I was 20 years old and had only ever experienced leather a couple of times in my life. The fact that those times were the most rewarding experiences I could remember informed my choice to return the uniform bar, Headquarters, on Castro. This is the story of my experience that night.
I walked into the bar which was thick with cigar smoke and leather men. They had a pool table in the far back of the bar with a single light to light it up. Sitting cross-legged on the table was a man of about 60 years old. He was bald and wore a sleeveless shirt and shorts. His face was rugged and his eyes literally glowed blue under the light. It was such an amazing sight that I had tears in my eyes. He was so sweet and inviting that I didn’t even stop at the bar, I just walked right up to him to talk to him. He stared at me the entire time.
So I introduced myself and shook his hand. We had some chit-chat about this and that and then he asked me why I was there at the bar. I told him briefly about my other experience in this bar and I was ready to learn something new.
He asked if I wanted to leave the bar and go to his place on Diamond Heights. He explained that he would drive and that I could leave at any time if I wasn’t entirely comfortable. I decided to go with him.
He drove a nice sports car which indicated that the man had a lot of money. Not everyone in SF had a car. He also had a beautiful condo in Diamond Heights facing the city. From his bedroom window, you could see the entire San Francisco skyline from bridge to bridge. It was stunning.
So we parked the car in his garage and he opened the door to his place and followed me in. When we got to the lower level, he indicated that his bedroom was in the loft upstairs, but wanted to offer me a joint. I normally avoid pot because it can make me feel like a vegetable, but I took a hit off the joint and felt immediately high. I figured it was mostly nerves and excitement and tried to relax for a minute.
When we got upstairs, I could see a lot of things hanging on the wall around the loft. I couldn’t really process why they were there and when I asked about them, he just laughed and said that we would get to that in a minute.
He began taking off my clothes and rubbing my skin all over. He was excited like he had just been given a new toy or something. I felt objectified and it was kind of a turn on. I brushed away the thoughts that he particularly liked my skin.
He had me lie down on this huge bed that he had made himself. He put these super-comfortable restraints around my wrists and ankles. Then he clipped each wrist into a strap connected to the bed. He did the same for my ankles.
Next, he reached over to the side of the bed where a huge level was located and he cranked the lever one time. My wrists were pulled up and away from each other while my ankles were the same. I was being stretched out on this bed that I would later be able to identify as a rack. He pulls the lever again and I am stretched tight. I had a little discomfort on my wrists, but I was okay. He asked if I was okay and I said yes.
He then picked up a quarter from the nightstand and attempted to bounce it off my belly. It just landed flat so he said, “Not quite tight enough, boy” and pulled the lever again. This time it was moderately uncomfortable, but I could handle it.
Then the thoughts started creeping in. He knew I had done military service in the past and realized that I would recognize the quarter test. This is how the Drill Sergeant would test our bunks to see if they were “tight”. If they weren’t we’d be punished with pushups and he would wreck our bed and make us fix it while everyone else got punished while we fixed our beds.
But then he took of his shirt and pants with his back to me. His back was a twisted mess of scar tissues that reminded me of Freddy Kruger, only much, much, worse. There were literally hills and valleys where the flesh was so hideously deformed that you could lose a matchbox car in them. I stifled back the terror when a warm sensation flows over me because I realize what has happened.
It was obvious to me that he planned to skin me alive like that movie Silence of the Lambs. I had allowed myself to be completely unable to stop him and this was the end of my life. Tears formed in my eyes, but I was comforted by this warm and resolute feeling that I no longer had to worry about what was going on now or in my future. I was soon to be dead and my body was preparing for it. I wondered if I was having a heart attack or a stroke or something. I decided it was shock and went with it.
He lumbered over to me and crawled up on top of me naked with his huge penis in my face. He said to me, “son, you really are new to all of this aren’t ya? Well let me tell you something a little too late for ya. “
“Rule number 1 – never let a stranger tie you up.” he grumbled and acted upset or let down that I had not followed rule number 1.
He reached over to the side of the bed and grabbed a silver knife that was about 10″ long and perfectly shiny. He held the knife against one side of my throat and said to me, “Well, you fucked up boy. I was gonna enjoy pissing down your throat but you ain’t even worth my piss.” and he drags the cold silver knife across my throat and then stabs it into the pillow by my head. I could feel a little feather land on my face.
He crawled off of me and says, “I’m gonna piss downstairs–you stay put” and he chuckled to himself.
As soon as he was out of sight, my mind kicked into high gear. I was sure he had cut my throat and this was my only chance. I was going to get free and jump out his window so that even if I died, he wouldn’t be able to hide it. I figured I might get someone’s attention and they could rush me to a hospital. It was my only chance.
Clip, Clip and my hands were free. Immediately I reached for my neck to see how deeply he had cut me. I figured I would be bleeeding out but needed to know how deep the cut was. I figured I was in shock. There was no cut.
A fleeting thought ran through my head, “well that was easy enough” and I reached to grab the knife and hide it under my side where I could grab it and kill the mother fucker when he came up the stairs again. As I am positioning the knife, another thought goes through my mind.
“If the man wanted to kill me and harvest my skin, he would have killed me right away. He would have had a plastic bag to catch the blood. He was either the dumbest killer ever or that wasn’t his intent at all. Then I thought about Rule 1 and suddenly it became clear to me. This is a lesson. He has no intention to kill me, but he had to teach me a lesson so I wouldn’t be in this situation with someone less compassionate.
I was really trying not to cry at this point. It was a big gamble and I wasn’t sure what to do. My sense of time was distorted by the pot and I had to make a decision quick.
So I clipped my wrists back in and laid back. Almost immediately after laying back down, he comes up the stairs and we proceed to do some sexual things but nothing invasive or even slightly painful. He made me pee in his mouth which was difficult for me to do. Just simple stuff, but the entire time I was terrified that he could still skin me alive.
When he unclipped me and put his arms around me I had tears coming out my eyes though I wasn’t crying so much. I was scared and shaking and he cradled me in his arms to explain what was happening.
He told me that when he went downstairs, he didn’t really have to pee. He wanted to know if I was a willing participant. He said that he set a timer and after 5 minutes, he would come up and release me to take me home or wherever I wanted. He would apologize for scaring me and hope that his lesson was learned.
But, he said he could hear me get loose from the clips. That meant that I knew how easy those climbing clips were to release. Once he heard that, he reset the timer for 5 minutes. If he heard me clip myself back in, that was his sign that I was a willing participant. That was the only series of events that meant that it was okay for him to proceed. To my credit, I was one of about a dozen boys that had clipped themselves back in. If the timer had gone off either time, he would have brought up the lights, apologized and taken me home or called me a cab.
So he knew the entire time that I could escape if necessary. But I didn’t know that he knew. The mind fuck that this entire scene taught me was invaluable. I was once again in complete control as the sub. But not knowing that was the reward for the entire scene. This is exactly what the willful exchange of power is about. I am grateful to this day for Lesson 1.
Note: the reason his flesh was so horribly deformed is that every year, he is the whipping boy at Dorey Alley fair in San Francisco. The Dorey Alley fair is the real Leather/S&M fair in the city whereas Fulsom Street fair is the watered down commercial version that all the uptight pretty boys buy their leather costumes for.
So this guy is whipped publically by professionals that use the whip to lacerate his flesh on stage. It’s his kink, and he is always a willing participant. The process leaves his flesh in terrible shape, but reminds him that we are so much more than the flesh that we carry around. He is a compassionate and loving man and I am forever grateful to have spent time with him.
An exploration of the power dynamic in leather sex.
This is a true story of actual events that shaped my understanding of the Leather community and informs my belief in the role of dom/sub and the willful exchange of power.
It was a Friday night in the Castro and I was 20 years old but had a fake ID. I was horny and wanted to have sex with a big leather daddy, something I had only fantasized about. I picked Headquarters, the uniform bar off 18th Street in the heart of the Castro. It was 1990 and AIDS had already swept through the community establishing in its wake the negative connotation for leather-sex as irresponsible or dangerous. I was not deterred.
I walked into the bar and ordered the King of Beers, a Budweiser, and asked for two dollars in quarters. I loved pinball and they happened to have a couple of pinball machines right next to the bar where the hottest man was sitting. I floated over to the pinball machine, bent over to put my beer on the floor, and fed the machine its quarters. Nothing.
I was really expecting a comment or something from the man at the bar, but he ignored me. Two hours and at least a dozen multi-balls later and I had not gotten a single reaction from this man. I was bitter and frustrated as the lights came up and the bar started to close.
“You ready to go, boy” was the first thing I heard the man say. I was like Jack Russel Terrier on meth. I was bouncing around, so excited that I couldn’t help myself. As we exited the bar, I told him we could walk to my apartment just across Market Street on Castro Street. He said we were taking his car. I reiterated that it would be harder to park the car and that I lived literally 100 feet from the bar. He stated one last time that we were taking the car and I understood that I needed to shut up and get in the car.
It was a brand new Volkswagen Golf–pristine white. I kind of laughed to myself- some leather daddy, huh? When we get to my apartment, he pulls up on the sidewalk and parks illegally in front of my bay window at the garden level.
He tells me to get his bag from the back of the car as he walks to my door. I could barely lift the huge leather bag and I began to wonder what I was getting into. Not enough for my erection to go down, but a little fear creeped in.
The apartment I was living in was located right above Market Street on Castro. We had a beautiful bay window that faced the street at the garden level. I was living with someone I had fallen in love with the previous year during a computer convention my first time in San Francisco. Falling in love with this man literally saved my life. It was his choice not to be dating when I arrived, but I never though I would trick with someone in his apartment, especially not with him asleep in the back room.
We get in the door and the leather daddy has me put the bag down. He tells me to strip naked and I start to suggest going to my bedroom…then shut up and stripped naked. He walked over to the bay window and opened the curtains all the way. The bars had just closed and people were walking by the garden level flat and looking in to see us. They were forced to walk around his car that was blocking most of the sidewalk, but that gave them an excuse to look right in the bay window. I was a little freaked out, as small crowds would form and then dissipate.
Once we got started, I don’t remember thinking about the people outside for even a second. I was so focused and driven to be the best boy this leather daddy had ever played with. I had previously had some serious dental problems and pain was something I was used to. I figured I had an advantage here.
He put a dog’s choke collar on me with the teeth pressed against my neck. Then he put a cock and ball separator on me and ran a chain through the loose part of the collar through my legs and tied it to the door handle. I could hear the love of my life stir a little in the back room and my heart was racing.
He had me walk towards him, away from the door. Each step pulled my nuts and dug the teeth of the collar into my neck. He encouraged me to continue like he expected it. It was supportive, but had the tone of, I know you can do better, come on. And I did.
What I remember next was that he had his arms around me and my back was pressed against the door. I was too excited to realize that I had choked myself out. When I couldn’t breathe, he picked me up and walked me back to the door where the collar was released. He loosened the collar and could see the 40 little bruises around my neck. He told me I was a good boy and stroked my head while I pressed against his hairy chest, shaking just a little but happy, so happy.
He then pulled out a cat of nine tails and had me reach out to hold his nipple ring. He told me that he was going to whip me with this thing and that when it got to be too much, I would let him know by releasing his nipple. He would stop the second I indicated that I had enough.
As he began lightly whipping my sides, cock, and legs, I tried not to wince or express discomfort. He picked up the pace and increased the strength of each hit. I could feel the residual pain when the whip would come away from my body, but I dealt with it. He never once asked if I was okay–why should he? At one point, I felt my legs start to buckle but caught myself. I thought, surely I have to let go, right? But I was driven to be the best he had ever seen. He stopped a couple minutes later. He praised me and grabbed a towel from his bag. I could see blood on the towel and realized that I was bleeding.
He began reprimanding me in an educational sense about my sense of safety. He insisted that I learn boundaries and explained that I should have stopped him earlier than I did. He never apologized because I was in control. But I could tell he didn’t mean to cause me to bleed. He bandaged me up and packed his things. He gave me his name and number and told me to call him at 10:30a.m. tomorrow if I was ready to learn more.
He left, and I went to set down and realized it was probably best not to sit on my ass anytime soon. It was so red and sore. I went to get in the shower and masturbated for what seemed like all night. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
At 10:30 the next morning, I called. He answered on the first ring saying, “good boy” and I had tears in my eyes. I was so into this guy that I couldn’t believe it.
He explained that he was duly impressed and was considering making me an offer. He said he had never offered this to anyone without a thorough series of tests. He offered to let me come to his compound in Palo Alto and meet his boys.
He had 3 full grown men that he referred to as his boys. They were his to command and they provided for his pleasure only. They didn’t work, or wear clothes and they attended to him at all times. They were stunningly gorgeous and they had amazing bodies. They would take the scraps of affection that he would offer and they seemed content and fulfilled.
One of the boys had been there for 15 years and all three were committed for life.
After my visit, he gave me a couple days to think about what I had experienced. Then he offered to make me one of his boys. I was flattered by the offer and after talking with his boys each of them had an initiation story that sounded intense. They had to go through a lot before they got their offer. I got mine right away.
I would have to give up my six figure job where I had already established myself in the industry I was in, my apartment, my friends, everything. I would never wear clothes again and I would have my head shaved and his information tattooed in a QR code on the back of my head (this was before QR codes were common). I would become his property and he would take care of me for life.
I had one week to decide and surprisingly, it became the hardest decision I have ever made. I chose not to take him up on his offer. I knew there would be no second offer or a chance to negotiate and it broke my heart that I would never see or hear from him again.
Come to find out, he was the Dean of Stanford’s Psychology Department. He was compassionate and one of the hottest men I have ever seen. I was so close to taking him up on his offer and still today, I think about how different my life would have been.
What I learned from the situation is invaluable. I was in complete control the entire time even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I chose my limits and the motivation to allow myself to experience more pain for his pleasure drove me. I do not regret a single moment I spent in his presence and when times are rough, I can’t help but think that maybe I made the wrong choice.
Conservative Anti-Choice Advocate being dramatic about abortion
The topic is Abortion and the creator who posted this screed about abortion reveals his true motivation for making abortion illegal. He is clever to disguise his intentions with subtle editing techniques, his self-righteous tone, and his severe appearance. In all, itโs a well-produced piece of propaganda for Anti-Choice advocates. However, he reveals the truth clearly amidst a bunch of false claims that make it seem like he is concerned about the life of a fertilized egg inside a woman that cannot host a human life yet. Here is my response: His claims are in bold.
Every Human being in society must have innate value.
Literally, no one disagrees with this concept and you are well aware of it. You are guiding your audience to view pro-choice advocates as morally insufficient right out the gate. You are simply being manipulative because you are trying to cover up your real reason why you want to make abortion illegal.
If human beings donโt have innate value then they have nothing and all notions of the social contract would be torn apart.
One can only assume that when you use the term โsocial contractโ, you understand that it has little to do with the justification of the innate value of human life. It was used as justification for government overreach in the 15th-18th centuries.
Social Contract: An implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection.
You seem to be implying that for a woman to be part of society, she must agree to surrender her personal autonomy to the state for the social contract. Whether that is your intention or not, it doesnโt really matter.
In fact, there are a number of people who disagree with the notion that you should have to give up any human rights to be governed by the state. There are certain inalienable human rights afforded to us not by some social contract, but simply by virtue of our human nature.
This is nothing more than haughty drama designed to discredit pro-choice advocates as non-believers in innate human value. Itโs specious at best and we can see right through you.
You continue with:
Describing an unborn child as a clump of cells is technically accurate but also inadequate because this description could apply to every other human being.
Itโs unclear if you missed the point of referring to the fertilized egg as NOTHING MORE THAN a clump of cells when you claim that human beings can also be described the same way. In fact, it is all of the things besides our cellular makeup that distinguish us from a fertilized egg. If you were to list the characteristics of human life and compare all of them to the characteristics of a fertilized egg, you would see that being cellular is the only reasonable similarity and certainly not enough to consider the fertilized egg an unborn child. Anyone who was NOTHING MORE THAN a clump of cells could not sustain life and therefore would not be living. You need a lot more than a fertilized egg to host human life.
Your claim sounded cool until you think about how ridiculous it is. Nobody except you wants to claim that human life is nothing but a clump of cells.
This is a complete non-sequitur. Nobody was describing an unborn child. They were instead describing the clump of cells that do not have the discernable characteristics of a unique human life. People are not describing the cells as an unborn child because there is no guarantee that those cells will become a viable host for human life. 22% of pregnancies are aborted and 16% are stillborn or eliminated through miscarriage. So, the clump of cells has a 62% chance of potentially developing into a body capable of supporting life. The bodies being developed inside the women are not alive until they are capable of supporting life. At which point, they become a viable fetus and can be removed safely from the womanโs body.
Your claim that every other human being can be described as nothing more than a clump of cells is outright ridiculous. Among many things, human beings can be described as a collection of cells but nobody would be so foolish as to claim that human beings are nothing more than a clump of cells. Whereas a fertilized egg inside a womanโs body is nothing more than a clump of cells. The description is perfectly adequate and accurate.
But you dig in further with:
It is neither an organ nor a collection of tissues, it is, in fact, an individual organism forced to feed off its mother from circumstance and through no fault of its own.
This is nothing more than a lie. The clump of cells quickly divides into recognizable organs and tissues, so your claim is invalid regardless. But you make the claim that these tissues and organs developing inside the mother are an actual organism. This is wrong. When you look up the definition of an organism, you can see clearly that the cells and all of their developing complexity do not qualify as an organism until they are viable.
organism
[ รดrโฒgษ-nฤญzโฒษm ] Noun
An individual form of life, such as a plant, animal, bacterium, protist, or fungus; a body made up of organs, organelles, or other parts that work together to carry on the various processes of life.
The second word in the medical definition of organism is the key element that you are neglecting on purpose. While the cells are forming but unable to sustain life on their own as an individual, they remain part of the womanโs body and therefore should be well within her right to remove if she wants to.
What is brilliant about this medical definition is that bacteria are organisms. It is estimated that 1 to 3 percent of the cells in our body (10x the number of human cells) are actually individual organisms that can be removed from the body while still exhibiting the characteristics of life. The clump of cells-not at all.
Even if you found a way to rationalize that this clump of cells was an organism, it does not mean that it will become a viable human life. According to the CDC, there were 24,000 stillbirths in 2014. Those were bodies that could not host life. They were not children nor were they ever alive. They were physical structures built with the goal of supporting life that didnโt make it.
It is neither an organ nor a collection of tissues, it is in fact an individual organism forced to feed off its mother from circumstance and through no fault of its own.
You are entirely inaccurate in your assessment of what these cells are. If they are anything they are organs and tissues so your claim makes no sense. Then you invoke the innocent fetus meme claiming that through no fault of its ownโgive me a break. Your personification of these cells is specious at best.
Yes, a woman should benefit from personal autonomy just like every other free citizen, but the freedom to affect her body ends when it might affect somebody else.
While it is refreshing and unexpected to hear you claim that a woman should benefit from personal autonomy, you do so by granting citizenship to the clump of cells that are not capable of supporting a life yet. Now, just being a fertilized egg grants you citizenship? Itโs not just that you want to claim that the cells are a unique living organism forced into feeding off the woman despite their innocence, now you want to grant them citizenship? Seriously, this is not even worth laughing about.
Why donโt we see a significant number of insurance policies on pregnancies. A life insurance policy seems like it would be perfectly in order from the time of conception if we followed your logic. But we know that until these cells can host life, they canโt be considered a person, let alone a citizen.
Again, if a woman wants her autonomy and the cells are viable for human life, she should be able to remove the cells and they should be allowed to liveโgranted citizenship if you will. But thatโs the problem, the cells are not autonomous until they become a viable host for human life. You simply cannot grant or even infer citizenship for every fertilized egg when 38% of pregnancies fail to produce a human child. See Suggestions-Technology.
Especially when another human life has come to an end.
Once again, it is important that you are more honest with your appraisal of the situation. Nobody is advocating for the euthanization of a viable fetus. Nobody wants to end a viable life. Of the unwanted pregnancies that are not the result of rape, incest, or force, not a single person wants to kill a baby. This is why it is important to eliminate the cells before they become a viable host for human life. Until such a point that the life can exist separate from the mother (even if feeding has to be done through another host or machine), the cells are not able to support human life and are therefore still part of the womanโs body. It is only when the cells develop to support a living unique autonomous organism that these cells can be considered alive.
Rationalizing the decision to end an unborn life can lead to some dark ideas.
Though this is obvious fear-mongering and has little to do with your genuine desire to force a woman to follow through with the delivery of the unwanted child, it is pretty narrow-minded and lacks a reasonable reflection on modern pregnancy. Once again, your intention is to portray pro-choice advocates as evil, dark-thinking zealots that get pregnant just so they can kill a baby. Itโs ridiculous, but when you need to hide your true motivation, you just as well go there.
There are those who suggest that an unborn life should end if it should otherwise be poor or disabled. Thatโs called Eugenics.
Again, you are dead wrong. Here is the definition and goal of Eugenics:
The study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable and decrease the occurrence of less desirable characteristics such as disability or deformity.
This has been done in some manner throughout history with varying degrees of success. Royal families have insisted that members of the family must marry other royalty to keep the bloodline safe. Some extreme situations like Sparta would cull all of the weak babies. In China, female babies were disposable. It is not an unreasonable desire to foster a healthy society of strong, intelligent, creative individuals. It is just that the methods were hideous and unspeakable. So much so that this distorted and horrific version of Eugenics was adopted by the Nazis and used to justify the elimination of Jewish people.
Today, however, the middle class and up all have access to medical doctors that will do genetic screening for compatible genes. We are even using CRISPR to genetically modify cells before they become viable to hopefully eliminate genetic diseases and mutations. They are selecting against the same things like deformity, disease, etc., but they are doing it in the context of an intentional pregnancy. The goals are the same and should a woman become pregnant by a man who is a poor genetic match, it is without a doubt better for everyone involved to terminate the pregnancy before it becomes viable. These kinds of abortions will always be available to the rich and middle class who would not want to suffer raising a deformed or challenged kid.
But thatโs not the kind of abortion that you are against because you are not concerned with the life of the future baby or the life of the woman. You are not concerned with women who want to have a baby but experience complications. Those abortions are fine because these are responsible women doing the right thing.
You make your claim about poverty only because the majority of unwanted pregnancies are unwanted because the woman has no way to support the child that may come as a result of the pregnancy, not just because they are poor and certainly not because they want to kill a baby. An unwanted baby born to a teenage mother that cannot feed it or care for it and literally does not want to feed it or care for it is not likely to make it. If a baby lives a short and torturous life before dying of neglect, it is hard to see the virtue in subjecting an innocent baby to such a thing while also claiming to be in support of life. Eliminating the non-viable cells by ending the pregnancy saves suffering for everyone. But thereโs the rub, isnโt it? Ending the suffering is clearly the last thing you want.
NOW, at least, you are finally admitting the part that you have been so hesitant to admit. You could really give a shit about the babyโs life. You are entirely concerned about the mother.
Furthermore, thereโs a point to be made about individual responsibility.
More important than the potential life is the need for you to make a point about individual responsibility. In fact, if you could be completely honest, you would have to admit that you do not mind if the woman dies during childbirth. Even if both the mother and child die during childbirth, it is not nearly as important as the need to punish the woman. This exposes your hypocrisy and underscores why men should have no say in what happens to a womanโs body. Men have no liability when they get a woman pregnant, but yet they want to make a point about individual responsibility.
Even if the pregnancy were unintentional, most are not the product of malice or force. Thus it would be unfair for the woman to seek the procedure because it is she who indulged in reckless or risky behavior and it is the unborn life that would pay the penalty.
If this were truly your motivation, it is important to note that a woman cannot singly indulge in reckless or risky behavior and get pregnant. No extreme masturbation toy is ever going to make a woman pregnant. The pregnancy could not happen without the man involved. Yet you do not see fit to instruct the man on his duty to be responsible and not to indulge in reckless or risky behavior. Where is the penalty for his half of the problem?
Next, you go on to bring back up the argument that nobody is claimingโthe innate value of a human life bullshit, but you have shown your hand already. No matter how nefarious you try to make the system look that permits abortion, you are just doing so to cover the only real reason you care about abortion at all: women who have sex.
RESPONSE
Abortion is about teaching a woman to be responsible for her actions. Abortion is not about saving lives because without abortion, 16% of pregnancies do not produce a viable life through no fault of the woman. If you were honestly as invested in saving lives as you claim to be with regards to pregnant women, there are numerous ways that you could apply your conviction (see Suggestions) however, it is clear you just want to punish women for their part in having sex.
Some quick facts about abortion:
16% of pregnancies, both wanted and unwanted end in stillbirth or miscarriage.
22% of pregnancies end in abortion before the cells become viable.
The United States has one of the highest mortality rates for pregnant women and newborns in the civilized world.
The majority of deaths occur in areas stricken with poverty where access to adequate medical care is non-existent and babies are born without any prenatal observation or interaction.
25% of the women who die during during childbirth are black despite making up only 7% of the general population.
The number of abortions has gone down significantly since abortion was legalized.
Some quick observances about Anti-Choice (formerly pro-life) advocates:
There has been no coalition of conservatives dedicated to ensuring that high risk populations have adequate prenatal, natal, and postnatal medical care which conflicts with their claims of wanting to save lives. The most effective way to save a pregnant woman and her baby is through adequate medical care. In fact, free medical care to those who cannot afford it is contrary to the conservative platform and just further proof of the specious nature of their claim to support life.
There has been no coalition of conservatives dedicated to improving the foster care system for unwanted babies after birth. Since unwanted babies are more likely to be subjected to malnutrition, abuse both physical and mental, and neglect, someone who truly cared for the life of the unwanted baby would acknowledge the importance of prompt post-birth adoption and would organize to make this a reality.
There has been no coalition of conservatives to provide education and contraception that could prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. In fact, a recent Trump-supported candidate in Minnesota has made her platform out of making contraception illegal, abortion punishable by death as well as eliminating gay marriageโall factors that could help limit unwanted pregnancies.
We have seen conservatives pass trigger laws in 13 states that make abortion punishable by death despite the fact that they claim to care for the life of the fetus. This can only demonstrate that they do not care for the life of the woman whose uterus they want to control.
Some states even provide life in prison or the death penalty for miscarriage–an act of nature.
We have seen a constant campaign attempting to make abortion illegal again despite the fact that abortions are on the decline and making them illegal will likely increase the number of dead children and women subjecting themselves to coat hanger abortions or clandestine pseudo-medical abortions.
Despite claims of supporting the life of the unborn baby, we have seen no significant investment in technology that would allow surrogate births for unwanted pregnancies. No technological advances or advanced training in areas hit hardest by maternal death during childbirth. If you were as invested in saving lives as you are in punishing women, there would be new technology available to the riskiest pregnancies to ensure that they didnโt die during childbirth.
Every single possible measure to prevent unwanted pregnancies has been thwarted by conservative Anti-Choice zealots.
We have yet to see conservatives step up to the plate and provide a network of Christian homes ready to take in the unwanted, disabled, deformed, and crack-addicted babies they insisted be brought into the world. We donโt even see any concern whatsoever beyond ensuring that a woman has to pay the price for having sex with a man.
No matter how you look at the abortion argument, it is clear that conservatives are not really invested in saving lives, especially not the womanโs life. Conservatives are only invested in punishing women. They refuse to hold men responsible for getting women pregnant and they offer no support to stop unwanted pregnancies.
The conservative Anti-Choice advocate is a masochistic hypocrite whose only concern is the punishment of women and this is evidenced repeatedly by the lack of concern for anything other than punishment.
Suggestions
Temporary Castration
If a woman has sex with a man and the man gets her pregnant, the man should bear half the burden of the decision to force a woman to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term. Therefore, men should be subject to medical castration to prevent future examples of their irresponsibility. The procedure should be performed by women doctors and should be expensiveโabout the cost of a pregnancy. Failure to submit to the procedure would be a felony or potentially punishable by death in some states.
Financial Burden
Furthermore, exactly half of all medical expenses and medical obligations should covered by the man responsible for the pregnancy. Failure to do so should result in their incarceration.
Equal Liability
If a woman chooses to have an illegal abortion and is tried for murder, the man should receive the same penalty. If punishable by death, both parties responsible for the supposed murder should be put to death. The man would be considered an accomplice.
Focus on Care
Since poverty is the leading cause of unwanted pregnancies, the government that wishes to legislate a womanโs uterus should be equally invested in her health and should provide free medical support by qualified specialists for prenatal, natal, and postnatal care.
Focus on Prevention
Also, a significant focus on education and prevention of unwanted pregnancies should be the focus of any administration that wishes to make abortion illegal. There should be no law outlawing abortion that does not adequately support the prevention of unwanted pregnancy.
Focus on Training
For rural hospitals, specialized training should be required to understand not only the potential problems during childbirth, but also on the difference in requirements between races when giving birth. Long held myths about pain levels need to be reversed and hospitals in rural settings need to be capable of handling births more effectively.
Focus on Adoption
The government that outlaws abortion should also invest significantly in a foster care or surrogate birth program that would allow a woman to relinquish responsibility to care for the unwanted child she was forced to give birth to. Adoption should be handled as soon as possible, preferably before childbirth so as to ease post-partem depression and child liability.
Focus on Technology
Without a doubt, if conservatives are actually concerned with the potential life of the fertilized egg, the most effective measure to ensure viability besides the things already mentioned would be to develop a technology that would allow the fertilized egg to be removed from the womanโs body and either preserved or implanted into the body of a willing conservative for gestation and birth. Even artificial birth would be of significant benefit to unwanted pregnancies and could be achieved through a significant investment from conservative Anti-Choice advocates.
Summary
You have clearly demonstrated your real motive for your anti-abortion stance though you have cleverly hid it with pseudo-scientific and even false information about pregnancy and viability. Your production value was superb and your tone was perfect for the self-righteous and dishonest Anti-Choice movement. The fact that you are a man detracts significantly from your concerns since you will never have to face the penalty you are so adamant about enforcing. In all, you gave a good show and I am sure you will receive lots of praise from other conservative Anti-Choice advocates that have no problem with hypocrisy or lack of integrity in their claims against abortion.
I would like to preface this reply with two points: This Creator is brilliant and so well-spoken that I strongly encourage anyone who reads this to check this creator out. His voice is warm and inviting and his insights are, well, relentlessly positive. Also, it is with nothing but respect that I post this Tok-Bak. I wish him no disrespect at all, I just couldn’t express my thoughts in 150 characters.
Summary:
In his video, he appears to recite a piece of work from an author that he found inspiring. It is unclear if the entire piece is a quote from the other author or if this Creator expands the basic notion he felt inspired by.
The idea that he presents is that there is only the present. That we must forget the past and avoid worrying about what if, or what could have been. We shouldn’t focus or dwell on our failures or things that have happened because they are out of our control.
He makes the same claim about the future. Because it is out of our control, we should not look to the future and therefore should not setup expectations or designs for what the future should look like or what we want the future to be.
Instead, we should live in the now and celebrate the present because it is really all that we have.
This made me think about a story I had heard recently.
Monkeys Love The Present
In Africa, when a monkey comes across a wooden box with a small hole in the side of it, he inspects the box and to his pleasure, he finds a banana in it. Being a modern and well-adjusted monkey who follows the principle of living in the now, he plunges his little arm through the hole and grabs that delicious banana just like this author suggests. Way to live in the present, monkey!
Now when the monkey attempts to withdraw his arm and eat the banana, he realizes that he can’t withdraw his arm from the box. The banana is too big to fit through the hole. He gets stuck.
But because the monkey lacks the mental capacity to think about the fact that he saw some other monkeys do this in the past, he didn’t realize that this was a trap. He was so busy living in the now, that he failed to remember how poachers grabbed his friends this same way.
All the monkey could think about was the banana. But the banana was too big to come out of the small hole that the monkey’s arm went in. As a human, we’d drop the banana and pull our arms out and avoid being captured. This is especially true if we had seen our friends and relatives captured and taken away doing this. But this monkey, obsessed only with the now, will not drop the banana. This is how poachers catch monkeys in the wild.
Uniquely as humans, we would leverage our past experience to predict our future and use these two “virtual” scenes in our heads as references in making our decisions. We would drop the banana and escape capture. Monkeys that live in the now do not have that luxury.
In fact, there is no context that living in the now benefits us to the exclusion of acknowledging the past or predicting the future. This is why I disagree with the sentiment the Creator shares with us.
The Good Parts
However, what I think is important to acknowledge in the Creator’s sentiment is that we often forget about the present because we are spending all of our energy and time feeling upset about the past.
The Creator is right, we cannot control the past and what’s done is done so it is the fool’s folly to obsess about it. I agree that we must not dwell on our past, especially our failures or successes. The irony is that dwelling on the past costs you the now.
The Not-So-GoodParts
But the creator claims that we cannot control the future and though he is right in the technical sense, it obscures any sort of agency that we have over our own lives. To practice this belief that there is no predictable future would be to render us unable to move–caught in the inevitable knowledge that no matter what we do or don’t do, we cannot influence the future. This is counterproductive and most assuredly the wrong approach.
So what is the solution?
We have established that living in the now will get you caught by poachers.
We have established that living in the past robs you of your enjoyment of the now.
We have established that predicting the future is futile and like living in the past, robs you of the now.
What’s left?
What’s left is to understand that one of the most amazing things about being human is the virtual worlds that we create in our minds. Starting at around age 5, we begin constructing a brilliant world in our heads that acts like a stage in which we are mostly in control. We acknowledge some things are completely out of our control for the most part, but how people act and what people do is all up to us.
We draw from our past experience and plot a future that allows us to avoid the pitfalls we faced or heard about previously. And though our future is almost never exactly like the one we predict, our future is always better than the one in which we completely ignore our past and fail to predict a future.
What I want to encourage this creator to consider is that the past is so valuable in that it presents a foundation of knowledge that we can use to maximize our enjoyment of the present. We need to pay special attention to avoid dwelling in the virtual headspace of our past and we need to focus on living in the now. We need to use our past experiences to inform our decisions in the now as we move towards a future that is better. We use our past experience to inform the virtual headspace of our future in the hopes of moving forward and living a better life. This motivates us to take action in the now.
But most important is that we need to understand and accept that the past is virtual–it exists within the context of our minds. The future is even more virtual and it also exists only within the context of our minds. Both of these virtual headspaces lack the detail and beauty of the now. Both the future and the past are carved down to their most essential essence by our mind that uses these two sets of thoughts like weights on the end of a tightrope walker’s pole. If we focus on one too much, we will lose balance. Focus on the other, the same.
So the answer, in my opinion, is to cherish the knowledge we gain from our past experiences, to use this knowledge to plot a path to a brighter future, and to inform our choices in the present based on these two important aspects of our life.
Focus on the now informed by our knowledge of the past and our plan for the future.
Here is the wonderful video with a wonderful, but slightly inapplicable sentiment in question:
I want to first say that I follow this person because I find her compelling. I think has incredible insight and profound experience on the topic of gender and her method of communication is both compelling and educational more than it is accusatory and hateful. At a time when or a lot of people, this idea is new or p ossibly even uncomfortable, the last thing someone needs is to be attacked, shamed, and mistreated for using the wrong pronouns or accidentally using transgender as a verb in the past particle form (i.e. someone is transgender, not transgendered).
So while honestly trying to understand that for which I am fully in support of, I have found that the people most qualified to teach me are often too embittered and too frustrated to recognize an ally that simply lacks the linguistic chops to sound supportive. But I don’t even have a problem with that, I figure it must be difficult to deal with the negative reaction to someone trying to be themselves and others just not getting it.
But that’s what I love about this creator. From what I have gathered, she suffered (or perhaps suffers) from gender dysphoria and felt pressured to transition when she had a breakthrough that gave her a new perspective and helped with her dysphoria. Rather than be supportive, several people in the community turned on her and she is simply telling us her story and hoping to reach others that have successfully found ways of combatting gender dysphoria without having to change genders.
Today, however, I was watching a video where I think she got it wrong. And honestly, I shouldn’t care, we all make mistakes, but I think it is important to clarify because she expresses a great deal of frustration and angst over the topic when I don’t think it is necessary.
The video starts with a quote from her comment section. She describes the lead-up to the comment and then proceeds to make claims that aren’t supported by the comment. If there was more to this person’s comment, it wasn’t apparent.
The problem is that with 150 character limit, trying to use the term ‘general masculine demeanor” is gonna use up a lot of your space.
Okay. (pause/dramatic deep breath and smile) First, I'm gonna give some context...
and then I am going to explain how completely ridiculous this is just in case it's not obvious already.
“No, I’m not. I live in LA. Women who look like her use he/him pronouns. Short hair and general demeanor.”
Comment on Tik Tok
Had the person said, All women who look like her use he/him pronouns” there would have been some reason to be upset. Even if you think the word “all” is implied, what if you implied a different word? “Some women in LA that look like her use he/him pronouns” That is a fact, I know a couple of them myself. If anything this refutes the idea that how you look determines your gender and he is citing his experience to support it. Just because you look like a woman doesn’t prohibit you from identifying as a man or using your own preferred pronouns. Maybe, he’s on your side? Maybe his response to “look at her, she’s a woman” is spot on.
When he adds to the description to further qualify that the women he is talking about have short hair and a general masculine demeanor. The creator knew precisely what he meant by that but took petty potshots over it. No big deal.
But at no point did he claim that a stereotype was useful, though that is exactly what stereotypes are: useful. Not always in the way you would expect them to be, but rather in the way that everyone knows the stereotype so why not reference it? The important thing about stereotypes is that we all know exactly what a stereotype is and we know that very few people fit the stereotype. Stereotypes are not a problem. Believing that they are more than what they are is the problem. Nobody who references “blond hair and big tits” for example really thinks this is what qualifies a woman—but we all know the stereotype and what it means–regardless of how vile it is. This is especially useful when someone completely defies the stereotype. He never claimed that you should do anything. That you should look any particular way to satisfy the stereotype that we all know but pretty much don’t know anybody who fits it. It is a caricature, and stereotypes when used in this manner are very very useful.
We all know who Tom & Jerry are and we can all reference certain things about them because they are public knowledge. Nobody thinks they are real. That’s how stereotypes work. Nobody believes them, they are gross exaggerations and that’s all.
Regardless,
He simply stated his experience and was responding to the idea that even though you look like a woman, doesn’t prohibit you from using he/him like other women he knows in LA do.
So, why do I give a shit about this little misunderstanding? Because I think it is a source of pain for the creator that could be avoided if she considered one change in how she perceived the comment. I support everything she said in general about how stupid it is to expect women or anyone to look and act a certain way.
However, it doesn’t change the fact that comments like, “but look at her, she is obviously a woman” aren’t necessarily true. Surely you see that just because you look like a woman, doesn’t mean that you identify as one. He was on your side and defending your choice to look like a woman without having to identify as one.
I hope she gets a chance to read this and to reconsider her position. It’s not that her perspective on it is hard to understand, but perhaps there is a better or more healthy perspective that simply involves one more letter imagined (some=4, rather than all=3)
Regardless, this is yet another example of how terrible TikTok’s comments are and how easily they get distorted. I look forward to more content from this creator and hope she hears my message as one of loving support that makes his comment supportive, not abusive like it sounds like she felt that it was.
“Our identities are tied to our lived experiences, and lived experiences will inform and influence how a person goes about interpreting information.”
Your use of semantic ambiguity with phrases like “tied to” and “inform and influence” make this statement nearly impossible to discuss. Changing verb tenses from the future conditional to the present in “will inform” and “goes” also makes this a semantic landmine. Even the change of subject and object references from the implied [our lived experiences] to [a person] makes it so ambiguous semantically that any statement I make about your intent or implication can be countered with an alternative that better suits your argument in context.
I am going to have faith that you will not employ tactics like this in what I hope is an honest conversation.
Identity Renders Your Analysis Equally Biased and in Need of More Sifting
It appears that you mean to say that our identities are built on our experiences and that these experiences, therefore, determine how we analyze information. In short, any analysis made by any person is based on their identity and therefore their lived experiences. You seem to believe that either the entire compendium of historical human knowledge must be re-analyzed using modern views of identity as it pertains to historical figures and their associated works or just the juicy parts that support your agenda in dismantling power structures.
If we, for the sake of discussion, believe that you honestly believe that the “good” parts of the research done by “problematic” historical academics must be sifted from the “bad” parts and that it is only through this lens of identity or what the person “brings to the table” that you can do this virtuous work, you end up creating an eternal self-referencing loop.
If you don’t hear how opportunistic and selective this is, you should reconsider whether you are any different from the original men who sought to condition society based on public media/propaganda.
I mean, I have no doubt they sifted through the news they received and chose the good parts, discarded the bad parts, and promoted their new version as the truth much like you are doing. The difference is that they knew their intent and they were explicit about their goals. Can you say the same or do you honestly think you are coming from a place of academic virtue and innocence?
And using your own logic, any analysis that you offer has to be filtered through the lens of your identity which you wear on your sleeve. Your characterization of the straw man in your example shows implicit bias on numerous fronts. It would, by your own logic, be in every academic’s best interest to take your bias and identity into consideration when listening to anything you present. As well I have.
And if not me, have no doubt that the next generation will invalidate your content by nitpicking the “good parts” and discarding the problematic sentiment just like you do. The next generation, following your virtuous lead, will be just as stuck trying to invalidate the past as you are.
And where do we end this stroll backward through history picking the parts we agree with based on how racist we think the authors were? Back to Lincoln, Washington, Plato, Socrates, dare we even apply this logic to the sacred word of God himself, because I assure you that the inspired word of God in the Christian faith is the most virtuous a Christian can get. It might be valuable to pick out the good parts only….oh wait. We’ve already done that, I forget.
Complexity of Analysis
Let’s skip the obvious efforts to propagandize a literal rewriting of history while signaling virtue, what about the complexity of identity in a historical context? How do we reconcile the fact that Thomas Jefferson, a founding father, tried several times to prevent slavery in our constitution and failed every time? Should we sift through his good intentions and only keep the bad ones because they fit the modern narrative characterizing our founding fathers as racist white supremacists whose only goals were to subjugate black people?
Who gets to determine the identity that Jefferson brings to the table in founding our nation? Because if you let the current narrative speak, you can discount just about everything he wrote in much the same way that modern activists discount the constitution.
The bias associated with trying to evaluate perspective from 400 years ago is more telling about modern victimhood than it is about identity at the time. That is to say that you have no way of isolating the identity of historic academics individually.
This is further compounded by the shared beliefs of other countries at the time. To take into account the entirety of social contexts and personal ideas, and then use that to cherry-pick historical texts for “good” and “bad” parts is indistinguishable from blatant propaganda.
You then cite an example of a research paper written by an”old rich white guy from a previous generation that had really bigoted thoughts about people of color.” You are quick to indicate that this alone does not invalidate his work, just that you have to consider his perspective when reviewing his findings.
And why is that? It must be because people are unable or unwilling to record factual data that conflicts with their identity, right? We should ask Roland Fryer or Glenn Loury about that.
Identity vs. Integrity
Next, you claim that “problematic people” often produce “good work” that you can use, you just have to re-analyze it, sift the good from the bad, and make some use out of it.
There is no doubt that our identities are tied to our lived experiences. However, to claim that our identities are created entirely based on our lived experiences is not defensible. In every bit as much as our identities are influenced (not defined) by our lived experience, our lived experience is also influenced by our identity.
For your premise to be reasonable, I would not be capable of acting in conflict with who I identified as. My identity as a gay male does not prohibit me from having sex with a woman, for example. In fact, having had a significant amount of sex with women in my youth, distilling my analysis of the sexual appeal of a naked woman to my identity as a gay male would be startlingly inaccurate.
Your belief that we have to consider a person’s identity when reviewing their work is dishonest and inaccurate. Often, people in academia publish their analyses that conflict with their identity.
Dr. Roland Fryer grew up in a household where several members of his family dealt drugs. When the recent media focus changed to present stories of black men being killed by police, Fryer set out to express his identity as a proud black man who came from an underprivileged life and succeeded as an award-winning economist to analyze the data on police killings using his skills of analysis. When his findings showed, without a doubt, that the media was exaggerating the killings of black men by police and under-exaggerating other forms of injustice and abuse, he was distressed. He published his findings in direct conflict with his identity and his preconceived notions about the situation.
But let’s see how other academics went about similar analysis. When self-proclaimed racial justice advocates analyzed the data without taking into consideration the details of the situation, they chose an intentionally dishonest base of comparison. They created a false narrative based on per capita analysis because it was appealing, not because it was accurate.
That is to say that if you were to analyze the mortality rate of women during childbirth to the US population, it would be a useless comparison but it might sound good. Even if you refined the comparison to just women, it would still be a useless comparison. Why? Because not all women can get pregnant, for one. But even the further refinement to just women capable of getting pregnant is nonsense because not every woman capable of getting pregnant had the possibility of dying during childbirth. The only responsible analysis would be to compare the part/whole. The number of pregnant women who died during childbirth to the total number of women who entered into childbirth. THIS paints a much different picture than the one where men were included in the comparison.
The same is true for killings by cops in the line of duty. Using the entire population when a lot of people never even interact with a cop or have never seen a cop paints the same false picture as the one in which men are included in the mortality during birth analysis.
So if we then look at just the people who have the opportunity to get killed by a cop, that is they have to have been stopped, walked past a cop, interacted with a cop in some way, suddenly the analysis is much different. WHY? Because cops have historically focused a majority of their policing efforts where the majority of crime is being committed. Cops have historically interacted with more black people every year than white people. This is true regardless of whether you take into consideration police bias or not. If more black people interact with cops every year, more black people are at risk of being killed. In its most simple form, if 51% of cop interactions (where someone could possibly get killed) are black and only 24% of all people killed by cops are black…there’s a much different comparison that is significant digits more accurate.
But like with women and pregnancy, we can be more accurate in our comparison:
What if we just compared stops by police where the person being stopped had a history of criminal activity or violent criminal activity. When we do this, suddenly it becomes entirely clear that cops are not killing black people more than white people. They aren’t killing them with racial animosity. They are routinely subjected to significantly more cases of black subjects that are violent and confrontational and refuse to cooperate. This is the analysis that Fryer did that makes his study more accurate. But it conflicts with the social justice warrior identity.
To Filter or Not to Filter?
So I ask you, based on the fact that one man’s identity would have preferred to present research that supported the public narrative of extrajudicial cop killings and yet, despite his lived experience, despite his desire, he found data that empirically conflicted with his view of the world and he published it.
But then you have others who half-assed their analysis and focused a cloudy lens on the subject just long enough to create more conflict in our society because it felt good and jived with their lived experience or at least matched their promoted narrative.
As a critical analyst, how do you reconcile these completely different cases where identity and history fail to account for the analysis.
But before you answer that, let me give you a similar straw man like the one you gave us about the old racist white dude (an obvious construction from your own identity.)
Anecdotal Analysis
Enter Darrell, he is a young black student who was raised by his grandparents who were alive during the failed Civil Rights Movement. His father was put in jail when he was five and Darrell got to watch his mother struggle with three jobs at a time when violence was really bad in their community. Still, he studied hard and went on to college to become an attorney where he was introduced to an idea that provided a novel defense for black defendants. It was highly effective and wasn’t exactly lying. Being a lawyer, he understood that you only have to present one side of the argument and it could be hypothetical–that didn’t make it dishonest.
So Darrell learns this effective way to get a majority white jury to view his client as the real victim in a case. He was compelled to this life of crime because the system made him that way. Darrell would raise his voice with the fury of a Baptist preacher as he reached the peak of his closing swinging towards the jury to make the claim that “You all compelled this man to commit these crimes… you should be the ones on trial, not him.” The gavel rings out and the DA yells objection, but the seed was planted and all it took was one white person to accept the story that their whiteness and complicity in systems of injustice were more to blame than the defendant and the man gets acquitted.
When Darrell realizes how effective this measure is, he hooks up with a group of legal students who suddenly realize that this same idea could be applied to more than just the courtroom. Why not expand this idea to promote the notion that black people, in general, are incapable of being successful because white people hold them back as an expression of white supremacy. But rather than go full speed ahead, they keep their ideas centered in higher education so that the next generation can take up the charge. In fact, if they can push this concept into high school by modifying the context slightly, they will get younger, more vibrant activists already informed of this plan when they get to college.
Before long, all of the works of every scholar past must be re-analyzed to support this idea. Surely anything that conflicts with this idea will be labeled as “problematic” and during this great sifting process from history, only those sufficiently subordinate white folks like Peggy McIntosh and Robyn D’Angelo will be exempt from this application of identity politics to their writing because they were “good” or useful to the cause.
Never mind that Peggy McIntosh was from one of the richest white families in Brooklyn and had never spent a moment in the ghetto when God inspired her to list out her privileges that black people didn’t have. Things like having her hair did by anyone in her neighborhood, being sure they would understand how to cut her hair. Had she come to my neighborhood in Atlanta, she would have quickly scrapped that nonsense lest she walk out bald. My point is that had anyone applied the critical analysis of identity like you claim that you do to the foundational work of white privilege, they would have clearly seen that the privileges of which she was confessing were not shared by all white people as she claimed, but rather by the rich white aristocracy from which she alone came.
Never mind that Robin D’Angelo’s book on white fragility chronicles cases of white people getting angry when feeling pressured to be polite to black people who felt no such pressure. Her entirely self-referential fragility could be easily discounted when you consider her position and her identity. She owns 4 mansions in San Francisco where she charges outrageous amounts of money to peddle white guilt and self-deprecation as a testimony to white supremacy. No self-respecting academic could read her work without laughing and yet here we are.
My point in relaying this story is, of course, to use Derek Bell’s preferred method of supporting his arguments–the anecdote. Hopefully, you can see how someone could easily be indoctrinated into a cult-like mentality that has but one goal: to bring about the destruction of our democracy because they believe, as Derek Bell does, that no society built on racism is redeemable and that the only way forward is to tear it all down and start from scratch.
And you want us to take Darrell’s analysis of past research based on his own biased identity as though it has more academic goodness than the original article? Surely you see that it is equally as biased and that the future analysts will then be responsible for going back to correct for your political identity in your analysis of bias in previous papers….it’s ridiculous and it’s exactly what you are proselytizing.
Summary
In summary, let me say that I have written and rewritten this about 20 times since I saw your post (included). I do not believe that you have any conscious malice or that you are aware of how your identity leaves you with only the past to draw comfort when you discard the parts you don’t like.
I hope you can see that you have no mystical insight into the minds of the past by which your analysis can be any less biased or expressive of current social norms.
I hope you can see that even if you did have God-given skills at analyzing the identity of historical writers, you would still have to account for the social identity of the region where the paper was written. You would have to know the social moires of the time and you would have to be able to suspend your own personal beliefs based on modern logic when sifting through history.
And if nothing else, I hope you can see that cherry-picking the good and bad parts from history based on writers that you see as problematic is nothing more than propaganda.
Please reconsider that you have no particular insight into history that isn’t formed from your own Identity and therefore you are claiming that your point of view is more accurate, more virtuous than others and history has shown that it is not. We are all subject to interpretation and we are all fodder for propaganda.
PS. Please know that I mean no disrespect and that my writing style is more an expression of my passion and my affinity for the spectrum. When obviously good-hearted and well-meaning people like yourself are rewriting history while ignoring the real-time results of this sentiment, we are rapidly approaching the most violent time in our history (certainly the last 25 years) and the more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we become easy targets. Surely you have seen other representative democracies go down this path as liberals create racial or sociopolitical unrest and a weary, broken democracy welcomes an authoritarian that can deliver peace. Surely as a student of power structures, you see the potential we are headed for.
Dear Emmanuel Acho, I want to first thank you for your Tik Tok video. I look forward to watching the full video soon.
I wanted to also tell you that I appreciate what you are trying to do and I can see the virtue in your intentions. The unfortunate thing about this Tik Tok is that it introduces a subject and immedately sends people in the wrong direction. In your attempt to make white people comfortable, you have made some tacit assumptions that serve more to undermine your goal than I think you are aware.
When you grant your viewers the notion that there is a lack of success in black people, you are painting black people with the same miopic brush that your viewers use. There are 10 black billionaires in the United States and hundreds of millionaires. This is hardly expressive of an inability to succeed. Yet you go with it. Why would you concede that black people are unable to succeed? Black people are not monolithic. In 150 short years, despite all odds, black people have progressed through society in ways that we have not seen from a formerly enslaved group of people in all of history. To that end, there can be no doubt that Black Americans are the richest, most successful black people on the planet by any measure. To be a modern Black American is to be successful already in so many ways. Statistically, the black middle class in America has exploded and is growing at a faster rate than the subculture of poverty that so many people want to characterize as “black.” You tacitly approve of this in your video.
You then continue by admitting that you “thought about it” rather than researched it. You proceed to tell us what seems like logic, at least from your perspective. But you fail to account for the time period after slavery was abolished when black families were strong and stayed together despite all odds. You see the way that black families were decimated systematically by slave holders didn’t destroy a belief in family. If anything, it gave cause for black freed citizens to cherish family more than anything. Slavery absolutely was terrible and it destroyed a great number of black families, but it instilled in freed black communities the importance of family. Look back only 3 generations and it you will find black couples still married having raised dozens of children and grandchildren. It cannot be Slavery that destroyed the black family or those families would have been even more heavily influenced than black citizens are today.
And we see this despite Jim Crowe, despite widespread acceptance of racial bias against blacks. Literally despite all odds, black families persisted. What changed?
If you would please listen to this speech by Glenn Loury at the National Conservatism Conference where he addresses this exact topic in much more eloquent detail than I ever could. He’s an award winning economist and his concern is for Black Americans as he is a Black American himself. Please consider what he says.
I was an early adopter when I fell for Wyze marketing. They appeared to be a diverse group of young, passionate tech geniuses that got together and decided that they could make a better camera for cheaper. And sure enough they came out with the Wyze cam for 25$. It was hi-def, good picture quality, but had a buggy app and no desktop access. Then came the CamPan which was a taller version of their cute little square camera that had a servo in it that let it swivel back and forth 270% or something.
I bought 5 of the small cubes and 2 of the panning cameras. I had them all over my house and even got a waterproof 3rd party enclosure for the outside. I was so pleased with the fact that they had 2 way audio that I got rid of all of the ring devices I had purchased.
But something happened. Suddenly the cameras were never online. Then there were problems with the firmware. Sometimes the cameras would show up but they’d have previews from the last time you used them (still a problem today). The software never quite worked and all of this was okay because they were a rag-tag team of kids that you just wanted to cheer on.
The truth is that we don’t even know if any of the people in their marketing video were actually employees of Wyze. What’s clear is that the hardware and software were made in China. The firmware was maintained in China and several users were noticing a lot of traffic between China and their Wyze cams.
Of course, when asked about it, Wyze denied that China had anything to do with it, but the fears lingered. Suddenly, the firmware renamed several of the devices and they began downloading updates from a proxy in the US. It was still coming from China, but it looked like they had switched to US servers.
Still the cameras were terrible about storing information. I would regularly lose recordings that were either auto captured or manually recorded. Just disappear of my memory card entirely.
Often the little SD Cards would just stop working. It has been a mess from day one, but it was worth it because, after all, they were some young upstart Americans with diverse backgrounds that marketing kept shoving down our throats.
Support for the cameras has always been abysmal and mostly required group help from the forums. Their website to this day is ridiculous to navigate and now they have so many products that there is just no way to think if them as a rag-tag group of struggling tech geniuses barely scraping enough profit to get by.
They started announcing everything from an automated enema bag to a brain implant and matching brainwashing glasses. The line of products they produce now has entire destroyed any credibility they have and yet people are still enamoured by their marketing campaign. They release new products that aren’t ready for market and make you wait 16 months to get them after you have paid for them. Explanations are always something fabulous like, Oh we found that on occasion the bezel on the watch failed to reflect your full countenance, so we had to re-engineer this ridiculous watch.
It looks enough like a bulky Apple Watch first gen, but it has the worst UI Ever. Not only is it just plain ugly, it’s hard to use and it requires a stupid custom magnetic cable that is hard to distinguish from the pile of other stupid cables you collect from other ridiculous devices that have custom cables. I lost mine the first week after waiting nearly 2 years to get watch in pre-order. It’s supposed to have features like oxygen levels, but the interface is just so crappy I can’t even bare to look at it let alone be caught wearing it. The watch faces are so bad that Fisher Price would be a significant upgrade. I honestly can’t believe how bad the watch is. I wouldn’t give it to someone I didn’t like it’s that bad. I know, I know, what can you expect for $20? It’s a piece of shit and you knew it when you spent $20 for it.
But in true Capitalist form, the Wyze team decided that rather than making a windows or mac interface for the cameras, they would start developing all of these other shitty products. But then they introduced CampPlus, so they could milk money out of us on subscription. Originally it had all of these great features but none of them really worked. Eventually, some worked, but not consistently. Often, the camera I had signed up for Cam Plus just wouldn’t work. If I put an SD card in it, it would complain. So I had to rely on their web-storage of my camera footage. It has been terrible since day 1.
Then they came out with Cam Plus Pro but it’s obvious they fired their marketing team because it never made any sense. The pro version was supposed to identify people which the Plus version was supposed to originally as well. Just another way to milk money from you.
Then AWS lost all of our data.
The on December 15, right in front of my Wyze camera outdoors, about a dozen cop cars chase a man into our parking lot, get out of their cars and chase him into our back yard and under our deck. Then out in the open where IMMEDIATELY in front of my Wyze Cam, they taser the fuck out of the guy. Wyze got none of it. Not a single fucking second. AWS apparently went down.
Now today, I get a message from the guy’s defense team asking for the footage and I can’t provide it. That’s shitty. This was Wyze’s opportunity to shine and they failed again. Wyze is a piece of shit company that produces crappy cheap equipment and provides terrible and absolutely unreliable service for a monthly charge. Absolutely anybody but Wyze would have caught that footage without a problem.
I can no longer rely on Wyze for any service or piece of hardware. They have let me down over and over and they suck. Today, because they outsourced all of their tech support to the Philippines, they closed tech support because of the super Typhoon. It is too difficult to figure out that you should have 24 hour tech support by distributing your support staff around the globe so someone can always help. No, they are too cheap and prefer to rely on slave labor from the Philippines.
I just can’t believe how many years I have put up with the bullshit substandard product because I wanted to cheer on these entrepreneurs. I am all but convinced it was all a big marketing ploy and I fell for it hook like and stinker. [sic]. I will not buy another Wyze product of pay for another Wyze service again.
Upon launching Tik Tok yesterday, I was greeted by your post replying to @nyydollaas who had left a comment on your page.
Since Tik Tok only provides 150 characters to post a comment, I felt compelled to reply in more detail and therefore created this tok-bak page for your post.
The amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than the energy it takes to produce it.
Assymetry of Bullshit
Please excuse the length of this post, there was a lot to refute.
The reason this is so important is that you have lied to your viewers with impunity. You have made incorrect assumptions about the person who left the comment and then you proceeded to create a series of false equivalencies and ad-hominem attacks to further your agenda rather than reply in any genuine manner to the comment as presented.
Your glaring first mistake, and the one that shows that this is all your misandry boiling over is that you presumed that the comment came from a man. Not just a man, but a sleazy man who enjoys watching 14-15-year-old girls “sway” and “dance” innocently on Tik Tok.
According to the profile of Tik Tok user, @nyydollaas, she appears to be a 14-year-old girl who has lots of followers, but no content. The only clues we have about who she really is comes from her profile which reads:
So the entire foundation of your sexist diatribe and malicious attack on a commenter missed its mark completely. You treated a 14-year-old girl like she was a lecherous man. and then proceeded to make several unfounded and unrelated claims that literally had nothing to do with the comment. You owe her an apology.
I’d be willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend that this girl’s Father figured out how to use her Tik Tok account and came across your post then decided he would comment on your post about how he perceived your message came across. It’s a reach, a sexist and unfounded reach, but for the sake of argument, I will give you this one.
Before we break down the substantive portions of your false and fallacious claims, I would like to point out a couple of considerations:
Two of the biggest trends on Tik Tok so far have been the Twerking Challenge and the Shake That Ass challenge. When searching google for these terms, there are more than a million videos that participated in these challenges.
So from the very start, when the supposed father says that he believes you are telling him that he should LET his 14-year-old daughter “Shake Her Ass” for middle-aged men on Tik Tok, it is not unreasonable to assume that he meant that literally.
When we look up the definition of Twerking from Merriam Webster’s, it clearly defines Twerking as:
sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting
Merriam Webster–Twerking
Just to be clear, shaking of the buttocks is what he obviously meant when he supposedly said, “..shake her ass…”
But more to the point of the issue, when the young lady is only 14-years-old, her father is obligated to take care of her legally. He is her guardian and therefore it is well within the guidelines of parenthood to decide what his daughter can and can’t do. You may not like that, but it is a fact. He can decide to LET her do something or not without stepping outside of the bounds of law or common decency, even for feminists.
According to the Federal Justice Bureau,
Child pornography is a form of child sexual exploitation. Federal law defines child pornography as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (persons less than 18 years old). ย Images of child pornography are also referred to as child sexual abuse images.
Federal Justice Bureau
This clearly indicates that when a 14-year-old girl participates in the popular craze of “sexually suggestive dancing characterized by rapid, repeated hip thrusts and shaking of the buttocks especially while squatting” it qualifies as sexually explicit conduct and therefore her legal guardian is legally obligated to prevent this behavior.
For you to claim otherwise is the blueprint for child pornography and your post is the architecture that child pornographers use to falsely claim that she was just “swaying” or “dancing” when she was actually simulating riding a man’s erect penis rhythmically as indicated by 1.5 million videos on Tik Tok.
But seriously, this is not about whether she posted the comment after hearing her dad say that. It’s not about her dad posting the comment, It’s about all the vile and disgusting stereotypes and general misandry that characterizes the rest of your post about which I am most embarrassed for you.
You tell us that the architecture of our society is inequality and that the supposed man’s claim was the blueprint. Not the blueprint for the protection of his daughter from predators, not the blueprint for the protection of his daughter for being under age and participating in literal child pornography, but rather it is the blueprint for how inequality is created in our society.
Then you tell us you are going to put THAT SENTENCE to work another way. The casual reader and follower would surely expect you to conjure up some convoluted context in which THAT STATEMENT would sound sexist or oppressive rather than protective as you claim first.
But you never deliver.
You used different words, in a different context, under a different tone, to say something that in no way sounded anything like the sentence or even the sentiment expressed by the supposed father.
Furthermore, you have no way of knowing anything about the father (if there even is a father involved), so what makes you so sure that he isn’t a card-carrying feminist who regularly prosthletizes to former friends who were lecherous towards women? You absolutely cannot support your claim at all here. And to think for a second that your statement shoved down the throat of this imaginary father is in any way equivalent would be laugh-out-loud funny if it weren’t so hateful and unjust.
You claim that the words that he used were too close to saying that she deserved to be raped for how she was dancing and you are shocked that you think that means that she is somehow responsible for her actions?
Which is it, M. Dowling? Is a 14-year-old girl old enough to have agency here when she gets on Tick Tock to shake her Money Maker (from her profile) for middle-aged men despite her father telling her she can’t. The law sure as hell doesn’t believe that. But somehow you appear to believe that.
You lie to us by claiming that she is likely to sway and dance innocently. Ain’t nobody on this planet using their “Money Maker” to sway and dance innocently. And guess, what, M. Dowling, the father most likely wouldn’t have complained about that.
In fact, he didn’t complain about her dancing or doing one of the g-rated dance challenges, did he? He wasn’t upset about that, just the part that is the biggest craze over the longest period targeted at young women, challenging them to shake their asses. Look on YouTube for the compilation videos and file that in your feminist agenda notebook under, “sway and dance”.
And though you have dug yourself in deep enough by your crass characterization of your imaginary father who foolishly thinks that his daughter might be less of a lying cheat than you were to your parents, the barrage of unjust confrontation and mischaracterization doesn’t stop there.
You go on to ask which would he prefer: To control all men (which sounds a lot more like something you would like than pretty much anyone else) or his daughter.
So let’s evaluate the safety of his daughter if he controlled all men.
Presumably, that would take all of his time and so she would be at liberty to do whatever she wanted. She could twerk her sexy little 14-year-old ass all over Tik Tok without any fear because daddy magically had control over all men in the world.
Guess what, M. Dowling, women are also child molesters. If the man controlled every other male on the planet, the girl would still be at risk for shaking her ass (not swaying). She’d be at risk from other children, from women, and from the Federal Justice Bureau. She would still face considerable risk to satisfy your fantasy that she should be allowed to do whatever she wants because her supposed father was using a blueprint that made things unfair for her. Safer than your fantasy for sure, but unfair.
If the man were to lock the girl in the basement and not try to control everyone in the world that he has no responsibility for, no concern for, and no license to dictate their actions, she would be safe Much more safe.
But what about this as an option. You see, I’ve got a little bit of feminism in me too. I have an entire extended family of almost a dozen lesbians and allies that are die-hard feminists. Being gay myself, I am an advocate for any solution that improves the quality of life and doesn’t oppress people using stereotypes and misinformation in much the way your post does.
So if it were me, I think the best solution here is to educate his daughter on the real-world risks that she faces for being sweet and innocent. Then I would educate her on the effects that her provocative dancing could potentially have on men or other people. I wouldn’t tell her that it was okay or fair, because it’s not. But wanting things to be fair when they aren’t isn’t helping anyone.
I would explain that some people would claim that if she is going to provoke a sexual reaction with her appearance and her actions, she is willfully putting herself at risk and she should know better. I’d explain that people will blame her for whatever happens to her and as much as that sucks, she has to be aware of it and prepared for it. I would reinforce over and over that no man under any circumstance should be allowed to hurt her, to touch her, or to approach her for any reason without her permission.
But I would sure as hell avoid painting some feminist fantasy picture that releases her of any responsibility for failing to recognize the risk she was walking into and for provoking a situation where she is victimized. I’d ask her if she would walk into a yard with a dog she didn’t know wearing Lady Gaga’s meat dress and then blame the dogs for attacking her. I would emphasize that she needs to think of men that she doesn’t know like that dog until she knows better.
If this were some feminist utopia, she should be able to walk naked into a group of men and simulate all kinds of sexual functions and they would do the right thing and stand there without commenting or noticing–because women deserve that right after all of the oppression they have had to endure without any benefit whatsoever. But we aren’t there yet, so please quit putting women in jeopardy by suspending their agency to be aware of their surroundings and how their appearance and actions can put them at risk–no matter how unfortunate and unfair it is.
But I would sure as hell let her know that while I support her doing the more innocent dance challenges, maybe even a little swaying and having a good time so long as she is aware of her actions and those actions fall within the guidelines that I (speaking as her father) have decided are best for her.
This was his video in response to my analysis of the wealth gap.
When he posted a video claiming that Ben Shapiro said, “It’s not that you look black, it’s that you act black…” and then made some flippant comments about how that affects the wealth gap, I replied that he never said that.
Show me where Ben Shapiro says, “The problem is not that you look black, the problem is that you act black?”
Just in case you thought that this Content Creator had done his research and found that statement in the full clip, here’s the full clip:
You can see clearly that he never uses the terms “look black” or “act black”. This by itself proves that this Content Creator is willing to lie to his viewers. Literally, he makes this claim and cannot support it.
But this is not about whether or not a Content Creator is lying when he paraphrases someone incorrectly, the question is more about the content of Shapiro’s argument.
When the announcer asks the question
Given this disparity, how can you argue that race is not a driving factor in income inequality?
Announcer, https://youtu.be/OiRZp-mhqW0?t=2376
It is clear to see that as soon as the first panelist starts flailing about in dismay because Shapiro said, “Because it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with culture.” Suddenly Shapiro changes gears. It’s obvious.
No longer is he trying to prove that it is culture, but he is taking the opposition’s position that it’s all about race and asking about these other factors.
He foolishly assumed that anyone watching this video could see clearly that when he says, “Oh yeah, then explain to me…” he is asserting that if race is the only issue, then explain this to me. Are they true for the entire race? Or are they true for a subculture within the black community? Are all black people failing high school? No. Are all black people poor? No. Are all black people equally responsible for half of the murders in the country every year? No. So if the answer to every one of these issues is “No, not all black people are affected by these factors” then it can’t be about race.
You know what [if it’s all about race], explain to me why black kids aren’t graduating high school.
He’s sitting there speaking with a panel of people who have graduated high school and gone on to graduate from college. Does the Content Creator honestly believe that Shapiro is unaware that not all black kids are failing to graduate high school? Of course, not all black kids are failing to graduate. But if it’s about race, then presumably all black kids would be failing high school. It’s not about race, but he continues with the questions.
Keep in mind, he is asking, “Okay, if it’s all about race then…”
Explain to me why black kids are shooting each other at rates significantly higher than white kids are.
https://youtu.be/OiRZp-mhqW0?t=2396
So he continues right along the lines of the worst stereotypes of black people to ask, “If it is about race, do all black people share these characteristics?” If you say, “yes”, then the stereotype is valid. He knows it is not the case. It’s not all back people. It’s not the entire race that is like this.
If it’s not about race and yet there are some black people who are ultra-violent, some who are poor, some who are rich by illegal means, some who are apathetic, some who are trapped. These are all different cultures within the black community. It is patently foolish to assume that there exists a single black culture in the United States. Foolish and insulting, in my opinion.
But this is the argument that people like this Content Creator are supporting. He is literally trying to say that all black people participate in a single black culture. The Content Creator even goes so far as to say that all black people have a look, or act the same–something that Shapiro never says.
So as the video continues, we can see more about Ben Shapiro’s views. Needless to say, the Content Creator is afraid to show you the entire clip.
The announcer asks the question to the panelists:
There might be…there will be a disparate impact on different groups of people that doesn’t necessarily mean, I think what you’re saying…it doesn’t necessarily mean something racist is going on even though there’s a racial impactย so the question was about where do you draw the line between something that might have a racial impact but is not inherently racist?
When the announcer is citing “the question”, he’s citing the question about the wealth gap. How do you determine that it’s racist? What is the deciding factor? This is the most important question. If you are going to make the claim, what informs you that it is true?
To which Ben Shapiro delivers his entire point in this video.
It’s called evidence of racism. When there is no evidence of racism it’s probably not racism.When there is actual evidence of racism it’s probably racism.
Bem Shapiro https://youtu.be/OiRZp-mhqW0?t=3200
The fact that everybody jumps from there’s inequality to there’s inequity; just because there is inequality doesn’t mean there has to be inequity.
Ben Shapiro https://youtu.be/OiRZp-mhqW0?t=3206
When one panelist claims that there is bound to be racism, Ben Shaprio states:
I agree that it exists, but the problem that I am seeing, and the problem with the general conversation is that there is no solution in simply saying “There’s racism out there” How does that solve anything? And when you talk about institutional racism, what does that mean?
Ben Shaprio: https://youtu.be/OiRZp-mhqW0?t=3173
He then asks for any literal example of racism in the law in the justice system, etc. and he will agree that it is racism. He even cites a case where a cop shot an unarmed black man in the back in South Carolina and stated clearly that it was racism and needs to be dealt with.
He continues:
The idea that you can graft a narrative onto something when there is no evidence of racism but rather that there must just be racism somewhere out there in the ether. That doesn’t solve problems for anybody. It creates more problems for people because now they grow up in a milieu, in an environment where they are told that every obstacle they face is from some shadowy, nameless, faceless group that is out to get them simply because of the color of their skin. They will never succeed in that environment.
Ben Shapiro,
Perhaps the most damaging part of the panel discussion was when Ben Shapiro, after listening to the first panelist go on about how inappropriate it is for a school where the majority of students are black to have a white administration. She wanted to say that a black person should be the principal for example. This is a common sentiment. But this is the key element here. Ben Shapiro shuts down the race issue right here:
The question I was going to ask is, ‘It’s not any person of color?” I assume. I mean if they were going to staff the school with Laura Connely, and Thomas Sewell, and Condaleza Rice, and Clarence Thomas, you’d be standing up against that and say, ‘these are not real black people’ I assume.
Bem Shapiro https://youtu.be/OiRZp-mhqW0?t=4243
This shows clearly that not all black people are the same. Not all black people share the same experience. These famous black people would be more than competent at running the school, but the panelist didn’t mean ANY black person. Why not? If all black people are the same, any black person should be sufficient. They aren’t. She meant black people from the culture that the school was in. This culture is not shared by all black people.
It’s also important to note the second panelist admits that he grew up wealthy and has no perspective about poverty. He lived the first half of his life in Zimbabwe after he was born in America. He never really thought about racism or was affected by it until lately. But even then, he just thinks about it with respect to the police. This is the point that I am making.
Ben Shapiro wraps it up quite honestly when asked if he ever thought about what it would be like if he had been born black. Admittedly, he comes close to messing up when he states that he came from a stable family with two parents in a safe neighborhood…nearly implying that he couldn’t have the experience as a black person, but then he states:
I understand why people would be more wary of police officers given the fact that many police officers are going to react to disproportionate crime statistics with stereotypes. I understand that.
Bem Shapiro https://youtu.be/OiRZp-mhqW0?t=4869
I think the reason that David is asking the question is that…because there is this idea out there that every person who is born white is born privileged. And I don’t think that that is accurate. Just like I don’t think that every person that is born black is born into a horrible situation. I think that we are all born as individuals and if we can start seeing each other that way, we’ll all be a lot better off.
