Knowing Them By Their Fruits

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

cider-apples-2908856_1920

Yesterday in the comments, there was a discussion about the bitter fruits of #metoo.

And it made me wonder exactly what else was supposed to happen.

Sure, in many industries women are treated shamefully.  This is usually the kind of industry — like writing used to be, like literature still is, like academia, I’m sure, also is — that is afflicted by oligopsony.  I.e. there is only one buyer (the gate keeper) but far more suppliers than could possibly be bought.  In such a market it quickly becomes known that the reason you’re being bought or rejected is not just the quality of your work. I mean, it was known in the nineties when countless “how to write” books told you to go to conferences and workshops to meet editors, because it’s easier to reject the work of an unknown.

In writing and publishing — and yeah, other industries — there is another level of crazy induced by not being able to “control” how well your book does.  I.e. so many people put their hand in, a critical failure by an office drone at a publishing house — say stealth releasing your book in eform and telling no one, not even the author — can make a book “fail” because by the time the paper book comes out your numbers aren’t great on Amazon, so the bookstores don’t order it, etc.

In that sort of system, where the fault is always the supplier and the supplier is always expendable, it helps to be in good with the gatekeepers.  Women are treated shamefully, yeah, but so are men.  In different ways, sure (not really always.  I’ve heard rumors.  Everyone has. Men too can be sexually harassed when they’re powerless.) but still treated shamefully.  I’ve heard of men whose publicity for a book was quietly dropped after they disagreed with their editor on a trivial non-book-related matter, for instance.

So, yeah, horrible things happen to women — and men — under systems where people have absolute power over the career of others and have never learned economics, and also, honestly, don’t care for the field or what happens to it.

It seems to me, particularly since in the twenty first century most of these systems are in rapid failure mode, that the way to deal with it is to get around and build around them.  It’s surely happening in publishing, and as for Hollywood, the tech isn’t so far off.  For education, the tech is here and what is holding us bad is accreditation and prestige, things that should arguably be easier to get around than tech.  Or at least which are possible to remedy by being loud about it.

It is patently obvious oligopsonies are poisonous to the soul and the mind.  The fact they also engender sexual abuse is almost irrelevant.  Oligopsonies by definition destroy the fields they “serve”.  (Particularly when the people who exert power have bee misstaught economics, but that’s something else.)

So sure, the #metoo movement had a point in Hollywood and such places.  Perhaps too narrowly focused on just women, and just sexual abuse, which in turn led to its being quickly spun into crazy.

I.e. it was rapidly presented as being a problem everywhere and of every woman.  Which in turn led to women complaining about men with a slightly off color sense of humor, men who might not have meant what women thought they meant, men who were so old their hands wandered aimlessly and might, maybe, have touched something, and men who were ugly and dared ask a woman out. Oh, yeah, men who knew more than women about any given subject, were also more than ever shamed for “mansplaning” (something that now involves any appeal to logic, so women using logic are also accused of it.)

Look, in the States, in our day and age, no woman my age or older has experienced “patriarchy” nor anything resembling patriarchy at large.

Sure there are toxic work places.  I worked in one (physical location employment) and I’m sure other women have also (and not just fields like Hollywood, but places where the boss is a handsy jerk.) but a) this is not the universal experience, far from it.  b) if these men are discovered and revealed, they are universally reviled by men and women.  It has been so since I came to this country in the early eighties.  There are legal and social means to deal with this kind of thing.  The cartoon of the boss pursuing the secretary around his desk was at least 50 years out of date.

But women are told that #yesallwomen and #metoo called for every woman to chime in with SOME incident.

It took exactly zero seconds for the movement to devolve to “he looked at me longer than I felt comfortable with.” as well as demands that all men denounce men who do this, and SOMEHOW mind control them into not doing it.  Sorry but “I should be able to walk in a dangerous neighborhood and no one will attack me” is fantasy land.  In the entire history of mankind, including periods where attacking someone meant death, there have been safer and unsafer times and places, but there has never been a time where somehow no man would ever attack any woman (or man.  Again, let me point out that while the “abuse” or “attack” is different, men aren’t safe in this type of neighborhood either.)

Since men STILL lack the ability to mind control everyone who shares the same genitalia with them — just as I can’t mind control the Shabies (sheep+babies) who fall for these “movements” and make these demands — that portion of #metoo was always going to fail.  How could it not?

So, what has #metoo and #believeallwomen and #yesallwomen wrought?

Well, what it seems to have wrought is young men (and generally men who might be in mixed industries) refusing to work with women, and certainly refusing to work with women alone.

Because any woman at any time can accuse you of anything, and the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply.

In companies that contract with government and where quotas (of course there are quotas) might be observed, I predict a vast preponderance of open floor plan offices, and maybe as time goes on some kind of morality officer, that keeps an eye on everything.

Also you thought you wanted unisex bathrooms? Ahahahahahahahahahahah.  I suspect that bathrooms for the sexes will be soon located at opposite ends of buildings, and if the idiocy doesn’t stop, there might actually be a panty-check which never existed before.  At any rate, anyone in possession of a penis, no matter how gay, or how much they identify as a woman would have to be insane to enter a bathroom where a woman could claim to have been raped.  Hell, I’m not sure of entering bathrooms with other women and no witnesses, and I don’t have a penis.

Unless of course, you take to filming all your calls of nature from the moment you go in, if not using the all-men bathroom.  (Sure, men can probably be raped in bathrooms, and are, but you know, no one ever said #believeallmen.)

Other things are already happening.  No man in his right mind will meet with a female colleague in an isolated spot.  One of the reasons I didn’t drop out of writing entirely in 2003 was a long talk with a male colleague in a park near the convention we were attending.  Sure my husband and his assistant were nearby, but they pretty much ignored us for the whole of it, because it was a long and involved talk about how publishing worked.  Would it happen now?  I don’t know, but I doubt it.

In my own field I’ve seen men accused of sexual harassment for criticizing a woman — in a non-sexual manner — in a series of emails, or offering to help the woman get over some craft issues.  And this was before #metoo.

I’ll point out the other reason I continued writing after 2003 was a bestseller who took it upon himself to call me several times a week to coach me out of the dismals, offered me his agent (didn’t work out) and in other ways tried to get me over the hump.  Would he do it today?  Who knows?

Now?  Any man who offers to help/apprentice any woman he doesn’t know extremely well/trust absolutely is a quixotic fool.  Particularly if that involves any kind of in-person mentoring.

In fields like STEM where women are fewer, this will result in beginning, “apprentice” trainees being ignored and isolated.  It will result in men being afraid to work for female supervisors when it involves any sort of even vaguely possible time alone.

The fruits of the #metoo tree are strictly segregated work places, in which men for their own protection can’t afford to help and mentor women.

Is this what was intended?  I don’t know.  The left always talks a good game, which results in a lot of shabies thinking they “care” and therefore giving them the moral high ground.  But the fruits are usually the same.

Help the poor? Generational welfare and broken families.  Universal education? mal-education and illiterate graduates.  Universal health? dead babies.

I think part of it is the insistence on treating men like widgets who should fit their place like cogs in a machine.  It never occurs to them that poor people are not exactly the same as rich people and the reasons might go beyond the “don’t have money” to cultural, nutrition and yes, even genetic reasons (though those don’t tell us anything about any particular individual, because human genetics don’t work as eugenicists think they do.)  It never occurs to them that the obvious physical differences between men and women lead to differences in perception, or vision, or, yes, culture.  No, it’s always “if we make people treat everyone the same, everyone will be alike.”  Which results in things like the French terror, or the Stalinist purges, and some pigs being more equal than others, but never mind that.

Men and women are different.  Sure, we can work together in the same work places, if you make allowances for the fact that you’re different. Men will, yes, be more interested in ah… carnal matters.  Seems to be a function of testosterone.  Women will often read meanings into gestures and events that are incidental.  If you convince women no sexual jests should be made in their presence (even if not aimed at them) because that victimizes them, or that calendars with pulchritudinous young women are an objectification of ALL WOMEN and also an insult on them, rather than something that makes men happy and hurts nobody, or that any man who asks them out and isn’t their type has oppressed them, then they can no longer work in a field dominated by men. And they will be pretty hard to work with in any field.

The calendar thing?  Hell, some of my best professors had them in their offices.  It amused me a little when I went into conference, but I never thought it was a sexist thing. Men like pretty women in scant attire.  And women like barechested firemen holding kittens (yes, the calendars exist.) Liking the visual means nothing in terms of treating the other sex with respect.  Again, why should it?

And yet they’ve convinced us that’s offensive to #yesallwomen and probably would cause all our hair to fall out or something.

Sure those calendars were more prevalent among men, because men are more visual, but women are more verbal.  Any number of romances and the equivalent of those calendars.  Should men run screaming when they see a woman with a romance novels?  And tell me anyone can read the Anita Blake series (even the first few books) and not find men objectified as sex objects.  And yet I read them and emerged without thinking of my husband and sons as such.

Again, all this seems to be predicated on people being exchangeable, and all the same.

Even if well intentioned, the fruits of that tree are always poisonous, because they don’t fit reality.

And the fruits of #metoo, like the fruits of feminism in general seem to be to make women isolated, powerless, and unable to work in fields and in ways men do.

Maybe it’s time to reexamine the tree?

 

292 thoughts on “Knowing Them By Their Fruits”

  1. I completely missed an excellent point you made in your earlier response: yes, men refusing to solo network with women will hurt women, but it will also hurt men who would have received mentoring from women.

    I’m still trying to work out if that didn’t initially occur to me because I have a sexist blind spot, or because in my experience women only support other women.

    I’m in a rapier club. Our group once did a pirate skit for a local scouting org. Mixed, boys and girls. As we were gearing up, my female sparring partner confessed “I want to be a good role model for the girls”. I responded “the boys need good female role models too”.

      1. And once you put advice out into the wild, you have no control over where it may go.

    2. Third option, it’s because the “me too” is supposed to help women, so it’s obvious to look at fruits in that specific area.

      1. Which is why they silence, brutally, any man who spoke of what he suffered (generally from women).

        1. Precisely. They call it “derailing” to bring up male victims, since the entire point of feminism is the uniquely horrible lives of women. Demonstrating that this is untrue is a refutation of the entire basis for the movement.

    3. No surprise to overlook it. The focus has always been on women needing female mentors. The idea has always been that you mock differences between men and women in order to break women into the job, while at the same time talking quietly in the background about how women make better mentors for women. And then once the necessary critical mass of women within that job has been achieved, you switch which of the two is in front. You stop downplaying the differences (unless you need to dust it off and trot it out again when some retrograde misogynist turns up), and start emphasizing that women need female mentors.

      It also taps a bit into “kids need to see people like themselves in field X so that they know that they can go into that field”. i.e. telling people that the most important thing about Jane being a rocket scientist is that her example encourages young girls to dream of becoming rocket scientists.

    4. Well, there’s also the fact that women can role model for females, and men for males, in ways that vice versa won’t work so well.

      I can tell you for sure that the men in a young boy’s life are very important.

      So one could naturally be drawn to that conclusion.

      Thing is, no single person can model all the behaviors and qualities that any one other person might need modeled. So everyone is really looking at a wide range of models, and it isn’t clear that those models must be of only one sex. For example, I’ve taken lessons from some of my female ancestors about resolve and sacrificing for various goals. It is not clear to me that the way I attempt to solve PDEs, read book, or look for work are only things that men can imitate.

    5. I’ve worked with enough male teens “on the spectrum” to know that yes, older women mentoring younger men is a thing. I’m sure Mrs. Hoyt can speak to it even more than I.

      1. I know, right? Or a fact-finding trip! Did you see the one that is all “This is my +20 Kitten of Cuteness! Surrender!” I find them all relevant to my interests…

            1. Thirded. And thank heaven they didn’t have the firefighters holding babies, I couldn’t handle it.

      2. Yes, yes, definitely need to research this more. I’m thinking I may need personal interviews with #11 (with the puppy on his shoulder) and #14 (feeding the baby llama). Just to be sure that my book is as accurate as possible.

      3. Well, maybe I should suggest we do a topless calendar of the top 12 indie male science fiction authors, each holding a small, non-Earth standard species.

        Just in the interest of equality of course. 😉

        1. I have a story world that has 1) genetically engineered super soldiers, and 2) a planet of exotic engineered wildlife that pretty much all wants to kill you.

          I’m entertaining myself greatly, just now, imagining the topless sexy shots with the murderous bunnies and saber toothed tiger squirrels and carnivorous unicorns….

          1. Oh oh oh!

            The engineered troops nickname the alpha monster bunny for its propensity to pick up field mice and bop them on the head.

            And now I rest 😀

              1. Just Foo.

                One of those names you dont hint at until halfway through. Then you drop that Foo was shortened from Foo Foo, letting the readers in on the troop’s inside joke. But only after “Foo” has been associated as the harbinger of the apocalypse.

    5. I would feel objectified… except I KNOW I haven’t looked like THAT for a good number of years. To feel objectified, I would have to be flat out lying to myself.

      Sure, fresh out of boot camp I was pretty buff, I wish I had the sense to make before/after pics because it really was like the add in the back of the comic where the skinny kid gets sand kicked in his face, then orders the thing, and at the end you see him all buff. I went from 148 Lbs (keep in mind, I’m 6′ 3″) to a shade over 180 Lbs. and trust me… NONE of that was fat.

      Now I’m a jolly 280… sigh… oh well, we all grow old eventually.

      1. Last time I looked that good was about 1988 while I was learning Tae Kwon Do and competing. Was also the year I placed #2 in the squadron for physical fitness.

      2. I never understood why anyone would hit on me. I was “over weight”. I am 5’4″, back then weighed anywhere from 125 to 132, Depending on the season (seasonal FS field crews so a LOT of steep hiking, not on trails). Pretty sure naive was my middle name.

        Uhhh 20/20 hindsight, never mind. I’d LOVE to be 140 now, let alone lower, neither is likely to ever occur again. Currently at 220. At this point I’ll be tickled to see below 200, let alone 160.

        1. At one point, My Lady went on a medically supervised diet, and lost 125 lbs or so. And she started getting hot on at the Cons we attended, which she found hysterically funny. Her attitude?

          “Hey, I married somebody who fell in love with me when I was FAT!”

          *snerk*

        2. 5’4″, 125 to 132, and I’m guessing you were at least somewhat physically fit since you mentioned hiking.

          “Over weight”? NO. Not sure how old you are, but if you are roughly my age, I’m guessing Twiggy lied to you and made you think you were over weight.

          2. Like I said. 20/20 hindsight. Yea, no way was I overweight. Part of the problem now, is the adolescent/college era dieting when I should not have been (that & pioneering genes, I swear, my body says “no calories, I think I’ll gain weight”). Yes, I was in very good shape … couldn’t out “hike” the guys on the crew (darn short legs anyway). Good news was other than the hike to location along proposed roads, that wasn’t an issue. Running compass & chains (measurement) for units & lines (before GPS), timber cruising, it was go/stop, not a marathon, or sprint.

            FWIW. I’m 62 in 9 days …

              1. Never would have guessed I am almost 62, or at 5’4″ I couldn’t out hike the guys? 🙂 😉

          3. I was 5’3 and about 130 to 140– don’t have to look for Twiggy when everyone assures you you’re fat for having enough body fat to function correctly. Especially with nice, thick bones.

            1. Yes, this. Know who Twiggy was but she wasn’t the problem (directly). Won’t throw anyone under the bus, but both my sisters & I refused to allow weight & diet occur in conversations regarding any of our kids. None. Zip. Zilch.

              Results. Zero of 8 have a weight problem of either extreme. The three of us still do.

              1. Yep. I was 5’7″ (pre shrinking due to well.. pre eclampsia doing bad things to my joints) and 129 lbs and on a starvation diet, because I was convinced I was fat.

          1. I think so. He lost the buff and got pretty fat at one point, anyway. And I seem to recall a claim of sexual harassment. His career got into the dumps, too, at a point when it seemed to be going pretty well.

    9. Seconded on the wombat!

      I noticed that I tended to look at the eyes (part of the reason for a SERIOUS eyeglasses fetish), then face, then ‘ooh, nice smile’, then animal, then notice hot bod last. Dunno if it’s just me (because the beefcake factor for me is how nicely a man’s ass fills a pair of well fitted denim…)

      I”ve nothing against a hot bod (hubby chuckles and does obliging flexes when I coo over his biceps) but there have been a few occasions where I find myself losing track of conversation because I’ve gotten caught up watching his expressions and face. #^_^#

    10. Ok so the beefcake does nothing for me, (wrong gender, wrong species). Impressed by the animals, I like the wombat especially, How you got the shot with the grey kitten walking out the guy’s arm I have no idea. That’s going to last on the order of milliseconds until the kitten jumps off or loses balance (kittens are lovely but balance is not yet their high point) sliding its claws down the guy’s arm.

      Koala takes immense courage to hold with no shirt. Although they are mellow creatures they are apparently easily spooked. And they have SHARP claws for tree climbing. Their emergency response is grab on hard then climb. My younger daughter did a junior project in Melbourne for a quarter and they got to do an outing to a nature park. She got to hold a koala because the handlers decided she was the least excitable of the group and most likely to succeed. She said she felt like Harry Potter with the Buckbeak the Hippogriff.

      And finally meerkats? Seriously? Come on what the hell does a meerkat have to do with Australia? Pose the guy with a quokka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quokka) or similar small member of the Kangaroo family.

      And as an aside my daughter did say there seemed to be an excess of cute guys in the Melbourne area (Accent didn’t hurt ..) compared to her engineering school in Worcester. She was trying to figure out how to smuggle one (or more) back through customs :-). Extras for her roomies mind you 🙂

      1. That’s going to last on the order of milliseconds until the kitten jumps off or loses balance (kittens are lovely but balance is not yet their high point) sliding its claws down the guy’s arm.

        Clip the kitten’s nails before the shoot starts– the baby nail clippers and some sense and it works great, although you have to do it every few days when they’re tiny– and then do a LOT of shots.

      2. And meercats because they are pretty cute for a rat, and seem to get as much of a kick out of humans at the zoo as humans get out of seeing them. No different than the kittens and horses and puppies.

  3. There are always unintended consequences; some guy named Murphy has a law about it. The man-woman closed door meeting is sad. I used to travel with a lady co-worker from the east to left coast. Her husband was happier when we both traveled vs her going alone. Different world today isn’t it?
    The consequence of some “parties” taking advantage of the power differential the movement created should really come as no surprise. All part and parcel with the politics of personal destruction. Once we slide down the slick and slippery slope, there is no way to get out of the cess-pit without a lot of suffering all around,

    1. I know, right? I remember when I was in the photog and production unit – TDYs, with teams of men and women mixed. We were all friends together, the guys were our buddies and friends, almost brothers, really. In a couple of TDYs, the women preferred to bunk in a tent with the guys from their unit (whom they knew and trusted) rather than bunk in a tent with women from some other unit whom they didn’t know – especially when there was a lot of expensive production gear signed out on a hand receipt.
      The guys, again — were like our brothers, And we often were good friends with their wives, too.

      1. Was on a 20 person fire crew, pulled off a district; summer 197?. The “fire” we were originally sent to was really in mop up mode. When we were rotated off, we were originally headed home, when we were diverted (until a hot shot crew rotated in, then we were sent home). Housed in rooms, segregated by gender. That lasted about 3 hours. Rest of crew were in one room. Went to crew boss. They helped move the 20th cot into a far corner & that is where I stayed. Most of them I barely knew, just we all worked at the same district for different departments. But there, I was their “sister” & they were my “brothers”. Naive, maybe, probably, likely. Guess you’d have to be there.

      2. I remember hearing a similar story about a National Guard unit deployed for disaster response (Katrina? I don’t remember.) They moved into their quarters and arranged themselves including a hung sheet partition for the three or four women. Someone caught on and they were forced to move to segregated quarters. You’ve got the whole crew in an “open bay” situation and what did they really think that they’d be getting up to? But moving the women meant that all down-time unwinding and talking about how the day’s disaster response went, all the back-and-forth, didn’t include the female members.

  4. > maybe as time goes on some kind of morality officer, that keeps an eye on everything.
    —
    As more and more workplaces fall under full-time video surveillance, the security people will do the watching, and pass “incidents” onto HR.

    “We have three documented incidents of you looking at a co-worker for more than five seconds. You’re fired.”

    (yes, there are already companies who have rules on how long you can look at someone when you’re talking to. I would have a hard time there, since my own cultural conditioning would say they were either not listening or being rude…)

    1. This might explain why I seem to bug someone who bugs me. My “creep alarm” doesn’t seem to trigger on a good many it really ought to… but one guy who is probably Just Fine makes my teeth itch. And so when speaking with him, I tend to focus not eye-to-eye, but looking a bit above/over rather than directly at him. I’m NOT supposed to know (word gets back, eventually, just the same), but evidently I seem to creep him out in return. Perhaps my ‘defocusing’ is part of why. That and if he has any sense of humor, it’s orthogonal to mine. To me, watching him try to invoke humor is rather like watching a computer attempt to write poetry – the form is there, but it’s full of wrong. It’s… the stuff of TV sitcoms so bad it needs the laugh track.

    2. “some kind of morality officer”

      Gee, seems to me I’ve heard of some countries that already have those…give me a minute to think…

  5. But these are all positives for the folks who are whipping the fury up. Have fewer women in a business? Means we need to hire studies minders to make sure we bend over backwards and fill our quota. So we need more oversight by our benevolent rulers.

    The ruling class of the country doesn’t care about mere peons, just defending and enlarging their turf.

  6. *Sigh* Teachers are strongly encouraged never to be in a classroom with a student unless both parties can be seen through an open door by all passers-by. But we are not supposed to criticize or discipline students where others can hear. And calling in a second teacher as witness can be considered intimidation.

    As with men mentoring women and vice versa, it only takes a few bad actors to make life really difficult for everyone else.

    1. “Two deep leadership at all times.” “No leader is ever alone with a youth if said youth is not their child.” — Scouting 101 for Adults

      FYI. Another child/youth is inadequate. A car full of kids, with one adult driver is okay; but that is the only exception.

      Please note. The above is not stating what the gender of the adult is, doesn’t matter. Changed “boy” to “youth” because even before the recent changes in policy allowing girls in cubs & scouts, this policy has always also applied to Venturing & the old Explorer programs (both of which has been coed for a long time or at inception).

      The ONLY change to the above policy, which has occurred in the last few years, is the Youth Protection program used to be recommended for all adult registered leaders. First change was to require it of top unit leaders, plus any adult that goes on any outing or accompanies unit to summer camps, plus must be registered scouter. Most recent change. Any adult participating, however infrequently, must be a registered scouter (background check), & must take the program ANNUALLY.

      Question: If on an outing & someone is hurt, only 2 or 3 adults along, can the person hurt be escorted to help & the group continue on?

      Ans: NO. Why? No way to configure adult supervision into two groups. The entire group must abandon the activity … period.

      Someone else will have to cover 4H, Girl Scouts, & Camp Fire, etc., policies. Last I heard Girl Scouts would not allow men to participate as adult leaders or chaperones on outings, even if they were sole custodian of their female children.

      1. Girl scouts allow for male leaders and chaperones, but overnights must have females. You must register as an adult volunteer to do any volunteering – including assisting with cookie booths – and must be background checked for overnights and money handling. If I were to have an official scout event at my home, I would need to have my husband background checked first (because apparently the Marines and US Gov’t don’t do as thorough a job as the Girl Scouts).

        But there is no requirement for two-deep leadership, or two adults in any group.

        1. “(because apparently the Marines and US Gov’t don’t do as thorough a job as the Girl Scouts).”

          Of coarse not … /scarcasm

          “But there is no requirement for two-deep leadership, or two adults in any group.”

          Actually … think it through. It doesn’t just protect the youth … it protects the adults too.

          Hubby & I were both registered scouters. When we were along as leaders, I counted us as ONE adult, because of the perception that we would protect each other from an accusation. Not a scouting policy to treat any known couple this way, just me not being naive.

        2. “(because apparently the Marines and US Gov’t don’t do as thorough a job as the Girl Scouts).”

          Oh, hell, that’s only the organization trying to keep their insurance down. THEY have to have done it, so the appropriate box gets checked off. Nobody in the organization ever gave a second’s thought to the Government’s background checks, much less the Marines’. Nor, for that matter, did anyone in the insurance business that drives this nonsense,

          1. Oh, now there’s an idea that’s looking for a politician to decide to run with it. Call it the Central Background Check Bureau, aka Peepers ‘r us, and let them collect all the various checks that we go through in life, and provide reports on you in response to properly authenticated requests. So your insurance company and bank can feel more secure, knowing that you have had an EBI, been bonded, and whatnot. Of course, having all that information in one place might make it a target for people interested in collecting such info…

            1. Given what we know about government watch lists and so on, can you imagine the Supercharged Mongolian Clusterf*ck such an organzation would become almost immediately?

              1. They won’t need to go to the IRS, FIB, CIA, and so on seperately in order to get the Democrats oppo research.

                Or destroy uppity proles.

      2. I know too many people who had “sexual experiences” with boy scout leaders, in one case leaders of more than one troop on separate continents, to have any opinion other than “two deep leadership” and “never alone with any youth” are extremely good ideas. 😦

        1. Don’t disagree. Just pointing out the policy.

          Also does anyone thinks it has been limited to Scouting & the Catholic Church, regardless of lack of reporting … doubt it, but you know, hasn’t been reported, so no proof.

          1. Oh yes, I know. People like to hate on who they like to hate. And it’s truly sad, too. But generally predators go where the access is. So the idea that *other* sorts of groups (schools, for example) that serve kids don’t have the same problem is generally self-serving.

            Look at that sports physician last year (?) who was convicted of sexual assault after *decades* of telling teenaged gymnasts that he was massaging their pelvic floor for medical reasons.

          2. The district we were in has had it’s own problems. One was a registered leader, who didn’t have a record. Second was a non-participating parent (again no record) who used his scout foster son. Or rather in both cases the attempt was made. Scouts reported the attempt. Scouts also have turned in adults attempting the same outside of scouting program.

            Both were at the scout level (11 to 18), while we were still at the cub (6 – 10) level. Also, well before the more recent policy changes. Two deep leadership was in play. Scouts from Tiger through Scout rank, part of the rank requirement is age appropriate “what is appropriate or inappropriate, what do you immediately run to another adult after another, until they will listen”. The pamphlet is (or used to be) the first thing you see when you open a scouting book.

          3. I’d be surprised if rates among teachers ain’t significantly higher. Had one who got it on with student, went with him to protest that there was a Republican governor at state house, and did it again afterwards. Hubby wasn’t pleased.

            1. There was a study as part of No Child Left Behind. The conclusion was that about one in ten public school children were molested by the staff.

              You remember the outcry when that came out? Neither do it.

                1. When it came up in the geek group, Elf and I were the only ones who hadn’t been abused by a teacher. We were also the ones who have parents/grandparents that would have murdered anybody attempting it, in front of the school house, and everyone knew it.

                  All guys but me.

                  Ranged from extremely inappropriate touching to really awkward implications of much more. Even the blowhard didn’t try to make it like he was bragging, they just acted like it was…normal.

          4. I know it isn’t. I know of a number of reported cases inside the Evangelical Christian community.

            1. Yet. Where is the national reporting. Scouts, Catholic Church, & not sure how slipped through the Olympic Doctor, national blare. Even, at least the most recent reports locally, are “no scouts were touched or harmed, but were propositioned, & they reported it to their scout leaders.” (*)

              (*) Who are legally required to report it immediately to local law enforcement & to the council; even if not occurring at scouting event, by a scouter or another scout. If a scout reports it, it gets reported to the appropriate authorities, period; whether report is believable, plausible, or possible, or not.

          5. Oh, the abuse of children by school teachers, a profession men were driven out of for safety, is even more common but for some reason the press isn’t interested. They aren’t even interested in the fact that teachers are passed around districts after being caught.

            Despite the fact you can go to jail for not sending your kids to school, but not for refusing to send them to scouting or a Catholic Church.

          6. There is a time bomb ticking away in the Public School system(s). I have it on the authority of several people in the trenches there, and while it’s probably at about the same level as the Church’s problem (about 3%, or so I’m told) , it ALSO features the same ‘shuffle the offender to another district and pretend nothing happened’ nonsense. Right now the bureaucracy and the Teachers’ Unions can keep a lid on it, but sooner or later it is going to blow sky high.

            The SCOTUS recently damaged the power of Public Employee Unions by ruling categorically that they could not collect dues from non-members. We’ll have to see if it weakens them anywhere near enough.

            1. The districts out here have gotten pretty quick to drop anyone accused of impropriety. Probably because they don’t have the $$ to deal with lawsuits. Which makes you worry what’s not getting caught.

              1. Which makes teachers reluctant to discipline. My mom found out real fast that white teacher with black students = raaaaacist…. from the parents if not the kids. Usually both.

                Any time you set up a system where undisprovable accusations = guilt, it’s a Bad Thing.

            2. 6-10% in the No Child Left Behind study, though that’s all school employees and included simple stalking and persistent sexual harassment. (You say buzz off, they don’t.)

              Going by the study from the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, your kid is roughly 100 times more likely to be harassed or assaulted by a teacher than by a priest. Raw numbers, there, but they also didn’t correct for known-false accusations.

      3. And unless things have changed remarkably since we were involved in Scouts back in the ’90s this will inevitably mean the death of scouting. For every core Scouting family there are many times over kids and parents who are at best marginally involved. Participation was always a struggle back in those days and I doubt that it’s much different today. Add any burden to those already barely interested and you will quickly deplete your membership to the point where you no longer have a viable national organization.

        1. Can’t answer to Nationally. But locally, the opposite has occurred; at both the Cub, Scout, & Venture, levels. Both are booming; at least the units we were directly involved in. Only difference, is the school PTA no longer charters the Cubs, & the church no longer charters Scouts & Venture Units. All 4 are chartered by the local grange now; & extremely closely linked. (4 — Cubs, Scouts Boys, Scouts Girls, Venture) plus Girl Scouts of various ages, some of which are co-registering with BSA.

          It doesn’t hurt that the leaders in question are also tied heavily to the youth sports scene (at grade & middle school at minimum). Kind of hard to state “can’t do both” when your kids coaches are doing “both”. Still happens, but a lot harder.

          FYI. The local kids sports loves scouting. They don’t do adult background checks. As already stated, Scouting does.

          It also doesn’t hurt that the Scout/Venture level is solidly ran financially. Even before officially crossing over, there is an annual major fund raising that allows Scouts* to pay their own way every year involved which includes: scouting gear, monthly dues, gas fund, summer camp, & backpacking week. Since the troop provides tents, tarps, ropes, poles, & group cooking equipment, scouting gear is less than some units.

          When we were involved the hourly (non-taxable rate) per scout working ran between $10 to 15. That is for 10 to 18 year-olds. That is after the troop took 1/2 of the net income for the equipment & high adventure funds. This was in the early 2000’s. Please tell me where else a kid can make that kind of money? FYI. This was Christmas Tree Pickup.

        2. That such strictures may lead to the death of scouting may be a feature, not a bug, to those promulgating them. Can’t have today’s youth learning self-reliance and independence. (Time to go change the tinfoil in my hat.)

      4. Once upon a time I heard the term “active non-involvement” which was, as I then understood it, that if someone (who was not a power-hungry fink, nor a moron) wanted to take on some grand sounding role, let them – it frees you to get real work done. One would need to get involved, in self-defense, if the seeker was power-hungry, a moron, or (most likely) both.

        This looks like a powerful argument for being actively non-involved. Lest one become fully involved… in the sense of a multi-story building visited by a skilled arsonist.

      5. Boy Scouts child protection used to allow 1 adult and two scouts situations as the scouts could chaperone each other. Which worked very well for the older boys doing merit badges with counselors. When they nixed that, and required annual training, AND required annual background checks for the counselors; I told them that I refused to have my privacy invaded every year on their demand and to remove me from the counselor lists. (And the idiots still haven’t managed to remove me from their e-mail lists even after 10 years.)

        1. Still can if the parents hang around to chaperone.

          Yes, non-scouter’s merit badge councilors are reported to becoming a problem. Used to be if you knew someone that could cover a badge, you could sign them up as a councilor, usually limited to one time, then supervise, as a parent or scout leaders if there were a group wanting to do that badge. Don’t know what dodge is having to be done now.

    2. One of my ward-mates while I was in hospital is/was (?) a schoolteacher, and related a story from the all-girls school she was doing her student teacher rotation at. There was a girl in the class who was ignoring the (male) teacher and kept gossiping very loudly and disrupting the lesson. Finally he asked her to please keep her voice down, because it was time for lessons. She stood up, declared that she did not feel safe in the class, and walked straight out to get the principal, who came back with two other administrators to investigate. If the shocked student teacher hadn’t spoken up in defense of the male teacher, something awful may have happened to him. The girl was suspended, thank goodness.

      1. Glad there was punishment. We tend to either not punish or reward false accusers. Especially if they meet preconceptions

  7. I think we’re starting our timeline too late: #metoo is an effect, not a cause. It’s the effect of zero tolerence. You grew up in a country where slapping a cad was not grounds for school suspension, I believe, Sarah, but my generation (Y) was the last to get away with that in rural areas and it was already gone under zero tolerence in more urban areas.

    Millennials and Zs and most Ys, and probably younger urban Xs, didn’t get the right to punch, slap, or otherwise physically reject a harrasser or assaulter. But they have the right to use traditional and social media to destroy him or her. And since that’s the only weapon they have, they’ve taken the mean girls’ verbal tactics and turned them up to eleven and turned on anyone they don’t like or who’s done them wrong.

    Thirteen years of teaching kids that they can’t hit, that Truth is subjective, that if they disagree with authority they should lie . . . I do like that poll I saw yesterday that says kids more likely to reject PC. It matches my observations pretty well.

    The first Zs-the post 9/11 kids-will be eighteen next fall. Their country’s been at war their entire life. I don’t think they’re going to vote the same as the tail millenials do. I think they’re as different from millenials as X is from boomers.

        1. Eh, the desires of the millennials means cut or loss of my income, loss of any retirement, and probably my death at the hands of their jackboots. Rather roll the dice.

          1. Ah, when Random Chance is the alternative to Certain Doom, hit the button on the Infinite Improbability Drive even if it hasn’t been programmed. Got it.

            1. This needs a name its large and round, row, roun round , Ground Yes thats it ground. I wonder if it will be friends with me?

            1. Millenials are a small cohort, is the thing that’s particularly notable. Dating from the end of Y to 9/11. If we go with boomers start in ’45, X in ’60, Y in ’75, Millenials in ’90, they lost four years of people.
              Millenials grew up with internet in their homes. Y got the internet partway through their childhood, and are old enough to remember that. A lot of Zs (including my two oldest) would be Millenials if it weren’t for 9/11, but that’s a defining event like the outbreak of WWII.

              Anyway, that’s how I read the numbers.

              1. Ye gods, I went searching and found a crud of differing age ranges for these “generation names”. Some have Millenials and Y as the same. The number of years in a “generation” varies from 14-20. Some have Gen X ending in 76, 79, or 81. Some have Boomers starting in 44, 45, or 46. No rhyme or reason that I can see. Last year for Millenials may be 1995, 1999, or 2000. Argh!!!!!!

              2. Boomers, X, Y/Millennial– was in use in the late 90s even, usually set as starting in 1980, Census says 82– and Z or Post-Millennial, which oddly enough they set as starting in 2000.

                And we’re about a quarter of the US population.

              3. Born in the mid-70s, but I can’t possibly be an Xer because I have never seen a single episode of The Brady Bunch.

                Somehow I have borne up under the crushing deprivation.

                1. Lordy I wish someone had deprived me. My cousins would be over in the afternoon aftetr school as they’re Mom worked late and they ALWAYS wanted to watch Brady Bunch or Gilligans Island reruns, never Star Trek (real Star Trek mind you, Capt Piccard etc is 15+ years in the future…) on WPIX or the monster movies (Godzilla, Gamera) on channel 9(WWOR?). There were days I wished for a tsunami to deal with Gilligans Island…

                2. eh, was born in ’66, and I’ve seen maybe 4 full episodes of The Bunch. Only one watched voluntarily, as a cousin was acting on it (his character sold a car to the oldest boy)

            2. I am one under many of the definitions (born late 80s). I am told by peers on a nearly daily basis that anyone not left wing is crazy. Lost count of how many times told I should just kill myself. Called greedy because I don’t want to increase my 25% tax rate and lose the decent health care I have. Have discarded all ties to peers from growing up because of similar.

              Yeah, not all, but pretty damned common.

        2. My kids, Orvan, and their friends. Granted mine are weirdo home schoolers, but not all their buddies are.

  8. What I don’t get, is all the people praising the British type of healthcare (on sites such as NotAlwaysRight), while, and after, those stories about those babies being killed were still ongoing.

    1. Because those infants weren’t really deserving of health care. So since they would be a drain it was necessary. Of course your type 2 diabetes, transition, and feel good meds aren’t a drain so they should still get those at others costs.

      A huge chunk is just dressed up greed.

      1. Major factor, but governmental lust for absolute power over the public plays a significant role as well. In both cases that I followed of UK infants consigned to death by the NHS the families had foreign offers of treatment at no cost to the NHS, but they were forbidden from taking advantage of those offers by force of law. The rationale given was that it was “kinder” to allow the babies to die rather than take a chance on experimental treatments. Which is bureaucratic BS for “we own you and you will respect our authority!”
        It is my fondest wish that the officials responsible for that burn in Hell, and the quicker the better.

        1. But that comes from financial as well. Prove that the child can be helped and your subjects will think they should be able to get similar. Gotta manage expectations

            1. I don’t know Great Britain hasn’t banned rope yet have they? All in all annoying the British people always seemed like taunting Ents in the Lord of the Rings. They’re formal and slow to anger, but once you set them off look out. Although, today to some degree Great Britain seems mellower as it has had 2-300 years of kicking out any non conformists who headed for the assorted Colonies (America, Australia, South Africa). They self selected for politeness and conformity…We selected for orneriness

              1. about the only place over there I’d live is the Isle of Man. The rest would be worth a day visit at a time. About all i would be able to put up with, methinks

          1. It’s a creeping idiocy. The babies are only the latest manifestation.

            The Terri Schiavo case scared the shit out of me. A lot of people have told me that, since the autopsy showed she couldn’t possibly have been savable, it was for the best, and it infuriates me. We had gone from a standard of ‘We will take you off of life support if you have a careful written legal document saying that is what you wish’ to ‘We will take you off of life support on the unsupported word of someone who has a financial interest in your death’.

            *shudder*

            1. We will surely get it fixed if a bunch of assholes listen to me, and do horrible things to a bunch of old hippie stoners in nursing homes.

              *spit*

              1. I’m with you Shadowdancer. The one about not providing fluids to a 14 year old slowly dieing of cancer. I don’t think there is punishment on this earth sufficient for that doctor, death by lack of fluids or lack of food is from my understanding horrific. How do you become a doctor where Primum Non Nocere (first do no harm) is something you take an oath to do and then do that? Remind me NEVER to get ill if I go to Old Blighty…

            3. Definitely freaky as hell.

              “Hey, after repeatedly being starved and dehydrated half to death, being warehoused for years, her family being locked out when they tried to monitor she was getting basic care, her brain shows she would’ve most likely been disabled.”

              Yeah, let me do major brain damage to YOU, then withdraw all therapy for years on end and see what happens to your brain.

        3. See, that’s where I would become a criminal. Any government that tried to prevent me from seeking treatment for my ill child, has violated both my child and my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and therefore it becomes my sovereign right to alter any agreements between me and that government, including use of lethal force against any and all agents of said government. Of course the British have done a fine job of disarming their population; so the only arms people can take up against them are butter knives and cricket bats.

          1. The Brits have all but eliminated the legal ownership of firearms, and just about forbidden the use of force in self defense as well. London is last I knew on a ban all knives campaign. No telling where that will end. But they’re still associated with the EU so minimal if any border restrictions on travel through most of Europe. So once you decide to ignore the law you have a vast array of opportunities to acquire the ordnance of your choosing.
            The powers that be in the UK keep this chit up and Brexit will be the least of their worries.
            On that note, I just realized that November 5th is fast approaching, Guy Fawkes Day, celebrating the gentleman who tried to blow up British Parliament. And the next day, November 6th, is our own midterm elections which might very well spark any number of mini revolts here in the USA.

          2. When the Hospital has the child, it is a little hard to break them out.
            That is why the Hospitals don’t even let the child go home to die or visit, they would lose control.

            1. Search “breaking out of Mayo Clinic” and you’ll find a story of how a family managed to get their daughter from the clutches of a hospital that didn’t really have a justifiable reason to keep her.

              It didn’t seem so much evil as a cascading fustercluck of bullheadedness, power-tripping hospital bureaucrats, indifference to patient welfare, people generally getting their back up, and the ever-delightful “policy.”

              Lawyers and various police departments were involved before and after.

              Take something like that, then add governmental approval… urgh.

              1. Then there was the Massachusetts hospital that went full NHS and tried to get (or got) guardianship over a minor teenager (whom they had mis-diagnosed, just to add gravy).

          3. Jerry Pournelle used to refer to the difference between “Subjects” and “Citizens”. I think we’re [slowly, dammit] heading back to the ‘C’ end, but I doubt the British people have moved much off ‘S’ just yet. OTOH, with their powers that be, that move might just be abrupt.

          4. I have to admit, the sheep baffle me. A few years back, a 12 year old asthma sufferer DIED in Canada because the school wouldn’t let him carry his inhaler. The mother is said to be ‘working to pass legislation to address this problem’.

            ME? I’d be chasing the officials at that godsdamned school with a chainsaw.

            1. Chainsaw’s okay, just noisy; and the good ones are too heavy to chase after officials unless they are in the morbidly obese range. Scissors style hedge trimmers are too much like the scissors in Psycho. Pickax is quieter, until the first strike. Shovels on the other hand, work very well and generally have longer handles. Plus, you can sharpen the blade without most people being the wiser. Or you can use a sidewalk edging tool. Don’t use hoes because the handles are too flimsy and break on the first blow. What really is the cat’s meow is a heavy duty gas powered weed whacker with a blade instead of string. But if you see a nun with a ruler, RUN!

          5. But the precedent! If the NHS allowed the children to leave, or adults to come to the US for chemo, then the people in England would want the same. And since the NHS is bankrupt already… Bureaucrats, lampposts, et al.

            *horks hairball toward the NHS*

            1. Giles, who was a Socialist from the 1930’s and never really changed, started mocking the NHS in (at latest, because I have that Giles annual) 1957. Think about it; less than a decade in and a SOCIALIST is already making fun of it.

              That’s all I need to know about Single Payer.

              1. Come on, we have all these chronic criminals that the lawyers and judges refuse to do anything about, we can reclassify them as ill, and treat them via death by slicing. Why are you racist against the Chinaman? XD

                1. Let’s Not.

                  Considering how many times those “studies” come out labeling Conservatives as having some sort of “mental illness”, I don’t want Progressives to start saying “You’re not evil, you’re just sick. So we’ll send you to the hospital to be cured.”. 😦

                  1. Those “studies” solidified the final steps in my change of opinion about the death penalty. I still believe there are some people so evil that they “need killing”, but I no longer think it wise to trust a government, with all the political BS that goes on, with the final decision of who that applies to and who it doesn’t. Maybe I would trust ME with that decision, but I don’t expect other people would, and that doesn’t hurt my feelings one bit.

                    1. While I understand your POV, I disagree because there is a slippery slope. Once you abolish the death penalty, then life in prison is seen a cruel. It ends with someone getting a 15 year sentence for killing Pim Fortuyn.

                    2. Yep. Saw this at work in Portugal in the seventies. And now homes in nice suburbs have bars on their windows.
                      The thing is to make sure it’s just applied to murder. Just murder.

                    3. Pope is already there.

                      Logic goes that the death penalty is unacceptable because we can protect the right to not be murdered, tortured and/or raped by locking people up.
                      Locking people up for life is inhumane, though, because they’re isolated from people.
                      …who they then go back to robbing, raping, torturing and murdering.

                      *********

                      Square the circle, it’s not the gov’t who decides that someone should die. That’s the jury of their peers, inside of limits set by the gov’t.

                    4. My change of mind concerning the death panalty came about from Radley Balko and REASON magazine reporting (together and seperately) on the ongoing clusterf*ck with forensic evidence and the unaccountability of prosecutors and cops who break the rules to get convictions. If I knew that any prosecutor on a capitol case was crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’ because he didn’t want to be put on trial for attempted murder if he didn’t, I would still be for the death penalty.

                      As matters stand, I simply back the Second Amendment, on the grounds that if you really need killing, some armed citizen is likely to see to it.

                    5. Taking away the death penalty is a crazy solution to the abuses of prosecutors. Take the one who had to spend five (or was it ten?) days in jail for locking a man up for decades — and that was the first actual jail time for that abuse.

                      The solution for the insanity of prosecutors is to curb them but good, not assuage ourselves with the thought that innocent men will merely rot in jail.

          6. Slipped into the first episode of the new Doctor Who was The Doctor describing the new sonic screwdriver that she built: “Scanner, diagnostics… tin opener. More of a… sonic Swiss army knife. Only without the knife. Only idiots carry knives.

            1. Since the sonic screwdriver performs all the functions of a knife, cutting torch, laser weapon, lockpick, and so forth, I guess you don’t need an actual cutting edge. It’s a pretty nasty weapon without one.

              Sounds a bit disengenuous to me.

              1. Its just them trying to come up with a BS way to say they ‘helped do something about all the knife crime’ in the UK.

            2. It has long been my opinion that the two greatest advancements in human history were mastery over fire and the use of a cutting edge. The current British campaign against knives along with their policy of criminalizing the use of force in self defense leads me to believe that everyone with stones and a spine must have emigrated from that once proud nation.

              1. Nah. The elites tried to cow the people of Britian, and are still trying. And the people’s patience is running qute thin. You’d think the elites would take the results of the Brexit vote as a warning, but like our own would-be Betters they are proving remarkably stupid.

            3. I’m sure that line will be quoted by many who see a female Doctor as political correctness run wild, but in my mind I can certanly hear Tom Baker saying it in the persona of the Fourth Doctor.

        4. One of those children had the support of one of the major English Soccer Clubs (Everton FC) behind them in their efforts to allow alternate treatement and the NHS and British Government still told them to drop dead (which while figurative was intended to be literal, and ended up being literal). When government controls healthcare it controls the individual. The quality of that healthcare is utterly irrelevant. because the goal is power and control, not whether people get better healthcare.

          1. Charlie Gard? I think that he had the sponsorship of a US Senator and was denied the ability to go to US for treatment until he was too sick for the treatment.

            1. Actually I was referring to Alfie Evans, but Charlie Gard is another example of how government run healthcare means that people are serfs who exist at the state’s sufferance.

    2. I know several people who have come here from Great Britain and have heard some choice things about the medical care system. Those who left elderly parents behind told of wait lists so long that their parents aged out before you could get treatment. Those who have had their own experiences here with diseases such as cancer believe they would never have survived if they had remained in England.

      Still the worst health care story came from France. A woman whose appendix burst while on business in France was first taken to a French hospital. They assumed that as a overweight American it was probably a heart problem, and had scheduled her for tests down the line. Fortunately the firm for which she worked insisted she be taken to a different hospital, the American Hospital of Paris, where she was rushed into emergency surgery which saved her life.

        1. Well, if the guy who starred in a movie called “Dumb and Dumber” says that, I guess that ends all debate.

        2. Jim Carrey was in one film – ONE – where his performance didn’t make me want to hit him with a shovel.

          OK, there’s the one Batman film which he plays the Riddler, but the reason I remember it fondly is that Carrey was bouncing off the walls, and Tommy Lee Jones (in that gawdawful makeup, no less) could upstage him while sitting still and not saying a word.

          I try, I really try not to judge actors by their politics, so I suppose I shouldn’t judge his politics by his acting. But I can’t help but think; ‘Acting is his PRIMARY job. And he’s lousy at it. What are the odds he does politics that much better?’

          1. He’s not actually a bad actor, he’s just very good at some really insanely obnoxious character types, mostly in the “zany” area.

            Which yes, make my hands itch for a cluebat, too. I didn’t have much patience for it when it was coming from a 14 year old class clown, much less a grown man.

            Kind of like Andrew Robinson, AKA the killer in Dirty Harry, and Larry in Hellraiser.
            Also a plain, simple tailor on a space station….

            (Last I heard, he was STILL getting death-threats for the Dirty Harry movie, because he played the evil psycho to the hilt. But apparently he’s a real sweetheart.)

            1. You have a point. I have a similar animus against Robin Williams, largely because of the type of character he usually played. People would rave at me about one Williams film after another in which he was an unconventional genius being oppressed by Authority…and 8n each one I sympathised DEEPLY with the authority in question. I liked him as the Djinni in ALLADIN and as the King of the Moon in THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN. Otherwise, yuck!

              1. Glad it’s not just me that found the justification in a lot of those “oppressed by authority” movies to be somewhat lacking.

                I’ve been bitten, a lot, by people deciding that rules don’t apply to them…and then I’m stuck cleaning up the resulting mess, if it’s even possible to clean it up.

      2. Well, the U.S. Army didn’t think I hurt enough or had a high enough white cell count to have appendicitis, and waiting an entire weekend before scheduling surgery and discovering it had ruptured already. (Leads to the hoary old joke about military physicians actually PRACTICING medicine.)

        1. I was overweight, and the “push the site and if you scrape him off the ceiling, it’s appendicitis” test didn’t work. It also didn’t help that Eldest Brother had his appendix out a couple weeks beforehand, and I was feeling rotten enough that I actually mentioned it. No, I didn’t like/dislike EB enough to develop a case of Munchausen’s over it…

          I’d gone to the clinic at opening time. By mid/late-afternoon, the surgeon talked to his head of section, who’d encountered the same problem, as a patient. By 7PM, I was loopy on a gurney, heading for the OR. It hadn’t burst, but it was close.

          (Thought I remembered after the pre-op Valium hit: “I could die from this, that would be a bummer.”, with all the concern of dropping a penny. I try to avoid Valium as much as possible, for some reason. 🙂 )

        2. Oh Lord. The stories we could tell about Navy medicine (Even at Bethesda!) I really thought that the active duty soldiers got the good doctors, though and it was just the dependents that enjoyed unmitigated gummint healthcare.

          2. And that’s not my interpretation, that’s the flat out statement by one of the older doctors, about himself. Thought it was dreadfully clever.

        3. Well, fifteen years ago on Labor Day weekend (which had something to do with it, in my opinion) 71 y. o. maternal uncle with heart history went to ER with appendicitis. They didn’t want to do surgery and sent him home; this is a teaching hospital, in the US. At some point, he went back. While waiting to be seen in the emergency department, as I’m told, it ruptured and he went to the desk and told them never mind, it had ruptured. (I assume the pain went away.) Of course, he had surgery, and had to spend a week in the hospital instead of a couple of days.

          BTW, doctors nowadays say they can cure appendicitis with drugs; funny thing is, they were saying that during World War II (according to Admiral Lockwood, COMSUBPAC’s, memoirs)—at least if the alternative was to have a pharmacist mate do surgery at 100ft. down on the mess table, which happened more than once, successfully.

          1. There was also a squadron commander of his who proposed they run everyone through an appendectomy as part of getting dolphins….. an idea which probably had merit.

  9. It just astounds me that anyone can be so dirt stupid as to say that men and women are the same.

    One of the best illustrations of just how wrong that statement is can be found at The New Hampshire Highland Games & Festival, Heavy Athletics page (https://nhscot.org/festival/heavy-athletics) and looking at the world championship record holders. All men. Not that women can’t compete; but there hasn’t been a woman ever show up who can match or surpass the strongest men in these events.

    —

    Whatever happened to a woman taking a pass as a compliment, even if she turned the guy down?

    —

    Five second rule for looking at someone? I have massive facial recognition problems. It may take me as much as half a minute to burn someone’s face into my mind so I match their name up properly.

    —

    The cure to the bathroom dilemma is to have single stall bathrooms with a locking mechanism and floor to ceiling walls. Problem is, you can’t fit as many into the same space as you can with an open bathroom; and for schools, you can’t fit more than one person in the stall to be able to provide aid for that kid (assuming you’d risk a child abuse accusation.)

    1. I appreciate passes as long as the guy takes “no, thanks, but I appreciate you asking,” or “No, thank you,” at face value and that’s that. I had to fend off a guy in HS who took “No, go away, don’t touch me” as “Your mouth says no but the rest of you is saying yes.” Even a hard-bound book to the hands wasn’t enough to convince him that I was baring my teeth, not smiling. *sigh*

        2. In high school my bride to be used the sharp side of a pencil to explain to one of the jocks that she wasn’t interested. When asked about the yell (in class) the clown was so stupid that he told the truth. Teacher told him to stop be stupid and suck it up. Guys were expected to deal with rejection – a major lesson we no longer teach our kids, unfortunately.

        3. Confession time: I don’t like most women. This group is a rare and delightful find for me. Thank you, ladies.
          I was fired from a contracting job because my female supervisor went to the boss and complained that I “refused to follow directions.” My response was “what directions?” She apparently thought that asking my opinion on a software change (I agreed it might be a good idea) was a direct order to stop my priority programming job and send a week putting her change in place. I was told to finish my priority job and then was let go. The boss agreed with me that discussing a “good idea” was not the same as “change your priorities and work on this now” but felt he had to support his female employee (his term). He expressed his regret that he was loosing a good programmer (I was pretty good) and wrote a good review for my work but I was out of a job. This in a major, international energy company. When I applied for the astronaut program I was literally told that NASA was looking for the best female candidates they could find. So much for equality.
          Women do NOT, in general, think the same way men think. I learned early that if you want to understand someone, read what they are reading. I read some of my wife’s books with her (we alternate reading chapters to each other). The works of Janet Evanovich are some of our favorites. Reading some of the pulp fiction tells you what a person “dreams” about. My mother-in-law read historical romance novels. My own mother read Field and Stream! Radically different ladies.
          If the goal is to understand each other, a little time looking at what you are reading tells me a lot about you. The thing that most people, male and female, never understand is that how you “feel” is totally irrelevant. Neil de Grasse Tyson said in a speech,”Mother Nature is NOT your friend; she wants to KILL you!” and he is correct. I may feel that life is unfair but that will not get me a job, or stop that bear from mauling me or any other bad outcome. Ask any special ops troop about his feelings and he’ll probably look at you like your are a fool. Feels do not count when it comes to determining the outcome.
          Unless we learn this and teach our kids that being an adult means “getting up one more time than you get knocked down” (John Wayne, “The Train Robbers”) then I fear we are doomed.

          1. My reading preferences: Heinlein, Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Pratchett, F. Paul Wilson, Larry Correia, David Weber, John Ringo…
            Mind you, I also read stuff like endless Jane Austen fanfic when I’m tired and have a shorter than usual attention span. Eh. I might be weird.

          2. Janet Evanovich’s books were hysterically funny, though they did sort of go on to the point I lost interest. I wouldn’t read them to my husband, though.

            What we did read together (or I read out loud while we were together) was David Weber’s Oath of Swords, the first few of them. And I read Wen Spencer’s 8 Million Gods aloud.

            Normally we don’t like the same science fiction books. He likes big fat far ranging epic space opera and I like small-crew space opera adventure.

    2. Well, there was Eilidh Mor, who famously killed several Vikings with her bare hands, and then pushed a boulder down into the Viking horde on the beach, killing their leader and persuading the rest to depart forthwith.

      But that took motivation. They tried to steal her cow.

      And it was a smallish Viking raiding crew.

    1. Nasty neural infection… and .. Nasty neural infection.
      One is twisted up proteins or such, the other is twisted up ideas.
      But a neural infection is a neural infection, so.. it fits.

  12. “Well, what it seems to have wrought is young men (and generally men who might be in mixed industries) refusing to work with women , and certainly refusing to work with women alone.”

    I feel for any women starting out in the two careers I’ve had. I’ve worked at 6 companies & one governmental position in my career (since HS graduation, 45 years ago). In exactly 2 of those companies, was there another female in the same group I was working in. 1 of the 4 season s for the governmental position was another female.

    Short of the people hiring being absolutely stupid, women are just not going to get hired; or offers will be such that most won’t take the offer; then they won’t last because of the isolation. Neither will a smaller percentage of the men. When it is pointed out the lack of diversity the company can list the ones that were made offers, & those hired & quit.

  13. “What it seems to have wrought is young men (and generally men who might be in mixed industries) refusing to work with women, and certainly refusing to work with women alone.”

    In which cases, those young men will be hounded as sexist pigs who are deliberately denying women career opportunities because they don’t trust themselves to be alone with a woman without raping her.

    See Pence, Mike for details.

    1. Exactly.

      Somehow it was obvious to all and sundry that this policy closed off opportunities for women to have “business dinners” with their boss “like male colleagues do”. Though I sort of doubt that one-on-one mentoring in social settings is really that common or vital. But maybe that’s because I’m in a career where we all get done with work and go home.

    2. Mike Pence is smart enough to be considered for President after Mr. Trump. Trouble is, I think he’s smart enough to choose not to want the job.

        3. Cute idea, but seeing as after 8 yrs as pres, Trump would lack the single most important qualification of a VP. That being the legal ability to become Pres if necessary.

            1. My (non-legal) understanding that one can’t be voted in as President more than twice, which = 8 years as President. But, should a president die days after being sworn in, a VP succeeding to President, who then wins the next two elections, could then serve 12. As long as President Trump does not run for president under Pence/Trump ticket, should Pence die, nothing to stop President Trump from finishing Pence’s term. Couldn’t run again at the end of the term, but he could serve it out. OTOH, he’d be what 80+. At that point one would have to ask … WHY???

              But yea, the hysteria on the left would be worth the popcorn & sit back & watch.

              Personally I surprised nothing is being made of President Trumps apology to Kavanaugh, at the swearing in. Yes, they are screaming “resist” the illegal court, but nothing on the actual apology. I really thought the left was going to swoon in abject horror … hmmm maybe they have & just not recovered yet?

              1. I think the Legal Logic against VP Trump would be that the VP has be somebody who could legally be President.

                Once Trump has completed his two terms as President, he can’t be legally be President again (elected or otherwise).

                Oh yes, if possible, it would be wonderful to see Liberal Heads exploding. 😈

              2. The amendment declares that serving two years of a term to which some other person was elected is a term.

                So a person could serve at most a smidgen under ten years.

    3. because they don’t trust themselves to be alone with a woman without raping her.

      …Didn’t a certain group outright say this? You know, the “if a cat eats the meat that’s left uncovered, it’s not the cat’s fault…?” /very, very dry tones

  14. All it really took, though, is changing a goal of being treated like “one of the guys” and making that into something awful. Not that I personally appreciate dirty jokes or such but men around men act differently than men around women (and vice versa) and when you’re the only or one of very few women in a group the men generally act like they do around men and it’s noticeable.

    I honestly prefer it.

    But the code-switching is something women are supposed to be better at because we’re supposedly the best most awesomest at communication, don’t cha know. So what’s the hub bub about bub?

    1. But that would not empower womyn. The work place must be AS Womyn like it or they will be oppressed. Anything that makes a Womyn FEEL uncomforatable MUT BE DESTROYED! Because Womyn are EQUAL to MEN but MUST be treated BETTER or ELSE!

      1. I honestly have no clue what people are smoking. I scrolled past a thing this morning saying that a university student study group was caught out planning to deliberately exclude autistic students because they wanted their study group to be a “safe place” and well, autistic spectrum people just blurt stuff out or something, and ain’t no one can deal with that!

        Honestly, how freaking pathetic can you manage to be if you try?

        I was imagining a college professor having everyone stand up and then pointing to the one side of the room and say “autistic spectrum students over there” and then pointing to the other side and saying “students who want a Safe Space study group go to the other side of the room… everyone who wants an A go stand with the autistic spectrum students.”

        1. You know… in the twelve years I spent incarcerated in various public school systems, I can’t remember ever encountering anyone who would meet the modern definition of “autistic.”

          I keep wondering if it’s one of those self-fulfilling diagnoses. “We have the budget to deal with X number of autistic students, so we will designate X number of students as autistic.”

          1. *anyone* on the spectrum gets labeled as autistic so that the school gets extra money for ‘mainstreaming’ students that are ‘learning impaired’… anyone, including mild aspies. You saying you don’t know anyone who was a mild aspie?

            1. I understand they redid the DSM to classify all the autistic spectrum as Autistic.

              I am convinced that people exist who have serious problems, and those serious problems fit the old criteria for Asperger’s.

                1. My understanding is that most pro’s will not treat them anyway because they are too dangerous. They can destroy a carrier easily.

                  2. Autistics or narcissists are dangerous? If the first, is this primarily damage to the career of the practitioner, and if so, I’d be interested in hearing about the mechanism?

              3. By modern standards I’d probably fall somewhere in the “spectrum.” I could probably claim Special Snowflakeness just like… how much of the population could wave that banner now? 65%? 75%? More?

                When you move past 20% or so, I maintain whatever you’re measuring is well within the bounds of “normal.”

          2. I’ve met one while I was in school who was full blown, and a number afterwards. The low end of scale stuff is imo more grab bag atypical kids vs actually mentally different.

            1. Also trying to cover-up the damage done by removing classical manners.

              All that “freedom” really sucks if you don’t have the intuition and natural skills at body-reading to patch it over. (Starting to think that’s a lot of why boys are diagnosed as autistic spectrum so much more– besides the ones that are simply high IQ.)

                1. Bouncing off of that, a bunch of Elf’s buddies at the office did a “team building exercise” where they wrote down their favorite color, favorite food, favorite kind of book and something else.

                  Two of the folks there are pretty good friends of his, several others are social-friends, and two he barely knows.

                  Got two folks 100% right. The guys he barely knows, because there wasn’t enough information to confuse him; the guy who wears red almost every day and brings in CfL bags at LEAST once a week, and who’d only had two non-work related conversations with Elf both on science thriller type subjects he got right, the guy whose wardrobe he’s actually seen, who he gets restaurant suggestions from and with whom he games, not so much.

                  One’s a fountain, the other is a firehose. Yeah, great, you’re getting a TON more information– now use it.

          3. Yeah, anything like… doesn’t catch social signals and has difficulty with interpersonal communication gets labeled anymore.

            There *might* be some environmental issues causing greater occurrences, I sure don’t know.

            There was one of my classmates who certainly qualified as autistic when I went back to college a few years ago. There were a few others with “issues” that really needed someone to simply give Very Clear Orders on behavior and personal hygiene but really there was only the one guy who I’d call autistic at all and that was really obvious.

            He would ask questions in class, though, and my one professor just annoyed me to no end. He’d ask for exact information and she’d push back, that he had to understand it, not just memorize it. He didn’t seem the least bit worried about her saying that but I wanted to tell her that I’d prefer to actually be taught what was already known as well, and that’s HOW many people understand and incorporate what they know into what they don’t know and that she was super annoying with her “nevermind what the real term is, lets make up a way to explain this because then I know that you understand it.” ARRRGH.

            The difference between him and I might be that *I* found it very frustrating.

          4. I may have spent time in a special ed classroom where they were keeping the disturbed kids and the autistic spectrum kids. One guy was pretty clearly low functioning, and probably was all the way into the proper autistic diagnosis. No language, and his behavior was pretty clearly not what you would expect from Down’s.

            Regarding incidence, couple bits of research I heard second hand, which means I don’t have names or citations. Long while back, RL discussions had covered apparent correlation with extreme sensitivities to a range of materials. If this is true, and the rate born autistic is constant, mildly hazardous environments might disproportionately kill autistics young, and artificially lower measured rates. Very recently, heard that some new stuff had come from ultrasound inspection of facial lymph nodes. Lymph nodes can clog, and certain of them are tied to drainage in the head. Excess fluid drains from the brain down certain pathways. If it does not, apparently the brain can swell. A swollen brain can apparently pick up surface lesions from hitting the skull, which can apparently cause autistic like symptoms. Also allegedly, fixing the drainage can permit the brain to heal, causing symptoms to cease. So some modern research suggests the possibility of an environmental cause.

            1. Drainage. Kind of like kids who have to have tubes put in their ears when young. Eventually most grow out of it.

          5. Two issues besides survival– mainstreaming gone wrong, and institutions being an option.

            It takes a very rich population to be able to routinely care for really-hard-core autistic folks at home without them getting killed, and a lot of them would just be diagnosed as whatever the then-current term for elf-touched is.

            Our elder son would probably be diagnosed as autistic if we did normal school– he hits all the warning signs my mom was taught in the 70s in the ed program. But he doesn’t realize he’s weird, because he’s not forced to spend 8 hours a day with folks who would identify it, isolate it and go on a warpath to destroy it.

          1. Who else has seen the GEICO horror commercial? All the kiddies making those poor choices? Want to bet they’re all democrat-socialists?

  15. Another thing that MeToo accomplished (which may have been the reason for it) was to take the spotlight off of Weinstein.

    1. And ALL the OTHER DEMOCRATS!! It was ONLY supposed to hit Republicans but the targeting didn’t work.

      1. It was supposed to hit TRUMP. Because bragging about your conquests is just like rape. But there were enough women extremely angry with Weinstein that they picked up the opportunity and ran with it.

          1. This may be a case of “It depends on which of them you’re talking about.” The metoo crowd was big enough to have a multiplicity of motives. I suspect few of them were actually noble, though I am unwilling to state absolutely that NONE of them were noble.

  17. Thr fruit of the tree of Leftism has been poisoned for a long time. The Progressive Movement may have been so-so ok under Teddy Roosevelt (I hear arguments both ways) but by the time Woodrow Wilson was elected, it had started downhill and was picking up speed rapidy. Since then the Left has been working hard to subjugate the masses into Lefty Approved slavery, and BOY do they resent you when you point this out.

    The Counterculture of the 1960’s was a bunch of stupid youth being managed by older Intellectuals with bad intent. Some ok stuff came out of that anyway. Some of the music is fine and at least two of the products of the Underground Comix movement are still readable. But way more than the customary 90% was drivel, music, comix, and all.

    Modern Art, Modern Architecture, Modern Classical….all tend toward absolute garbage with a few small gems.

    I grew up with the strong prejudice that if the Intellectual Left were for something it was most likely wrong and very probably actively evil. I have not been wrong often enough to matter.

    1. There is a reason why Soviet bloc architecture was monolithic buildings that all looked the same; can’t have people seeing any creativity or anything other than absolute conformity.
      When the left screams “diversity” they are really screaming “conform” because to them Conformity is Diversity (which should be the fourth principle of Oceania’s Ingsoc)

      1. Diversity is:
        A. A hammer to divide people and energize their supporters.
        B. A way to get special privileges for themselves, e.g. you being mean to me is hate while me hurting you or destroying your life is just speech.

      2. Actually, there are several reasons;

        The Russians are rubbish builders, as anyone who has read about the building standards in Tsarist Russia can tell you.

        Stalin has revolting taste. (So did a certain despicable Austrian, but most of his stuff got blown up)

        By the time they got out from under Stalin, even if his successors had had any better taste, they were more or less committed to Modern Architecture, because the Westerners who pushed it were useful idiots.

        I’m sure others will occur to the sufficiently cynical.

  18. its not a tree, its a viney weed that just keeps growing and can’t be stomped out because they are making roundup illegal.

  19. “Well, what it seems to have wrought is young men (and generally men who might be in mixed industries) refusing to work with women, and certainly refusing to work with women alone.”
    Can you say “clear and present danger”, boys and girls? Because that’s what girls are, to boys.

  20. After reading this article and the comments, “I’m so glad I’m not young anymore…” I need to get out back and put in some shooting practice. Just in case.

  21. There’s a reason (besides most of my fellow employees are idiots) that I don’t accept almost all the offers to socialize or do stuff with my coworkers after work.

    65% of the office is female, and I have always had issues with non-work interactions with women. All I have to do is make one toe over a line that I have no clue even existed…and, game over, man.

    I can’t blame companies and such for not wanting to take the risk. Yes, there are a lot of women that look at the #metoo movement and go “girl, what the (YAY!) have you been smoking?”, but there are way too many (>1) that would have no problem with using this kind of thing to deal with people they don’t like.

    Or to get rid of the “creepy” guy in the office.

    Or to deal with somebody that turned them down.

    Odd boys need women that can set firm boundaries and know how to enforce them. Not torture them with boundaries they can’t even see.

    1. Yep. Saw it done at work personally. Reason I will not interact with folks outside of work, even though it negatively affects my career chances. Not worth the chance.

    2. The evidence is near to overwhelming that the Left has been subverting corporate Human Resources departments to exploit this new dynamic. I’ve been near to several cases of that sort: well acquainted with the accused, and fully aware of the predatory nature of his accuser.

      The hell of it is, in the new, guilty-until proven-innocent world, a man cannot ensure his protection against accusation without video-recording every instant of his life. Women are going to regret this. Men already do.

      1. Hence why many places make personal recording disallowed. And you think the HR harpies are going to allow someone to use company footage you’re on good stuff.

        1. Disallow it all you like. You’re going to fire me over the false accusation, at least I’ll have evidence to take both the accuser and you to court.

      2. A dictation recorder is very unobtrusive thing and can be easily carried and used from a pocket. And can be used in places where they say recording is not allowed. When falsely accused, use the recording to disprove it. When they try to fire you for failing to obey corporate regulations, you sue them into oblivion for promoting an unsafe workplace that encourages unlawful activity.

  22. It took exactly zero seconds for the movement to devolve to “he looked at me longer than I felt comfortable with.”

    By the late 1960s, feminists were calling that a ‘mini-rape’.* The feminist crazy in America is over 50 years old.

    * Stacy McCain has read the major feminist publications of that period so you don’t have to. He’s written about what he found.

    1. as for the interaction between males and females, I always wanted the old rules, extant when my parents dated, if not when my grandparents dated, which I’d have preferred.
      There is a reason all my relationships were long distance, besides “Portuguese guys are crazy.” Long distance you had to establish what the relationship WAS. In Portugal you were “just friends” and suddenly you were engaged.
      Judging by some of the proposals I was tended I think I dated a few Portuguese guys without realizing it.

  24. 40 years ago, I was doing my PhD in astrophysics and was the only woman in the lab. Observational astronomy in those days involved long stays on remote mountaintops. I’d go off to the observatory for 3 weeks with a couple of the guys and no one–not my husband, not the (personally conservative) professor in charge of us all, not the wives/girlfriends of my teamates–ever turned a hair. Those observing trips were an important part of my education, and if the current overcharged atmosphere means that young women will be deprived of that kind of scientific experience, it will be a big step backwards.

      1. My wife hates talking on the phone anyway; she hates being interrupted by useless, dubious telephone solicitations. I mean, she despises sales calls; she loathes surveys, and doesn’t want to talk on the phone for a long time to anyone. She dislikes phone calls from strangers interrupting her when she is trying to get work done or resting. Telephone calls from people she likes are okay (if not too long), but if anything substantial is discussed, she will repeat what she said after she hangs up in hopes that she didn’t say anything offensive nor misunderstood. I blame the latter on sort of teaching career trauma.

        1. I hate talking on the phone, too. But at a crucial point in my career, if I hadn’t had MAJOR psychological encouragement from a bestselling friend, I’d not be writing today.
          HOWEVER I’ve seen my leftist colleagues call the equivalent from a male writer “sexual harassment” even though there’s nothing remotely sexual about it.

          1. Half the problem with the phine these days is the way everyone expects you to be available all the time. It’s the reason I don’t have a cell phone; I’ve seen the ration of dung my friends get when they don’t answer theirs RIGHT NOW. I had a colleague who had gone somfar as to program his phone to text “What part of ‘I’m at work, I’m not supposed to be on the phone’ didn’t you understand?” To anyone who called him during his shift…and his MOTHER teed off on him about it.

            When people demand of me “Why don’t you have a cell phone?” in the tome of voice they would use to ask “why don’t you have an indoor toilet?” I tell them “Because if I wanted to be available for you to talk to 24/7, I’d have married you.”

            We used to get a lot of calls from a collection agency, looking for somebody who had had that number before us. They were extremely persistent and I came to doubt that the debt was legit even for the guy they were looking for.

            I was delighted to learn that at least one man, who was similarly pestered, had learned enough about the relevant law to get multiple thousands of dollars in judgements aganst sketchy collection agencies, until his name was put on an industry list of people to treat like the plague. Evidently they aren’t allowed to imply that they are law officers, or can have you arrested, or to call you at work, or outside of certain hours at home, and every time they break those laws they can be forced to pay you a sum of money in reparations. The fine doesn’t go to the government, it goes to YOU.

            1. When I was working for the private process serving firm, one of the great ironies was having to call collection agencies and “creditor’s rights attorneys” to get them to pay their bill.

              One collection agency routinely had over a quarter million outstanding at 120+ days past due.

            2. Well, stinky fish. You mean I cut mom out of money when I told the collection agencies to quit calling or it’s elderly abuse? Mom was 71.

              Technically the dept was valid, for grandma & grandpa, estate. But, that was what the lawyer was for, & the court judgement & probate. They were absolutely not allowed to call mom, or her siblings.

              Not only that the calls persisted AFTER the judgment was rendered. I mean I get it, creditors got 10 cents on the dollar owed. What did they expect from my grandparents estate, that their kids, grand kids, & great grand kids, would bankrupt themselves, paying off dept that should never, ever, been provided to the grandparents; yea, right. Also, think I told one or two of them to pull their head out of their A$$.

  25. Pingback: Knowing Them By Their Fruits – Wince and Nod

  27. I work part-time at a range, and there’s something that’s been a touchy subject that’s much more so now:
    Cleavage.

    Lady with [cue Monty Python] huge tracts of land[/MP], in a low-cut top and- usually- a push-up bra comes in, Do you warn them, delicately as possible, of the consequences of a hot case in the cleavage, or do you think “Screw it, I’m not saying a word” because of the possible consequences?

    I’ve told a couple of ladies of the risk, and so far no problem, but last year another employee warned a lady and got screamed at for “STARING AT MY BOOBS!” And in the current atmosphere, this could get you fired. But if you don’t say anything, and someone gets a nasty burn, that doesn’t go over well either.

    1. I’ve had hot case down my bra. In my defense I didn’t realize we’d be going by the range when I got dressed in the morning and it was hot.
      Future-daughter-in-law and I were talking about that just last week.

    2. My dad managed to get a case down his shirt, because it was just loose– you could just mention to anybody who has a top-down gap.

      The shrieking harpy was probably feeling self-conscious and nothing would’ve stopped her.

      1. From description, her outfit: skin-tight jeans, four-inch heels, said low-cut/push-up combo on top, and with her boyfriend. ‘Self-conscious’ probably doesn’t figure in.

        1. From a girl– that makes it much more likely that she was over-doing it and really, really uncomfortable doing so.

          Might also be showing off for the boyfriend, though.

  28. Had a lady a few months ago who actually got a case stuck under her bra strap.

    One of the reasons we have burn gel in the first-aid kit.

  29. “Look, in the States, in our day and age, no woman my age or older has experienced “patriarchy” nor anything resembling patriarchy at large.”

    ITYM “younger”… My mother is 93, and she encountered quite a bit of “patriarchy” in her day. But even for younger women it’s not true.

    Consider some of the hyper-observant Orthodox Jewish communities around NYC. Or the polygamous Mormon sectarians out west. Or Pakistani and Middle Eastern Moslem immigrants; girls subject to the threat of “honor killing” have certainly experienced “patriarchy”.

    Of course that depends on how “patriarchy” is defined.

Comments are closed.