The ACME Womanizer™ lets you womanize anything! Your car is a woman! Your dog is a woman! Your house is now a woman! Whenever you want something womanized, count on The Womanizer!™
I also want to say that I really enjoyed your book. I couldn't put it down. It gave me a real insight into the, what shall we call it, social contagion or contemporary mental illness, that appears to be all the rage. I'm past 65, but remember that we all loved androgyny and gender-bending in our youth, but we were quite certain of our sex and wouldn't have dreamed of the horrors of cross-sex hormones and surgery.
Grateful for the “womanizers” in my life. They taught me a lot (and I also recognize the benefit of not engaging with any of them until my late 20s, so I had more wits about me).
You know this is really true. I spent a period of time unknowingly being gaslit by my then husband while he was secretly drinking and telling me I was crazy for thinking I smelled alcohol on him (he claimed it was listerine). I spent a period of time deciding I guess to believe him. But really what I was doing was bargaining. Buying for time. Ignoring my common sense (and my nose) that was telling me “this man is drinking again”. I ended up finding proof in the most round about way…and at that point I left him. It was in hindsight that I recognized the dishonesty for gaslighting.
For me to have continued in the relationship (which undoubtedly would have endured repeated events of dishonesty) would have been on me. I would have victimized myself. He showed me his true self. Yes it took a couple of rounds for me to be ready to take the kids and go, but I chose not to continue to be a victim of his disease. I’m a grown woman and I have agency.
I know there are lots of reasons why people stay - you’re making choices for the lesser of some other evil. But it’s still a choice.
Thanks for reflecting on this at length. Great Saturday read.
Hi, just wanted to pop in to say, for the record, in response to your comment on another blog's paid post that I couldn't respond to there, that I've been calling this extreme genderism a "slow-motion Jonestown" in exactly those words for at least a year -- alternating with "stochastic Jonestown" -- I can't prove this, because my comments are generally deleted, as I typically post in places where people need to hear things they don't want to.
I'm not looking for credit, really, & of course it could be independent invention -- nonetheless I have found the growing awareness of the obvious parallels to be encouraging, and I choose, not strictly rationally, to take it as evidence that posting a lot of comments on the internet really can spread good ideas & effective rhetoric and cause things to happen. It's sort of like life emerging from a seething primordial soup -- stir the pot & keep adding ingredients, and eventually something effective will crawl forth, though one never can say where or when.
The extreme genderist movement's comeuppance has been creating, via tragedy, people like us, who are driven to demonstrate their errors & horrors & who have infinite patience in doing so - of the kind that you demonstrate here - because this crazy, cruel vulgarity has imposed itself on our lives and robbed us of fundamental sense & sanity. I don't care about money or any other damn thing until this barbarity is done & dusted, and I will take as much time as it takes to pick apart & push over anyone who tries to defend these practices where I am permitted to speak, because what the f*ck else am I supposed to do? Just sit around and watch TV? Not likely. I lost a sister.
& I agree with everything I've seen here on your 'stack so far, though I do think rising rates of hormonal birth control use are a concern from an endocrine health perspective (and also that the phenomenon is pretty much entirely men's fault...)
If you've not seen it, I recommend the film "Gaslight" (1944), from which the term derives. It's superb—and a stark enough story to but the casual claims of "gaslighting" in context.
Possibly a lot of the usage of the term can be traced back to the underlying idea that anything stated to you by the right sort of person needs to be accepted as true on its face. Well yeah, of course you’d feel “gaslit” all the time if that’s how you’ve been conditioned to see the world. It cedes so much of your perception of reality to other people and makes it so other people’s perceptions ARE an imposition on you.
Womanizer: from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun A man who seduces or attempts to seduce women as a matter of habit.
"The key point is that men who have success in attracting women are typically more likely to use coercion, and those who are less successful are less likely to use coercion." David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
The ACME Womanizer™ lets you womanize anything! Your car is a woman! Your dog is a woman! Your house is now a woman! Whenever you want something womanized, count on The Womanizer!™
That's going to be worse for the birth rate than those AI sex dolls!
Bracing stuff and true. Thank you.
I also want to say that I really enjoyed your book. I couldn't put it down. It gave me a real insight into the, what shall we call it, social contagion or contemporary mental illness, that appears to be all the rage. I'm past 65, but remember that we all loved androgyny and gender-bending in our youth, but we were quite certain of our sex and wouldn't have dreamed of the horrors of cross-sex hormones and surgery.
“But Stephanie’s brain is not putty, her legs are not broken, and she hasn’t forgotten where the door is.”
Such a striking, incisive turn of phrase - you are a gifted writer with enviable moral clarity. Your voice on these topics is invaluable.
Aww thank you!
I love this "dislike" in your bio: "heterosexual queerness." I'm gonna steal that when the right moment arises.
Grateful for the “womanizers” in my life. They taught me a lot (and I also recognize the benefit of not engaging with any of them until my late 20s, so I had more wits about me).
You know this is really true. I spent a period of time unknowingly being gaslit by my then husband while he was secretly drinking and telling me I was crazy for thinking I smelled alcohol on him (he claimed it was listerine). I spent a period of time deciding I guess to believe him. But really what I was doing was bargaining. Buying for time. Ignoring my common sense (and my nose) that was telling me “this man is drinking again”. I ended up finding proof in the most round about way…and at that point I left him. It was in hindsight that I recognized the dishonesty for gaslighting.
For me to have continued in the relationship (which undoubtedly would have endured repeated events of dishonesty) would have been on me. I would have victimized myself. He showed me his true self. Yes it took a couple of rounds for me to be ready to take the kids and go, but I chose not to continue to be a victim of his disease. I’m a grown woman and I have agency.
I know there are lots of reasons why people stay - you’re making choices for the lesser of some other evil. But it’s still a choice.
Thanks for reflecting on this at length. Great Saturday read.
Hi, just wanted to pop in to say, for the record, in response to your comment on another blog's paid post that I couldn't respond to there, that I've been calling this extreme genderism a "slow-motion Jonestown" in exactly those words for at least a year -- alternating with "stochastic Jonestown" -- I can't prove this, because my comments are generally deleted, as I typically post in places where people need to hear things they don't want to.
I'm not looking for credit, really, & of course it could be independent invention -- nonetheless I have found the growing awareness of the obvious parallels to be encouraging, and I choose, not strictly rationally, to take it as evidence that posting a lot of comments on the internet really can spread good ideas & effective rhetoric and cause things to happen. It's sort of like life emerging from a seething primordial soup -- stir the pot & keep adding ingredients, and eventually something effective will crawl forth, though one never can say where or when.
The extreme genderist movement's comeuppance has been creating, via tragedy, people like us, who are driven to demonstrate their errors & horrors & who have infinite patience in doing so - of the kind that you demonstrate here - because this crazy, cruel vulgarity has imposed itself on our lives and robbed us of fundamental sense & sanity. I don't care about money or any other damn thing until this barbarity is done & dusted, and I will take as much time as it takes to pick apart & push over anyone who tries to defend these practices where I am permitted to speak, because what the f*ck else am I supposed to do? Just sit around and watch TV? Not likely. I lost a sister.
& I agree with everything I've seen here on your 'stack so far, though I do think rising rates of hormonal birth control use are a concern from an endocrine health perspective (and also that the phenomenon is pretty much entirely men's fault...)
If you've not seen it, I recommend the film "Gaslight" (1944), from which the term derives. It's superb—and a stark enough story to but the casual claims of "gaslighting" in context.
Possibly a lot of the usage of the term can be traced back to the underlying idea that anything stated to you by the right sort of person needs to be accepted as true on its face. Well yeah, of course you’d feel “gaslit” all the time if that’s how you’ve been conditioned to see the world. It cedes so much of your perception of reality to other people and makes it so other people’s perceptions ARE an imposition on you.
Womanizer: from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun A man who seduces or attempts to seduce women as a matter of habit.
"The key point is that men who have success in attracting women are typically more likely to use coercion, and those who are less successful are less likely to use coercion." David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault