#but yeah choice feminism is a disease

[milkcanned]

your disease

an alternate route where trafalgar law is effected by the feminization disease a little longer

ft. female!trafalgar law x afab!reader

switching, cunniIingus/oral, tribbing, heavily implied wlw/sapphic reader (duh??), ngl it gets right into the prawn

word count: 1215

a.n: i need her... him? so bad. self indulgent fic

Law honestly had no idea what to do in this situation. At all. How does a captain, stuck as the opposite gender, go about asking one of two of his only female crewmates about feminine urges. Feminine urges even as a doctor he could not have fully understood without having the body of a woman.

You seemed like the obvious choice to go to. He's seen you with girls before, right? Women stumbling to your cabin and promptly leaving a mess. Not to mention, leaving him completely dumbstruck and flustered, because how long have you been doing this and how good are you, exactly!?

Normally, he'd tell you off, like any other time he'd catch a crewmate sneaking in strangers for a quick fuck. But he didn't. And he never knew why.

Until now.

He's standing in front of the door to your room, hesitating to knock on the door. It's been a day after the fight and he's still, well, stuck as a woman. He's frustrated. Angry. Embarrassed. What the fuck is happening!?

He lets out a sigh and musters up a solid three knocks. A beat goes, and then your door creaks open. And wow, was there a sight to see. Law, in all his —her— glory, looking down at you with a slight tint of red on her cheeks. She's beautiful, and you hadn't realized until she was right in front of you. Her tattoos look delicate on her skin, her supple chest straining against the white tank top she adorns.

"Captain! Can I help you?" You giggle, batting your eyes. You know she caught you staring. You don't care.

"You fuck women, don't you?" She spits monotonously at you. You nearly double over in laughter. "How forward! Let me take you out to dinner at least!" You smirk, leaning forward.

"Don't act dumb." God, Law's a bitchy girl isn't she? You grab her wrist and lead her into your room. "Okay, yeah. So what." You huff, eyeing your captain.

"I," Law starts, a little embarrassed. "You.. Show me." Your eyes shoot out, and you manage to sputter a 'WHAT!' as you flop on your bed.

"You heard me!" She barks, arms crossed as she advances towards you. "The fuck Law!? You think because you're a woman now that you can be some girl pervert?" You accuse her, pointing a finger into her chest.

"No! I just," She's defeated. There's really not an excuse. Since she's been turned, though, she's felt so frustrated and angry. You can read her like a book.

"Oh."

You smirk, grabbing her wrist and leading her onto your bed. "I'll treat you. Get against my pillows." She complies, still a little embarrassed to be in this situation.

"Could you take off your pants?" She nods, wiggling out of her jeans, which takes some effort. Damn. Your breath hitches as you come face to face with her pussy. "No undies huh?" ... "No shit. My boxers are too big at the moment." She rolls her eyes. Yeah, that's still Law all right.

You bring a finger up to her clit to test how sensitive she is, starting to rub slowly. "How's that feel? You've never felt this before, huh." Law's thighs attempt to close at the feeling of your finger, but you hold them open. "Feels nice." She admits.

You smile, lowering your head to lick a stripe along her slit. You feel her shudder as you put her legs over your shoulders. She looks down at you with half-lidded eyes, already looking absolutely debauched. You dive in, pressing sloppy kisses to her cunt and tracing her hole with your index finger. "Oh, fuck." She groans, clutching the sheets when you slip a finger into her pussy.

"And, I bet it feels really good when I do this, right?" You start to curl your finger inwards, looking for that spongy spot that makes girls squeal. "This is the G-spot, but I'm sure you already knew that." You mumble, diving back into her pussy. You slip another finger in and start to go in and out with the rhythm of your slurping. "Don't you dare stop that." Law barks, groaning at every little touch on that special spot. You mumble a mhmm, which sends vibrations right through her core. "Oh, I'm." She pants, "Something's.. I'm gonna come." You vocalize another approving mumble, giving her a shock of pleasure. You speed up your fingers plunging inside her, and circle your tongue around her clit.

You feel her spasm around your fingers, and are met with a surprise when she drenches your face. You pull away from her pussy and slow down your fingers, gradually bringing her down. "Wow."

"I did not know I would do that." Law admits, still flustered from her orgasm. You sit up to wriggle out of your own pants. "No shit." You crawl over to her, straddling her hips. You reach out an arm to tug on her tank top, signaling that you want it off. She brings it over her torso and you're breathless. You have never really taken a chance to admire Law's tattoos until now. Every intricate line around the curves of her breasts.

You move back a little to bring one of her legs spread to the side, angling your pussy over hers. You look at her through your lashes, a silent gesture to see how she feels. She gives you a slow blink back, giving you the go ahead. You grind down onto her pussy, finding a rhythm as you reach up to fondle one of her tattooed breasts. "Mm, fuck." You moan, picking up pace a bit and alternating angles to rub against her cunt.

You're absolutely taken aback when, in the midst of your grinding, she props herself up onto her elbows to slide her hands under your shirt. "Law!" You moan, still slotting your slits against each other's. She tears off your shirt and latches onto your nipple, swirling her tongue around it as you rut against her insatiably. "I'm," huff "I'm supposed to be treating you!" you spit out, whining when your clit catches along hers. "Mmf." Is all she says back, with those dark lidded eyes.

She bucks her hips up to meet yours, both rutting against each other now in the race for orgasmic bliss. She releases your nipple with a pop, letting out a deep groan. "I'm not gonna make it much longer. You're a damn good fuck." She sighs, grinding up against you. "Me neither!" You moan, leaning forward to pant. She lurches her head towards you, bringing you into a sloppy kiss. Your rutting becomes choppy as you feel yourself coming, moaning into Law's mouth. She follows shortly after, wrapping an arm around your waist to keep you slotted against her pussy. "Oh, fuck."

You crawl off of her to head to your bathroom, dampening a cloth with water to clean the two of you up.

But when you come back into your room, you're not met with the nude girl you just fucked. No, you're met with the nude guy you technically just fucked. Your fucking captain. And he's met with one of his crewmates. Post-orgasm clarity hit the two of you hard, apparently.

"So, let's not talk about this again?"

"Yeah. Good idea."

[sun-lit-roses]

The Broca Divide

I’m prepared for anything in this episode: more Goa’uld? A new planet (PLEASE)? Weird 90s feminism? Bring it on! Season 1, Episode 5, here we go!

Ooo we’re referencing back to the pilot. I like that there’s a throughline to at least some of the plots.

‘I pride myself on my deductive reasoning skills.’ Sam looks like she doesn’t know whether to laugh or hit him. The General would definitely like to do the latter 😂

Why’s that guy giving Teal’c the ol’ side eye?

Oh, she’s leaning closer to hitting now.

Although, yeah, I would never get a single planet right if I had to remember a - what? six? digit code for each of them.

Why do I get the feeling SG-3 aren’t the friendliest bunch? Although maybe it’s just a little Air Force-Marines rivalry going on.

‘We’ll watch your back sides.’ ‘It’s my front side I’m worried about.’ Daniel’s been around Jack too much.

Did that guy just shove Sam out of the way?!

Oh good, I wanted to spend the evening squinting at my tv. I’m willing to believe it’s night, turn up the lights.

We’ve got squint vision or green night vision. I do not like these choices.

AH

Are those cavemen?

This is the second time we’ve seen cavemen in this show already. Is that going to become a theme?

Okay, guess we’re still going to explore this world despite the World’s Most Violent Welcome Wagon.

Daniel, that is not what survival of the fittest means at all, your 90s is showing. Now stop trying to prevent Sam from kicking ass. I would like to watch that.

Now there’s ghosts? Well, at least they’re trying to save that woman.

‘The Untouched’ I’m guessing whatever separates these people from the cavemen?

Hey, daylight!

And a whole city. Minoan, it seems. What are they going to do when they run out of Earth cultures?

A disease, maybe, that spreads among them. A bit like rabies, if they go mad.

No Goa’uld today!

Aw, the Nerd Duo is sad.

I’m not sure what harm it would do to spend an hour or so there - shouldn’t they be starting diplomatic relations or something? Are they just planning to spend fifteen minutes per planet and then never go back to any of them? Seems like a waste of resources.

I guess they didn’t run into the Touched on the way back? They had to go back to the Land of Dark to get to the gate, right? Maybe they were still scared away.

YAY! The nerds win! Also, yeah, it probably shouldn’t have taken the President to figure out that it might be nice to get a little more scientific bang for the military buck out of these missions.

Okay, Side-Eye Guy has moved on from side-eyeing to fist throwing. Have you seen Teal’c, sir? Why does this strike you as a good plan?

Teal’c’s not even phased. ‘I would prefer not to hurt this man.’ King of Cool.

Drooling - maybe this is related to rabies? He’s clearly been infected by the Touched somehow.

‘Maybe he was drunk.’ No one else made the Touched connection? Or maybe you just came back from Planet Rage People?

Well, that was dramatic.

Uh oh, Sam’s scratching her neck - she’s infected, too! Probably?

Uh. Okay. Well, that’s not a *violent* reaction exactly. Why is she kissing Jack all of a sudden? And where’d her shirt go? And how did no one notice her in the locker room?

‘I want you.’ ‘Why?’ Poor man, he’s very confused in this moment 😂

‘Not like this.’ Hm, that’s interesting. I mean, he’s been loutish a couple times (’I like women’ and ‘It’s working for me’ - yeah, Jack I’m not forgetting over here.) But mostly he seemed to see her as an annoying scientist.

At least Jack’s head is still clear - to Medical!

A new doctor! Let’s hope she has a better track record than the last ones.

Question. If everyone from the team that went to Planet Rage is coming down with this violent disease, why are the other team members allowed to wander around freely? Shouldn’t they be in observation or quarantine? At least until they figure out how it’s spreading?

How does Daniel not know what’s going on?

Ooo I think Jack might be tipping over to the Dark Side here.

Yep, another one down.

And NOW we have the whole team getting their blood tested. I guess it’s early days and they don’t have a protocol in place for Weird New Planet Disease, but this seems like it should have occurred to someone a little sooner?

Daniel and Teal’c team up, woot!

Oh good, it seems less dark this time!

Aw, that poor girl was infected.

And now Daniel’s been kidnapped by cavemen. They just aren’t having any luck this episode.

Oh no, not the General!

Hey, they have a clue now - heavy sedation. Not ideal, but more than they had! And Jack volunteered to be a test subject 🥺

Well, there go the diplomatic options. Teal’c is perhaps a shade too blunt for this task. But just the right person to knock out a guard and get a blood sample!

Sam got stabbed?! That’s going to be unpleasant when she’s back to normal.

I hope this doctor survives, she’s very cute when she’s excited about Science!

It worked!!

‘I cannot be certain you are recovered, you referred to me as Lucy.’ 😂

Everyone’s back to normal. Wait, why is Sam going, wasn’t she stabbed?

They’re going to cure everybody! Huzzah! I think the Doc mentioned there was something in their diet that promoted antihistamines. Guess eating your veggies just became imperative on this planet.

I am 100% positive that Jack remembers what happened and is just pretending not to because Sam was going to awkward her way through that whole conversation. Braver woman than me - I would have pretended not to remember any of it.

Sam did get stabbed!

Oh, so he did remember and was just waiting to roast her. Rescinding those tact points there.

Although it seemed to make her laugh, so I’ll leave that at a draw in the ‘is he just a massive jerk’ tally.

Rating: 🔘🔘🔘

3/5 Gates I know I said I was prepared for anything, but Rage People Disease was not exactly what I expected. Still, we got a new planet (woohoo!), a quirky disease, giant bulls, a win for the scientists, and Teal’c being an utter delight. Gates deducted for Sam inexplicably molesting her CO unlike everyone else’s reactions.

Also, is everyone taking turns being kidnapped? It was all of them in the pilot, Sam in episodes 3 and 4, and now Daniel. At this rate they should microchip SG-1.

[slovakbabe]

choice feminism is such a fucking disease i’d sooner kms than ever think that wearing eyeliner ‘sharp enough to kill a man’ is empowering. you know what is empowering? taking pride in ur natural face and refusing to please men by wearing makeup. refusing to shave and be shamed for the natural hair on our bodies that protect us and thermoregulate. i’d also sooner kms than not have a little pool of money for myself if i was a SAHM. yeah if i get married to my bf i’d merge most of my finances but i’m not giving up that little bit of security that i have in a bank account that he can’t touch bc frankly i’m paranoid. not because of him but for my own sanity. you people would sooner choose to apologize to the boot that steps on u than spit on it and tell it to get off of you

[peanutbutterenjoyer]

It really baffles me that so many people think it’s ok to exploit the insecurities of young girls for profit as long as it’s a woman who is doing it.

[a-room-of-my-own]

A while before the latest hoo-ha about Judith Butler, I had just been reading her again. Though she claims her critics have not read her, this simply isn’t the case. I read Gender Trouble when it first came out and it was important at the time . That time was long,long ago. She was just one of the many ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers I was into. I would trip off to see  Luce Irigaray or Derrida whenever they appeared.

I got an interview  with Baudrillard and tried to sell it to The Guardian but they  didn’t know who he was so its fair to say I was fairly immersed in that world of theory.  For a while, I had a part time lecturing job so I had to keep on top of it. Though Butler’s idea of gender as performance was not new , it was interesting.  RuPaul said it so much more clearly in a  quote nicked from  someone else “Honey ,we are born naked, the rest is drag”

What I was looking for again , I guess is not any clarity – her writing is famously and deliberately difficult-  but whether there was ever any sense of the material body. She wrote herself in 2004 “I confess however I am not a very good materialist. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language” . 

Butler from on high ,cannot really think about the body at all which is why they (Butler’s chosen pronoun) are now the high priestess of a particular kind of trans ideology.  The men who worship Butler are not versed in high theory. The fox botherer had a “brain swoon” at some very ordinary things Butler said. Mr Right Side of history nodded along in an interview. Clearly neither of these men are versed in any of this philosophy and would be better off sticking to tax law and the decline of the Labour Party. Butler is simply a totem for them.

Butler said in the Guardian interview for instance  “Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us.”

So yeah? That’s a fairly basic view of the social construction of gender though I take issue with the assigned at birth thing ,which I will come back to and why I started reading her again in the first place.

This phrase “Assigned sex at birth” is now common parlance but simply does not make sense  to me. I am living with someone who is pregnant. I have given birth three times and been a birthing  partner. I know where babies come from. There is a deep disconnect here between language and reality which no amount of academic jargon can obliterate. 

Babies  come from bodies. Not any bodies but bodies that have a uterus. They grew inside a woman’s body until they  get pushed out or dragged out into the world. 

The facts of life that we are now to be liberated from in the form of denial. Only one sex can have babies but we must now somehow not say that. The pregnant “people” of Texas will now be forced into giving birth to children they don’t want because they are simply “host bodies”. The language of patriarchal supremacy and that of some of the trans ideologues is remarkably close, as is their biological ignorance.

There is no foetal heatbeat at six weeks for instance. When a baby is born , doctors and midwives do not randomly assign a sex, they observe it and they do it though genitalia. 

There is a question over a tiny percentage of babies ,less that one percent with DSDs but even then they are sexed with doctors having  difficult conversations with parents about what may happen later.

Somehow, though when I read the way in which this is now all discussed it is clear to me that the people talking have never been pregnant, never had a foetal scan, never been near a birth , never miscarried, do not understand that even with a still birth babies are still sexed and often named. 

If you want to know the sex of your baby you can pay privately and know at 7 weeks ((*49-56 days from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual cycle). A 12 week scan will show it. That is why so many female foetuses are aborted . I have reported on this. 

Talking to paediatricians about this is interesting because they do indeed have to think through these things that we are being told are not real eg. that sex is just a by-product of colonialism for instance.  Sometimes pre-conception , geneticists will be looking at chromosomes because certain diseases are more likely in men or women. Males have a higher risk of haemophilia for instance.  

One doctor told me “When babies are premature, the survival advantage of females over males is well known throughout neonatology. This is sometimes something we talk about with parents when there is threatened premature labour around 23 weeks' gestation and options to discuss about resuscitation and medical interventions. In fertility treatment (or counselling around fertility in the context of medical treatments) it is pretty inherent to know whether we need to plan around sperm, or ova + pregnancy.”

She also said that if she involved in a birth that “assigning” isn’t the word she world use. “Observed genitals a highly reliable observation, just like measuring weight or head circumference which is also done at this time. “ Another doctor said that anyone involved with a trans man giving birth  would be doing the best for the patient in front  of them. 

Sex then is biological fact. A female baby will have all the eggs she will ever have when she is first born which is kind of amazing. It is not bio-essentialist to say that our sexed bodies are different nor is it transphobic to recognise it.

Except of course in my old newspaper ,The Guardian who are now so hamstrung by their  own ideology they have got their knickers in such a twist they can barely walk.  They completely misreported the WiSpa incident , basically ignored the Sonia  Appleby  judgement at the Tavistock. Appleby was a whistle blower ,a respected professional concerned with safe guarding. She won her case. The cherry on the cake this week was an interview with Butler, themselves (?) in which they went on about Terfs being fascists and needing to extend the category of women.

Does anyone EVER stop to think that most gender critical women are of the left, supporters of gay rights, often lesbian and that this is not America? We are not in bed with the far right. This is bollocks. Just another way to dismiss us.  

As we watch Afghanistan and Texas ,to say Butler’s words were tone deaf is to say the least. But they didn’t even have the guts to keep the most offensive stuff in the piece and overnight edited it out without really explaining why : the bits where Butler described gender critical people as fascist. Perhaps because the person their “reporters” had  defended against  transphobia at WiSpa turned out to be a known sex offender,  perhaps because someone pointed out that Butler was throwing around the word fascist rather like Rik Mayall used to do in the Young Ones. 

All of this is rather desperate and readers deserve better. When I left that newspaper I said that I thought and expected editors to stand up for their writers in public. Instead they go into some catatonic paralysis. I may have not liked this interview but it should never have been cut. Stand by what you publish or your credibility is shot.

But this is about more than Judith Butler and their refusal to support women . Butler is not really any kind of feminist at all. What this is about is the large edifice of trans ideology  crumbling when any real analysis is applied. Yes, I have read Shon Faye’s book and there are some interesting points in it and I totally agree that the lives of trans people should be easier and health care better . I have never said anything but that.

What Faye does in the book is say that there can be no trans liberation under capitalism so there will be a bit of a wait I suspect. 

Yet surely it is the other way round and what we are seeing is that trans ideology (not trans people – I am making a distinction here ) represent the apex of capitalism .

For it means that the individual decides their own gendered essence and then spends a fortune on surgery and a lifetime on medication to achieve the appearance of it. Of course lots of people spend a lifetime  on medication but not out of choice.  Marx understood very well that the abolition of our system of production would free up women.

Now it is all about freeing up men. Who say they are women. Quelle surprise.  

 Nussbaum’s famous take down of Butler is premised exactly on the sense of individual versus collective struggle “ The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. “

Such thinking now dominates academia. There is simply an unquestioning  rehearsal of something most of know not to be true thus Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex  “At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned.”

What does ‘sorted’ mean here? A tiny number of intersex babies are born. A tiny number of people are trans and decide to change their bodies. The feminist demand to challenge gender norms without mutilating any one’s body no longer matters. What matters now is this retrograde return  to some gendered soul. This is not something any decent Marxist would have any truck with . Of course one may change over a lifetime and of course gender is never ‘settled.’ We are complex people who inhabit bodies that often don’t work or appear as we want them to.

But not only is there a denial of basic Marxism going on here , what becomes ever more apparent is  that there is a denial of motherhood. Butler said “Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.”

Self-assignment is key . One may birth oneself. No longer of woman born but self -made. This is a theoretical leap but it also one that has profound implications for women as a sex class. We are really then, just the  host bodies to a new breed of people who self-assign.

Maybe that is the future although look around the word and there isn’t a lot of self-assignment going on. There are simply women shot and beaten in the street, choked to death or having  their rights taken  away. There is no identifying out of this , there is no fluidity here . This is not discourse. It is brutality and do we not have some responsibility to other women to confront male violence ?

Instead the hatred is aided and abetted by so called philosophers describing  other women as Terfs. It is utterly depressing.

The sexed body. The pregnant body. The dying body. The body is in trouble when we can’t talk about it . I thought of Margaret Mary O’Hara’s  beautiful and  strange lyrics and what they might mean. I await my child’s return from the hospital as hers is a difficult pregnancy and thank god they are on the case. The sex of the child she carries does not matter to me at all .

It simply exists. Not in language but within a body. 

Why is that so difficult to acknowledge? 

[malaysian-rants]

so what do we REALLY think of Sex Work?

If there’s one thing quarantine in Melbourne’s lockdown has brought me, it is the endless curiosity to understand our thoughts and unpack them. So at least once a week, I do a poll on my Instagram page feed into my nosiness and see what thoughts people around me have on different topics - exploring our stances on our mortality to orgasms to parenthood. Last week, I decided to understand where people placed themselves in regards to sex work and BOY, did the whorephobia jump out!!!!

“ Whorephobia can be defined as the fear or the hate of sex workers. Sex workers like me would argue that it also embraces paternalistic attitudes that deem us a public nuisance, spreaders of disease, offenders against decency or unskilled victims who don't know what is good for them and who need to be rescued.” - Thierry Schaffauser

Let’s rewind a little bit though. The people that responded to the poll were mostly friends from Malaysia and Australia. Malaysia being where I grew up and Australia where I’ve spent some of the most telling years of my young adulthood. Growing up, we have stignamised ideas of sex work, a very narrow-minded understanding of the various FORMS of sex work, and an even more warped perception of WHY people choose Sex Work (SW). The word of the day is choice - the agency to choose sex work. All the choices are worthy of our respect. In Malaysia, most view sex work in a very derogatory sense. We, unforunately, perceive sex workers as dirty, unsafe, in need of rescuing - saviour complexes, or an easy getaway card out of “real” work. It’s funny the amount of times teenage/young adult women will say, “should we just drop out and become strippers? hahahah” as if the sex work industry doesn’t involve immense skill and tact that is not necessarily a natural skill; it has to be learnt - like many of the skills a lot of us use in our jobs. Coming to Australia, the perception shifts. Some forms of sex work are decriminalised which create safer working conditions for SWs. It’s not perfect though, there still lies a lot of racism within the sex work industry especially against Indigenous SWs and there is still stigma in presenting as a sex worker in public situations.

SO LET’S SKIP AHEAD TO MY QUESTIONS AND DEBUNK SOME OF PEOPLE’S PERCEPTIONS ABOUT SEX WORK!

Question #1 Are Strippers Considered Sex Workers?

46% answered YES and 54% answered NO. *drumroll please* The answer is YES! Strippers/Dancers do fall under the umbrella of sex work. 

Let’s take a brief dive into this. SEX WORK actually an umbrella term coined by SW activist Carol Leigh to create an alliance between the marginalised groups of work & to counter the whorephobic second-wave feminism's derogatory terms.This term also helps to combat "lateral whorephobia" - another useful term to remember. SEX WORK as a term helps to unite a diverse range of workers. It combats strippers/dancers from saying "well at least I'm not a whore", cam girls from saying "at least we don't f*ck our clients", pornstars from calling escorts dirty - because ALL ARE SEX WORKERS. It takes away the stigma that people WITHIN the industry put onto different types of work - whorearchy as SWs call it! There are so many types of work that fall under the umbrella of sex work, a few to name being - strippers, dancers, cam girls, phone sex operators, pornstars, sugarbabies, people that work in brothels, pro-DOMMES, pro-SUBs, escorts, online workers, street workers, and the list goes on.....

(to flag: the next few stats may be inaccurate as more than half of the people that did this DID NOT PERCEIVE STRIPPERS AS SEX WORKERS - which may/may not change the future questions’ answers)

Question #2 Do You Know A Sex Worker Personally?

43% answered YES and 57% answered NO

Question #3 Should We Decriminalise Sex Work?

Around 75% answered YES and 25% answered NO. The real answer is YES! We 100% need to be decriminalising sex work and working towards unlearning our biases surrounding SW and sex workers.

Question #4 What Are Our Ideas of What Sex Work Involves?

“prostitution, escort services, massage services with happy endings, bartering”

“stripping, escorting, phone sex operating, sexting services, online entertainment”

“paid services for cash” 

“using your body as entertainment for another’s pleasure/enjoyment”

“people that sell any form of body pics (eg nudes) to escorts”

“exchanging sexual activites for something eg. cash, benefits”

“anything that involves direct touching from both parties” “lap dances”

“consensual services provided by adults”

Now.... there were HEAPS of people that replied with prostitution. Now that’s the first word to DELETE from your vocabulary. Sex workers don’t appreciate when people call them this. Below are more helpful ways to refer to SWs

Question #5 What Are Your Opinions of Sex Work?

“if you’re that comfortable in your body and feel safe at work then all the power to you”

“it needs to be acknowledged as an actual industry” “it’s work and should be protected and provided benefits as all jobs receive”

“I’m here for all women getting their coin! why it’s a taboo, I will never understand”

Sex work is Work. 100%, scream it from the rooftops! Here’s a response that I think is quite commonly held across the board.

“It depends on why they’re (sex workers) doing it. If they want to then YAS if they have to/no other options then :(” At the end of the day, whatever reason people go into sex work - we must give them ALL THE RESPECT and continue to advocate for safer working conditions to prevent exploitation,abuse and assault. There are a multitude of reasons why people go into sex work:

It’s a side job to earn more income

It's survival work

Sex workers also play a HUGE role in disability support. Having access to sex work services can assist with building self-esteem and give people with disability a greater degree of autonomy in being able to fulfil their desires independently.

Our work structures (because of capitalism) are INHERENTLY ABLEIST - people with chronic illnesses and disabilities that need FLEX work seek out SW as an option 

Question #6 Would You Date Someone That is Currently A Sex Workers?

It was a clean 50/50 split and THIS is truly where the internalised whorephobia jumped out because look at the next answers

Question #7 Would You Date Someone That Was Previously A Sex Worker?

82% answered YES whilst 18% answered NO. Here are some of the reasons why people answered NO for either of the questions and let’s debunk some of these!

MYTH #1 - “Cause I believe in monogamy” You can still be monogamous and date a sex worker. Way back when, monogamy was described as one person for LIFE and nowadays it’s evolved to one person at a time. This where the distinction that sex work is WORK becomes important. Sex workers are working when they interact with their clients/members in whatever form. 

MYTH #2 - “I’m a selfish boyfriend” This isn’t really a myth per say but it’s a popular line of thought. It interesting that we internally perceive our partners as ours/our property/someone we have onus over. I loved the honesty in this answer because like they say, it’s selfish. So yeah some people see dating a sew workers as “sharing” - as if SWs were engaging in the same capacity to their partners as they were to their clients. Well fam, I’m here to tell you that sex workers can make that distinction and if anything, are BETTER at establishing boundaries than the most of us. 

MYTH #3 - “I just think I wouldn’t feel safe having sex with them” This rhetoric only continues the damaging narratives that are projected onto sex workers which perpetuated the stigmatisation and discrimination sex-workers receive on the daily. Take a step back and unpack why you feel this way. What about sex workers do you perceive as dirty? In regions where sex work is decriminalised and destigmatised, workers have safe access to medical check-ups which means they’re probably getting tested more often than your average joe!

MYTH #4 - “I would feel less experienced (sexually) which would make me less comfortable” this.... well, is pretty common and stems from our own personal insecurities. some of us have felt this way REGARDLESS of whether our partner is a sex worker. It’s important to note that not all SWs work in the same way - some forms of sex work don’t require you to be physically present with another human, some just require a lot of imagination, creative and emotional intelligence ie phone sex operators.

So that’s all the questions! 

I’ve decided to start a #SexWorkSeptember series to talk about sex work across the globe to probe more open conversations!

Here a some phrases that are WHOREPHOBIC and we’ll unpack them in the coming weeks!

“I respect them and power to them but personally.... I couldn’t cause I have principles and morals ya know”

“I just couldn’t date someone that’s a sex worker :/”

“It’s alright if my friends and peers do it but oh no my mother/sister/niece/aunt could never! no that’s not okay!”

A final thing to remember is that sex work IS NOT easy nor the easy way out! Sex work can be difficult. Sex work requires marketing skills, assertiveness, confidence and a sales-like hustle. It’s as easy and difficult as your own jobs!

Over and out,

Lama :)

[ashandboneca]

The racism is coming from inside the house.

With all that's happening in the world right now, I wanted to take a moment to talk about racism and discrimination in the general pagan community.

I know a lot of people see pagans and witches as a loving, hippie-dippy, group who couldn't possibly contribute to such a hateful thing. It almost makes me want to laugh. Not only does the pagan community contain racism, parts of it actively enable and perpetuate it.

I have written extensively previously about my own experiences in my own community 5 years ago, when a local white supremacist was harassing me online, attempting to defame me, and attacking and slandering members of the community who are people of colour (POC). I cannot speak for any of those POC, I do not know their experience. I can only speak for myself and what I saw happen. I saw members of my own community, members and organizations that I have worked with and that I have trusted, back up a known white supremacist with 'they're just proud of their heritage' and a refusal to do anything to protect other members and potential members of the community, even with proof. I still see people that I know and used to respect attend their events or promote their events. The community where I used to live is so steeped in racism, and it is enabled by the people who have the power to prevent it.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to walk in the shoes of a POC here, seeing a whole mess of white folks who claim to be welcoming and accepting, sheltering a known neo-nazi. It must be so uncomfortable. It must be so infuriating.

Unfortunately, you see a lot of prevalence of neo-nazi beliefs and behaviours in the Heathen and Asatru community. Our gods have been co-opted by the jack-booted masses, looking to perpetuate their ideals of a pure race (which, newsflash, doesn't actually exist), white is right, and hatred of the other, searching for ways to twist the words of the gods to justify their tirade of fear and hatred. You have groups like the Wotan network, Asatru Folk Assembly (which is officially classified by the US government as a hate group), and the Thulean Perspective. You have the Heathen Harvest, the Soldiers of Odin, the Wolves of Vinland, Operation Werewolf. People take the beliefs of the Thule Society and the pro-Germanic beliefs of the Nazi party during WWII, and mix it with good old fashioned fear. Presto, welcome to the new nationalist kindred: whites only, please.

You run into a lot of issues with any POC who dares to work with gods from any of the northern European pantheons: it's as though they feel that anyone who isn't lily fucking white has no business working with their gods. Oh, did you buy them? Do you have a fucking deed of sale? I mean, try not to mention that northern Europe has never been 100% white, what with all the Romans and Moors who travelled there long before and long after they were Christianized. You think they didn't intermarry? Don't dare mention that most of the population of northern Europe is Christian, and they are praying to a brown, middle eastern Jew. Don't mention that their gods were queer and sometimes brown. Like, get the fuck over yourselves.

Don't even get me started on the racist practice of cultural appropriation, or the claim from some groups that are clearly not closed cultures (cough NAZI HEATHENS cough) that POC are stealing their beliefs. The POC have no right to the Germanic/Norse gods (what are you, their fucking keeper?), that they should (and this is a quote I have see many times) just stick with their own African gods, or go back to Africa where they belong.

Heathenry is not closed culture; it is in no way under threat of extinction, and it's practitioners were not subject to genocide or mistreatment. So yeah. How about no. How about this: we all should just listen to our POC and listen to what they say about their cultures and their practices. We white folks have no business telling them what we can steal from them; we've done quite enough of that, thanks.

As much as we claim that 'hate is not a pagan value', to some it is. A belief they hold deep in their very souls. It starts, insidious at first, as a belief in pro-nationalistic, pro-tradition rhetoric. It speaks of bringing together the 'disenfranchised', whose culture is being threatened by the cries of diversity. It slowly turns into anti-immigration, anti-islam, anti-feminism. Then it turns into marches and gatherings to 'preserve their culture'. Then it turns to violence. Then murder.

Example? Varg Vikernes. Super racist metal musician, confirmed northern practitioner, convicted arsonist who burned down churches, and convicted murderer. Now that he's out of jail, he preaches intolerance and violence through the Thulean Perspective. The man is so full of hatred, and because he was a popular musician, he commands a large audience.

Tackling the utter mess of the racist pagan community is not an easy task. I have no easy answers. All I know is that in times like this, there are 2 quotes I live by:

“Where you recognize evil, speak out against it, and give no truces to your enemies”

-Havamal, stanza 127

and the always quoted:

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

- Edmund Burke (often misquoted as 'all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.')

The most important thing to do in times like this is not not be silent. We need to stand up against racism whenever and wherever we see it. We need to own our own racist shit, and strive to be better. We need to listen to the folks who are suffering the most, and do what we can to make sure their voices are heard - and we need to let our voices rise up to combat the hatred.

We can't literal nazi fucks continue to co-opt what we have tried to build. Been there. Done that. Pretty sure we fought wars about it. It means making hard choices. It means removing people from your life who have decided, for whatever reason, that there are numerous people who do not deserve basic human rights. It will likely mean ending decades-long friendships, or family. It will mean standing up for what is right, even if it is what is hard to do.

We have to look at what these communities have become, and be absolutely disgusted at the state of them. We need to be the helpers. We need to be the ones to push to create change.

If we want this community to survive, we need to fight for it. If we can't save it, we need to burn it down to kill the disease, and start again.

[ms-hells-bells]

8 and 30?

8. How do you feel about the fat acceptance movement (the body positivity movement)? Why do you think it’s mostly women in that movement?

i think that everyone of equal worth no matter their looks, size, or health. i am very aware that a huge portion of fat hate is due to misogyny because men are nowhere near as criticised, women naturally have more fat, and it’s largely about attractiveness and not health. that is why it’s mostly women. women are the ones most affected by body shaming.

but i do have some qualms, because being concerned about the vastly increasing rates of heart disease, clots, diabetes, heart attack, and obesity related health issues is not fatphobia, it is wanting people to live long, pain free, happy lives. i care about others. there is also the issue of people can do whatever they want to their bodies, but they are doing the same thing for their kids, who have no choice in the matter, and we are seeing insane amounts of child obesity, which is heart breaking. 5 year olds that weigh 60kgs, children that have to use wheelchairs because their legs can’t carry them, they can’t breathe, their little hearts are working so hard, and will probably give out decades before their time. it is our responsibility to keep children as happy and healthy as possible so that even if they make decisions or develop conditions that lead to obesity as adults, they come into adulthood will all possible options open. 

i know that it’s very nuanced though, and that poverty, mental illness, and industry propaganda (particularly dairy, eggs, and meat, which are incredibly high in cholesterol, fat, growth hormones (steroids), and sex hormones that increase fat growth before it naturally occurs like estrogen) plays an enormous part in it, and that we need to work on this as a society while not devaluing those who are obese. subsidising of grains, fruits, and vegetables, removing animal product subsidies, programs to teach healthy, easy cooking, easy access to learning about nutrition, better mental health care, and basically an overhaul of the current social and governmental and economic system to erase the existence of poverty. 

yeah, that’s my opinion! i think that the fat acceptance movement unfortunately has the same problem as many other liberal movements, where when something is all the way in one direction (mistreating and dehumanising fat people, particularly women), they automatically fight to swing it in the opposite direction, which tends to not be the best option. when something that negatively affects people is avoidable if we change as a society, then that is what i want to aim for. but i don’t think less of anyone for having those issues, just like any other issue that affects health. it doesn’t matter to me what someone looks like as long as they have options that allow them the most health possible. and i know that losing weight or being skinny doesn’t automatically mean healthy (i’, thin but certainly not super healthy in my eating), and that people have rolls and chub and (under a certain threshold of weight) are perfectly healthy. but yeah, it’s not black and white.

30. How do you feel about ‘’baby radfems’’? Are they too young to understand radical feminist theory?

i mean, i got into radical feminism when i was 13 lol. i certainly have some feelings about it because becoming aware of how terrible the world is at that age made my depression and anxiety worse and i would literally have panic attacks. i think that their time online should be much more limited than adults because it is not healthy to be on here all the time, which i learnt the hard way. it is important not to be consumed by it in your teenage years, because there are decades of being an adult and having to think about it all the time, but we are only kids for a short amount of time and that time shouldn’t be spent largely worrying about indepth politics and being or not being “problematic” (as long as you’re not saying slurs and accept differences that don’t harm anyone in a positive mindset, that should be enough for kids).

but unfortunately for girls, it is very difficult because we are heavily victimised by misogyny long before we understand what it or radical feminism is. if there is no age limit for misogyny, there can be no age limit for radical feminism, as it affects our very existence and experiences. feminism in general is something very good to teach young girls; not the political aspects, but the simpler messages of strength, intelligence, defiance, worth, and justice that it teaches about. fromt there, give girls access to as much information in as many formats as one can. let them look, read, watch, listen, and learn, and they will form their own opinions naturally when they mentally feel ready to cope with it. teach radical feminism in depth then. it will take many years to full comprehend and understand, so i would say that they are technically too young to completely understand, but as they grow and continue gaining knowledge, they will build up on their base opinions. 

baby radfems are in a way lucky- in my personal experience, spending my teenage years in an online community with every kind of woman you can think of lead me to empower myself as a growing girl and woman. from 13 to now (19) i have suffered significantly less low self confidence and self esteem than my peers; apart form my face (which i got bullied about before i was a radfem so it’s a complex of mine), i have almost never felt self conscious about my body. i have almost never worried about whether men find me attractive. i have never regularly worn makeup (i’ve only worn it three times in total for special events and i will never do so again), i shaved for just 2 months before stopping and never starting again. i don’t wear or buy bras. i don’t wear dresses or skirts or heels. i am comfortable with grabbing things from the men’s sections. i speak up for myself and don’t put up with male bullshit. when my first and only boyfriend said something i immensely disagreed with on a moral level, i dumped him on the spot because i had no fear of being single and know my worth. i have developed my love of women and avoid viewing them as competition, being mean to them, of viewing them in a negative light as much as i can. i am happy to be single, or dating solely women. i have strict standards that i will not lower for anyone. i have developed so much knowledge and empathy for other minorites and how i can change my beliefs and behaviours to more positively affect them and be more aware of the advantages i have because of classes i was born into. 

although there were several years of depression, and sometimes it is still very hard, which much rage, frustration, and despair, but i can find happiness and solace in little things, and most importantly, in women and helping them as much as i can. and i think that there are very few movements that can have this big an impact on an individual AND group level (apart from lesbians) because other groups still mix both males and females, which negatively impacts those women no matter what due to intersectionality of oppression. women and girls are also raised with some incredibly positive traits that men are not, like immense empathy, thoughtfulness, kindness, selflessness, cooperation, etc. of course, there are still bad women, but on a class level, we have these things that mean that we will always have more of a secure, pure bond than any male group could ever have in this world. and we need to foster and treasure that within radical feminism, which i think some women forget, but it is one of the very few metaphorical spaces where there is the ability to create this sort of environment at all. 

so long story short, i think that baby radfems absolutely have a place here, but they need to be cared for, considered, and eased up on.

Thank you for the questions! i wish i could write this much (nearly 1400 word!) this fast and easily for my assessments lol

[recalculatingthegenderwar]

Feminist academic reminds us mainstream feminism really does just hate men

The Washington Post recently published an editorial entitled “Why can’t we hate men?” It is a short and illuminating look at the psyche of a modern feminist academic. In her editorial, Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danita Walters “names the problem”, a term feminists use when they get tired of dancing around how evil all men are and just decide to come out and say it. In these moments, the pseudo-academic smokescreens of “patriarchy” start to fall away and feminists reveal themselves as naked bigots.

Anti-male bigotry is mainstream feminism.

Although the article’s quality tempts you to think otherwise, Walters isn’t some random blogger:

“Suzanna Danuta Walters, a professor of sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, is the editor of the gender studies journal Signs.” [link to her bio added]

I’m surprising no one by pointing out that while women’s studies or gender studies could be a legitimate academic discipline, it is really only feminist indoctrination in practice. The Northern University Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program website states:

“We advance knowledge through interdisciplinary research, innovative pedagogies, and collaboration with other institutions, inspiring new generations of gender and sexuality scholars and feminist leaders committed to social justice. We strive to be a globally recognized model of excellence in gender, sexuality, and feminist scholarship.” [emphasis added]

Walters is neither a nobody nor a fringe radical. She is a feminist professor teaching feminism at a prestigious university, running a feminist academic center and a feminist academic journal. She stands at the zenith of mainstream feminism.

This also makes it laughable when Walters claims “[t]he world has little place for feminist anger.” I won’t rehash the mind-bogglingly examples of feminist power and influence I’ve written about. I’ll just point out that Walters is one of many for whom “feminist anger” is a viable career. This is like Bill Gates telling us, “People really never much had of a place for that whole computer thing.”

The problem with naming the problem

In my past articles, I explained how Patriarchy theory is the core narrative of feminism. Patriarchy theory claims that women (and sometimes to a lesser extent men) are being oppressed by men as a class. Since men are considered to have absolute power over the world, even problems seemingly unrelated to gender (war, economic issues, environmental issues, etc) are the fault of men as a class. Individual male misdeeds are attributed to the entire male class even if most men would find those misdeeds repugnant. Positive male contributions are forgotten. Indeed, Walters blames men for a “milienia of woe”. Because God knows humanity was so much better off a millenia ago. Things have really gone to shit since a man invented Penicillin.

Meanwhile female misdeeds are seen as rarities, ignored or blamed on male influence. Under feminism, women must be angels and men must be devils.

Men as a class are referred to as the Patriarchy. This obfuscates and dehumanizes feminist bigotry toward men. Feminists portray themselves as fighting a system rather than people. This is useful for public relations and seducing new recruits. It is unclear whether feminists are just lying to the public or also to themselves. I honestly think it’s a bit of both.

As feminists become more indoctrinated, they get tired of dancing around the problem. They feel like they are doctors who aren’t allowed to properly diagnose a disease that is ravaging the world. Sit in the feminist pot long enough and you will eventually boil over. That is what we are seeing with Walters:

“Seen in this indisputably true context, it seems logical to hate men. I can’t lie, I’ve always had a soft spot for the radical feminist smackdown, for naming the problem in no uncertain terms. I’ve rankled at the “but we don’t hate men” protestations of generations of would-be feminists and found the “men are not the problem, this system is” obfuscation too precious by half”

Notice Walters is not only framing men (not “Patriarchy”, but men) as the “the problem”, but challenging the feminist credentials of all “would-be feminists” who don’t openly hate men. Walters believes hating men is essential to being a feminist.

Walters justification for hating half of humanity

So what is the “indisputably true context” in which “it seems logical” to hate half of the entire human species based on a biological trait they have no control over? What is Walkers indisputably justification for hating over 3.5 billion people across the world with diverse backgrounds, identities and beliefs simply because they were born a certain way? You would think an academic would have a rock solid argument to advocate such widespread hate. You would be wrong:

“It’s not that Eric Schneiderman (the now-former New York attorney general accused of abuse by multiple women) pushed me over the edge. My edge has been crossed for a long time, before President Trump, before Harvey Weinstein, before “mansplaining” and “incels.” Before live-streaming sexual assaults and red pill men’s groups and rape camps as a tool of war and the deadening banality of male prerogative.” [included original links from article]

These aren’t arguments. They aren’t even coherent sound bites. Walters is just ranting. We don’t even know if Schneiderman is actually guilty of anything yet. Yeah, Weinstein is a jerk. He doesn’t represent all men.

Yeah, 2 incels went on a killing spree (killing both women and men) in the last 5 years. However, incels aren’t inherently violent. They aren’t always saints, but they aren’t a terrorist movement. There appears to be no evidence that either killer colluded with the wider incel community. Frankly, a lot of the reporting on the supposedly “dangerous” incel movement seems like fear-mongering/feminist propaganda. More importantly, incels are a fringe movement that most men want nothing to do with. Most men don’t even know what an "incel" is.

The only items with even a little meat are claims of live-streaming sexual assault and rape camps. How common are these things? Who are the victims? The perpetrators? Walker doesn’t tell us. We get no information about live-streaming sexual assaults. Her link on rape camps takes you to a 18 year old article about the trial of Serbian soldiers who sexually enslaved Muslim women during the Kosovo conflict. This is tragic, but is it grounds to hate all men? Again, the article is about their criminal trial in the Hague. Strange how the rape of women is globally condemned in our universal patriarchal rape culture.

“Pretty much everywhere in the world, this is true: Women experience sexual violence, and the threat of that violence permeates our choices big and small. In addition, male violence is not restricted to intimate-partner attacks or sexual assault but plagues us in the form of terrorism and mass gun violence.”

Walters provides no links or no citations here. Statements like this are largely meaningless without some effort to establish scope. “Pretty much everywhere in the world women experience” synethesia and gout. Female violence “is not restricted to intimate-partner attacks or sexual assault.“ These are also both equally true statements.

Similarly, Walters gives us no actual data about men’s role in terrorism or mass gun violence. I’m still willing to consider men might be overrepresented in terrorism and mass gun violence. However, does this mean I should hate women because women commit the majority of infanticide? What? I can’t because only a minority of women commit infanticide and most women find infanticide abhorrent? Feminists say I should be sensitive about possible psychological or social issues that motivate female child-killers? Really?

What about women being the majority of human traffickers? Should I hate all women now?

Surprise! It's the wage gap.

Walters eventually gets something that sort of resembles an actual argument:

“Women are underrepresented in higher-wage jobs, local and federal government, business, educational leadership, etc.; wage inequality continues to permeate every economy and almost every industry; women continue to provide far higher rates of unpaid labor in the home (e.g., child care, elder care, care for disabled individuals, housework and food provision); women have less access to education, particularly at the higher levels; women have lower rates of property ownership.“ [original links included]

Basically you should hate men because…wage gap - the dead horse feminists keep thinking will win the Kentucky Derby. The wage gap is generally found to be the result of women’s choices in the labor market, not sex discrimination. The same goes for unpaid labor. Walters’ own source explains that women often do more unpaid labor because their husbands often do more paid labor.

Walters claim about education holds a bit more water. Her linked source is a recently published academic report on girl’s worldwide school enrollment. I haven’t had a chance to read through it detail, but it seems to take a much more nuanced view of than Walters would have you believe. First, there are only significantly unequal primary and secondary school enrollment rates in very poor countries and/or war torn countries. The report doesn’t seem to blame girls lack of education enrollment simply on patriarchal oppression, but mentions issues such as the greater costs on families and greater concern for girls’ safety.

It is unclear what Walters means by “higher levels” of education. The report says very little about post-secondary education. It doesn’t seem to have any statistics on global post-secondary enrollment. One of the few things it does point out is that U.S. colleges have a higher female enrollment than male enrollment (page 18).

Walters never offers hard evidence all of these supposed inequalities she lists are due largely to widespread to sex discrimination against women by men. In fact, she doesn’t even directly make this claim. She only strongly infers it.

Walters Advocates Violence?

“So, in this moment, here in the land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men? For all the power of #MeToo and #TimesUp and the women’s marches, only a relatively few men have been called to task, and I’ve yet to see a mass wave of prosecutions or even serious recognition of wrongdoing. On the contrary, cries of “witch hunt” and the plotted resurrection of celebrity offenders came quick on the heels of the outcry over endemic sexual harassment and violence. But we’re not supposed to hate them because . . . #NotAllMen. I love Michelle Obama as much as the next woman, but when they have gone low for all of human history, maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts.” [originally links included; emphasis added]

Now we are getting into SCUM manifesto territory. The pivotal plot point in Thelma and Louise is one of the protagonists shoots a man to death. I’m less familiar with Foxy Brown, but it sounds like the female protagonist also commits violence against men. It’s hard to not to see this as a thinly veiled call to violence.

This fits with the general cowardice of Walters’ editorial. While it’s clear she hates men and it’s clear she wants us to hate them too, notice she never explicitly writes, “I hate man and you should hate men too”. She is simply stating “”it seems logical to hate men” and that women have every “right to hate” men. She isn’t literally telling anyone to actually hate men.

I’m not sure what legal, professional or ethical bullet she thinks is dodging by so thinly obscuring her obvious intentions.

Feminist Julie Bindel is a monster, but at least she had the decency to just come out and say she wants to put men in concentration camps.

Why was this written?

It isn’t well written. It isn’t thoughtful. It likely won’t improve the public opinion of feminism. Why would Walters write this? Why would the Washington Post print it? What purpose does it serve?

Firstly, Walters wrote it because she is a bigot who wants to spread her bigotry.

Secondly, the Washington Post produces feminist propaganda. I don’t know exactly why, but they do. They concocted a new bogus 1-in-5 college rape statistic after the CSA study finally fell from grace. They further scrambled to save the feminist college rape panic in the face of government data showing incredibly low rape rates on campuses. They tried to whip up #MeToo frenzy by creating a bogus work place harassment study that completely ignored male victims.

Finally, I hypothesis the main goal is to bring Democratic voters to the polls for the midterm election. Look how Walters ends her editorial:

“So men, if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.“

Since Trump took office in the United States, SJW groups and left-leaning media outlets have formed an indistinguishable mass of outrage to keep the anti-Trump fires burning for the midterm elections. This is why the National Organization for Women is making tweets about immigration and the 2nd amendment. This is why the Women’s March really wasn’t about women, but about left-wing talking points and hating Trump.

Take a look at this sentence again:

“Pledge to vote for feminist women only.” [emphasis added]

Remember feminism isn’t for women. Feminism is for feminism.

[todays-coupon123]

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Source URL: Quebec Cannabis Seeds Coupon Code

[fightersagainstnarccistic]

More of Valkyrie Western Martial Arts Bullshido

Randy is a really bad source of information for martial arts and fitness.

We can prove this in numerous ways.

Here is Randy giving nutrition advice which has clearly never worked for himself http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2013/09/18/power-stars/

And here is Randy talking about how he doesn't need to diet even though admits he is over weight

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2012/07/12/sixty-pound-cupcake/

These posts were made in 2013 and 2012. So what has been the consequences of Randy’s lifestyle choices and bad nutritional ideas?

Well.....it’s not good. 

Randy calls it a “broken ticker”.

That’s a really cute way of saying heart disease.

Randy’s lifestyle choices, all his earlier ranting about how everyone else has a poor understanding of fitness than he does, have amounted to developing heart disease at 50 years old. 

This is important for us to stress. His bullshido that he teaches to others, is actually killing him.

Here is some other relevant bullshido that Randy has spouted over the years and taught to his students instead of just losing weight and dieting like a normal sane person,

Randy incorrectly claiming mobility is the key to being healthy, and ignoring what is going on inside the body itself,

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2013/08/21/strong-body/

Here is Randy dismissing well established science on how fatness is unhealthy http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2013/08/19/healthy-body/

This is all blatantly incorrect and a ridiculous claim for a self-styled fitness coach to be saying.

That is not how somatotype body types are classified, and it’s not a strictly scientific approach to fitness anyway, and is often mis-used by fitness gurus who are more woo-woo than substance. Someone who claims to understand sports science should know this. 

Also, “Fat” and “overweight” mean the exact same thing, and playing little games of semantics won’t change this reality even if they make your ego feel better.

Speaking of Randy’s bullshido, here are a bunch of various psuedo-intellectual ramblings that Randy has posted over the years and which his cult has eaten up like pigs eating slop at a trough.

We said in a prior post that Valkyrie is the Scientology of the HEMA community. We stand by this statement.

This guy actually believes he is more intelligent than everybody else and these people who support him feed his narcissism.

So this one is interesting, not just because it is total fucking nonsense, but because his cult members, I mean students, such as Kaja, eat it up.

Oh, you “get it”, do you?

God you guys really would drink the Kool-Aid if he started passing out cups, wouldn’t you? You’re that far gone. 

So much pseudo-intellectual bullshido man. So much.

Here’s some more big brain stuff,

We’re telling you. This is the Scientology of HEMA.

But we want you to read some of the comments he gets to the above post from the more easily malleable among us.

It’s a cult guys.

Valkyrie is a cult.

And they’re all going down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.

Yeah well, I am pretty sure if I smash someone in the head with a sledgehammer instead of with a fork, their skull is going to take a lot more damage from the sledgehammer. 

Likewise I am very certain that thrusting with a spear generates more force than with a long sword. Which is why currently we can safely practice at high intensity with long sword fencing, but not do the same with polearms.

That’s kind of how physics work. But you’d have to let go of all your bullshido ideas to join us in the real world to accept this. 

Speaking of,

Pretty sure that has not a damn thing to do with real combat.

We’re going to cap this section off by showcasing where Randy really shows he is heavily influenced by movies he watches.

So. Much. Bullshit.

Dude, we’re all mutants. That’s kind of how evolution works.

But he’s developed this entire theory just so he can feel better about his disabilities.

And even appropriated the label of ‘veteran’ for himself, too. Good going Professor X. You’re way deep into denial now.

Down below, here is an article where Randy claims competitive athletes are afraid of his bullshido class workouts, because they are so “intense” because they do basic gymnastic tumbling exercises,

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2014/08/05/growing-power/

Which, by the way, Randy is convinced are all very relevant for combat. 

They are not, which is why military combatives training does not incorporate hand stands and cart wheels. Far more relevant exercises are focused on instead like push ups and jogging.

If you’d like a laugh, here’s Randy having a big brain moment where he makes several outrageous claims about how much smarter he is than most everyone else,

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2014/07/28/accepting-average/

Okay, enough poking at him for being arrogant. 

If you spend time reading through Randy’s blog posts you will discover they are a mess of disconnected thoughts, mixed in with narcissistic statements, woo and bullshido 

I mean, there was even that  time where Randy started referring to Capo Ferro as “Wolf Lord of Blades” because he became a fan of Game of Thrones, 

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2013/07/17/the-wolf-lord-of-blades/

,And here is an article where Randy speaks negatively of professional sport tournaments for having gender specific divisions. 

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2017/03/31/fitting-everyone-into-tournaments/

This is probably around the time that Randy began fully embracing the woke stuff in order to appeal more to the new demographic he started focusing on with Valkyrie, who were easier than trying to get more experienced athletes who understood basic tumbling exercises are not the epitome of martial arts training and could not be so easily sold on his bullshido.

He totally ignores all of the numerous, very obvious physical differences between men and women which give men huge advantages in sports, which is why these gender divisions exist. It’s not designed to put women down. It’s to allow them to have a field to compete on where they won’t be completely outclassed by men. 

Feminism as an ideology is fine, but we have to accept biological differences based on human evolution. Just because we no longer need to fight against damn near everything on the planet to survive doesn’t mean all the athletic advantages men have to protect women during their pregnancy periods have magically vanished into our imaginations. They are still inherent to our biology and need to be recognized. You cannot wish them away with ideologies. 

At this point we hope we’ve shown enough of the true side of Randy and his school, and how it operates that you can feel confident that something is not right with Valkyrie, and it is actually a cult.

A cult led by a very unstable person, who manipulates other unstable people down rabbit holes. 

And at present they have decided to attack a rival school with their full might. 

Let that sink in abit. 

Next article

Additional abusers who assist Valkyrie https://fightersagainstnarccistic.tumblr.com/post/624699657862381568/additional-narcissistic-abusers-who-assist

[epacer]

Classmates

Kathy Najimy, Class of 1975

Kathy Najimy on fighting for equality, “Hocus Pocus,” and performing with the American Pops Orchestra

Kathy Najimy enjoys playing games. Literally.

“For about three years, when I was living in San Diego,” she says of her early days trying to break into show business, “I paid the rent by going on Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud, and The $10,000 Pyramid.”

Years later, of course, Najimy, beloved for her roles as Sister Mary Patrick in Sister Act, part of a trio of witch siblings in Hocus Pocus, and as Peggy Hill in Mike Judge’s stunning, astonishingly heartfelt animated sitcom King of the Hill, appears on game shows as a celebrity star. Her favorite is Pyramid, which she calls “a brilliantly designed” game show, as winning it relies on talent. “There’s not a lot of luck,” she says. “It’s heaven for me. Any time that they call me up to go do the $100,000 Pyramid — especially because I get to be around the really, really cute Michael Strahan — I say ‘Yes!'”

If game shows are Najimy’s preferred form of celebrity leisure, then activism is her driving lifeforce. A card-carrying, outspoken feminist (she’s pals with Gloria Steinem, who officiated her marriage to musician Dan Finnerty in 1998), Najimy has been aligned with nearly every liberal rights organization in modern history, from PETA and Planned Parenthood to HRC and PFLAG. Her passion for what she feels is right and good and just flows naturally and abundantly from her, and she speaks of change and justice with a ferocious, emphatic charge.

“I have been a feminist since I was 14 years old,” she says over the course of two phone conversations. “And feminism dedicates itself to the equality and respect of all people.”

Najimy will appear as a special guest at this Saturday’s American Pops Orchestra concert, “I Am What I Am: The Music of Jerry Herman,” alongside Paige Davis of Trading Spaces, Broadway star Mauricio Martinez (see page 32), RuPaul’s Drag Race contender Alexis Michelle, Tracy Lynn Olivera, and Paul Roeckell, and was surprised when she got the call to appear.

“My agent got the request,” she says. “They said, ‘Does Kathy happen to be free on this weekend.’ And I was. And other than what’s going on there right now with the administration, I love Washington, D.C. I said, ‘Listen you guys, despite what you think from a couple of old movies that I used to do, where I kind of pretend comedy sing, I don’t really sing.’ And they said, ‘It’s okay, don’t worry. We’ll make it work.’ They were just so adorable and so persistent and convincing that I said sure. I think it will be really fun.”

“It’s so funny,” says APO’s founder and conductor, Luke Frazier. “She walked into the first rehearsal and said, ‘I’m not really a singer. I’m more of a talk-singer.’ We get done with rehearsal. I’m like, ‘No, Kathy. You can actually sing.’ She’s just very modest about it.”

Frazier has chosen a few special numbers for Najimy — among them one of Herman’s greatest chestnuts: “Hello, Dolly!” She’ll also sing “Bosom Buddies,” a raucous duet from Mame, with Davis and “The Man in the Moon” from the same show.

“So many of Jerry Herman’s female leads are truly larger than life,” says Frazier. “They all have an element of comedy, but there’s a lot of depth to them. Kathy has played so many roles where she shows off not only her comedic side, but as a person, there’s so much depth in the causes she cares about. Since she spends so much of her time on activism, it’s kind of that great duality. She brings so much to the roles.”

For her part, Najimy is thrilled to be a part of Saturday’s APO event. Each of APO’s shows are unique to their one evening, hand-crafted by Frazier to be eclectic, entertaining, musically invigorating, and fully adventurous. All the performers have a moment in the spotlight, culminating in a powerful all-hands-on-deck finale, and each APO show is calculated to evoke a wide range of emotional responses — from boisterous laughter to some serious heartstring-tugging.

“Every single APO show is original,” says Frazier. “We create them. They’ve never been done before. They’re never performed again. It’s one night. It’s a special event. That’s what makes us unique.”

Najimy, for her part, is up for the challenge. “I did a lot of musicals growing up — I did a lot in community theater,” she says. “I sung badly on purpose in Sister Act. And I sang backup for Bette in Hocus Pocus. But none of it was solo performer singing.”

Najimy, whose current projects include producing a documentary exploring why more than 50% of white women voted for Donald Trump, plans to incorporate some of her ideologies into the evening, but she won’t go into specifics. “I have about three songs,” she says, “and before each song, I’m going to talk a little bit about — not in a serious way — just where we are, that we’re in D.C., and how close we are to the haunted house. And also how much women have come forward and made strides in the [House] last year, which is really heartening.

“Of course,” she adds, “I would have liked for us to take the Senate as well.”

METRO WEEKLY: You are a well-known, amazing advocate for many issues, but specifically, with regard to the LGBTQ community, you took a stance for us as a celebrity long before many others. You were one of the first. And I think that’s remarkable. You didn’t have to do that. So the obvious question is, why?

KATHY NAJIMY: Well, I’ll tell you. I’m a feminist. And as a feminist, I believe in equal rights, equality, and justice for all people. So when there is a community of people who are being treated less than citizens because of who they love, that makes no sense to me. I believe everybody has the ability to love anybody. And I feel like there’s a spectrum between one and a hundred and we all fit somewhere there. Love is love, you know? And I believe that with all my heart. So I thought it was very unjust when I was a young activist in the ’70s and ’80s that anybody would be persecuted. That made no sense to me. I was happy to — and honored — to help any way that I could.

Also, in the ’80s, I was in college when the AIDS epidemic came to light. I’ve been sort of an ambassador for people with AIDS for many, many years. AIDS is the only disease where the people who have it are persecuted. If you have any other major disease, you’re surrounded by love and doctors wanting to help. People with AIDS not only had found themselves with a life-threatening disease, but also with no support. And that broke my heart.

MW: It’s different now, though.

NAJIMY: Different, yes. But when we needed it not to be different, it wasn’t. I mean, there’s a lot of people living healthy lives with HIV/AIDS now, thank goodness, but we lost way too many for no reason other than homophobia and hate.

MW: Did you at all worry at all about what your outspokenness, especially in the early years, might do to your career?

NAJIMY: Oh, it certainly has harmed my career, but I don’t care at all. I am an activist and human person first. Business is not everything, it’s not my life. There were certainly people — agents and such — who said if you speak out about this, then these people won’t cast you. And I said I respect their choice not to cast me. That is their choice and that’s fine. I don’t wish to be cast by them. And I respect my choice to be an advocate and to speak out and do one of the things in my life that is most precious to me.

Certainly, there have been studios that have asked me not to talk about radical notions. It’s their right to ask me and my right to decide to. You should hear some of the requirements they make. But isn’t it great to be a troublemaker? [Laughs.] It’s so sexy! I love it.

MW: You’re definitely my kind of troublemaker. We live in a country founded on different points of view. Yet, I often find myself feeling the opposing point of view is wrong.

NAJIMY: Yeah, but I respect their right to say it. I fight for their right to say what I don’t believe in. I don’t fight for their right to legislate against human conditions and human choices. But freedom of speech is freedom of speech, and we all don’t have the same opinions.

MW: I look over your career and think how marvelous it’s been so far. One of my favorite shows you did was King of the Hill. Peggy Hill was just such a rich, full-bodied animated character, largely through your interpretation of her. The show poked fun at conservative values, but not in a mean way — it was more instructive. Mike Judge found a way to appeal to both liberals and conservatives and provide insights.

NAJIMY: I’ve got to tell you — I’ve been on a lot of jobs and my thirteen seasons on King of the Hill were among my favorite. It’s really hard to find integrity like that. Every single Monday on our doorstep came a script that was just so funny and so relevant and so brave. I loved the writing on King of the Hill. I also liked that it was very collaborative — we weren’t separate from the writers. We were all at the table read together. We all got to put in our point of view. It was very respectful of the actors and what we wanted to bring to the characters. There was no preciousness about anything. And, to tell the truth, the greatest part is that there was no hair, no makeup, no line memorizing, no 6 a.m. calls. No wardrobe fittings. You just showed up for a couple of hours and recorded. It’s something I’m so proud of — I love King of the Hill. Every moment of it was just a joy and I’m a complainer, so there you go.

Najimy

MW: One of your biggest hits was Hocus Pocus, which just celebrated its 25th Anniversary. Disney made a big deal about it. Can you briefly talk about your experience making it?

NAJIMY: I’ve made 30 films, and you never know which ones are going to stick, which ones are going to become really popular. You just sort of make them. So the experience of it was only very singular to me because I had been a huge fan — like a crazy sycophant fan — of Bette Midler’s growing up.

I had all of her posters. I had all of her records. I had several incidents where I would run backstage at the Hollywood Bowl with guards running after me, and opening all the rooms until I found her in the room. I had one where I found where she lived in New York, when I visited New York in the ’70s, and left a message with her housekeeper. I even had one where I sang to her.

MW: That’s something.

NAJIMY: Well, I worked for a singing telegram company in San Diego. So my boyfriend at the time, Greg Barnes, who is now a big fancy Broadway costume designer, had designed costumes for a junior theater’s Alice in Wonderland. He gave me the “I’m late, I’m late” bunny costume. We took the bus up the Hollywood Bowl where Bette was performing and I pretended to the officials that I had a singing telegram for her after the show. But it really was just from me.

So, I hopped backstage, and in all these pseudo-celebrities were in Bette’s room surrounding her. And I sang a song and handed her the telegram that said, “From Kathy.” And she said, “Kathy? Kathy who?” And I said, “I don’t know, but I love you, too!” And I hopped out and fainted.

So for all of those experiences, plus more that we can’t go into today, getting a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg, after I did Sister Act, who said, “I want to offer you a role in a movie called Hocus Pocus to play Bette Midler’s sister” — that was really a full fate turnaround. An interesting highlight of my life.

MW: Did you ever reveal to Bette that the singing bunny was you?

NAJIMY: I didn’t want to freak her out, so I would slowly let her know things. Like, “Oh, you wore those shoes in Chicago in March of ’78. No, no, you didn’t sing that at that concert. You sang this other song.” She would always sort of look at me side-eyed until one day I said, “Remember that girl who ran backstage and got pulled off by the guards?” And she said, “Yes.” I go, “And then, remember that bunny?” And she said, “Yes.” I said, “Well, I’m the bunny.”

MW: What did she say?

NAJIMY: I think it was just a very slow sort of like, “Oh God, I’m making a movie with a crazy person” into very good castmates and friends.

MW: What was it like working with her?

NAJIMY: It was great. She’s tough and she knows what she wants, and so am I, and there was a lot involved in Hocus Pocus. There was dancing and singing and children and animals, and I mean, it was just flying, it was a lot, but it didn’t do well the first weekend. It didn’t do well at all. It just took years and years, and slowly started building an audience, generation after generation.

MW: And now it’s a phenomenon.

NAJIMY: Who knew?

MW: I will often ask this question of straight actors we speak with: Do you remember the first time someone came out to you, and what was your response?

NAJIMY: You know, I think one reason that I am effortlessly an ally of the gay community, besides my political views, is that in community theater, you’re usually surrounded by a lot of gay men. Those were the guys I hung out with, those were my friends. So being a part of the gay community was seamless for me. All my friends came out to me. In fact, straight married men now will come out to me. I’m a gay magnet. People who want to be gay will come out to me.

Also, I have to say something about being straight-identified by being married — I do believe that there is a spectrum. A lot of people don’t agree, but I believe there’s a spectrum between one and a hundred. And I don’t believe anybody is anything. I believe we have the ability to love who we choose, when we choose, and how we choose. And so, I think sometimes, straight people have to act straighter than they are because they’re afraid of political homophobia. And gay people need to be really rooted in gayness because it’s been taken away for so long. When something is beyond your reach, and then it is in your reach, you really root down hard.

MW: It’s more relevant today with the current administration. It’s scary.

NAJIMY: I’m scared. I’m scared-scared. The loss of Democracy is earth-shattering.

MW: But what do we do? How do we wake up from this? I’m looking to you for all the answers.

NAJIMY: I’ll tell you exactly what I think we should do. I think the reason that Trump is the President — God, I’ve never said that sentence before, that’s eerie — I think that the reason he won is because the Democratic Party and the Liberals were split. And I think we lost a lot with the anti-Hillary people. I was a Hillary devotee — I was actually a speaker for her. I would go and speak where she couldn’t. That was such an honor.

But I feel like the split, which I think is because of misogyny, led to Donald Trump’s win. I think whoever wins the Democratic nomination, whoever it is, we must wholeheartedly rally around that person. We must forget our differences of who our favorites were, because now this is serious business. Donald Trump is President. We can’t pussyfoot around anymore. We can’t go, “Oh, I don’t like him or I don’t like her.” Too f-ing bad. We have Donald Trump. That’s our alternative.

I was at the Tribeca Film Festival’s events and someone asked who do you want and I went, “Whoever is going to be the candidate, that’s who I want.” And that’s who we all should want. We have to all want the same person — any sort of a compassionate thinking person. Or else we’ll have another four years of Trump. So, you know, I’m going to rally around 100 percent, heart and soul, with whomever wins the nomination.

Now, I know who I would like to be nominated, but if that doesn’t happen, I’m not going to split the vote. I’m not going to not vote. I’ll just support that person, because we don’t have a choice anymore. We’re losing our rights — women are losing their right to reproductive choice. There’s many states in the middle of the country where there are no reproductive rights now. It’s happening. It’s real.

MW: It’s horrible.

NAJIMY: Oh, it’s horrible racism. It’s horrible misogyny. It’s horrible homophobia. It’s horrible everything. It’s anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-any kind of a brain. It’s really bad. And lives are being lost and Trump is making decisions that will affect our children’s children. There won’t be a planet. So, whoever is the nominee, that’s who I’m going to wave my flag for. Anybody but him.

MW: Who would be on your dream ticket, though? We’ve got so many amazing choices out there now. It’s an amazing field in many respects.

NAJIMY: Who would I pick? Well, I want Hillary. But if I can’t have Hillary, I love Kamala Harris. But honestly, it doesn’t matter to me. Anybody but Trump.

God, it’s so hard, because I don’t know enough yet. Honestly, I’m not being coy because, obviously, I say what I think, but I haven’t quite heard enough to claim my stake yet. I would love for it to be a woman. It’s time for it to be a woman, but I want whoever will win.

MW: You’re currently producing a documentary about the 53% of white women who voted for Trump in 2016.

NAJIMY: I am. At the end of this month, we’re going to do our first three days [of shooting]. They’re the most important equation in the nightmare of the last two years. We can’t dismiss them — they’re either women who voted for Obama, or didn’t vote at all, who, in 2016, voted for Donald Trump. So we need to honor them and find out why and what, and understand it, so it doesn’t happen again.

MW: It is a very perplexing statistic. We’re all like, “How could any woman vote for him?”

NAJIMY: Every one of us producers [of the documentary] has a different theory. My theory is that it is because of self-misogyny. When you’re taught that you’re not worthy — that you’re not worth as much [as men] — it seeps into your great-grandmother, and then down to your grandmother, and less to your mother, and less to you, but it’s still there. And if you think you aren’t worth as much, you’re not going to vote for someone that you think isn’t worthy.

Other people think differently. Gloria [Steinem] thinks it’s because they vote the party line of their husband. I mean, we all have a different idea. The truth is that none of us can put words in their mouth. We need to really find out and ask them and understand, so that we can move past this crazy nightmare.

MW: I want to bring it back to activism. What is the importance of activism to you and why should we all remain vigilant?

NAJIMY: There have always been activists and nonactivists, but at this point, there really is no choice. We know that, every day, we’re waking up, and not only are opinions changing, but laws are changing — laws that govern us and our daughters and sons. If you have any interest in the future beyond a year from now, just with climate change….

I mean, I’m so inspired by today’s high school students. This one girl that had just gotten an award here in New York said, “I take every Friday off and go sit in front of the UN.” And they said, “Do your parents mind that you aren’t going to school that day?” And she said, “No, they understand. If I’m not an activist today, I won’t have a future.”

The kinds of adjustments that are being made that affect our whole lives are devastating changes. I understand that everybody’s different. I don’t require everybody to be the same, but what I do require is that you open the paper and look on the internet and turn on the news, and see how, every single day, this isn’t just happening. It was planned, and it is dangerous, and we are going to find ourselves in the same position as in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Things are going to change in a way that you can’t imagine, because we’re ignoring and saying, “Well, I’m not a political person,” or, “It doesn’t affect me,” or, “It’s too hard.” And I get that it’s too hard. It’s too hard for me. I get that it’s scary. It’s too scary for me. Nobody wants to do this. We all thought it would be Hillary, and we’d be swimming in a lake and having picnics. But it’s real and it affects everyone, you and your kids, your nieces, your nephews, and just the future in general, people you’re not even related to. It’s the future of humanity. Democracy is being systemically [dismantled]. All the bolts are being loosened, all of them.

We can’t be sure what they’re finding out about Donald Trump. We don’t know how he got to be president. I mean, how many presidents have had 17,000 investigations about them being crooked? I mean, there was Nixon, and a couple more, and certainly, first of all, I don’t care what presidents have affairs with who. That’s a personal choice between them and their wife or their husband. That is none of my business, and I don’t judge somebody on what they do in their personal life. I judge them on how they protect and rule our country and sisterhood and brotherhood with the world, and this administration, more than any other administration — and there’s been some pretty sad ones — is boasting about the illegal-ness of their affairs. I mean, you can’t not pay attention this time.

MW: I have to bring up one final thing before you go. You made a guest appearance at Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend here in 2009. What do you remember about that experience?

NAJIMY: I remember that I was a little bit surprised about how very, very polite and well behaved every single person at that whole event was. I thought they were the sweetest, kindest, most considerate people. Not that I didn’t think they would be, but like it was very peaceful. It wasn’t very raucous, you know what I mean? Everyone was just really nice. The reason I was in D.C. was for the Obama Inauguration. And the excitement was in the air, you know? And then, of course, I went home with a couple of leather queens.

*Reposted interview article from the Metro Weekly by Randy Shulman on May 16, 2019

[fashiontrendin-blog]

The Gut-Wrenching Story Behind 'Colette,' The New Keira Knightley Movie

http://fashion-trendin.com/the-gut-wrenching-story-behind-colette-the-new-keira-knightley-movie/

The Gut-Wrenching Story Behind 'Colette,' The New Keira Knightley Movie

Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland were in a Los Angeles hospital on Feb. 22, 2015, the night Julianne Moore won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance as a woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s in their independent film “Still Alice.”

Surrounded by five or six friends in the intensive care unit, they toasted with champagne, wishing they could be at the Dolby Theatre to celebrate. But the married couple was used to missing out by then. Glatzer and Westmoreland had been watching awards season roll by from the sidelines for weeks. 

“It felt like this dream that the film was really connecting to an audience and that her performance was being so celebrated. But at the same time, we were dealing with the reality of Richard’s health, and I being a caregiver and looking after someone who could no longer look after themselves,” Westmoreland told me during an emotional call in August. “It was the best of times and the worst of times.”

Glatzer was diagnosed with ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ― a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord ― in 2011, after developing a slight lisp. Within a year, he lost his ability to speak altogether, and began using an iPad to communicate. Westmoreland urged his husband to take it easy as his physical health declined, but Glatzer had other plans. 

“He would type, ‘No. I want to make movies,’” Westmoreland said. “He was just determined.” 

By that point, Glatzer had written and directed two films with Westmoreland ― “The Fluffer” and “Quinceañera,” the latter a Sundance hit that won the 2006 festival’s grand jury prize, audience award and enough buzz to land a distribution deal with Sony Pictures Classics. From there, they made the heavily derided 2013 film “The Last of Robin Hood” about actor Errol Flynn, starring Kevin Kline and Dakota Fanning. “Still Alice” was their shot at redemption, even if Glatzer’s condition was tightening its grip on his body. 

“He started losing the use of his hands, so by the end of the shoot in 2014, he was just typing with one finger,” Westmoreland recounted, audibly upset. “We went into post and edited over that summer and, at the time, we just knew we were on the race against time to get this out into the world.”

The film, co-starring Alec Baldwin and Kristen Stewart, premiered at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics snatched it up from there, releasing “Alice” in December of that same year so it could contend for the 2015 Academy Awards. The accolades came and went, and Glatzer was on to the next project. 

“A few days after [Julianne’s win], it was back to what film we were going to do next. He had his iPad, and by then he was typing with one toe, and he just typed ‘C-O-L-E-T-T-E.’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’” Westmoreland recalled, crying over the phone,“‘We’re going to do “Colette.”��”

Glatzer died three weeks after the 2015 Oscars aired, at the age of 63. 

Courtesy of Wash Westmoreland

Wash Westmoreland (left) and Richard Glatzer in Paris. 

“Colette” is Westmoreland’s first feature directorial effort since Glatzer’s death. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is set for release this month, stars Keira Knightley as the real-life French writer whose husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West), took credit for her acclaimed Claudine novels in the early 1900s.

Featuring a queer lead character ― Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, best known for her novel Gigi ― the film is an unexpected period piece. It begins like many early 20th-century husband-and-wife novels do: she’s a seemingly naive, economically disadvantaged young woman, while he’s a man of means, education, celebrity and scandal. But unlike your run-of-the-mill redemption narrative, “Colette” veers confidently into a complex tussling of sexuality and gender norms inside and outside the construct of marriage.

Westmoreland and Glatzer started considering telling Colette’s story around 1999. They were enamored by her history. How Henry recruited Colette to ghost-write under his nom de plume, Willy. How the novels she wrote became a surprise hit among young female readers in Paris. How he refused to publicly acknowledge her authorship, going as far as to lock her in a room until she produced the pages he needed to keep his charade afloat ― a gruesome inversion of Virginia Woolf’s concept of a room of one’s own.

By 2001, Glatzer had written the first draft of the film. 

“We worked as if we were playing tennis with the ideas,” Westmoreland said of he and Glatzer’s collaboration, which took place during a summer vacation in Paris. “During the writing process, we managed to have it out in terms of what the story should be, what the characters should be thinking, what the juice was that propelled it forward ― and we’d just do it through a dialogue.”

“I’m more a throw-the-spaghetti-against-the-wall guy,” he laughed, “and Richard’s more discerning, had a Ph.D. in literature and a better hand on the architecture of the whole piece. That was the yin and yang for us.” 

Grieving is a long and complicated process and when I came out of the darkest times and wanted to work again, there was no other choice than to push forward with ‘Colette.’

After a few rounds of back and forth, Westmoreland and Glatzer finished the script in 2002 and began pitching it to producers.

They were shocked by the feedback. 

“People were like, ‘Oh, it’s very interesting,’ but there was this sense that it was almost too radical to fit into the conventional period-piece mold,” Westmoreland told me. “Certainly it’s set at the beginning of the modern age, but what this film really focuses on is the developments in gender identity and sexuality that were happening around that time and a lot of people just found it a little too strong, a little too much. So it took a long journey to get it to the big screen.” 

It took 18 years, 30 drafts and an Oscar, to be exact.

Because of the success of “Still Alice,” and Hollywood’s current infatuation with female-driven stories, “Colette” was greenlit in early 2016, nearly a year after Glatzer’s death ― thanks in part to support from “Carol” producers Pam Koffler, Christine Vachon, Liz Karlsen and Stephen Woolley.

Westmoreland was thrilled. The project had Glatzer’s fingerprints all over it. 

“Grieving is a long and complicated process and when I came out of the darkest times and wanted to work again, there was no other choice than to push forward with ‘Colette,’” Westmoreland said. “There was just a sense of this was a way of celebrating Richard, keeping his legacy alive and putting his name up there again. It was a way of me staying close to him ― to make this film that he loved and hear the words that he wrote being animated by such brilliant actors.” 

Westmoreland believes that Glatzer would be proud that the movie ― centered around a woman fighting for her worth in a male-dominated industry ― is hitting theaters now, during the swell of the Time’s Up and Me Too movements. 

“Throughout history we’ve felt the story of a man keeping a woman down, a man suppressing a woman’s voice, a man claiming credit for a woman’s work,” Westmoreland said. “But it’s just become more and more the focus of conversations about modern feminism ― this inequality in the sense of work and sexual abuse in the workplace, both of which feel very much in tune with the story of ‘Colette.’ It’s about claiming a voice that you were unable to liberate.”

“Colette” officially hits theaters on Sept. 21. Whether or not the accolades arrive this time, Westmoreland is as anxious as ever to move on to new films ― to make a name for himself while still protecting his late husband’s legacy. 

“We didn’t talk much about death, but one day he did say to me, ‘I want you to keep making films after I’m gone,’” he recalled, holding back tears once again. “Whatever I do, I think I’ll always be co-directing in my mind because Richard was so seminal to the formation of my whole view of film, and literature and art, as well. He’s just always been part of me so that will continue in anything I ever make.”