“I’m minded to pursue the current approach, given the sensitivities in this area, and reassess once we have greater visibility over how the strategy has been received,” Will spoke, baritone and authoritative.
“Urrrr,” Genevieve’s voice grumbled, … “is your Grand Plan of Action that you will carry on as usual and see what happens?”
Adele and I stifled snorts as Will stammered his way through her dressing down.
p162
“You know, it’s so messed up he calls us girls,” she fumed … I trained for seven fucking years to be here.” [They’re both lawyers at a huge firm.]
“Ah! … But Sheryl Sandberg told us to LEAN IN! So, I guess we must be the problem?”
p163
“You’re a young woman in the corporate world: some of these men see the fact of your existence as an offering.” p199
“So much of what is perceived to be ‘intelligence’ was Kit talking in a deep, male voice, being white and educated, and packaging up abhorrent views in grandiloquent, pretentious language. Men like Kit had been groomed from birth to speak the vernacular of success.”
“With every AI project abandoned, every bitcoin not mined, every pickup truck not sold, every jet fighter not flown, people somewhere will get relief. With every bicycle that replaces a motorcycle, every garden hose that supplants a power-washer, every rake that displaces a leaf blower, our world will both warm a little more slowly and become a little less noisy.”
…
“In recent decades, American pickup trucks and SUVs have grown steadily larger and heavier, with towering front ends and armoring that create a road-ruling mystique. Increasingly, to further satisfy consumer demand for big, intimidating vehicles, automakers equip many of them with high-decibel engines, turbochargers, and thunderous exhaust systems. Drivers all too regularly dial the volume up several more notches with muffler modifications that are often illegal. The automakers’ economic motivation for offering big, loud vehicles is clear ($$$), but why exactly do their customers want them? The deafening din emanating from those trucks has distinct political undertones, but there may also be something deeper going on.
“A 2023 study published in the journal Current Issues in Personality Psychology sheds some light on this. The researcher interviewed 529 people, split almost equally between the sexes, about their attitudes toward noisy vehicles. Then, using questionnaires, she evaluated the subjects for four “dark” personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. It turned out (surprise!) that men liked loud vehicles significantly more than women did. Across both sexes, those who expressed greater fondness for such vehicles also tended to score higher for two dark personality traits: psychopathy and sadism. The researcher drily observed that the results made perfect sense:
“Psychopathy reflects an up-close cruelty, whereas sadism includes viewing the harm to others from a distance… Modifying a muffler to make a car louder is disturbing to pedestrians, other drivers, and animals at a distance, meeting the sadism component, as well as startling when [the victim is] up close at intersections, meeting the psychopathy component.”
But read the whole thing: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/09/were-getting-sick-of-noise-pollution.html
so many choice bits … and this is just a small percentage of what I’ve underlined in my copy …
“…how wonderful it was that men had now increased the time they spent with their children to up to forty minutes a day! Well, hell, let’s have a fucking parade.” p7
“A basement dweller getting his kicks out of harassing women on the internet because he’s never talked to one in his entire life?” p8
Okay, see, right there: a solution would be if in school, every day involved ‘group’ work wherein one boy and one girl had to talk, talked, to each other
[re ‘reveal’ parties] “If the idea of gathering your closest friends and family to celebrate your child’s genitalia isn’t disconcerting enough …” p14 (see “Mr. and Ms.“)
[re the party theme “Guns or Glitter”] “I cannot fathom what kind of strange vortex you’d need to live in to think it was appropriate to enthusiastically connect an innocent little baby with a fucking gun…” p14
Yeah. Even the concept of toy guns … (see “Bang Bang” )
“When I read stories about little boys who have their softness and love shamed out of them by parents who are in thrall to their own fear, my heart breaks.” p32
We said all this [sexist conditioning has negative effects on both girls and boys] fifty year ago. FIFTY YEARS ago. So WTF?
Ah. ‘We’. As in ‘women’. To whom no one was listening.
“[J]ust ask yourself why women for the most part do all the work of growing and birthing children only to turn around and give naming rights to men who did barely anything at all.” p40-1
“… a marked difference between what was expected of us and what was expected of our brother. He was never told to wash dishes, sort and fold laundry or—heaven forbid!—iron the shirts my father wore to work. Instead, he was given the wholly undemanding task of sweeping the footpath outside and taking out the bins, both of which he seemed to do only sporadically.” p41
It was that way in the 60s too. SIXTY YEARS and nothing’s changed. WTF.
“…I found myself washing and folding yet another load of tiny leggings and singlets that my partner had just stepped over or walked past without even noticing.” p52
Frankly, I’m surprised she expected anything different, given her and her brother.
Why I didn’t get married and have kids. How do so few women see the writing on the wall?
“Men who look after their children aren’t ‘babysitting’. … What they’re doing is called ‘parenting’.” p58
“It isn’t helping to do a handful of chores in a house you live in.” p58
“… the dangerous notion that women exist to amplify the greatness of his own life.” p68
well-put
“That’s impossible to do when you have one demographic of people—white, straight, cisgender men—in charge of deciding what matters and what doesn’t.” p74
I’d change ‘cisgender’ to ‘sexist/MRA-advocate’ …
“We didn’t grow up with fucking George Lucas telling us that we could be a Jedi Master …” p78
again, well-put
“We love little girls!/ Yeah, sure we do. Right up until they hit puberty, then we slap ’em across the face and scream, ‘Welcome to hell, sweetheart! WHO’S SPECIAL NOW?'” p83
Ford should take this shit on the road. Open mic night …
“And according to the Geena Davis Institute, ‘Films with female leads made considerably more on average than films with male leads … [grossing] 15.8 percent more …'” p91
“Catherine Hardwicke’s opportunities didn’t explode after directing Twilight. … [S]he couldn’t even get an interview to be considered as the director for The Fighter … As Hardwicke noted wryly at the time, ‘It’s about action, it’s about boxing, so a man has to direct it … But they’ll let a man direct Sex in the City and any girly movie you’ve ever heard of.'” p91
“[Geena Davis told NPR] ‘If there’s 17 percent women [in a crowd scene], [men surveyed] think it’s fifty-fifty. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.'” p93
“According to this definition, being A Boy menas having sexual impulses that are stronger than your moral ones. It means being so base in your desires that criminality will always win out over doing the right thing. It means viewing the incapacitation or vulnerability of the girls and women around you not as a responsibility, but as an opportunity.” p116
This reminds me of a short video I once saw, maybe an ad?, of a young woman asleep or passed out on a couch, and a young man sees her and—gets a blanket and gently puts it over her. And I was surprised. And then, the point, I was APPALLED (but not surprised) that I was surprised.
“… the absolute repression of male emotional maturity” p142
yes. that.
“[How did] the language of misogyny most hateful become incorporated into the standard vocabularies of boys and men all over the world?” p168
yes. that.
“… because of course the best way for men to disprove a feminist’s central world view … is to gather together and threaten her with sexual violence.” p179
another one for her stand-up routine.
along with one I remember from her previous book, ‘Why do you hate men so much? You’re a fucking cunt, you know that?!’
lovely bit on p217 re MRA definition of abuse compared to women’s definition
see also p227-228 re the MRA agenda
“They’re barely out of adolescence, but they already believe that the world belongs to them. Why shouldn’t they? Everywhere they look, they’re reminded that they were born to rule.” p255
There ought to be a study of the change in sons’ attitudes toward their mothers when they hit puberty; I wonder how many here experienced that ‘sudden’ turn, when their lovely little boys started to show nothing but contempt for them …
“… the rich young white men whose careers and futures are treated with more respect than the bodies of the women they assault …” p287
“[After she was raped, she said] ‘I hadn’t even shaved my legs.'” p299
YES! If women’s behavior was actually used as the standard for consent, we could settle the consent issue sooooo easily. Reminds me of the story “A Jury of Her Peers”.
“‘All you need to say is, “Do you want to be here? … Do you want to have sex with me?” And if it’s not an enthusiastic “yes”, it’s a “no”. That’s it.’ … It’s really not that fucking hard …” p319
Yeah, or we could do it that way.
“We should be focusing instead on making a world in which women get to be considered just as big a fucking deal as men.” p322
“Women’s bodies are still being used as the conduit for men’s reckoning with each other.” p323
… eyes toward the wilderness … [He] sees slabs of light through the trunks where there should be shadow all the way to the forest’s heart. … [He investigates then] stumbles back through the curtain of concealing trees …
“Have they been clear-cutting, up the valley?”
… “Shit, yeah.”
“And hiding it behind a little voter’s curtain?”
“They’re called beauty strips. Vista corridors.”
“But … isn’t that all national forest?”
The cashier just stares …
“I thought national forest was protected land.”
The cashier blows a raspberry … “You’re thinking national parks. National forest’s job is to get the cut out, cheap. To whoever’s buying.”
p87
[He hires a ride in a small prop plane.]
“Just take me in the biggest circle you can make for the money …”
It looks like the shaved flank of a sick beast being readied for surgery. Everywhere, in all directions. If the view were televised, cutting would stop tomorrow.
p88
[She pursues a forestry degree.]
Soon, she sees. Something is wrong with the entire field, not just at Purdue, but nationwide. The men in charge of American forestry dream of turning out straight clean uniform grains at maximum speed. They speak of thrifty young forests and decadent old ones, of mean annual increment and economic maturity.
p122
[He’s planted 50,000 trees.]
“It’s a start,” Douglas says.
… “Hate to burst your bubble, friend. But you know that BC alone takes out two million log trucks a year? By itself? You’d have to plant for like four or five centuries just to—”
…
“And those companies you plant for? You realize they get good-citizen credits for every seedling you plant? Every time you stick one in the ground, it lets them raise the annual allowable cut.”
p185-6
I’d like to determine the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind …
…while everyone else is still trying to stabilize in-group loyalties.”
p237
[When they protest the logging, chaining themselves together …]
“When are you people going to grow up and get real? Why don’t you take care of your own business, and let us get on with ours?”
“This is everybody’s business,” Douglas answers.
p244
“People could make more money harvesting mushrooms and fish and other edibles, year after year, than they do by clear-cutting every half dozen decades.”
…
“Then why doesn’t the market respond?”
Because ecosystems tend toward diversity, and markets do the opposite.
…
“How much untouched forest is left?”
“Not much.”
“Less than a quarter of what we started with?”
“Much less. Probably no more than two or three percent. … they’re disappearing—a hundred football fields a day. This state has seen rivers of logjam six miles long.
“If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you’ll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century’s soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can’t even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.”
…
People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures—bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful—call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.
[After her presentation, the judge issues an injunction on all new timber sales of public land…]
“You’ve just made lumber a whole lot more expensive.”
She blinks at the accusation, unable to see how that might be a bad thing.
“Every timber firm with private land or existing rights is going to cut as fast as they can.”
p284-5
so many objections and replies (objections by the loggers; replies by the protestors)
“You’re killing our livelihood.”
“Your bosses are doing that.”
“One-third of forest jobs lost to machines in the last fifteen years.”
…
“For Christ’s sake. It’s a crop. It grows back!”
“It’s a onetime jackpot … A thousand years before the systems are back in place.”
…
“These trees are going to die and fall over. They should be harvested while they’re ripe, not wasted.”
[ripe for short-term profit for rich few, not ripe for ecosystem we depend on]
…
“You can’t stop growth! People need wood.”
“We need to get smarter about what we need.”
[and this obsession with growth, unlimited growth is a tumor, cancer]
[‘growth’, like ‘progress’ and ‘development’ – they all sound good until you ask what the words really mean]
…
p288
“We’re not saying don’t cut anything … We’re saying, cut like it’s a gift, not like you’ve earned it.”
p289
“What use is wilderness?” the judge asks.
[What?? Have you no knowledge of any science? Is not even biology mandatory in the schools anymore?]
p304
“A seed can lie dormant for thousands of years.”
p306
“Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?”
…
“Yes.”
“and would you say that the rate is falling or rising?”
He has seen the graphs. Everyone has.
“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. Is the house on fire?”
[Literally, now, I add since Powers’ publication date.]
p321
“The Northwest has more miles of logging road than public highway. More miles of logging road than streams. The country has enough to circle the Earth a dozen times. The cost of cutting them is tax-deductible.”
p333
“A sawmill … operating for months under a revoked license and paying the nuisance fine with a week’s worth of profits.”
p343
“Seventeen kinds of forest dieback, all made worse by warming. Thousands of square miles a year converted to development. Annual net loss of one hundred billion trees.”
p388
“There’s no endgame, just … endless, pointless prosperity.”
…
“How do you win? I mean, how would you even lose? The only thing that really counts is hoarding a little bit more.”
[Yes, these people … they’re just competing, trying to win, trying to make the most … playing with us as pawns … They have more than they need, more than they really want, so … why? It’s a pathology.]
p410
“Look around! Anyone paying attention knows the party’s over.”
…
“We accomplished nothing. Not one thing.”
p431
“In this state alone, a third of the forested acres have died in the last six years. Forests are falling to many things—drought, fire, sudden oak death, gypsy moths, pine and engraver beetles, rust, and plain old felling for farms and subdivisions. … Whole ecosystems are unraveling. Biologists are scared senseless.”
[And so should we be. Scared senseless.]
p452
*******************
[And I would add to the ‘Get your head out of the clouds’ accusation: No. We’re the the realists. Our opinions are anchored in soil, vegetation, rainfall. You’re the ones with your heads in the clouds, thinking you can live in a bubble without food and water on just, what, money?]
[Though I am, was, an idealist about people. Thinking they could be rational. Thinking they could change. But they’re too narrow in their thinking—too short-term and too selfish. And too unimaginative, too willfully ignorant, too lazy. And so the pathological few keep killing the rest of us. Those with the power to do so didn’t stop them. Because even they are too narrow in their thinking or too unimaginative or too willfully ignorant. Or also pathological.]
[And so we humans will die off, along with all of the other species we have killed.]
[Maybe in a thousand years, or ten thousand years, the Earth may recover. And maybe, just maybe, homo moralis will evolve.]
Notable bits from god is not Great, Christopher Hitchens
“…no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats [heaven, hell] we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.)” p5
“How much vanity must be concealed —not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?” p7
“A further difficulty is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.” p98
“(One recalls the governor of Texas who, asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me.’ Rightly are the simple so called.)” p110
“If the huge number of ‘contacts’ and abductees are telling even a particle of truth, then it follows that their alien friends are not attempting to keep their own existence a secret. Well, in that case, why do they never stay still for anything more than a single-shot photo? There has never been an uncut roll of film offered, let alone a small piece of a metal unavailable on earth, or a tiny sample of tissue.” p144
“…miracles are supposed to occur at the behest of a being who is omnipotent as well as omniscient and omnipresent. One might hope for more magnificent performances than ever seem to occur.” p150
[re those who turn to eastern religions] “They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reason to sleep and to discard their minds along with their sandals.” p204
I live on a lake in a forest in mid-northern Ontario. It’s bad enough that people come here to kill animals they have no need to kill, in often painful ways, which they do every weekend all summer long, when the animals are struggling as it is, given what we’ve done to their homes and their food supplies, and call it sport no less, but yesterday I was struck—
Rounding a point in my kayak, I saw a little boy, maybe six years old, standing in a boat holding a fishing rod (his father was standing behind him). The boy saw us and pointed with delight, seeing my little dog perched on the prow like a little hood ornament. I smiled. But then he turned back, no doubt reprimanded by his father to concentrate, to pay attention, and resumed trying to kill.
How does that little boy turn from being delighted to see Keezi on the prow to trying to kill another animal? There must be a disconnect. He must not think of the barbed hook tearing at the lip of the fish, he must not think of its pain as he pulls the fish by that hook in its lip through the water as it struggles to get away, then up out of the water where it will contort itself trying to get free, unable to breathe—
And that’s how, I realized, six year old boys become twelve, and eighteen, and twenty-four year old boys—who rape. Oblivious to the woman’s screams of pain, to her squirming to get free—
“Behind every well-respected man, there’s a woman who probably does his washing [laundry].” p103
“Why is it that men who prioritise adventure and independence over family are called ‘committed bachelors’ and ‘wanderers’ who just can’t be tied down, but women who similarly pursue a life free form burdens are called ‘spinsters’ and ‘cat ladies’ and are viewed as pitiful cautionary tales? It’s because men are given the complexity to be fully rounded individuals while women are still treated like plants in need of a man’s attention to fully bloom.” p103
“The state cannot and should not be able to force anyone to give their body over to medicine for any purpose—just as a person cannot be forced to donate a kidney to someone who will otherwise die, nor should a woman be forced to provide nine months of shared living space to a foetus she does not want to keep or care for.” p117
“All of a sudden, they can’t rely on being rewarded just for turning up. And instead of sitting down for a moment and thinking about what that means, most of them lash out …” p145
“Do feminists hate men? When you consider the level of hostility women are subjected to just for standing up for ourselves, surely the better query is why do so many men seem to hate women so fiercely, so aggressively, so violently, and so passionately?” p152
“Almost two women in this country [UK] are murdered weekly by aggrieved partners or ex-partners, and the all-too-common response is ‘Well, why didn’t she leave?’ instead of ‘Why did he kill her?'” p153
“If safety [is] such an important consideration for girls, [why don’t their parents] talk to their brothers about not hurting women?” p158
Indeed.
“The abuse received after exposing abuse proves how very prevalent this problem is.” p177
Must read the entire previous page.
“While women complain about the abuse we receive, we’re told to ‘get over it’ or ‘harden up’, two pieces of advice that completely miss the irony of the fact that the most thin-skinned, sensitive and retaliatory people online are white men aged between fifteen and thirty-five.” p179
Brilliant observation.
re her Facebook ban – “To be clear, all I had done was post images of the messages and comments sent to me that had been declared fine by Facebook’s standards.” p183
So “while it was evidently acceptable for these men to send these messages in the first place, it suddenly became an act of hostility for me to make an example of them.” p183
“He’s probably married and has daughters, and he uses this fact to establish himself as some kind of common sense expert and champion for women’s rights.” p235
p237. just—p237
perhaps a good summary of which would be
“Why do you hate men? You’re a fucking cunt, you know that?”
“The reality of rape is that it’s overwhelmingly more likely than not to be ‘unplanned and spontaneous’ and for a judge to decide that this makes it somehow ‘not threatening or violent’ is absurd.” p250
Yes! The fact that it can happen anywhere, anytime, to anyone, willy nilly, is what makes it MORE threatening.
re his son “didn’t deserve to be punished for ‘twenty minutes of action’ – p251 – a gunshot takes 2 seconds – so no deserving to be punished in that case either? wtf kind of logic is that?
“But shades of grey about consent can be very easily resolved by establishing whether or not your sexual partner is present in the situation, enjoying themselves, and being afforded a dignity that recognizes and respects their humanity.” p255
I’d just stop at “enjoying themselves”. I mean, seriously, how hard can that be? To determine.
And earlier comment by a woman who was gang-raped: “They never spoke to me, they spoke just to themselves, amongst themselves, laughing and thinking it was really funny. When you have sex with someone, it’s nice and you talk and you touch and this was awful. This was nothing like that.” p255
Yes, well those men had probably never had sex with someone.
“Why are you so angry? I’m angry that this is even a question, because implicit in it is the suggestion that women have nothing to be angry about. …” p266
and just carry on and read the whole paragraph. the whole chapter.
“What happened to you that made you so fucking bitter and angry? [A lifetime in] a society that not only freezes us out of its core operations unit but seizes every opportunity to hurt and demean us.” p271
“We should be angry. Because if we aren’t, we aren’t paying enough attention.” p271
"We License Plumbers and Pilots - Why Not Parents?"At Issue: Is Parenthood a Right or a Privilege? ed. Stefan Kiesbye (Greenhaven, 2009); Current Controversies: Child Abuse, ed. Lucinda Almond (Thomson/Gale, 2006); Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 2004)
"A Humanist View of Animal Rights"New Humanist September 99; The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist Winter 98; Humanist in Canada Winter 97
have been previously published in Canadian Woman Studies, Herizons, Humanist in Canada, The Humanist, and The Philosopher's Magazine - contact Peg for acknowledgement details.
ImpactAn extended confrontation between a sexual assault victim and her assailants, as part of an imagined slightly revised court process, in order to understand why they did what they did and, on that basis, to make a recommendation to the court regarding sentence does not go … as expected.
What Happened to TomTom, like many men, assumes that since pregnancy is a natural part of being a woman, it’s no big deal: a woman finds herself pregnant, she does or does not go through with it, end of story. But then …
Aiding the EnemyWhen Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang BangWhen a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
ForeseeableAn awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
Exile (full-length drama) Finalist, WriteMovies; Quarterfinalist, Fade-In.
LJ lives in a U . S. of A., with a new Three Strikes Law: first crime, rehab; second crime, prison; third crime, you’re simply kicked out – permanently exiled to a designated remote area, to fend for yourself without the benefits of society. At least he used to live in that new U. S. of A. He’s just committed his third crime.
What Happened to Tom (full-length drama) Semifinalist, Moondance.
This guy wakes up to find his body’s been hijacked and turned into a human kidney dialysis machine – for nine months.
Aiding the Enemy (short drama 15min)
When Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang Bang (short drama 30min) Finalist, Gimme Credit; Quarter-finalist, American Gem.
When a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
Foreseeable (short drama 30min)
An awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
What is Wrong with this Picture?
Nothing. There’s no reason women can’t be the superordinates and men the subordinates. But life’s not like that (yet).
Minding Our Own Business A collection of skits (including “The Price is Not Quite Right,” “Singin’ in the (Acid) Rain,” “Adverse Reactions,” “The Band-Aid Solution,” and “See Jane. See Dick.”) with a not-so-subtle environmental message
Rot in Hell A soapbox zealot and an atheist face off…
