ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα...

My friend is in a physically abusive marriage. Photos of red marks on their body are saved in my phone. I've thought they were going to be murdered before. The thought has crossed their mind. Their wife constantly accuses them of cheating, among other things, because that's her idea of what a man does. She has stabbed their mattress when she was angry to "see what it feels like." They showed me a tiktok she sent them. It's a woman out in the woods captioned something like "burying him here so nobody will ever find him ♥️♥️". This kind of memetic mean-girl feminist stuff has, as a part of the overall erosion of effective and principled feminist discourse, devolved into truly abusive personalities joking about harming men at its edges. This is rewarded and celebrated. My abusive ex did a lot of the same stuff. Would dig around these quasi-rad or outright radical feminist spaces to essentially find rhetorical ammunition to abuse me over. Then would fall back onto the plucky mean-girl feminist memes when I tried talking to her about the emotional and sexual abuse. I support mens rights to shut the fuck up. Same thing happens to my friend. Doesn't have anything to do with the actual person being hurt. It's just an expression of these gendered resentments. Spending time in communities literally listing off reasons for a woman to be angry at a man, and then taking that out on their partner. Happened to me. Happens to lots of people placed in the social role of "men." It makes a war-like philosophy out of gender. Turns it into an order of violence. Justifies violence.

I recently saw a post going around here about how men suffer abuse so rarely that there's no reason to adjust language about intimate partner abuse to include men. That the suggestion is simply men being big babies and trying to reframe every conversation to be about them. That my experience -- that my abuse on the basis of my perceived manhood, no less -- is literally a marginal experience, an outlier that shouldn't be incorporated in the conversation about other people going through the same things I did. That it just isn't deserving of discussion or concern. And it was being shared by mutuals, long time mutuals, people I respect and enjoy. People who are better than that. This isn't something that makes people irredeemable monsters. I don't want their heads on spikes. But this kind of cruelty is horrifyingly common.

In the end, this is the cost of harshly reifying gender. Resenting men as a class grows into a social infrastructure to justify and even gamify abuse. It becomes fun. It becomes jokes. It becomes blood for blood. There's a perceived justice to the suffering being doled out to the supposed abuser class. And, in doing so, patriarchal masculine standards are recreated and maintained. The abuse is perpetual. Men are belittled for having feelings about the way they're treated, for trying to talk about their emotions, and they are continually expected to simply bear the burden of abuse and not complain. The masculinized body and spirit is a vessel of abuse. This is its purpose.

You will be dearly missed. 🩷

Changes in this part of the brain were previously used to previously used to argue that women are the ideal primary caretakers of children in all cases. And apparently, it’s false. The reason they found these changes in women was that women were already the primary caretaker in almost all cases, not because there’s something inherent to women that makes them better parents.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

So I posted to my followers that I’d lower the threshold to 700,000 because I love you all and I’m starting to worry about a handful of you.

Look at that chart. He entered the governor's office in 2019.

California is the world's fourth largest economy, all by itself. The governor of California is one of the most powerful people in the country, and thanks to that, a general leftist and liberal history, and particularities of US environmental regulation, California also has more regulatory power than any other state in the country.

Not only do executive orders in a state the size of California actually hold potentially massive power, but also, Gavin Newsom has enjoyed a Democratic majority in both houses of the California legislature, and for part of the pandemic iirc a Democratic supermajority.

Gavin Newsom could have genuinely, stopped this trajectory at any point, especially during the pandemic.

But he hates poor people and homeless people and Latine people and undocumented people way too much for that!!!!!

He's pretending he's powerless in the face of California's homelessness crisis, like half of it isn't literally his fault.

Also he came and spoke at my college campus in 2018, when he was running, and in response to student questions about tuition, he basically said he didn't care that we couldn't afford tuition to our faces, he had no real plans to do anything about it, and then ignored all our questions about tuition and the affordability and homelessness crisis, and pivoted every answer to gun control for the next 40 minutes.

(Fun fact: my university has a Homeless Student Union. Iirc in 2018 it had about 200-300 members. At an incredibly prestigious university that, as a UC, Gavin Newsom is also in charge of. The homelessness crisis has only gotten worse since then, especially in CA. Much of San Francisco's good reputation as a tech capital is dependent on massive, city-wide police sweeps to round up every homeless person they can find and arrest them or dump them outside city limits before major tech conferences or big national events.)

The fact that radical leftist activists and anti-homelessness activists are basically the only ones I've seen correctly blame Newsom for his massive role in causing and perpetuating the brutal and literally deadly homelessness crisis that's been killing Californians for years.

*pinches nose*

Fellas, is it cultural appropriation to inherit your family's culture but you don't pass the blood quantum test?

However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.