malcriada

"Holy smokes"

My daughter says this is the whitest thing she's ever said

"And I'm only 25% White!"

Her math:

50% English

25% Mexican

25% White (American)

She has, by age 13, absorbed my definition of "White People" (and English people do not count)

She got the 25% from my 50%

The dilution continues.

She has blue eyes and pale skin

with our dark hair

Thank God for the dark hair

But she tells me she won't have a quinceañera

Certainly not with misa in a church in Tijuana, like I did.

She says no one believes that she is Mexican

They didn't believe me either.

A name like Jennifer

My father's Irish surname

I could not run for Señorita Cinco de Mayo

They would have laughed me out of MEChA

had I tried to join.

I did not try.

YES I am fully aware that this is nothing but a naked cash-grab by a soulless bloodsucking corporate behemoth that does more damage around the globe than it can ever atone for. 

Dear Claire Berlinski,

I was alerted to your “The Warlock Hunt” article ( https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/12/06/the-warlock-hunt/ ) on the Facebook page of a good friend of mine, a fellow feminist and in fact my date to the Women’s March!  I can say I have the utmost respect for this friend and that she and I fall roughly in line on most sociopolitical issues. 

And I am the first to admit I don’t do nuance.  I’m not a friend, nor even a passing acquaintance, of concepts like balance, subtlety, grey areas.  I’m a black and white thinker on most issues and I know this.  If you want to parse out all the fine details of a subject like the recent wave of men brought down in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and the #metoo movement—I am not the one.

And I have to tell you, girl—I fucking HATE this article.  As in, it legit got under my skin in a wake-you-up-at-3am-gnashing-your-teeth type of way.  If the job of the writer is to affect people deeply and keep them awake at night, then, like, mission accomplished.

I don’t even know where to begin with this horseshit. So let’s just do a numbered list in no particular order.

1. First of all, any response to sexual assault and harassment  based on the premise that “I would not have been offended by that”, “I would have laughed”, “I would have _____ [insert insouciant and heroic trouncing of the would-be assailant]”, is yes, otherwise known as victim blaming.  And it can fuck right off. This Annie Oakley act is getting so old, and the fact that I have friends employing it these days depresses me no end.  I don’t care what a badass *you* are, Claire.  I don’t care that you don’t mind old dudes grabbing your ass or hugging you or kissing you in your place of business, or if you see them as bumbling admirers who make such inimitable contributions to their fields that you cannot possibly live in a world where they are forced into early retirement.

The vast majority of women have just made it clear to the entire world that we DO care, this is FUCKED UP to us, and we want it to STOP.  What’s more—we are experiencing a rare and unprecedented cultural moment where we are actually being BELIEVED and LISTENED TO and there are real, concrete negative consequences to the men who are perpetrating these illegal actions. (And yes, sexual harassment is still illegal in the United States, although with the way you loooove people kissing in the workplace, maybe not where you live). 

This is a wonderful and exhilarating moment in our history, and you want it curtailed so that scumbags like Leon Wieseltier can continue to play Grampa Grabass ad nauseum into their Assisted Living years.

Well, sorry, but FUCK THAT.

2. Lest we think you have simply never experienced inappropriate conduct from men, you give us a few examples of when you did experience it.  And then you talk about how AWESOME it was.

“I did not freeze, nor was I terrified. I was amused and flattered and thought little of it. I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials—which took place one-on-one, with no chaperones—were livelier intellectually for that sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me, sensu stricto. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. But I also had power over him—power sufficient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power. “

????!!!!!!

This right here is the entire reason that little emoji scratching his chin with a WTF look on his face was created.

If your solution is that men stay doing piggish behavior and women suck it up, laugh and revel in their feminine power to “incite” piggish behavior… dude, that is a non-starter.  It would make me laugh if it didn’t make me want to cry so much. 

3. I am not willing to let the status quo remain in the hopes that most women are cut from this extremely particular brand of cloth described above, which I gotta tell you, sounds batshit crazy to me after reading this article a few times through (at 3am…I told you I was obsessed)  and reading all accounts of the behavior of these “innocent” men whose plights you lament.  I don’t know anyone who relishes the ‘undercurrent’ of a man who holds power over their career who plainly wants to fuck her more than he gives a good goddamn about her ideas.  I frankly cannot believe I’m only 4 years younger than you, because that sounds like some wacky old-timey shit out of a movie, to find that scenario anything other than repulsive and sad.

4. So if all the shit that makes me *repulsed and sad* makes you feel *alive with the irrepressible human spirit where we’re all just animals and ancient courtship rituals are at play 24/7 and blah blah fucking blah*…we’re just living in two different universes, experientially.  Sadly, the one most women agree we actually LIVE IN, in the real world, is fucked up, and it is finally getting a liiiittle tiny dose of justice.  Don’t mess it up, Claire.  We have enough of an obstacle, what with the thousands of years of patriarchy and all, to have to add your little bullshit argument to the heap, too. 

5. NONE of the examples you cite as “harmless” interactions that do not merit firing or career jeopardy…are harmless. NONE of them.  They are all examples of physical assault, physical harassment, verbal harassment, quid pro quo, or at thevery least, hostile work environments.  Your examples, bar none, are all CREEPY AF and would warrant disciplinary action in any workplace in the country…if they were not so commonplace and routinely swept under the rug as they have been for eons. We are FINALLY on the precipice of these gross behaviors actually being called out and truly dealt with.  Why would you want to kill that? 

6.  What if, instead of skeevy Michael Orestes or vomit-inducing backrubber David Corn, you had used as your example of this cultural moment going “too far” (your words)… Garrison Keillor? Keillor is the only man in the recent list of the newly unemployed who does not have multiple reports or in fact any rumors of having been a pig all these years.  No one besides the one woman whose back he admits to touching has come forward, anonymously or otherwise.

If there is anyone in this whole shit show who might elicit a modicum of sympathy, such as it is, it would be Keillor.  But do you use him as a (far more plausible) example of this “frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt” (ugh, my eyes roll so far back in my head every time I see those stupid fucking words)?  Nope.  You choose as your misunderstood hero this slimeball (Wieseltier):

“Decidedly not a joke was what happened to Sarah Wildman, a writer at Vox who worked at the New Republic from 1999 to 2003: “One night most of the staff went out. Leon cornered me by the bathroom and kissed me. I clapped my hand over my mouth and he said, ‘I’ve always known you’d do that.’ I felt terrible afterwards.”  Another classic Leon move: More than once, when he and I were out for drinks, he would pass along a mundane bit of office gossip, suggest it was a great secret, and tell me that if I ever revealed it to anyone, he’d ‘tell people we’re fucking.’ He framed it as a joke, but it was a joke-as-threat.”

The article describes dozens of similar incidents with dozens of women, over decades.

I’m so nauseated after reading it.  But this is your fanciful take on it:

“Nor for the life of me can I make sense of the allegations against Leon Wieseltier. “The only problem with that dress is that it’s not tight enough,” he is reported to have said to a woman who worked for him. A lewd comment, to be sure. The daily banter of men and women the world around is full of lewd comments. ‪At times, we have learned from The Atlantic, Wieseltier drank too much and made passes at his co-workers. That’s not a wildly rare occurrence.”

I urge people to read the article on Wieseltier. See if, in their analysis, it boils down to the harmless occasional madcap bawdiness described above.  If that’s the world you want to keep living in, Claire…damn. Am agog.

Seriously, Claire….What the fuck are you smoking, that this guy is OK with you??  I might have been able to keep the eyerolls to mid-lid if you’d used a man for whom most cannot imagine serial creepiness (like Keillor). You didn’t.  And all of your examples of “meh-not-that-bad” are actually GROSS and absolutely actionable upon the slightest examination.

7. Any argument that ends with telling *women* literally to “knock it off”…i.e. let’s keep shutting the fuck up about sexual assault and harassment… cos this bougie white lady who can’t get enough of randos kissing her at work that she had to move to France, says it’s all good?….NOPE.

8. And this bizarre analysis just gives me the howling fantods:

“I’m not sure what, precisely, is now driving us over the edge. But I’d suggest looking at the obvious. The President of the United States is Donald J. Trump. …  Daddy-the-President turns out to be a hapless dotard. Women who had hopefully imagined rough men standing ready to do violence on our behalf so we could sleep peacefully in our beds at night have discovered instead—psychologically speaking—that Daddy is dead.”

I read this and all I could think was, “Are you fucking nuts?!” WHO thinks this?! Who in the world woke up on November 9th and had this nonsensical horseshit rattling around their brain pan? Is my chief complaint about Trump that he is a HAPLESS DOTARD? Lady, that part doesn’t even crack the Top TWENTY complaints I have with that shitbag.

How about the fact that 59 million of my fellow citizens voted for someone who embodies the idea that women are dirt, men can do anything to them, and told every single one of us who has been sexually assaulted, raped, molested, or harassed (meaning every single woman I know, hence the whole #metoo thing DUH): “Too fucking bad.  We don’t give a shit and we’ll keep doing it and there’s nothing you can do about it.”  Doesn’t THAT make a whole lot more sense than your Freudian drivel? Might we need a little Occam’s Razor here?

9. What kills me is how it’s been a whopping 5 minutes and all these assholes like Matt Damon (way to put yourself in league with greatness, Claire) are all “WHOA, GONE TOO FAR, SOCIETY IN SHAMBLES”.  Really, bro? Line up every single man who has been called out in the past few months. All of them, including any Podunk, Idaho dudes ww didn’t necessarily read about. Now go grab a bowl of rice, and pick out one grain of said rice. Throw that grain in the trash. Now go back to your bowl. Do you notice any disruption? Any change at all?  Is your rice bowl IN A SHAMBLES? Well, that’s the percentage of the problem that’s been dealt with.  

10. It’s been about what, a few months? Since the Harvey dam broke? Are we really mourning how these men have had their lives and reputations *destroyed*?? I’m sorry, is Woody Allen not still a working director and writer who never stopped getting to create films and convincing all manner of respected artists to work with him? Aren’t all of these dudes still a) rich and b) walking the streets? Is not one with a list of NINETEEN accusers the current President of the United States?  Then CRY ME A FUCKING RIVER about how “destroyed” they are. And let’s wait a few years to see who’s not still doing just fine in their respective fields.

11. Claire, you are so heartbroken about Kevin Spacey.  Man, last time I checked there were FIFTEEN people accusing dude of assault , including FIVE who were teenagers at the time.  Why is your heart pumping so hard for this guy and not at all for any of the KIDS he tried to rape? (It should be obvious here that I stand with accusers and I believe all of these allegations—any who think everybody is lying can fuck off back to Trumpland with the Roy Moores of the world.  Not you, Claire—I know you believe everyone—you just don’t give a shit and wonder why they’re so uptight).  If even ONE of these kids were someone close to you—would you give a shit about Spacey being airbrushed from his next movie?  Why is THAT a tragedy to you?

12. And then you pull out the old "Harvey Weinstein = legit bad”.  As in, ‘I’m not a rape apologist cos I can plainly call out HW’.  Everyone else? Meh, just laugh. Enjoy the “amusement” and “power” that comes from men devaluing you and treating you like a piece of ass, and dread the day when you don’t have that power anymore. (Are you fucking for real, Claire? Do you think the treatment women receive has anything at all to do with our special and unique desirability?  That 90 year old women and 9 year old girls and women with every manner of facial structure or body type or race or color or disfigurement  or general “look” are all equally eligible to be assaulted and harassed at any stage of life JUST for being female?  Why is this a concept that needs to be explained to you?  Why is this even a conversation?)

13. Believe it or not, I am actually not a fan of the news, and details of the accusations against Oreskes, Wieseltier, Corn, et al, had eluded me.  So I read them all. I invite everyone to go read them.  To go click on each link in your article and see how they feel.  The idea that Claire Berlinski is A-OK with the world these men inhabit, this ass-grabbing Oxford don writ large is perfectly fine running every single enterprise for the rest of our lives—makes my skin crawl. NONE of these pigs deserves to still have their job, and I am happy for a thousand more just like them to follow the same path to the unemployment line.  HOW THE FUCK ELSE IS ANYTHING GOING TO CHANGE?  Why do you not want this to change?!

14. I’m not going to even TOUCH the fact that your “laugh the harrassment off and continue on your merry Oxford-educated intellectual expat way like the saucy and irrepressible bon vivant that you are” is so steeped, pickled and drowned in White Privilege that it comes with its own jar of mayonnaise and a Williams-Sonoma gift card. I got a mere seven words on that um, “strategy”, which is decidedly NOT accessible to poor women, working class women, women of color, trans women: Easy for fucking you to say, Claire. 

15. So yeah, I got no love for this ivory tower academia mierda, complete with Elagabalus reference and fond memories of your lecherous Oxford don. There’s no fucking way it is diminishing my workplace or my life in any way shape or form that a man who is not my boyfriend or my husband cannot roll up and KISS ME or come up behind me and hug me. (?!?!? Again, where do you work, Claire?!?!) Perhaps us plebes who don’t live the intellectual expat life in Paris are too dim to grasp this heady argument. All I got for you is a big piping mug of GTFO.

​"Mother Jones’ editor David Corn, it seems, offered unwanted backrubs. So what? From the prose in Politico you’d think he ravished Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The accused, we are to understand, “came up behind [his accuser] and put his hands and arms around [her] body in a way that felt sexual and domineering.” He gave her a hug, in other words; but it felt to her sexual and domineering. There is no reliable way to know if a hug will feel sexual and domineering to a woman or whether she will find this disagreeable, let alone how she will feel about it twenty years from now. So the lesson to men is clear: Never hug women at work, period. But this is insane. The project of eradicating physical affection from the workplace is cruel to men and women alike, and if it is successful, we will all go nuts.“

I have worked a quarter of a century in offices.  Not *once* has any man hugged or (VOMIT) KISSED me at work.  The thought of it is so alien and bizarre that I cannot even wrap my brain around it, and yet you seem to think this is the lifeblood of the workplace, physical affection. THE FUCK?!  Again, dude, WHERE DO YOU WORK, Claire??!!  I have not only NOT "gone nuts” from my years in a zone free of randos putting their lips and arms on me, I have been just HAPPY AS A CLAM.  You can do it, Claire.  We can ALL do it, and I would be willing to wager WE WILL ALL BE JUST FINE.

I don’t give a fuuuuck about the uncertainty or anxiety or tension that men will experience from wondering how to navigate a landscape where there are real and concrete career and financial repercussions for doing things that were A-OK a few years ago (and let you tell it, A-OK for the rest of our lives, if only we shrieking harpies would quit being all in our whiny feelings).

The accusations against EVERY SINGLE ONE of the men you mention as pitiable victims of the “warlock hunt” (and another Fuck You for using that bullshit trope even with the “clever” swapout of warlock for witch) are absolutely inappropriate in the workplace and would have freaked the fuck out of me if any of them happened to me.  But here’s the thing:

THEY DID NOT HAPPEN TO ME.

And the SUBJECTIVE REACTIONS OF THE PEOPLE THEY DID HAPPEN TO *ARE* SALIENT ISSUES.

The intentions of the harasser are actually immaterial if they are perceived as unwelcome to the person on the receiving end. 

The fact that you want to police the actions of the victim and leave the behavior of the perpetrator out of it, IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

THIS is why this is happening now, to GET RID of that mentality.

To take the onus off the victim and put it where it belongs, ON THE PERPETRATOR.

To change the behavior that elicited the response, NOT THE RESPONSE.

What part don’t you get about that?

Why are you siding with the Trumps of the world who would have us do exactly what your charming coda calls for, which is for women to “knock it off”?  Why do you not want MEN to fucking KNOCK IT OFF? 

I am so very sorry that dudes are losing their jobs when you feel they are innocent geniuses simply complimenting us with their gross attentions and maladroit fumblings.  But what, pray tell, is going to create actual change in the workplace, without concrete financial and economic consequences attached to these kinds of transgressions?  This shit has been going on forever, and it continued on in the decades after mandatory sexual harassment training became as much of an office fixture as stale donuts in the breakroom.  Those decades of training did not create the atmosphere where Michael Oreskes would STOP being someone who forcibly kisses a woman now almost 40 years younger than him, the same way he did in the 90s with the ones who were only 20 years younger (this fucking pig, I swear) .

You have such contempt and derision for the fact that Oreskes’ NY Times accusers came forward two decades later, anonymously.  THEY KNEW HE NEVER STOPPED, CLAIRE.  And guess what, HE NEVER STOPPED, CLAIRE.  He did it to Rebecca Hersher in 2015.  What are the odds of her being the only other victim in the 20-year interim?  (And you’re damn right they reported anonymously– because of the climate created by fucked up perspectives just like yours.)

Serving as an apologist for this kind of shit is what I expect from Breitbarty idiots and anti-feminists.  I even searched for what folks like Ann Coulter has been saying about #metoo–is she on the “this is a witch-hunt” bandwagon, too?  Well guess what, she’s not (yet).  And the first thing that came up when I Googled “conservative women on #metoo” is this article from the mother effin’ DAILY SIGNAL.

http://dailysignal.com/2017/10/20/im-a-conservative-who-was-roofied-by-a-stranger-heres-what-i-think-of-me-too-hashtag/

An excerpt:  “Yes, there is a difference between sexual assault and sexual harassment (although both are unacceptable) and sometimes the #MeToo hashtag has blurred that distinction. But that shouldn’t overshadow the larger picture of how many women are still affected by these issues.

And yes, it is difficult to bring the hammer of justice down on perpetrators when victims do not feel comfortable coming forward with names. (And I would urge women if they can to report incidents of sexual assault.) But a cold-hearted presumption of culpability or exaggeration only makes it harder for them to break their silence.”

Or how about a cold-hearted call for all these delicate, oversensitive gals to STFU and see the ‘humor’ and ‘admiration’ that really underlies what they interpreted as a demeaning and frightening and completely unacceptable in the workplace?

Yes, the DAILY SIGNAL has a better perspective on this issue than you do, Claire.  Congratulations, it takes quite an effort to out-asshole those assholes.

It goes without saying that the fact that you have a vagina does not matter here. Like Uncle Ruckus and Latinos for Trump, there is no shortage of assholes who sell out their own people, and they are discounted as the enemies of progress that they are. You just put yourself right up there with every hated GOP politician who thinks its A-OK to treat women like cattle at work, and that this whole war on men needs to go away. You and Rupert Murdoch, holding hands and kicking cans in the shared delusion that this whole brouhaha is ridiculous and it’s all a little harmless slap n’ tickle. 

I really wonder what the actual response to your article, since I couldn’t read any comments after the thread was 100% hijacked by two mouth-breather Trump voters of the Tiki-torch, men’s movement variety.  Those are the charming bedfellows who come a’callin’ when you align yourself with the misogynists of the world in the call to just tell all these #metoo whistleblowers to shut up, put on some lipstick and enjoy the harassment while you’re still hot enough to get it.

And to that, all I can say is….

"I'm not victim-blaming, but...." is the new "I'm not racist, but..."

More examples of victim-blaming:

--"Why didn't you say no?"

--"Why didn't you scream/yell/make a scene?"

--"Why didn't *you* _________?"

--"I would have done [insert heroic action here] that would have prevented it from happening or made it so I didn't care or think about it ever again, and certainly never reported it because it's not a big deal and I'm not a victim" (Because *reporting* is what makes you a victim. Not what he did to you. WTF?!?!?)

Because putting the responsibility on the person who was harassed or assaulted or raped instead of asking WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T THAT GUY *NOT* HARASS ASSAULT OR RAPE YOU is victim-blaming.

And putting your energy into worrying about that stuff is shortening this already tiny window of opportunity for us to call out abusers and actually be believed for once in our fucking lives. It's already closing. It's already in backlash territory where even "liberals", even feminists, even women who agree with me on most every other topic are feeling sorry for Louis CK...notsomuch for these spineless victim-y women who waited 15 years to expose what he did (which meh, not so bad, he's not Harvey Weinstein, he's not an actual rapist).

People: if Harvey Weinstein, who ***serially raped and physically assaulted SCORES of women for decades and then hired international spy organizations to systematically destroy their careers, reputations and lives***

If that's our barometer...

If anyone who did *less* than that is getting a pass...

I mean, seriously?!?!?!

WHY IS THIS EVEN A CONVERSATION? "Well, he's not Harvey Weinstein..."

You're right. Louis CK is not Harvey Weinstein. But what he did was WRONG and caused harm (and if you think it was *only* those 5 women, sorry but you're delusional) and there is no reason on Earth why he does not deserve to answer for that and pay whatever consequences befall him. (Which, cry me a river, he's filthy rich and even Woody fucking Allen still has a career.)

Spending your time bemoaning the sad fate of poor unfortunate talented wonderful not-Harvey-Weinstein Louis CK... it plays right into the forces that want everyone who has ever been victimized to go back to shutting the fuck up.