault! Good thing that there are places like Tavistock to medicate and carve the bodies of these distressed people so that they conform to their preferred, bullshit sexist stereotypes! Wait. What is “gender?”

• Gender Identity – how a person feels innately about their own gender – whether it be male, female or non-binary

Wait. What is “gender?” You’ve used it twice now, without defining it. How does differ from bullshit, sexist stereotypes?

• Pan – a person whose attraction towards others isn’t limited by sex or gender

A “gender” is not a “sexuality.” People are gay, straight, or bi. That’s it, that’s all, that’s everything. Stonewall used to know this.

• Trans – an umbrella term used to describe those whose gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth

An almost useless catch-all term that includes people who don’t even want to be labeled trans. And don’t even ask about all the rest of you fuckers that we’re going to label “cis.”

Note that “genderqueer,” that extraordinarily meaningful, insightful, and powerful term, the accidental discovery of which helped launch the downward spiral of Pan Hollingworth’s pursuit of surgical solutions to mental problems, is nowhere to be found on this list. Perhaps because it is meaningless, incoherent, and contradictory genderbabble?

How’s Trump’s forced retirement going? Oh you know – full of revenge and plots and shouting.

Trump is moving to handpick members of the House GOP leadership team — relentlessly attacking Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, and endorsing Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York to replace her.

He is plotting to take down Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach him for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, while continuing to stoke the false claims of a stolen election that has become a dangerous rallying cry for the party.

And he is playing host to a burbling stream of Republican well-wishers — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif). and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) — who travel to his private Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida to pay their respects, seek his support and post a photo of their ring-kissing on social media.

All this for a guy with no talent, no charm, no decency, no mercy, no brains, no heart, no kindness, no generosity, no wit, no talent – it’s an endless list of nones.

He rails that President Biden is “a disaster” and argues that “Joe isn’t in charge, everybody knows it’s Kamala” — a preview of his likely message portraying Biden as an unwitting stooge of Vice President Harris, this person said.

I know this one – Biden is “pussy-whipped,” am I right? Trump is exactly the kind of guy who thinks in those terms.

Trump’s reappearance is fueled by an ego-driven desire to remain at the center of national attention, said former advisers and allies who are in touch with Trump.

But of course he’s not the center of national attention now. I hope it’s eating him up. I hope he curls up on the floor every night and screams.

The defeated ex-president is propelled primarily by a thirst for retribution, an insatiable quest for the spotlight and a desire to establish and maintain total dominance and control over the Republican base, said several former senior White House advisers.

So why were they senior advisers? Why did they work for a horrific human being like that?

Advisers and critics alike note his statements do not receive the attention they once did — and he is severely limited after being banned by Twitter and Facebook. Some previous donors are no longer interested in giving, while allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argue that polling shows Trump is less relevant by the week.

What I’m saying. He’s a talentless heap of lard, and without the office to shine him up, that’s all he looks like.

Despite being banned from major social media platforms after his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack, he now regularly puts out statements from the “45th President of the United States of America” through his political action committee. Earlier this week, he also launched a bare-bones website, “From the desk of Donald J. Trump,” that was widely mocked by critics as underwhelming and unimpressive. He dictates the statements to aides, who then print them out for him to edit with a Sharpie before they are officially released.

Edit with a Sharpie bwahahahahahaha

Privately, however, many Republican officials — including some Trump allies — are growing frustrated, worried that the former president is wasting his time on petty rivalries and grievances. They say they wish he was working to protect policies from his term and affirmatively helping Republicans in 2022. “All the 2022 stuff is, ‘Well, what’s in it for me?’” said one former senior White House official, summarizing Trump’s thinking.

And this surprises them? Really?

A brief conversation.

I haven’t had any reply. But. But! You see that one (1) like? It’s on the Garbs tweet, not mine. Guess whose like it is – go on, guess.

It’s Gegi’s! Gegi herhimtheirself!

No like for me though. Gegi isn’t very incloosive.