A com­pi­la­tion of posts from my pub­lic Face­book. Fol­low me there if you want to see them drop in real time.

There are about a bil­lion dou­ble stan­dards in our cul­ture that don’t even need to be ten per­cent unpacked before it is piss obvi­ous that the idea that we’re egal­i­tar­i­an is laugh­able, but one that has been super preva­lent in the last 15 years or so is dudes whin­ing at a soci­etal lev­el about being lone­ly, like the world owes them a part­ner.

But not just a part­ner. A HOT part­ner.

Because lone­ly WOMEN are a part of the cul­tur­al zeit­geist. Crazy cat ladies, old maids, and women who can’t find a guy—that’s just like your aver­age best friend trope. This is not a social issue when it’s women. This is not some­thing that needs to be cor­rect­ed. This is not a sit­u­a­tion that requires women to have MORE pow­er and mon­ey with which to manip­u­late men.

There’s this hum (and it’s less hum and more “stat­ed explic­it­ly” in memes and online) where dudes want women to low­er their stan­dards and “raise their qual­i­ty.” “Don’t be too picky, ladies, or you’ll end up alone.” “We’re going to bang robots… then you’ll be sor­ry.” “You fuck­ing women all want alpha males, and you should be set­tling for ME.”

But the sug­ges­tion that they do the same is met with howler-mon­key-feces-throw­ing on the cul­tur­al lev­el. How DARE women ask them to be any­thing more? How DARE this bar six feet below ground lev­el be raised in any way? How DARE women find part­ners they like instead of THEM? How DARE any­one sug­gest that maybe they low­er their stan­dards and go date one of these chron­i­cal­ly lone­ly women that they pre­tend do not even exist?

And if they raise their qual­i­ty to the point that the dude finds them accept­able, but then their qual­i­ty is high enough to snag a “high­er qual­i­ty” dude… we are right back to the howl­ing feces.

And they are so out­ra­geous­ly enti­tled about this that a siz­able chunk of them want to break 60 years of nom­i­nal social progress so as to reestab­lish the world order where they were need­ed instead of desired. Then the hege­mo­ny of eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty and social cap­i­tal will return com­plete­ly (instead of just most­ly) to men’s hands, and women will be forced to low­er their stan­dards for sur­vival.

Beats going to ther­a­py.

It’s not actu­al­ly an “art of the deal” if you are hold­ing all the cards and you man­age to bul­ly some­one into what you want. What I find much more inter­est­ing is how absolute­ly pathet­ic he is at get­ting what he wants when he doesn’t enter a nego­ti­a­tion already hav­ing all the pow­er.
He’s just a bul­ly. That’s all he ever was. He’s a bul­ly with a lot of mon­ey. He thinks he can nego­ti­ate because he’s mean, and he cheats and lies and steals and calls it tac­tics (because what he means when he says “deal” is a par­a­digm that involves some­one get­ting screwed and some­one get­ting every­thing). But just like every bul­ly who picks on some­one who isn’t half their size (or knows how to fight), when he’s faced with any­body who isn’t on the work­ing end of a vast pow­er dif­fer­en­tial, he gets tak­en to the clean­ers.

Every. Sin­gle. Time.

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of racist influ­encers and big­ot­ed con­tent cre­ators and the fact that Democ­rats lose by 15 to 20 points among white peo­ple in every elec­tion since civ­il rights amend­ment are not two sep­a­rate facts that have noth­ing to do with each oth­er oth­er.

We live in a coun­try that has not divest­ed itself of its white suprema­cy lega­cy. It lives on in ways far more insid­i­ous than your drunk uncle being odi­ous at Thanks­giv­ing.

And it is absolute­ly why rur­al white vot­ers just can’t seem to ever have eco­nom­ic poli­cies ben­e­fit­ting them explained with mes­sag­ing that is soft enough, gen­tle enough, sim­ple enough (but with­out being con­de­scend­ing)… ever. They still go and vote Repub­li­can against their own eco­nom­ic self-inter­est.

It’s because what Repub­li­cans are sell­ing them is of more val­ue than their eco­nom­ic self­i­in­ter­est.

We live in a fuck­ing coun­try where Shiloh Hen­drix, who yelled the N‑word repeat­ed­ly at an autis­tic five-year-old, is about to become a mil­lion­aire (after the FIRST mil­lion on Gofundme was exposed and removed).

But sure, tell me again how white suprema­cy isn’t a thing any­more, and I need to pipe down.

When I was in my writ­ing pro­gram, one of my pro­fes­sors absolute­ly hat­ed spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, but he loved Six Feet Under.

One day, he was rip­ping on fan­ta­sy, and I’d had enough of his shit, and I point­ed out that at sev­er­al moments in Six Feet Under, when one of the main char­ac­ters had an inter­ac­tion with some­one who was dead, it actu­al­ly WASN’T ambigu­ous about whether or not they were talk­ing to them­selves, or hal­lu­ci­nat­ing or some­thing, or actu­al­ly talk­ing to a spir­it. They ~often~ learned some­thing that their char­ac­ter could­n’t pos­si­bly know, includ­ing things that had­n’t hap­pened yet. So that made it spec­u­la­tive fic­tion.

He did not like that. He did not like that at all. And being who he was, he decid­ed to turn his back on Six Feet Under instead of admit­ting that maybe spec­u­la­tive fic­tion was­n’t so awful. The next semes­ter he’d “phased out” his love of Six Feet Under and was on a total Toni Mor­ri­son run. Sula this, Beloved that, and Song of Solomon over here. “Good fic­tion does­n’t have to have a space­ship or some fan­ta­sy spec­u­la­tive ele­ment!”

So I point­ed out that Beloved was a ghost sto­ry.