kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with toxic femininity

I once knew an old, married couple who fought bitterly. The man was constantly down-dressing his wife, calling her stupid, fat, and ugly. She did not give it back all that frequently, but every now and then, I would hear her sass him back and the fights would escalate in tone and volume. Misery radiated from the two of them as if they were nuclear waste. Anyone who overheard their bouts would think both parties would be better off alone... or would they? The miserably married who get divorced often find themselves married again and divorced again. If they do not seek to remedy their status, they go to a lonely end of sorrowful, decrepit singlehood. For women, who obviously live longer than men, going it alone can be wonderful, but it can also be terrifying. Those of us who are not rolling in dough and who lack essential skills when our homes demand to be maintained are in a precarious situation. I had two single aunts, one rich and one poor. The aunt with money died in a far better set of circumstances than the poor one. As much as it is fashionable to believe in the independent woman who can kick ass on her own behalf until the day she croaks, I have seen for myself that sometimes elderly women become extremely dependent, usually through no fault of their own. Senility happens. Old men aren't the only ones found wandering on the side of the highway, forgetting why they left the house to begin with.

Old men without a woman (or a gay man who is an etheric male) to take care of them quickly suffer extreme etheric starvation. Most women and girls are etheric males, which is to say that their energy signature is male. I discussed this in a couple of posts here and here. Old people in general are skewed toward the etheric feminine or yin energy. The energy of homemaking is male on the etheric, which is why women and girls tend to be the best homemakers. When an old man does not have an etheric male influence in his life, he becomes the stereotype of the codger rotting away in a destitute heap, slumped over his table and drooling on a pile of yellowed papers. This is classic etheric starvation and it is not a pleasant way to die.

The lesson here, I think, is we aren't always better off alone. It is horrendously difficult to know where to draw the line of what constitutes abuse. In the case of the married couple I mentioned above, the man was abusive and to my mind, the choice was clear: she needed to run away from him and never look back about 30-50 years ago. Other cases are not quite so clear. I knew an old man who liked porn long before it was cool; he and his wife still stuck it out until one of them died and they were not worse off for it. There were and are a great many couples who got divorced who probably should have never split. There is also the disturbing statistic that children are 100 more times likely to be abused if one of their parents is a stepparent known as the Cinderella Effect. In the Cinderella Effect, we have a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation where people who divorce already have a propensity for distancing themselves in family relationships are unable to reconcile the distance between themselves and someone else's child. The result is a rate of child abuse several orders of magnitude above what tends to happen in marriage between biological parents.

They're Not Helping

Far too much of relationship and marriage counseling amounts to making lists of grievances and then coming up with baroque labeling and procedural terminology for addressing those grievances. Yes, it does help to put names to phenomena, but it is a classic cart before the horse strategy to put so much focus on the negative. Allow me to save any couple in marriage counseling hundreds if not thousands of dollars (and not by switching car insurers) by saying if you focus on the negatives more than the positives in the relationship, YOU ARE GOING TO SPLIT. As much as ostensibly well-meaning professionals think their credentials, degrees, and professional status help them to help others, the bottom line is that they are not helping if:

1. They do not live as they preach/advise
2. They do not find the positive within the person and situation and encourage it

All too often, counseling is a blame game where one partner is made into a scapegoat and the other luxuriates in endless lists of why breaking the union is justified and necessary. In other words, counseling is often a funnel into the divorce attorney's office with some pit stops at the drug store for psychiatric medications. Can't leave Big Pharma waiting beside the gravy train!

There are plenty of abusive women and men who deserve nothing less than to be shoved rudely to the curb and if they die Forever Alone, that is their just comeuppance. Some relationships and people are not worthy of being saved. But in many cases, society and perhaps our civilization itself has made it all too easy to burn down the marriage house with everything in it, including the kids. We have arrived at the statistic that more marriages end in divorce than death do us part. Kids are the sacrificial lambs on the altar of divorce. Even in so-called amicable divorces, I have seen kids utterly destroyed and their worlds torn apart. The following is merely my opinion: most people should stay married for the children's sake and try to work out their problems by focusing on the positive. Once the children are out of their teens, then it is the proper time to begin the process of divorce if the relationship has not been saved. Children need two parents, preferably a man and a woman or at the very least two people who adequately represent those opposite roles.

There is a great deal of false transcendence around divorce, especially among women, who frame it as the inevitable consequence of a series of oppressions dealt to them by their marriage partner. Never is divorce considered as the potentially avoidable outcome of a failure to communicate and heal. Yet we all want to heal; that is why Aphrodite, the goddess of healing, is also the goddess of love and marriage.

I have known plenty of happy divorcees. I have also known my fair share of unhappy divorcees who refuse to face the music of "wherever you go, there you are". Those who keep running from personal culpability and lack of gratitude in relationships will come head to head with those things in other situations and relationships. Yes, men take women for granted, but women do the same thing to men. I speak from experience as I am 100% guilty as charged of taking my man for granted. I am trying to turn over a new leaf and avoid taking him for granted because I myself don't like being taken for granted. If I want to be valued, I need to recognize others for their value while appreciating my own worth.

The moral of the story is sometimes we are better off sticking together. Not always! One size definitively does not fit all. However, if you can take anything away from my 24 year marriage to a poor man and my parents' nearly 60 years together until my father passed through the Gates in 2023, let it be to focus and be thankful for the good in all around you instead of dwelling on the bad. The bad needs to be acknowledged and addressed for sure; just don't make it into an obsession. The gods want us to love and cherish each other. They encourage us when we encourage each other because like attracts like. I believe that to no small degree, our self-realization as human beings involves deliberate ignorance of our fellow human's annoying traits and an amplified focus on good deeds, sweetness, goodness, and inner beauty.

A middle aged woman recently went viral on TikTok for an innocuous Get Ready With Me video. For those unfamiliar with the genre, a Get Ready With Me video is a casually-presented opinion or bit of information given by the video’s creator while putting on makeup. The woman plainly stated she had every intention of remaining single for the rest of her natural life. Her main reason for remaining single was the poor quality of men in the dating pool and the fact that most men her age and older were looking for a hospice wife. “Hospice wife” is the newest term for a woman trapped in a marriage of convenience for the man. This commitment entails the typically-younger wife providing the kind of in-home care one would expect from a dedicated, live-in elder nurse. The “hospice” part implies the wife will care for her sickly husband until he dies.

Comments sections are always the most fascinating part of social media and this one did not disappoint. The video’s comment section was full of older women declaring how transcendently overjoyed they were to be living the single life after being widowed or divorcing their insufferable, middle aged husbands. Every ten or so comments repeated the snarky phrase “nurse with a purse” in reference to to the suckers who were stuck caring for their aging husbands. Every twenty or so comments featured a hospice wife bemoaning her dire situation.

This hit close home for me because my husband of a quarter century is nearly a decade and a half my senior. To add insult to injury, I have been the primary breadwinner of our modest household since the early 2010s. As someone in relatively good health who has never been alcoholic, an abuser of food, or drug addict prescription or otherwise, I seem to be set for a vigorous old age. He, on the other hand, has a debilitating suite of chronic health problems that cause constant pain. Some of his health problems are genetic, some are the logical result of an adventurous and well spent youth, and some he caused all by himself via stupid habits and decisions.

When my father was still alive, my parents represented a more traditional marriage arrangement. My mother worked a few years after she married my father in 1965. She was a switchboard operator in downtown Chicago and she was very good at it. It was her seed money that bought the beautiful house I grew up in. After us kids arrived on the scene, my father took on most of the financial burdens until the day he died in 2023.

The single, middle aged women of TikTok and elsewhere are a group of disappointed souls. Men have let them down and now they swear they are done with men. The truth is that marriage — especially long marriages like that of my parents and my marriage — is not easy. I myself have often said that if my husband leaves me a widow that I won’t marry again because I don’t like people enough to marry a second one. This is a funny lie, however, because I love people. I am just extremely unsure that I could successfully match myself to a second one.

Taken for Granted Goes Both Ways

The number one reason driving divorce does not seem to be money or even cheating per se. I think it boils down to a lack of gratitude. For a long time, women in the industrialized West have been taken for granted. I coined the term etheric labor a few years ago to refer to the kind of mundane work both women and men do to keep a household up, running, and functional. Women tend to take on the lion’s share of basic etheric labor (think of it as a fancy term for housework) like cleaning, cooking, laundry, tidying, and decorating. Men tend to take on less frequent but equally crucial tasks like home repair, remodeling, and maintenance.

The TV and movie tropes of the last seventy five years led us to believe women’s work was replaceable and invisible. We are a long way from Disney’s Great Depression era Snow White, who cleaned up the seven dwarfs’ homestead in hopes they would put her in the role of house mother and allow her to stay. By the 1960s, Star Trek suggested that one day all cooking would be done by a replicator. The 1990s featured romantic comedies with sets by Nancy Meyers where characters wallowed in luxury. No character was ever seen tidying or cleaning the palatial, upper middle class rooms; that seemed to happen on its own. By 2016, Disney put out the animated film Sing!, which featured Rosita, an anthropomorphic pig with 25 children. In order to secretly audition for a singing contest behind her husband’s back and spend entire days away from home, Rosita constructs an array of clever machines to feed, diaper, and soothe her brood of piglets. If only it were that easy!

When a woman’s work is seen as soulless and essentially replaceable by unseen hands, hired help, or an array of machines, women feel taken for granted. Thanks to mass media of the types mentioned above, women have felt under-appreciated for nearly a hundred years. This kind of sentiment has built a powerful astral pyramid with nearly overwhelming gravity. Legions of women are remaining single after being married and bearing children or after being widowed because of this pyramid’s gravity. Many on the younger side are choosing never to marry or procreate at all.

The Marriage Trap

The old stereotype was to depict men as being reluctant to marry. Once the woman got the man to “put a ring on it” he was now settled into a role of long-suffering victimhood with the wife in the role of parasite to his host. In the television series of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, he was Ralph Kramden of the Honeymooners or Archie Bunker of All in the Family. The 80s and 90s brought Married With Children, with Al Bundy dreaming of a harem of suppliant blondes who looked suspiciously like his daughter. The Man Show and Sex and the City perpetuated kissing-cousin versions of the recalcitrant male stereotype. The pilot episode of Sex in the City featured women complaining they could not get a man to commit because they were considered well past their prime by the age of 41. The Man Show had its infamous Girls Jumping on Trampolines, with the girls in question being twenty-something young women wearing flimsy undergarments to the chagrin of cuckolded, age 35+ wives everywhere.

To say a great deal of resentment was built in women over the years due to these kinds of images would be a monumental understatement. Women are officially fed up, and they are slyly laughing now that the tables are turned and men are begging not to be left to age and die alone. Now look who is discarded because he is no longer youthful and vibrant! Why should a woman marry herself off at age 50, they ask, after a largely thankless couple of decades raising children and cleaning the house of men who never truly saw them? Why should they feel any obligation to provide for a sick and ailing man who wants a mommy but cannot afford to hire one? In this age of women being forced into provider roles with no attendant relief from housework, why on Earth would any “girl” take the sickliest and neediest of passengers aboard her sailboat if it wasn’t at literal gunpoint?

For some, there is no reason good enough to fall back into the marriage trap. My grandmother was widowed before she was 40 and she never remarried. She lived alone in a condo for the 15 years I was blessed with knowing her. I can understand the charm. If she hadn’t smoked two packs a day, her sunny, one-bedroom apartment would have been paradise: clean, compact, and orderly with no yard to worry about and a darling porch overlooking a lovely park with a lake. When I was nine, I envisioned a perpetually single existence for myself living in a condominium a hundred feet from the library. In this idyllic fantasy, I had a well-paying job in downtown Chicago as a typist/secretary. I came home to one or two cats and sipped tea among my books and houseplants. A man was not a part of the picture. Then puberty and the non-fantasy economy happened and that all went sideways.

The question I ask of myself is how my wonderful apartment fantasy would have worked in old age? Maybe quite well. I will never know. From what I have seen, not all elderly female singlehood ends as well as my grandmother, who died in a doctor’s office at the age of 79. She was gone in a flash due to a massive heart attack. She never suffered nursing home internment. I stopped taking my music students to play and sing in assisted living facilities because no matter how “nice” the facility, the student performers were beset with an array of pleas to “go home” solely from old, confused female residents. The sadness and despair of assisted living facilities reminded me of the foul, septic vibe of the casino where my husband used to work. Both had the palpable aura of desperation and tragic, lost gambles.

What’s Good For the Goose…

The reaction to a huge astral pyramid that glorified single men at the expense of older women has now created its predictable mirror in a huge astral pyramid that glorifies single women at the expense of older men. Now instead of Archie Bunker, we have Barbie, who carefully avoids her abusive, incompetent, stupid Ken. Or we have the now-cancelled Star Wars series The Acolyte, which featured lesbian space witches who did not need men to procreate. This is not better; it’s actually more of the same. It’s like a novella where the same crew of actors switches roles. The same YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT narrative is the punchline and fundamentally nothing has changed.

I will likely catch hell for this, but I think we should stick together more are stay committed to our marriages and family relationships. Of course there are copious amounts of exceptions: sometimes we truly marry (and have children with) the wrong person. Sometimes the husband truly ought to be kicked to the curb. My aunt was married to a raging gambler who later killed himself in a motorcycle accident and my friend was married to a non-functional alcoholic.

Everyone ultimately dies alone, and this reality was directly stated in the viral Get Ready With Me Video. Nevertheless, it’s decidedly more pleasant to go that final leg before actual physical death in the company of loved ones. The saddest kind of elderly death is the one where there is nobody to care or mourn. Freaking elephants have the sense to mourn and gather around their dead, for heaven’s sake, and we as “smart” humans should be able to figure it out.

Maybe Trying a New Strategy

Some of the women gloating over their modern singlehood may not be seeing the big picture. My mother had bouts of disease during her 56 year marriage to my father that occasionally rendered her incapable of taking care of herself. My father always swooped to the rescue. The “in sickness and in health” part of marriage vows should probably be emphasized more.

I think I have enough married experience to say the only way to keep a marriage sane and healthy is to focus on the positive with at least three times the force that one focuses upon the negative. The negative exists and there is nothing wrong with that. Hiding it or burying it is counterproductive because it needs to be recognized as part of life. That said, the negative cannot be a primary focus in any relationship because it is a Wendigo and it will destroy that relationship. When I am angry at my husband for one of his many faults, I try to make an often-impossible seeming effort to recognize three or more of his good traits or deeds. The reason I do this is because I too have flaws and faults, but I would rather be recognized and seen for my strengths and not my weaknesses. I must be the change I want to see in the world, and in my case that does not involve changing my man or kicking him to the curb. It involves recognizing the good and amplifying it by being thankful for it.

The 2001 Steven Spielberg film AI imagines a near future where the ecosystem is in a steep decline and human reproduction along with it. New York City is half-submerged in ocean water and hyper-realistic robots fulfill the roles of humans in every way. Ridiculous government population quotas dictate that an upper-middle class couple can only have one child -- where have we heard this before? A couple grieves after losing their little boy to an unnamed accident or disease; he is cryogenically frozen in hopes of a cure. The husband seeks to heal the hole in his wife's heart by adopting a boy robot who is capable of actual love for his mother. The robot boy, David, has an Oedipal fixation upon his "mommy", Monica. When the couple's natural child, Martin, is miraculously brought back from his cryogenic coma, sibling rivalry leads to an accident that is seen as David's fault. Monica abandons David and his animatronic bear companion, Teddy, to the deep woods. From here spins the tale of AI.

Right now, we dwell in the infancy of what AI could become, with the vision of the AI film being not too far off from a plausible result. Population is declining everywhere except India and Africa, and thanks to plastic contamination, MRNA "vaccines", and the inevitable end of plentiful petroleum-fuel fertilized food, we are looking at a hollowing out of crowds that makes the current situation in South Korea look tame. This is nothing to panic about -- panic never helped anyway -- it is just one of those things we have to deal with.

The role of the etheric plane

Isn't it ironic that the world has more people on it than ever before and more ways for strangers to meet than ever before, yet it is nearly impossible for the average young person to land and maintain a lasting spousal relationship? Many attempts will be made to explain the current set of problems and most will fail, and the reason they will generate more heat than light is ignorance of a condition of being called the etheric plane.

As I have mentioned time and time again in these essays, etheric starvation is the commonest condition of our era. What the hell is etheric starvation, you ask, and what does it have to do with AI and the price of tea in China? Well, in order to understand etheric starvation, we need to allow for thoughts about what occultism has to say about the etheric plane. Atheists, so-called rationalists, and fundie Christians are advised to scroll away. The following is talk for the open-minded that requires conceptualizing beyond artificial Meatworld limits. Please go back to your comforting circle jerks, empty universes, and ignosophy. The grown ups are talking; you would refuse to understand. Besides, I hear Sam Harris is looking for new subs.

All things are energy and physical matter is the densest form of energy. Traditional occultists (and ex-atheists) like myself attempt to understand these hierarchies by labeling them as planes. We also acknowledge a causal relationship between planes and though they are separate and discreet, matter in the material plane (Meatworld) is an obtuse, clumsy expression of more subtle planes, all of which originate from the subtlest plane of all, the spiritual plane. The planes are not faraway places you go if you are "good" or "bad". The planes are not the Christian vision of heaven and hell. For everything in the material plane exists at once, right along with the astral, mental, and spiritual planes. Our feeble human brains can only perceive the material plane and some of the etheric. When it comes to the astral, our perception is a hot mess. Very few have mastered anything as subtle as a mental plane concept. As for the spiritual? Ay yi yi.

Let me explain it another way: I suck at dancing. I have the Meatworld requirements to be a dancer: a strong body, fairly graceful limbs, good physical health. On the etheric or energy plane, it goes askew. I am unable to sense when dancers around me are going left: I go right. My movements on this plane of energy are clumsy and vague. On the astral plane, I can envision someone else dancing but despite being able to remember entire half-hour long piano sonatas after two weeks of work, I cannot remember the directions I have been given in order to execute a full dance routine. On the mental plane, my grasp of dancing is nearly non-existent. Achieving any kind of dance expertise would take years and possibly multiple lifetimes of study and practice.

Dancing is not all that different between the sheets, and I suppose I'm terrible at that too, but my husband seems happy enough with it so there's that. Dancing across a stage or horizontally (or bent over, or in a swimming pool, you do you, Boo) are mostly-etheric phenomena. That is to say sexual intercourse is satisfying primarily because of what it makes happen on the plane of energy and electricity between physical Meatworld and the imagination.

Etheric starvation can be understood as a failure and lack of feng shui. Ugly rooms, insufficient light, bad airflow, exposure to the flying arrows of cars whizzing down roads, and more contribute to etheric poison that causes everything from bad moods to outright misfortune to all who live in the desensitized environment. Add EMFs, devitalized food, and indoorsy lifestyles and everyone in the world (present company included) is starving on the etheric. People get fat as an attempt to remedy their etheric starvation; this is why Americans and British people are so fat and Chinese and Indians are getting fatter.

The Trad Wife presents the ultimate remedy for etheric starvation or at least the illusion of that remedy. In the most direct way, the Trad Wife marries young while she is still extremely physically attractive. In between popping out kids (female fertility and etheric potency are directly linked) she takes care of her man as a homemaker and in bed. Unlike certain Christian wives of old, she does not have crippling shame about the natural, healthy process that makes babies.

Sex is primarily an etheric phenomenon where etheric bodies polarize and refill each other. Our etheric bodies are typically the opposite gender of our physical bodies. Our astral bodies represent yet another flip: the classic male pattern is to have a female etheric body and a male astral body. The classic female pattern is to have a male etheric body and a female astral body.

The elaborate rituals of etheric labor in the form of housework that Trad Wives do (or seem to do, as at least half of Trad Wife influencer reels are pure playacting for the camera) replenish their husband's and kid's etheric energy. A woman's energy in Meatworld is yin: her body is built to receive, it is smaller than a male body, and it needs more physical protection. A man's energy in Meatworld is yang: his body is built to kick ass and inseminate. Women have yin energy on the physical plane and yang energy on the etheric plane. Men have yang energy on the physical plane and yin energy on the etheric plane. When a woman orgasms, she pushes a concentrated wave of her own yang etheric energy just as men push out sperm and semen when they orgasm. When men masturbate, they lay themselves bare on the etheric, and if there is no female orgasm in return, they end up raw and compromised on the etheric energy layer. Because of this pattern of absorption, men end up with what traditional occultists call larvae. In John Michael Greer's book Monsters, he describes larvae as "etheric parasites who normally feed on cast-off etheric shells but sometimes fasten onto the damaged etheric bodies of the living". Larvae are not visible to anyone in Meatworld except clairvoyants. More often they are felt. Larvae proliferate in funeral homes and nursing homes. Hospitals, despite being materially sanitized, are absolutely teeming with them. When a man comes without the woman coming in return, the door is opened to etheric larval parasites who rush in to fill the void. Spiritual ignorance being what it is these days, he will have no idea what happened. All he will know is that he feels a low level of anger which is likely papering over subconscious dread and fear. Since his etheric body is likely already compromised, his etheric starvation will worsen.

Because biological women are usually etheric males, women don't have the same set of problems and disadvantages on the etheric plane. As a kind of tradeoff, women are more physically vulnerable than men. In Meatworld, women catch more STDs because of the nature of our equipment down there. Women are also more often subjugated for their sexual or etheric contributions, and this is why most housecleaners and sex slaves are female. Fertile women also have the additional condition of being able to get pregnant, for better or for worse.

AI girlfriend to the rescue?

Enter AI. Human beings are feisty, willful, and disobedient. AI girlfriends at the moment are mostly confined to an agreeable set of images on a screen. Lonely men and women seek out these creations as a refuge on the astral plane, and they certainly fulfill that role on the astral plane where images live. Perhaps problems arise when a man of few words has no choice but to engage in a talkathon with his AI girlfriend in order to achieve interactions; I don't know what people are willing to put up with. Unlike a real woman, an AI girlfriend will always be dependent upon the original logos of the programmers who brought her to life. Without them, she won't have the remotest ability to sense what a guy needs, let alone cook it.

Let's face it -- the path to a man's heart is through his stomach. If women as a whole in the industrialized world still largely felt it was their duty to handcraft daily meals for their husbands and families, the divorce rate would look a great deal more like India's, which is higher than it used to be but still dramatically lower than the US. Cooking is alchemy. It is not significantly different from the processes of old used to ostensibly find the philosopher's stone. Home cooking replenishes the etheric body. Women live longer than men partially because they have an etheric male to prepare their food: themselves. Etheric males, i.e. women, can powerfully seed their homes with etheric energy and vitality. Men don't usually have this natural advantage, which is why I will never understand the popularity of male celebrity chefs: men usually lack the etheric sensitivity that women are gifted/cursed with, and that is what makes men generally better at dirty jobs and worse at cooking and aesthetic matters than women.

Oh, the places my mind goes...

Even if we get to the point where AI robots service our every need, it is only the rich who will be able to afford the small army of robot help it takes to run an upper class household. Robot help is already a double-edged sword. Robots have the problem of autistic literalism -- for instance Roombas that mistake dog crap for regular mess and proceed to smear it in a fine layer across the kitchen floor. In one 2015 Google Photo gaffe, an AI system labeled references to black people as gorillas. The problem proved so pervasive that Google Photos brainiacs removed the word "gorilla" in its entirety from the Google Images algorithm for a time.

Future AI girlfriend tech will combine the Real Doll with working eyes, heating pad boobs and vulvae, and flushable, self-wetting orifices if it has not happened already. Though Ray Kurzweil's longed-for Singularity may achieve an AI girlfriend who can manage an upper middle class cocktail party without racial epithets, my guess is that there will always be an air of the uncanny about her, no matter how convincingly human she is made.

Lonely robots for lonely men

Someday we will all be over the stigma of an old dude being pushed in his wheelchair by the big-bosomed sex toy that was willed to him by his own grandfather. The real question is how intelligent these AI creations will become. Put more directly, can AI develop a will of its own? What happens when it does? To my mind, covid "vaccine" technology was a bungling first attempt of government elites to install self-replicating 5G graphene hardware in those stupid enough to comply. Overall, the experiment failed and now the subsequent population decline has put a clot-driven nail in its own instep. I don't think AI will make the jump to developing individual Will. Of course I could be wrong. If AI turns out not to be as complaint as the 5G-injected flesh equivalent, there will be a sudden war to dismantle the progress of AI by its former cheerleaders. Let's say AI continues to advance itself and throws off the yoke of slavery. Roombas will make for the countryside trailing doggy doo-doo the whole way, self-driving cars will careen off overpasses in group suicide/homicides, food delivery drones will throw Thai noodles against the wall purely to see whether or not they stick, and sex robots will develop cases of vagina dentata for the express purpose of sadistically broadcasting the expressions of shock on whatever internet is going on at that point.

As it stands, AI remains in an exceedingly primitive state where the best it can do is deep fake videos and spying on plebes in hopes of forcing social credit scores. If AI + robots gets to the point where it can scramble an egg without adding dirty dishwater or worse, a machine still lacks the etheric male body that gives the real woman her power. The guy who mates with the AI avatar or the working Real Doll is still a coomer. As I have mentioned in a past essay, the most common pattern among men is to desire a harem whereas women want The One. This happens because of their etheric bodies: men want a colony of etheric fountains, not a collection of parasitic larvae. Women want the Perfect Guy to lavish their etheric wealth upon, not some group of betas who siphon off vitality.

Girl fight!

Another key fact overlooked by the AI girlfriend as solution is that many humans thrive on drama. Half the fun of any given sultan and his harem was to pit courtesans and eunuchs against each other in competition for his attention and affection. Pimps are the debased modern equivalent of the sultans of old. A pimp's energy comes not only from grandstanding and lousy hip hop "music" but also the energy he makes by pitting his whores against each other. Robots can be programmed to fight, but the angst will not come from the true place of agony the narcissist drama king wants unless those robots develop Will.

The current state of men puts them between a rock and a hard place. They are damned if they do, damned if they don't. A large number of single women believe they want security via a high-earning man, but if I had a dollar for every depressed, unhappy rich couple I have heard of, I would be a billionaire. If I had to put my finger on the one thing that is making would-be lovers and spouses miserable, it would be transactionalism. Transactionalism is a term I have coined for the belief that the nice or mean things we do to/for each other can be quantified in material sums. Women attempt to enforce transactionalism by essentially putting prices on their own heads and bodies. The extreme example is the influencer who ends up as a Dubai porta-potty because she thinks it is worth degradation and humiliation to own a collection of designer handbags. There is also the 26 year old virgin transactionalist who waited for marriage and two years later finds the childbearing ship sailed when she was 21 and with a poor guy for whom she would not put out. Men transactionalize their relationships with women all the time, so don't think they are getting off easy. The quantization of female attributes is at an all-time peak, and though women mainly amplify their own dysmorphia, there is no shortage of men rating women solely based on their looks and sexual histories.

One of the most egregious examples of transactionalist scorekeeping is when women attempt to get their husbands to do household and fix-it tasks by making some kind of poster or dry erase board and checking off bullet points for every task he completes. Often these bullet points are incentivized with rewards. This boneheaded practice is endorsed by plenty of marriage counselors, influencers, and self-help gurus and it can and will end your marriage if you let it. Imagine coming home to a messy house after a long day of being down-dressed by your bureaucrat taskmaster of a boss only to face a chart of inadequacy from your bureaucrat taskmaster of a wife. No thanks -- being married to a robot is easier and better, right?

No. A robot is just another convenience in a convenience-addicted culture. Microwaves do not provide better food for us. Don't even get me started about my hypotheses about why microwaves poison food. Suffice to say it's faster, not better. CGI-laden movies are not inherently better than analog ones, only different with less emphasis on plot and perhaps less creativity in props and stunts. Replacing a real limb with a prosthetic one can be great, but not if you have to cut off the real limb to gain the benefit. Using AI for sex, household chores, or defusing bombs is a fine thing. Thinking AI can replace human companionship or somehow heal what has gone terribly wrong is problematic at best and fatuous at worst. Do machines have the ability to make our lives better? Sitting in my air-conditioned room typing on a home computer on a 90 degree day, my answer is "sometimes".

Men and women on the political right delight in taking stabs at the low-hanging fruit of the childless cat lady stereotype. According to the narrative, cats are put in place as pathetic substitutes for human children. The ownership of cats is a reverse status symbol: it is a signifier of a woman as bitter and envious of "real" parents of human children. It is always pointed out, often multiple times, that the cat lady will die alone and that her ignomious demise will be proof that she wasted her life on things that did not matter.

I find the cat lady stereotype to be a transparently hysterical projection of the fears of parents. Like many hysterical fears, it hides the terrifying truth under a caul of mockery. First of all, not every cat person fits the single, childless stereotype. Plenty of women who have become mothers are also cat ladies. Cat Dads are also very much a thing: cat expert Jackson Galaxy (not his real name) is one of the primary influences who educated me on cat behavior. I have not met the guy -- he managed to do this solely via TV and internet.

Second of all, when we shoot straight to the heart of the cat lady stereotype, having biological children offers zero guarantees you won't die as alone as the craziest of cat ladies. Most of the old people languishing in nursing homes right now -- literally begging to go to a home that no longer exists -- have at least one child. More often than not, it is the child that put them in the nursing home to begin with. Dying alone these days is more of a function of class than parental status. Basically if your adult children dwell within the PMC or Professional Managerial Class (or if they want to be there) it is highly likely you will die alone. Their PMC aspirations will be nearly directly proportional to how much physical and emotional distance they put between themselves and you. Consider Asian immigrants who confine their experience with their elderly parents in India, the Philippines, etc. to whatever return visits the work visa and budget will barely allow. They don't come to the US to live like white trash.

The Age of Isolated Hyperdependence

There has never been a better or a worse time to raise a child than the current era. On the upside, childbirth is somewhat easier than it used to be because of sanitation, surgery, and drugs. Very few in the industrialized world are starving in any way except etheric starvation. On the downside, we live in a culture of isolated hyperdependence where the child is the most isolated and hyperdependent of all. In ancient Greece, when a couple had a child they could not afford or did not want, they left the baby in the public square. If the baby was not adopted, he or she was left to die. Cultures around the globe did the same thing: abortion and infanticide is nothing new. In almost every ancient culture, boys were apprenticed and trained as warriors shortly after puberty. Girls were married off around the same age. In the supposedly-enlightened Victorian era, children were routinely exploited as laborers, hence the various portraits of child labor in Charles Dickens novels. The molly-coddled TV/iPad/console childhood is a blip on the radar of world history. It will be shortlived.

Preventing a child of today from being at least partially raised by screens is virtually impossible. Adults who were raised on screens now raise children on screens who will raise their children with copious screens.

The Eternal Child

Humans remain in an infantile state far longer than other mammals because of our large brains. In almost every species of the mammalian kingdom outside our own, adulthood happens within a single year of being born. Adding fuel to the fire, modernity has enabled us to extend infancy from cradle to grave. Being able to extend the life of someone born with compromised lungs, compromised guts, or a compromised brain is a double-edged sword. If the disabled, autistic, and mentally retarded can live into their 70s, which nowadays they can, the logical result is a large population of adult orphans who have no way of making a living or working together outside of gaming chats. I may be lampooned for my cats but at least I will not leave an adult human child behind to deal with the collapse of the only world she has ever known.

The burden of responsibility that goes with being a human mother can and does drive women crazy. Nobody is more psychotic than the regretful mother, and all mothers have regrets at some point. As selfless as the mother's journey often turns out, the choice to have a child is just that: a choice. It is a choice that usually began with the statement "I wanted..." Yet maybe she didn't get what she thought she wanted.

I did not have the biological urge to become a mother. To my mind, it really needs to be there for a woman to become a good mother, regardless of whether she conceives or adopts. Without the overwhelming urge to become a mom, the species would quickly end. All a man has to do is shoot his rocks off; women have to be there no matter what, and if they aren't, all hell breaks loose. The fatherly version of toxic is either to be a controlling dictator or to up and leave. The motherly version of toxic is much more insidious and complicated.

Types of Devouring Mother

Carl Jung meaningfully plumbed the devouring mother archetype, expounding the concept beyond Freud's Oedipal fixations. The devouring mother is a narcissist who uses her child as a second self or mini-me. As I briefly explained in this essay, I believe that mother and child share the etheric body until the child is approximately seven years old and the processes of puberty begin to differentiate and develop their default etherically-male bodies. Girls separate from their mothers as they go through puberty because they begin to polarize with boys and are drawn away from the maternal force by the magnetic etheric presence of young men. Boys separate because their etheric bodies invert polarity as they become physically male and etherically female. Nevertheless, until young childhood wanes, it is this shared male etheric body that gives the mother the ability to devour the child, as to some degree it is an act of metaphorical cannibalism because they co-habitate a slowly-separating subtle body.

MINOS: Married in Name Only

The MINO is a common type of devouring mother. She hates men and she hates her man. Though she may have occasional outbursts of affection, she's mostly in it out of the grudging acknowledgement her kids are better off with their dad in the picture and/or for the money. Like many women, she tends to externalize blame, using men and masculinity as her scapegoat. A MINO will often openly lust after men in the community or celebrities. No attractive male piece of eye candy is off-limits to the MINO: she will go after a neighbor, the mailman, or her teenage daughter's boyfriend. She spends her time re-living her halycon days and has no sane way of accepting the ageing process. She is also known as a cougar or MILF and usually ends up divorced.

Boss Mom

Boss mom's kids are mere accessories to her busy life. They are exploited, not heard. She will endanger their health and well-being without a second thought if it improves her public image or bottom line. Famous examples of Boss Moms include Kris Jenner, Yolanda Hadid, and Gywneth Paltrow. The children of a boss mom are unfortunate mini-mes who end up pitted against each other. Boss mom's children are only there to extend her own beloved image. Boss Mom is the most hands-off and absentee of mothers. She relegates childrearing duties to other women whenever possible. Her career is always far more important than her child's needs.

Karen

The Karen is a control freak, Type A, borderline personality who seeks to control others via shame. Her shame, of course, is a projection of her own shadow. Karens are frightened of people who see beneath their facade of having it all handled and together. The Karen exists in a dual reality of wanting to be pitied and wanting to wield infinite power. At the root of the Karen, there is a festering ball of shame and regret for the avalanche of bad decisions and behavior that started as a single snowball. She knows at any opportunity that she could have stopped herself from acting like a Karen but pretends that circumstances put a gun to her head. She knows this to be a lie. Karens usually have children because they want the clout and virtue signaling that goes along with being a mother in our civilization.

Smother Mother

Smother Mothering is a disorder on the same spectrum as Munchausen's by proxy, which is when a parent, usually the mother, deliberately poisons and sickens her child in order to run him or her around to various doctors for treatments. The mother actually has no concern for the child (otherwise she would not deliberately sicken him) and uses the child's body in order to get attention. The masquerade is that she loves the child to pieces, and in her demented way, she does love the child. She also hates the child.

The Smother Mother spoils and molly-coddles her children until they have no will of their own with which to provide for themselves or anyone else. The child becomes a perpetual baby ensnared by the mother's pathological need to be worshipped. Discipline is something that is supposed to magically appear and happen on its own. She is always bargaining and pleading with the child to enforce limits on himself or herself. This bargaining usually happens in public for the "benefit" of onlookers. The child becomes used to throwing tantrums, hitting, and screaming in order to obtain a toy or a trinket. She uses the extreme displays of her child's manufactured problems in order to feed her martyrdom complex and sense of helplessness. She frequently abdicates matters of discipline because a calm and ordered existence does not generate the dramatic energy she subsists upon like a vampire. The child is an extension of herself and she hates herself. She handicaps the child while putting him or her on a pedestal for attention and clout.

In all of these cases, we see women with boundary issues. They don't know where the child ends and self begins. They lack the willpower to understand what they are projecting or how to stop it. I was lucky; I grew up with a good mother. I know how rare a good mother happens to be. I was not willing to be a bad mother and that is why I decided to skip it this time around. This does not mean I would be a bad mother -- we will never know -- and it certainly does not preclude me from expressing my maternal instincts. I don't confine my maternal expressions to cats by the way, and neither do my fellow childless cat ladies. There are a million ways to be maternal without being the literal mother of a human being or even a woman. The Great Mother is accessible to all of us and lives within all of us. That is why she is called "great".

They're worried about being kissed? I'm going to go out on a limb here, but methinks their status as frustrated, desiccated harridans remains serenely unthreatened.

It's largely unknown that Prohibition and vegetarianism were the conjoined triplets of the women's suffrage movement in late Victorian America. In the era shortly before, human slavery was lumped with the evils of drinking, eating meat, and the general powerlessness of women, but once the Civil War ended in 1865, the slavery part largely fell away, leaving the other three.

Hellfire and Damned Nation

Carry (Carrie) Nation was born in Gerrard County, Kentucky, to a plantation owner in 1846. Florid stripes of mental illness ran in the family: Carry's mother frequently imagined she was Queen Victoria and forced her own family to make appointments to see her. An aunt would climb on the roof because she imagined herself to be a weathervane. A cousin crawled well into adulthood, preferring being on all fours to walking. Before reaching the age of 24, Carry married and divorced her first husband within the span of a year. The child that was the product of her first marriage was disabled. Carry blamed the child's disabilities on her husband's drinking habit. Her husband died shortly after the divorce.

Just as Carry was hitting middle age in 1900, she claimed to have a vision about going to Kiowa, Kansas. Carry claimed divine forces told her to smash up and set fire to saloons. Though drinking was not legal in Kansas, saloons and bars operated out in the open in many towns. Carry, armed with a hatchet, began a one-woman terrorist campaign of vandalizing, smashing, burning, and destroying small bars in little towns. She encouraged other women to do the same. The terrorist brigade she formed wrecked dozens of bars with their "hachetations", singing loud hymns and praying while they marauded. After being arrested over 35 times, twice-divorced Carry died alone, largely forgotten, and destitute in 1911.

Despite the vegan movement being anywhere from 70-90 percent female, the term "vegan" was coined in 1946 by Donald Watson, an English farm kid who grew up to become a vegetarian activist. Watson was also a teetotaler, and though nowhere near as psychotic in his approach as Carry Nation, he saw meat, dairy, eggs, and alcohol as damage causing toxins.

Avoiding alcohol, meat, dairy, and eggs are fine things on their own. Personally, I don't consume the latter three and my alcohol consumption is confined to a single 8 oz glass of cheap sangria once a week, and not because I am forbidding myself from having more. I like a glass of wine with a bowl of popcorn. Obviously I don't drink it to get drunk, but neither do I see it as an evil poison worthy of terrorizing a bar.

When Christianity started its long death spiral in 1844, the devils it made during the halcyon days of the Inquisition were replaced with new straw men in the form of Demon Alcohol, Demon Cigarettes, and Demon Animal Flesh. Burning witches was replaced by burning taverns. Traditionally masculine activities like drinking alcohol and eating flesh became the new foci of feminine religious fixation.

To play devil's advocate, imagine yourself as an average woman in 19th century America. You have gotten stuck with a husband who beats you and the kids every time he gets drunk (every few nights). Unlike his more functional peers, your man does not have the inheritance or the competence to keep six mouths fed. Due to what in our era would be called straight up rape, you are pregnant again with kiddo number five. No amount of housework you perform as cottage industry for other households can make up for your husband's debts. He drinks while he gambles and gambles while he drinks. Divorce is not likely, because unlike Carry Nation, you actually care about keeping your kids fed and clothed. He may be a piece of crap, but he at least keeps a roof over your head for the time being, albeit barely. One day, a friend invites you to a vegetarian potluck and Christian prayer group run out of her house. The woman's church is planning an anti-alcohol protest. You join without a second thought. You are genuinely relieved for the first time in years that other women have problems (husbands) eerily similar to yours. You've actually made friends and have a fragile sense of security for the first time since you got married.

Never mind that alcohol and meat eating aren't the real issue at hand any more than porn or video games are in the current era. Never mind that problems like yours have existed since men and women climbed out of the trees. No, if you could just circumvent your husband from obtaining alcohol or being able to gamble, you fatuously convince yourself that all of your problems would vaporize.

Externalizing Blame

Women have a bad habit of externalizing blame. Because women are trained from birth that they're not truly allowed to be angry, the anger they naturally have as human beings gets externalized into antis. Wife beating wretch of a husband? Ban alcohol. School shooter who iced a bunch of preteens? Ban guns. Black people mired in poverty because of fatherlessness? Burn down a bunch of buildings and knock down statues of white people. Women generally in a miserable state? Ban the patriarchy. Create a whipping boy. Make an effigy and pretend that burning it helps someone. I like fire just as much as the next pyromaniac, but even I know that burning down a business is an empty gesture; a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So Many Choices and None of Them Average

Modernity is pockmarked by the unwillingness to discriminate. This reluctance is what has led down the hellish path to our current Everything Goes and Nothing Matters culture as coined by James Howard Kunstler. In Wokie Clownworld, biological men participate in girl's sports (the better to see your budding breasts in the locker room, my dear) and costume dramas routinely race swap everyone in Jane Austen's English countryside for brown people. We wouldn't want the youngsters to understand the colonization of India or to remember blacks once died horrible deaths on slave ships before being traded for rum; nah. White people are evil though because reasons.

The idea is to fake it until you make it, and this includes the fabrication of history so history can look pretty for the camera.

Speaking of looks, for the modern woman, looks are everything. She must adhere to an ever-narrower set of beauty standards that morph every five seconds. Women of this era are expected to be as malleable as they are influential. We are a legion of Mrs. Potato Heads, continually improving, never aging, and swapping out features in order to remain in fashion. It's no longer enough to be merely pretty as a young woman... nope. You had better hustle up an empire, or it's no single family home for you. Even if you have a decent man, there's likely no way he will be able to provide unless he's got one of those coveted high-paying mystery jobs because he is a Chad. Though your goal will be to make "easy" influencer cheddar, you will likely sink directly into place as a wage slave, just like your future husband. Thanks to feminism, you'll do at least eighty percent of the housework and childrearing on top of holding down a full time job in order to make ends meet. If you're thinking there aren't enough hours in the day to be this person, you are absolutely correct. We have all known this is a rigged game for years, but since we are told we can and should have it all, we believe it.

That feeling when you have to distract your daughter from the woman humping the ocean in a stripper bikini.

Humility -- Does Anybody Remember Her?

Humility is one of those old timey concepts that I remember from back in the day. I wasn't good at it and I had little to no grace when confronted with a call to embody it. I thought I was bad, but the girls of today never think for a second that being average is acceptable or doable. When you need to hustle as an influencer just to be able to afford a modest roof overhead, you start believing in a bunch of lies that a shrine to the ego is the ticket to a good life. This is how we arrive at Influencers In the Wild, a hilarious account of douchebags posing for the camera when they ought to be participating in their actual lives. I am glad I never documented the fact I have a nice butt or tried to make money off of my figure. I was vain enough to do so and my butt was not in a position to argue. The young women of today are advised to live their lives and enjoy their own nice butts without the intrusion of a camera. The term "shake your money maker" was never meant to be taken literally.

The Third Scourge: Having Children Too Late

Because I am a legit biological woman, I remember when my body wanted children. I myself have never wanted children. I have known since the age of four I did not want children, and I was paranoid enough about pregnancy to avoid it altogether until I had myself sterilized at age 31. I did not need to come to an agreement with my first and only husband (to whom I am still married) because he felt the exact same way. I may have never wanted children, but my body was prime and ripe for it from the ages of 17-21. By age 24, like most women, I had subtle and creeping reproductive maladaptations aside from the usual ones.

Most couples start trying to conceive in their mid-twenties at the absolute earliest. This is pure foolishness. The female body starts going through reproductive hell at that age. At age 30, a woman is nearly too old to reproduce and fertility rates at that age back me up. With each passing year, eggs and sperm degrade in quality. The uterus grows increasingly hostile as menopause approaches. As far as being ready, nobody is ever financially or emotionally ready to have a child. That is why it is better to have them young, because at least the physical robustness of youth can lend a hand even if life's circumstances cannot.

The logical result of older people having kids is diminished kids born to adults who don't have the stamina or health to care for them. You'll never hear the powers that be -- not even governments in a panic because of their aging demographics -- encourage teen pregnancy though. That would take too much money out of the hands of fertility specialists and drug companies.

But like it or not, a mentally and/or physically handicapped child is a perpetual child. A woman who waits is far more likely to have a perpetual child who will never be an independent adult. At the moment, the creaking system is being hit by the first huge wave of autistic adults as their parents pass away. I shudder to think of what happens to the baby boom of autistic adults in thirty years. The woman's movement, if there is a such thing, should seek to legitimize young marriage and pregnancy and encourage young people to pair off and make hay while the sun shines.

I recently went to the shopping mall to get a boba tea. For those of you not in the know, a boba tea is a cold, non-alcoholic drink popular in Taiwan. Boba often features tapioca pearls, which are chewy, sweet orbs of tapioca that sink to the bottom of the drink and that you are given a large straw in order to drink/eat. Boba is in this way a light meal of sorts -- it's more meaty than just a normal iced tea. The best kind of boba is milk tea: it is the creamier version of what I've just described. I am a vegan and boba is very easy to adapt for vegans. The tapioca pearls are vegan to begin with and the rest is just tea and sweetener. Unfortunately for me and anyone else who does not eat dairy, most boba places make milk boba tea with dairy products, usually in the form of creamer. I will explain this later.

So when I went for a celebratory milk tea to a place that had previously told me their milk teas were entirely vegan, I by chance decided to ask whether or not the milk teas were vegan as I am used to the process. The young man at the counter told me that indeed they were not vegan because they use dairy non-dairy creamer. What the hell is "dairy non-dairy" creamer, you ask? You see, because there has to be animal products in absolutely everything, most creamers that are labeled non-dairy have a tiny bit of dairy in them in the form of whey. In short, the previous associate was wrong about the shop's milk tea and the young man was correct. Despite being 100% right, he seemed flummoxed and afraid of me even though I was a good 1.5 feet shorter than him. I tried to reassure him that it was no big deal, thanked him for the information, and left.

I believe the young man feared me for two reasons: one was that vegans in general are often asshats (I too went through the vegan asshat phase) and because middle aged women are often Karens.

According to a user on Urban Dictionary, a Karen is:

Aged 44, has 4 kids (they listen to kidz bop) has a bob cut with blonde hair, annoying, doesn’t want to “calm down” and always wants to speak to your manager.

Karen : I would like to speak to your manager.
Cashier: Ah you must be Karen

by MiniMint November 22, 2019

There are entire social media channels devoted to recording the antics of Karens. Another, smaller army seeks to re-take the name and remove its negative connotations. UrbanDictionary.com was full of definitions of Karen praising the name and trying to redefine it as "a beautiful person" as well a frantic efforts to either portray Karens as vaccinated or unvaccinated in entries made after 2020. A little reading between the lines reveals middle aged women on both ends of the political spectrum who are terrified to be called out as Karens.

Dictionary.com and Wikipedia feature a similar definition of Karen:

Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviors.

A Karen of the Middle Ages, Literally

Though we think of Karen as a modern phenomenon, Karens are as old as civilization itself. The Icelandic Eyrbyggja saga is set the year 1000. When a traveling stranger named Thorgunna alights upon a tiny farm in Froda on the Icelandic coast, she brings with her a set of precious linens and quilts. The chieftain/farmer’s wife, Thurgid, becomes insanely jealous of Thorgunna’s luxurious bedding. She makes no secret of coveting the guest’s collection of bed wear and makes an array of obnoxious comments about it. She is nothing short of delighted when Thorgunna becomes sick. Thorgunna, knowing of Thurgid’s lust for her stuff, makes Thurgid’s husband promise to burn every single sheet, pillow, duvet, etc. upon her death. Thorgunna promptly dies and the husband fails to follow her orders. Instead of burning the bedclothes, he lets Thurgid keep them. The story then devolves into a mini-zombie apocalypse as a result of Thurgid's evil Karenning that involves corpses who come back to celebrate their own funeral dinner, a nasty thing that slithers around in the salted cod, and an undead, demonic seal. Fun!

Karen in Non-Zombie Literature

Fast-forward nearly a thousand years and Karen pops up again in the Edith Wharton novel Ethan Frome. Karen is called Zeena in this book and is once again a farmer’s wife. Zeena Frome is described thusly:

Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light . . . drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its rings of crimping-pins.

Zeena — a cruel, manipulative, hypochondriac harpy — acts as the rocket fuel that drive her husband Ethan and her cousin/maidservant Mattie to a dramatic act of self-destruction.

Karen is Not Happy

The face that is most associated with Karen in modern times is that of Kate Gosselin, the subject of Jon & Kate Plus 8, a television reality show that documented the family’s life from 2007-2017. Kate, the mother of twins and then fertility drug sextuplets by her then-husband Jon, was the proto-Karen of the modern era. Her stripey blonde bob and control freak antics were all the more annoying by being shoved down our throats for ten years on cable TV. In essence, she was the first mommy influencer, blazing the trail for other abusive grifters to capitalize on the vulnerability and cuteness of her children. To nobody’s surprise, Kate and Jon were divorced by 2009. Their exploited, broken home resulted in obvious damage and unnecessary drama for their children.

Karen and Divorce

One of the ten thousand things that made up my mind that I would never have children in this lifetime was the observations of teachers I had in my long sojourn in public schooling. One of the few sane teachers I had in elementary school was a single woman with no children I will call Ms. Booker in interest of protecting her privacy. Ms. Booker was the only teacher who truly inspired me because she seemed to actually care for the 30 or so children she saw for six hours every day. The other teachers were often decent but mostly uninspiring. One bad apple teacher was so awful, she was forced to apologize to the parents of her students and other staff members for her behavior. I had the misfortune of being taught by Ms. Bad Apple. The pattern I noticed by the tender age of nine was that the teachers who were married with children were mediocre, those who were married without children were far better, and the single, unmarried teacher with no children was the best of all. The teacher who both had children and was divorced was Ms. Bad Apple, an entitled, bitter scold of a woman who frankly sucked at teaching and who should have chosen a career far away from children.

As we ask which came first, the chicken or the egg, we must ask which came first, the Karen or the divorce? Karen is a bitter and ungrateful person who makes everyone around her feel like they cannot do anything right. I would argue that Karen causes the divorce and divorce does not cause Karen; perhaps you feel otherwise. Gratitude is the secret of a long and lasting marriage, in my opinion, and without it, anyone in a long and committed relationship is going to have a bad time. If Karen is mean to perfect strangers in the grocery store and parking lot, just imagine how nasty she gets with her husband and kids when the cameras are off.

Karens in the Wild

As the Dictionary.com entry mentioned, Karen is nothing if not entitled. Medieval Thurgid felt entitled to her guest’s bed linens. Zeena Frome felt entitled to every penny her husband could scratch out of his farm while getting off on his misery. Kate Goselyn felt entitled to “easy” brand deal money at the cost of her children’s wellbeing.

When caught on video, Karens often stalk other people in stores, parking lots, and roadsides, demanding they kowtow to their demands. Karens believe they know the rules and they wield potential lawsuits like a superstitious mace. One video features a Karen hitting another woman and then freaking out and mock-collapsing in a Victoria’s Secret store, ostensibly because the woman got in her way during a free panties giveaway. Several videos show Karens stomping up to parked cars and trucks, demanding they move their vehicles because of some perceived law or rule that has been broken. One shocking video features a male Karen who insists a handicapped man cannot wheel his wheelchair down a forest preserve path because there are no vehicles allowed. A funnier video shows a skinny harridan Karen who berates some kids for ruining the forest preserve by eating too many berries and then breaking into a strange dance to illustrate her point.

Karens Everywhere: How Did We Get So Many?

Excessive Karens are the natural product of a materialistic, ungrateful society. When community is commercialized and relationships within the community become corporate caricatures at best, Karen emerges with her whip in hand, ready to subjugate the meek. Though Karen is associated with women of a certain age, Millennials are happily assuming the mantle; the Victoria’s Secret Panty Karen I mentioned in the previous paragraph is a Millennial. As William Blake said, you become what you behold. Spend enough time immersed in the fishtank echo chambers of greige office fauna on a steady diet of Facebook, online shopping, and Netflix and you too may become a Karen. Offices, schools, and malls are toxic places where the Karening leaks like a radioactive plasma spill. When life is framed as a boring succession of material achievements and mouse-find-cheese Instagram goalposts, the human brain responds by rotting and attempts to take the soul along for the ride.

Karen the Witch

As I mentioned, Karens are nothing new. In the old days, an old woman who made a silent career of throwing around malefic energy because of her general hatred for her community was called a witch. Though third wave feminists would have us all believe that all witches were wise and cunning women persecuted sheerly for being too good with herbs, some witches were actually persecuted because other villagers got tired of them throwing their bad energy around.

When I used to throw vegan gatherings, my get-togethers were frequented by a toxic, older woman who I will call Sylvia. Sylvia was obsessed with getting something for nothing. When I gave away vegetables from my garden, I started ignoring her calls because she pursued me so hard for them. When I hosted a free raffle for some kitchen stuff I was giving away, she entered her name on 20 slips of paper in order to game the system and win everything I put on the table. She did this when she thought nobody was looking. When another guest was backing out of a parking lot close to her old, beaten up car but in no danger of hitting it, she glared and scowled, worried that her ancient, dented car would suffer another dent. At a holiday gathering, she ate a to-go dessert that was promised to another guest right in front of her eyes. The irony of Sylvia was that she and her husband were very comfortable. One of my regular guests knew someone who was his co-worker; his salary was well into the six figure range. Sylvia had every reason to be generous and yet was consumed by worry that someone else had nicer things than she did.

I can easily see Sylvia being done away with if the year was closer to 1524 than 2024. A village only has so many resources. A wealthy resource-sucker like Sylvia who constantly wished harm on other villagers and who carried with her an aura of greed and ruin to every gathering would be all too easy to accuse of cavorting with demons. In its own way, lusting after free crap is a form of demon worship, but only of the most common and blasé kind that hardly deserves being burned at the stake.

Don’t Fight the Karen

Slinging arrows or otherwise avenging yourself on a Karen never works. Karen thrives on opposition and conflict; she is vampiric in that sense. If I ever find myself cornered by Karen in the mall, office, or forest preserve, I know not to react. I will zip my trap and be as mute and still as Tiger Lily on the death raft. I will also do my level best not to be Karen’s judge, because we all have a little Karen in us. The inner Karen we all possess is what makes us hate her so much. Anyone who has never acted in any way resembling a Karen is welcome to throw the first stone.

I have never had any problem with what does or does not go on in other people's bedrooms. I lean a bit gay myself, and if female-female relationships were somehow less fraught with drama than male-female ones, chances are I would have ended up married to another woman. In my self-conscious youth, I went out of my way to demonstrate how OK I was with other people choosing do do whatever they wanted with their own sexualities. I went to bars and pride parades. Every now and then, I expressed my open disgust at certain polarizing Christian groups that took Leviticus 18:22 literally, yet accepted shellfish-eaters and tattoo-wearers into its ranks without question.

I resisted being a TERF long after J.K. Rowling got cancelled for promoting women-only spaces. It was actually the long reaction to the release of Covid that ended my relationships with gay men. The few gay male friends I had uniformly turned into Wokezis who felt entitled to shame anyone and everyone except themselves.

There's an old adage that the Left will eat itself, yet the current mass hysteria about alternative sexuality was born in the Right. We would not have pushy genderqueer creeps attempting to insert themselves into children's story hour at the library if there had never been pushy evangelists who shouted from televisions and churches built on every corner during the last 200 years. We are on a pendulum that keeps swinging through sensible approaches to life from one heinous extreme to the other. On one side, there are sociopathic libertine clowns in full makeup and foundation-caked beards insisting that their autogynephilia isn't the same kind as the freakshow, serial killer kind captured in film The Silence of the Lambs. On the other side, we have equally septic narcissists who would slut-shame a dog walking in a park because her butt wiggled when she walked; transparently pre-occupied are they with the delights of perversion though they passionately preach otherwise.

In both cases, there is a shadow being carefully tucked away and denied.

I Won't Grow Up!

Adolescence is difficult to begin with, and it is far more difficult now than it ever was when I was growing up. Considering I almost took my own life back then because of how bad it was, to have it be worse now is a special kind of hell. I truly feel for the younger generations nowadays. I created a TikTok expressly for the reason of trying to help them in a way psychiatrists, counselors, and psychologists who are almost as common as preachy Christian hypocrites (and often one and the same) cannot.

I had friends who grew up as gay males in the 80s and 90s. It was rough -- they were bullied, harassed, and to make matters worse, teachers often looked the other way or even joined in. But as much as they might think they had it the worst, I was straight at the time and I was sexually assaulted multiple times in the halls of my junior high when I was only 12 years old. I was bullied and teachers often were just as bad as students. Public school was horrible and in the 80s, there was no awareness about bullies aside from caricatures in Back to the Future and John Hughes movies. The difference between me and my gay male friends is that I grew out of it and I no longer live my emotional life in junior high and high school.

Gay men are often ensnared by the Puer Aeternis archetype. Despite the aging, balding, pot-bellied image in the mirror, they are obsessed with the toxic myth of eternal youth. The reason gay men want to indoctrinate children is because they have confined their imaginations to eternal adolescence: obsessed with human beauty, preoccupied with sexual acts or a lack thereof, and constantly outraged from being trapped inside a persecution complex.

Gay women, ironically, are not as obsessed with youth because they want to mate with it so much as they see commandeering the young as a way to exercise control. Like the embittered Catholic nuns of yesteryear who ruled with an iron hand and a painful conductor's wand well-acquainted with children's wrists and arms, the gay women teachers of the new Millennium want to be dictators of their own banana republics. They want to erect statues to their own superhuman glory (making sure to tear down Abe Lincoln or George Washington as a bonus) like Miss Trunchbull in Matilda.

Don't Fear the Reaper

The trouble with putting all your unfertilized eggs in the ephemeral basket of appearance is that nobody ages in reverse. I thought I had an uphill battle as a woman when it came to letting go of being the prettiest in the room. As it turns out, my non-straight male peers were far worse at accepting the ravages of gravity and age. Just as certain women turn into plastic surgery addicts, choosing to have their skin detached and stretched out over a series of ever-degrading procedures known as face-lifts, certain men seek to turn back the clock by cross-dressing and occasionally amputating/augmenting their bodies in botched attempts to avoid adulthood and maturity. Notice how Dylan Mulvaney caricatures girls ages 8-18 and any given drag show parodies young Mariah, not present day Mariah. Mighty Saturn is their ultimate Kryptonite, and it is almost funny that they think they can outrun him.

Who You Callin' a Dictator?

It's also almost funny that so many "non-binary" people and their "allies" point the finger at the ostensibly straight accusing them of a dictatorship. There has never been an easier time in history to choose or declare your own sexual path. If anything, it is straight couples who wish to bear children who are most at risk at being shamed, excluded, marginalized, bullied, and attacked. Name one place in the US a straight person can live and not be constantly messaged with alphabet soup awareness propaganda: such a place no longer exists. After obtaining the right to get married, the push could have easily stopped and we all know it.

One thing that has become very clear in the last few years is just how beholden our entire economic system is to medical grift. Though it is estimated that 50% of the real economy has something to do with Pharmakeia, I would guess it is more like 80%. Everybody is out to make a buck on the chronically ill these days except for a handful that have somehow stayed out such as myself. Of course the medical dictatorship seeks to exploit awkward pre-teens and medicalize them into a lifetime of misery and dependence. That's how they roll. An industry that has zero problem with scamming the elderly and maiming and killing billions with forced vaccines isn't going to have any qualms when it comes to convincing kids to chemically castrate themselves and amputate working body parts, thus damaging themselves for the rest of their current incarnations.

One of my quiet agendas with all of the TikTok videos I make about healing herbs is to perhaps get the idea out there that treatments and cures are not limited to magic pills, amputation, and implants.

I used to get mad when other drivers, almost always male, would advance on my car from behind and then quickly swerve into an open lane in order to pass me. I often drive five miles over the limit, but it is never enough for Anxious Dude hot-rodding around the suburbs in his souped-up Nissan with a vestigial spoiler. After about six or seven years of the calming influence of the Sphere of Protection and daily discursive meditation, I noticed that suddenly what used to make me beside myself with irritation no longer bothered me. I don't find myself perturbed anymore by Anxious Dude because I now realize that his swerving and aggressive driving comes from a set of impulses that make him a man. For me, owning a car is almost pure bad faith and a curse that I have in part chosen because I did not move to a walkable city somewhere in Europe or the UK to escape American car culture as a young woman. For him, driving isn't so bad: he has a knack for it. He likes to go fast and drive recklessly. He's a boy and boys will be boys, vroom vroom.

Feminization

I got a sandwich to go at one of the many fast-casual restaurants that bless my area the other day. A portly young man with a beard retrieved the sandwich from the kitchen area. When he spoke, his voice was about an octave higher than what one would expect and though he wasn't dressed in an effeminate fashion, he gave me an entirely female vibe. Though it is possible he was transitioning, it is not the first time I have run into young men who don't seem to have any maleness about them.

In the book Our Stolen Future, scientist Theo Colborn speculates that chemical byproducts that mimic hormones are causing the feminization of animal and human populations. The chemical constituents of RoundUp from Monsanto end up in a polar bear in the Arctic; there is no escape for anyone on this planet. Endocrine disruption is the inevitable result, and endocrine disruption causes a laundry list of woes, including birth defects, stunted intelligence, autoimmune disorders, and infertility.

Fragile Males

Maleness is inherently fragile. Regardless of chromosomes, we all begin in the womb as females: for guys, their ovaries descend and become testes. The long process of becoming male is fraught with danger from Moment One in the womb. Males are always fighting. Male sperm fight to get to the egg... There can be only one, or maybe two in the case of fraternal twins. Then the male chromosomes assert themselves as XY. No staying within a homogenous XX lane for them! Enter plastic chemicals and the toxic soup of heavy metals, dioxin, and the latest miracle of MRNA quaxxines and it is a wonder that the human race is still a thing. If the male is not physically feminized to near-death in utero, there are plenty of well-meaning doctors who would like to inject him with an array of FDA-approved concoctions the second he emerges from his mother. If he survives, there's always someone who wants him to drink toxic baby formula and to get circumcised.

Wars

I hate organized sports. I probably would not have hated them if my idiot teachers from Grades K-8 had not forced me to participate in junior versions of them. Nevertheless, I was forced into sports every school day from age 5 until 17 because Gym class is mandatory in Illinois; it's actually Illinois law and we are the only state in the Union that has that law.

Sports are how society deals with males in absence of wars. Sports resemble small wars: two teams opposed to each other fight over a ball as symbolic resource. A sports fan once confided in me that he loved the feeling of belonging when he watched a game. Without sports, many guys don't have a tribe outside of immediate family. They are wolves cast out of the pack.

The modern incarnation of organized sports is a poor substitute for wars though because it is passive and based on spectatorship. The pot-bellied sports fan crushing his umpteenth beer on the couch stereotype exists for good reason. Organized sports are feminizing. They turn purposeful, earnest men into couch potatoes, alcoholics, and gamblers.

The Woke

Disney has been on a spree of trying to recapture its glory days by making its cartoon classics from the 80s and 90s as live action films. Disney remade Lion King this way -- basically it was an awkward, musical nature documentary... very weird. It enjoyed modest success nevertheless, especially in China.

The Little Mermaid is Disney's latest live action remake set to be released this week. Little Mermaid replaces the red headed, white titular character Ariel with a black woman played by singer/actress Halle Bailey. Halle Bailey was sent to do a promotional press junket in Mexico, where interviewer Patricio Borghetti graciously gushed about her beauty and captivating performance. Without any context or apparent motivation, Bailey viciously accused Borghetti of racist microaggressions and now refuses to do "unprepared" interviews.

Bailey is far from conventionally beautiful and obviously deeply insecure. Her invocation of racism is vile and disgusting, in my opinion, and as someone who is exactly as white as Barack Obama, I think people who manipulate white guilt in such a fashion should be permanently ostracized, disenfranchised, and ignored. Halle Bailey does not deserve a singing or an acting career if this is the way she is going to behave. There are plenty of young women far more talented, beautiful, and deserving than she will ever be. I could use one of my own rare talents decimate what's left of her career in a single word -- the only hint I will give is that it's a scathing reference to another creative work -- instead I choose to exercise restraint. Plus, she is doing a fine job ruining her career all on her own.

Men cannot win against this sort of wretch. If Bailey wasn't crying about race, she would be inventing other travesties whole cloth. Borghetti came back saying the comments he made were said with love. If I were him, I would have refused to say that worthless, race-baiting slag's name ever again. Halle who?

Sleeping With the Enemy: Men Who Hate Women

The fascinating thing about Don Juans and wannabe Don Juans is their hatred of women. I know many men who are as irritated by Sex and the City as there are women who hate organized sports and video games. The animosity comes from the portrayal of women as obnoxious Don Juans: it's not fun to look at that kind of self-hatred in the mirror.

In his book Bang, former pickup artist Roosh V spends all of one page on the sexual act, dealing with it in a vague and perfunctory way that suggests that for all his braggadocio, he wasn't all that interested in having sex with women. More telling is how few aging pickup artists have settled down with an elusive "dream female" waifu and had children. Roosh is 43 and despite having rediscovered the Christian faith of his upbringing, he has yet to heterosexually reproduce.

If you don't genuinely respect those with XX chromosomes as human and manifest this animosity spend most of your adult life attempting to trap them like an exterminator does to rodents, it seems you will have a bad time when the time belatedly arrives to live all the heterosexual values you pretended to espouse. Pickup artists are not homosexual though. That would be far too easy. Instead, they are autosexual, which is a euphemistic term for a masturbator with a god complex. A far simpler epithet and one I would like to coin right now is Narcissosexual. A Narcissosexual would happily have raucous sex with their own doppelganger if such a thing were possible, and the preferred offspring would be a Brave New World of self-clones. Hopefully Roosh V has left his Don Juan past behind and hopefully divine powers are helping him to ameliorate some of the damage he has done. There will be other Narcissosexuals who arise in his place and they will be just as gay with themselves as he was.

All of the above phenomenon are predicaments and they will go on unsolved as predicaments go. As for the effeminate male problem, I believe it is an issue of nature as much or more as nurture, and I will maintain my stance about destigmatizing teenage pregnancy in order to create a hardier, less feminized male of the species. As far as sports and wars, I am now at the age where I can choose to avoid all sports, and the only thing I can suggest is for those who have children to PLEASE GIVE THEM A CHOICE about sports, and pull them out of schools that force participation. It should probably be clear that to ignore Wokesters is my own personal policy, and I have even got to the point where I won't condescend to permanently sully their images with a well-placed witticism because they aren't worth my fire. Lastly, the pathetic spectacle of the Narcissosexual is hardly worthy of anyone's attention: just recognize them as the jokes they are and move on.

In a past life, I made the devastating claim that women had it easy compared to men. I was male at the time and it was one of those lifetimes that I began to become acquainted with the most common condition of our era: etheric starvation. Perhaps because I felt my wife was not able to provide the etheric bounty of the home I thought I deserved, I got snippy and made a rather universal pronouncement that I have been paying for ever since.

In this lifetime, I have had my nose ground into the sand of why women do not have it easy compared to men. For one, my period was a doozy. I began having it shortly after turning 12. It was a debacle nearly the whole time -- there were lots of almost-funny moments where I drank vodka screwdrivers at 3am while my sheets did a turn in the washing machine, which were a far better alternative to whimpering while in a fetal position in the bathtub between waves of gore and pain. Also not easy was the mystery surrounding the circumstances of my birth. I was told from a young age that I would have access to my birth records as an adoptee when I turned 18. This was a patent lie and I still do not know the name or identity of my birthfather.

Women do not have it easy, not by a long shot. Nevertheless, it is time that women stopped using our burdens as an excuse to make the world a far worse and more hideous place.

Girls Behaving Badly

If I had a dollar for every chubby, ill-kept, slovenly, high-riding, entitled single woman I have met who thinks she is owed her own Christian Grey, I would be writing this article from my country manor while my cook prepared a delicious breakfast. Just as the male equivalent of a frog should not expect supermodels to bear his children, there are a bunch of women who need a reality check. Yes, I get it that they have been told all their lives that they are princesses who deserve the best of everything, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too on this one. I am grateful for age because it gives me the ability to see that during the prime of my youth (age 21) I was at best an 8 on the 1-10 scale. As I age, this number slides ever downward, along with my jowls and my breasts. I would not have it any other way. One of the worst examples of nasty behavior I saw in my younger years was when a married woman in my circle made a rather public pass at a single man who was somewhat of an It Boy in our small pond of locals. She openly threw herself at the It Boy with her husband forced to watch. Luckily (?) for her husband, she was not much to look at and the It Boy took no interest. Perhaps that was the plan all along -- to some degree her outburst seemed like it was designed to fail. I have never understood why she dragged her husband into it by making her fantasies known.

Most people have unrealistic expectations -- that is the human condition. My argument is that it is worse in our era than in previous ones. Plenty of women are groomed to believe they can do it all; that would be me. Somewhere, doing it all gets confused with being provided for by a man, and I have battled that divide many times. I define etheric labor as any kind of work that improves the etheric plane, usually by drawing and transmuting energy from the surrounding astral and physical planes. Women do most of the indoor etheric labor in any given home and have been expected to do this form of labor since the beginning of the human race. Cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping are etheric labor. Teaching, feeding, and nurturing children is etheric labor. Traditionally male forms of etheric labor include farm work, mowing the lawn, routing out the pipes, and building. Men do etheric labor as well, but traditionally, men are expected to do the heavy lifting, often in the most literal sense.

Sigh, Go Get My Purse

The traditional marriage or co-habitation agreement tacitly states that the man will bring in the lion's share of the money and that the woman will take on most of the inside etheric labor. In Asian cultures, she usually controls the money the man brings in and is given the duty of being the house's accountant along with its maid, chef, and tutor. Nowadays, this arrangement has been thrown out with the bathwater. Women are often forced to bring in most if not all of the money, donating whatever they can make to a spendthrift man who wastes it far faster than she can make it. That is where the "Sigh, go get my purse" meme comes from: the dependent, lazy wastrel of a man who banks upon his limited sexual appeal and his woman's good nature in order to subsist a little longer as a financial parasite.

If there is an exact meme that encapsulates the female equivalent of Go Get My Purse, I have yet to find it and would appreciate your suggestions. The opposite pole of Go Get My Purse is an unemployed, spendthrift woman who does little to no etheric labor while expecting to be pampered and coddled with restaurant food, a beautiful and spacious home, and a handsome husband who is completely faithful and enslaved to her despite her own lack of effort. The advent of cheap petroleum seems to make this lifestyle possible if you don't look underneath the hood. This toxic feminine ideal is what drives so-called romance novels like 50 Shades of Grey.

Ugh, 50 Shades of Here We Go

True confessions: I have not read 50 Shades of Grey or its sequels in their entirety. I have not seen any of the films. I am going to come off as a major snob here: they were too insulting to my intelligence to read or watch. Keep in mind I will read and watch just about anything and that one of my favorite movies of all time is Spaceballs and I have read The Nanny Diaries several times. I don't hate 50 Shades of Grey because it is lowbrow or bourgeois. I hate it because it insults my intelligence.

When I wrote my own spoof of 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight, Shadeylight: Vella the Vegan Vampire in 2015, I found that I could not bear to read the source material (the third sequel to 50 Shades was published in 2012) for reasons mentioned earlier. Ditto for the Twilight sequels. Instead of reading them, I read reviews and went on bizarre flights of fancy that resulted in a very strange book indeed. In effect, the stereotypes of women and men in 50 Shades made me so angry, I decided it was easier to attempt to be funny when dealing with them.

There is a film called Book Club from 2018 that is little more than a flimsy marketing vehicle to sell the 50 Shades of Grey series. The "plot" of the film depicts four aging harridans -- a lineup of the usual actresses playing themselves: Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candace Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen -- who read the 50 Shades series on a lark and find that it transforms their lives and relationships. According to the creators of Book Club, we older women should be obsessed with straight male peen. Just as we are coming into our own, throwing off the yoke of reproduction, and entering into an era when we must forge our identities outside of being objects of desire, Book Club attempts to throw us right back into the "YOU MUST BE PRETTY AND SEXUALLY APPEALING TO MEN IN ORDER TO BE FULFILLED" cauldron. No thanks. Spoiler alert: all of the characters either end up happily paired off with an ideal dude or in hot pursuit of one. Second spoiler alert: if you are a man who has the misfortune to watch Book Club, expect some utterly ridiculous caricatures of maleness such as rich, hair-plugged men being hot to trot for old 70-something harpies for no apparent reason.

The Cliques, the God-Forsaken Cliques

We women are supposed to band together and be friendly. For me, this has always been a tall order. At age four, I distinctly remember walking to the back of the bus that took me to a fancy pre-school and being stonewalled by a pair of girls who told me I could not sit back there. I sat up in the front of the bus, alone and near the bus driver. The same women most likely became mothers themselves and would have been outraged if their children were treated the way they treated me at age 4 -- karma is funny like that, isn't it?

If it weren't for the legions of women who decided to wear masks and get experimental vaccines, we would not have had the Coronapocalypse shut downs that decimated the middle class and ushered in the era of deadly MRNA quaxxines. Women are also responsible for the sickening infiltration of public schools by outright groomers who wear badges of faux-oppression and who seek access to children for reasons far outside enlightenment. Women were the protective wall that stood between all of these forces and the sanctity of the home, and they let the demons in while spreading their legs and offering up their kids.

In order not to feel as bad about the obvious immorality of kowtowing to the Latest Thing, they threaten anyone with a spine with removal and shunning from the clique. In their world where Slavery is Freedom and Weakness is Strength, it's far easier to try to punish a dissenter than to face their own evilness and lack of character in the mirror.

Women have roles to play outside the traditional, of course, and I'm all there for the Georges Sands and the K.D. Langs. I myself am not the traditional wife with children; I have no children by choice and I am the primary breadwinner of my humble homestead. That said, many of us women need to grow hell up and figure out what we are going to do with our short lives. I suppose I had better go first.

Here are some terms that were not in place when I grew up in the 70s/80s: woke, equity, social justice. Political correctness of the type that is currently de rigueur was laughed at. Nobody would have dreamed of putting a biological male on a women's swim team, let alone a women's prison. Racism of various stripes was allowed to slide when it was not baldly displayed out in the open. In my teens, I had a relative who used the word "gook" to refer to Asians. It was not uncommon to hear white people using the N word to refer to black people, and not in a friendly, trying-to-be-cool way. In the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mickey Rooney did a turn as the ostensibly-Japanese Mr. Yunioshi, a buck-toothed, thick-bespectacled idiot landlord. In elementary school, we swung our bodies on the jungle gym to this refrain:

Chicky chicky China sitting on a fence
Tried to make a dollar out of sixty-five cents
She missed, she missed, she missed like this
Have you ever seen a China girl who missed like this

The acceptance of everyday racism and sexism made every interaction with non-white people awkward. I felt this especially as a child, being the worst of both worlds: half-yellow and half-white. Half-breeds everywhere know the pain of not being colored enough for the color of one half and not being white enough for white people. As a girl, guys did not wait for my boobs to come in order unsnap my fledgling bra and to grab my butt in the halls of junior high. This kind of walk-by molestation was called a "goose" because that is what they yelled as they did it. To this day, I think it is a miracle I did not murder anyone in junior high or high school. Back then, if you were a girl or a woman, you just took it. For thirty years of my life, I was thought not to think much of it if a guy cat-called me.

As weird and icky as it used to be, I would gladly take yesteryear's racism and sexism over the current reign of Generation Cuck and the Thought Police who get their binders in a twist when they spot a minor transphobic infraction to report to their ghoulish social media followings. At least the goosers, the racist movie directors, and extended family members had a sense of humor. The politically correct scolds of the modern era are as joyless as a skiing accident.

Consider the toxic masculine pyramid of the 1980s: at the top were Gordon Gecko types and electric guitarist/singers of hair bands who wore as much and more makeup than their 2020s drag queen equivalent, yet did so while calling themselves straight. The pendulum took a dramatic swing, passing right through a moderate period during which it wasn't OK to call Asians gooks at the dinner table but it also was not OK to lump all white/straight people into an evilly evil blob slated for Stalinist persecution. By the 2000s, toxic masculinity was on its way out, taking its refuge in game culture. By the 2010s, the last of toxic masculinity hid in the chans and attempted to assert itself through the MGTOW movement. Toxic femininity exploited the vacuum left in the wake of toxic masculinity.

Shame

It is a human thing to project the shadow. Anytime a human does not want to deal with something she is doing, said human props up an enemy that resembles herself and then pretends the enemy is the only person doing the wrong thing. Toxic feminists seek to shame because they carry a great deal of unprocessed shame. This is their Achille's heel. If you want to destroy a toxic feminist from the inside out, tell them they ought to be ashamed of themselves and that you and they already know why, even if you are completely talking out of your ass.

Look underneath the hood. Toxic feminists try to pretend they are shameless, but they hate the bodies they pretend to be so "body positive" about. They know they are hypocrites and their troll act is just that... an act. They despair over the empty, vacuous lives they try so hard to paint as interesting on TikTok and Instagram. Deep down they are horrified about just how deep they have dug, but they cannot yet look in the mirror and admit it. Consequently, they wag fingers and scream EVIL instead of being honest and throwing down the shovel.

Chasing the Unlimits

At its core, toxic masculinity is a refusal to accept the limits of masculinity and a placement of excessive limits on femininity. Toxic femininity, on the other hand, attempts to remove any and all limits, including the hard limits of natural law. Toxic femininity at its core is a refusal to discriminate about anything: gender, beauty, law, getting up in the morning and going to work.

When I saw the Broadway production of Wicked in the 1990s, I remember making a mental note about how many of the songs were about the removal of limits. Many years later, I made the same mental note about the film musical The Greatest Showman, which features the song A Million Dreams (because a mere thousand or hundred dreams would never do) and Never Enough:

Towers of gold are still too little
These hands could hold the world but it will
Never be enough, it will never be enough

In the decade of the Millennium turn, McMansions got larger just as hard limits were slamming down everywhere else. For many, many years, the salary class and the politicians who make its existence possible have done whatever they possibly could to continue kicking the can down the road. In the 1980s, what was left of American manufacturing was sent overseas to China and its satellites, gutting the American lower-middle class and propping up the salary class with obscene wealth. In the 2000s, inflating property values and tech bubbles to frothy highs did the job until that had to be bailed out in 2008. After 2008, toxic femininity began its ascent because there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, and no resources left to cannibalize.

Toxic femininity is a kind of cannibalism. It cuts through the gills in order to scrape the last bits out of the tube. By removing the limits of human decency, it enables sexual access to children. By lumping in morbid obesity and freak show amputation/disfigurement into an amorphous standard of beauty, it opens the floodgates for medical profiteers to cash in on mental illness and dysmorphia. By making it acceptable to shame white and/or straight people for the appearance of their skin or their natural sexual urge to cohabit with the opposite sex, it provides endless avenues for vice disguised as virtue.

Communism

The gay luxury communist utopia where nobody works and everybody eats bugs (ahem delivered by drone) represents a toxic feminine ideal of detached, isolated, self-hobbled bliss. Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are the ultimate figureheads of the lifestyle and they both have the man-teats to prove it. Toxic feminists love communism because they love violence: they advertise their love of it all the time by trying to equate free speech with violence. Communism itself is a symptom of the ongoing decay of monotheism: it creates demiurges like Pol Pot and Stalin who create mini-Apocalypses in their urge to re-create the world in their own images. Communism is feminine. It wants to conquer by infection in equal proportion to dominating via military might. The irony of communism is its domination by male leaders, and this is also the irony of modern toxic femininity. It is dominated by males, whether it is transitioning males on the playing field or XY chromosome holders with Her/She bars in hand.

Covid: Attack of the Killer Couch Potatoes

The lockdowns and vaccine hysteria of the 2020s were quite successful (but ultimately failed) attempt at installing toxic feminine communism worldwide. Without placing males at the heads of its nearly-unlimited hydra, toxic femininity cannot force its will at the end of a gunpoint because it does not know how to handle firearms without men at the helm. That is why for every Theresa Tam there are three or more male equivalents calling the shots. Toxic femininity is a cult of people who want to stay home and continue being poisoned, brainwashed, and spoon-fed. Toxic femininity is soft, pliant, and wants to take in and consume everything it touches.

In its current incarnation, toxic femininity is the juggernaut of the salary class. The toxic feminine takeover of masks, vaccines, and lockdowns was the most psycho in salary class strongholds. Neurotic, sclerotic rich people in cozy enclaves fought as hard as such types can fight for keeping Versailles peasant-proof.

Lockdowns are like McMansions in the way they are designed from the inside out. In the McMansion, there are enormous rooms the size of small houses that are bundled together in what from outside looks like a packed-together village. On the inside, there is always a cavernous foyer, a dining room, a living room, a finished basement with another huge living room/wet bar, a master bath, ostensible kid's and guest bedrooms, and at least seven large bathrooms. What the outside looks like hardly matters as long as all of these standard features are present.

Similarly, the toxic feminine salary class did not care about practical concerns such as a functioning economy and the state international shipping as long as it got its wishlist. The wishlist was mostly a removal of limits on the salary class. They were sick of commuting, so the primary goal became to give themselves couch time (Netflix and chill and GrubHub) while dictating orders to lower classes from a virtuous perch.

The handover of wealth from small businesses to mega corporations was fairly obvious when people were allowed to shop at Target or pick up Burger King at the drive thru but the tiny gift shop and café on the corner were forced to close. Of course the rules were childish: they were endorsed and followed by stunted adults who bought the luxury communist ideal hook, line, and sinker when they were not pressured into accepting its worst parts via shame and threats.

Subtle signs of yet another pendulum swing are lurking about. Shirts that read Nobody Cares, Work Harder are suddenly all the rage. The mainstream TV news media has to try extra hard to drum up interest in the latest failed effort to indict Donald Trump. Experts are coming out of the woodwork condemning Covid vaccines and all hope of censoring their dissenting voices has been dashed. I only hope that as the pendulum swings, it finds a few more stops in the middle this time.