You Keep Using That Word

In light of the torrent of women finally coming forward with their stories of rape and sexual assault by powerful men -- and being believed --I wanted to take a moment to broach the topic of consent, and why men -- not just heterosexual, as we've seen with Kevin Spacey, but I'm going to focus on straight cis men because let's face it, that's the demo that can't keep their hands and dicks to themselves -- seem to have such a difficult time both recognizing "no" and taking it for an answer.

The problem is that men are socially conditioned to view sex not as a mutual expression of affection between two (or more) people, but as a thing they do to someone else. And perhaps more disgustingly, a "deal" they have to "close." They must overcome the objections of their target and turn that "no" into a "yes." You can see this ridiculous mindset at play in David Wong's Ayn-Randian manifestos on Cracked, particularly this one (which I've torn apart here).

And men are conditioned this way because up until very, very recently, their partners didn't exactly have a say in the matter. Particularly straight men. If you were a woman? As a member of the nobility/aristocracy, you were flat-out assigned a man to have sex with (the husband chosen for you by your father). If you were a peasant, you simply married the first man who asked because you needed his salary. Ergo men never had to worry about being worthy, so much as first. The woman wasn't ever going to turn him down. She wasn't allowed to.

Up until even more recently, sexual assault and rape were in the same category as property crimes. Raping a woman was no different than vandalizing a piece of merchandise. Rapists literally paid a fine to the husband of the victim if she was married. If she wasn't, he could either pay a fine to her father or marry her; you broke it, you bought it.

Hell, just for perspective? Ancient Greece (on which nearly all of Western society is based) had no separate word for "rape."

For men, particularly straight men, sex is viewed through the lens of a sales transaction. He offers strength, protection, and wealth, and he gets sex and children as payment for his services as a husband. His objective is to turn any potential "no" into a "yes."

Thus, to him, sex is something his partner is letting him do. And if they let him do it, whether they want him to or not, that's all that matters. He closed the sale.

On the contrary, when victims -- especially women -- talk about consent, they mean "sex that is wanted, with this particular person" rather than simply letting sex happen out of a sense of obligation or being too under-confident to refuse. And that's a concept that we can't seem to get through men's heads.

Comedienne Margaret Cho outlines the issue perfectly in this post on her site:

But the sex I am talking about having, the kind I didn’t want, is sex I initiated with people I wasn’t attracted to so that I could get finished faster, or so I didn’t have explain whytowherefor I wasn’t into it or into them, or I loved them so much, but the chemistry wasn’t there, and I felt bad for them and so I would leave my body temporarily for them to do what they wanted, like “take what you want, I’ll be over there” and then return at the end for cuddling and the nice warmth of sleeping in a bed with another person.

Women have been conditioned by and large to agree to sex we don't want to have because it's presented to us as our end of the bargain. Something we let men do to us in exchange for him providing financial security and physical protection.

Why is this not consent? Okay, you remember Lumbergh from Office Space? Star of the That Would Be Great meme? Would you say Milton/Peter/Porter/Slydell consented to anything he asked for? Of course not. They did it out of unspoken obligation.

They acquiesced. They relented. They did not, in any way, consent.

Now picture being expected to have sex in the same way you're expected to go to work on Sunday. Specifically, picture being expected to have sex you derive little, if any, pleasure from because your partner does not know or care if you're enjoying yourself. Picture this and you're starting to scratch the surface of the problem with the male definition of "consent" with regard to what it means for women.

The difference between consent and acquiescence can be summed up in one word: desire. "Lie back and think of England" isn't consent. You don't "let" people do things to you out of desire; you do it with them as a willing and enthusiastic participant. Consent is having sex out of desire. Acquiescence is having sex because it's easier than refusing. Particularly when it comes to the power dynamics between women and the powerful men they work for. If they're "letting you do it" because "you're a star", that's not consent. That's a person too afraid of what might happen if they say no.

So if you could take no for an answer and keep your hands and dicks to yourselves unless you're double-damned pinky-swear sure the other person is into you (or wants you to be into them), yeah, that'd be great.

Neon Genesis Evangelion Is the Most Misunderstood Franchise of All Time

The show that launched a thousand flamewars, because pretty much nobody knew what the hell was going on. And a show that everyone agrees was one of the darkest and most nihilistic works of fiction ever made.

Well, almost everyone.

I'm one of those weirdos that saw it as the complete opposite. As one of the most optimistic and positive views of humanity in fiction, minus the usual cheese that comes with the Humans Are Special trope. It was a visceral deconstruction of said trope, stripping away the layers to find out why. I think the reason so many folks consider it negative is because they're so focused on the visuals (which are indeed horrifying) that they ignore what's actually happening and what the characters are discussing.

The short version is that the underlying main plot of the show is to collapse the AT Fields -- the physical manifestation of the psychological wall that separates people's identities from each other, in effect the thing that makes you able to identify as the individual you are -- of everyone on earth and combine all souls into one being (referred to throughout the show as Instrumentality). The goal is that nobody will suffer any longer since they don't have an identity, and therefore no need to establish relationships with other people.

Shinji, the series' protagonist, ultimately rejects this despite his crippling fear of others, and opts to keep his identity. Hence the movie ending with him and Asuka alone on a beach in a post-apocalyptic hellscape with the "sea" in the background. That sea is the collective souls of mankind.

Now, why the unholy fuck would I consider this a positive ending? Even uplifting? Besides me just being weird and disturbed?

The devil is in the details.

Up to this point, Shinji has been through the proverbial wringer. At 4 years old, he watched his mother get absorbed into Evangelion Unit 01 (and opt to stay there, effectively committing suicide, but it's not clear he was ever informed of that). Right after this, his father shipped him off to live with a teacher, and only contacted him nearly a decade later to be Evangelion Unit 01's pilot.

Then came the 13th Angel (Bardiel) battle. It had possessed Unit 03, and when Shinji refused to fight because he knew there was another pilot just like him in there, his father took control of Unit 01 away from him and had him sit in the cockpit fully conscious and aware while it brutally tore apart Unit 03 and nearly killed the other pilot (whom he learned was a friend of his).

Right after this is the battle with Zeruel, the 14th Angel. Shinji is forced to return to piloting Unit 01 after swearing he wouldn't, and in the course of that battle is absorbed into it exactly like his mother was ten years prior. Only he makes the decision to come back.

Right before the events of the movie, he fights the 17th Angel, who had shown up disguised as Kaworu, a fellow pilot. Before learning his true identity, Kaworu was literally the first person in the series to not treat Shinji like an object that exists to fulfill the needs of other people. And in the end, Shinji is forced to kill him. Something he swore in the Bardiel battle that he would rather die than do.

So by the time that the underlying plot of the show comes to fruition, Shinji is at the lowest point any human being could find themselves. More than anyone, he has every reason to go "yup, fine by me, I'm totally cool with not suffering anymore" and taking the ultimate escape from reality that is joining Instrumentality. But he doesn't.

Because as all the philosophical talk in the movie illustrates, having an identity is painful when you fear other people and when you view the world as a cruel, shitty place. Having an identity is pure torture when you hate that identity because you are under the impression that everyone else does.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

When you change your own perspective and stop viewing everything and everyone as hating you and out to hurt you, having your own identity is good. Even pleasurable. Certainly preferable to floating in a sea of nothing and not caring anymore. As Shinji himself puts it:

I feel that there were only hateful things there. So I'm sure it was okay to run away. But there was nothing good in the place I ran to, either. After all, I didn't exist there... which is the same as no one existing.

But that's not all. The real punch comes in the next few lines:

Kaworu: Is it okay for AT Fields to hurt you and others once more? 

Shinji: I don't mind.  But, what are you two within my heart? 

Rei: Hope.  The hope that people might be able to understand one another. 

Kaworu: And the words 'I love you'. 

Shinji: But that's just pretending - a self-intoxicating belief... like a prayer. It can't possibly last forever. Sooner or later I'll be betrayed... And they'll leave me. Still... I want to meet them again, because I believe my feelings at that time were real.

That is the point at which Shinji rejects Instrumentality, and his reasons for doing so. Sure, he'll be hurt sooner or later. But there's happiness there, too, and it's just as real as the pain. And that alone is worth retaining his identity for.

So despite the crucified Eva series in the background, despite the giant decapited Rei head on the horizon, despite everything else...existing is better than not existing. And that giant sea in the background? All of humanity has the chance to make the same choice as Shinji. They can all come back if they want to.

Having walked that line before? This is powerfully positive stuff. Especially in current times when so much is going wrong. When every day seems like the world is sinking into that sea inch by inch, figuratively if not literally. It's going to get ugly, but people can act to set shit right again. Things can get better. But only if we stick around long enough to take action.

That is, at its heart, the message of the entire film and the entire series. As long as you're alive, there is still hope that things can get better because you have the ability to act. As Shinji's mother says, "Anywhere can be heaven as long as you have the will to live. After all, you're alive... and you can find the chance to achieve happiness anywhere."

God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world indeed.

Puerto Rico Isn't Trump's Katrina; It's Worse

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

That line has got to be the single most defining moment of Bush's presidency. The reality-denial of incompetence so over the top it sounded like a Marx Brothers movie if 1,800 people had died making one. Today, barely 12 years later, Hurricane Maria's leveling of Puerto Rico is being compared as a similar defining moment for Trump. But it's not; it's way the fuck worse.

See, the Katrina response was sheer incompetence. Then-President Bush, then-Governor Blanco, and then-FEMA Director Brown had no idea what they were doing. Katrina was the first disaster on that scale that any of them had witnessed. And then they had to figure out how to respond to it. People were outraged. For the first time, the suffering and deaths of hundreds of brown people drew the empathy and attention of white people. And as a result, shit got done. This time, it's worse. Once again, the suffering of an island full of brown folk has drawn the attention of white folk. Once again, there is pressure and outrage. But unlike in 2005, shit ain't getting done.

Because in 2005, Bush's problem was ignorance and incompetence. Trump's problem is indifference.

Shit got done after white people all around the country made a big enough ruckus because for all his faults, Bush still saw the people of Louisiana and Mississippi as fellow citizens and as human beings in need of relief and help:

Trump sees the inhabitants of Puerto Rico as neither American citizens (which they are, and have been for a fucking century) nor as people:

And not just because they're brown. He doesn't view the inhabitants of Houston as people or fellow citizens, either:

Trump...really doesn't view other people as humans. Period.

He is, as Twitter user @HoarseWhisperer has observed, a severe sociopathic narcissist. The short version is that everything he does serves two purposes, and only two: gain positive attention, and deflect shame. He has the mentality of every screaming toddler at Wal-Mart the week before Christmas. And there is nothing that exposes a narcissist of Trump's level like a humanitarian crisis.

When we see pictures from Puerto Rico -- people who have lost everything, people covered in mud, standing in waist-deep floodwater, looking like they haven't slept or eaten in days -- we feel for them. Even those of us who have never been through a major disaster can at least imagine what going without food, water, electricity, and sanitation for weeks and months on end would be like, and therefore we at least attempt to understand how they feel. That's what empathy is. Being able to recognize and understand the emotions of other people.

A sociopathic narcissist is incapable of empathy. It's part of the disorder. They do not feel emotions except on a superficial level, therefore they can't recognize them in others. More than anything, a humanitarian crisis -- a crisis of human suffering -- requires empathy in order to deal with effectively. It requires recognizing the needs of the suffering people, and meeting those needs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

When the Bush Administration failed spectacularly at the start of the Katrina relief effort, it was still able to recognize what went wrong and took steps to fix it. Because for all of his other shortcomings, George W. Bush is still a human being capable of empathy. He is still capable of recognizing the needs and feelings of others and prioritizing them. He was just a complete fucking moron about it. But in the end, he did care about getting it right and helping the people.

Trump, by contrast, is dragging his feet to help Puerto Rico and its citizens because he doesn't give a shit. He has no properties there (anymore), and Puerto Ricans on the island can't vote for him. He has no reason to bother. Even if public opinion were to pressure him, he has no incentive to do more than the bare minimum. And even then, it's just easier to invent some other crisis to distract people with and deflect shame from this absolute clusterfuck.

So when you get a narcissist forced into a situation where empathy is required, and for which they haven't had time to rehearse their act, you get a floundering, incoherent mess like Trump. While I have no doubt whatsoever that he has some form of Alzheimer's, this is not what you're seeing when he talks about Puerto Rico. You are watching a kid get called on in history class to answer a question and he hasn't been paying attention all year.

Trump is a 100% cold-blooded sociopath. A soulless, reptilian predator trying to convince you he's one of you. And his human suit is starting to itch.

White Supremacists Are Scared of Their Own Mediocrity, Part 1

Special Note: I'm well aware that there are mediocre white women who are just as dangerous. I'll get to them in Part 2. I'm concentrating on white men for this part, because the people who marched on Charlottesville and murdered a woman with a car were by and large not women. Men have historically been the face and engine of the movement for a reason.

After the horror in Charlottesville this weekend, I've noticed way too many people -- not gonna mince words, here, it's literally all white people -- expressing shock that this could be happening in 2017. And as a fellow white person, this is the part where if I were from the South, I'd be going "bless your hearts, you sweet summer children." Because it's obvious by your shock that you don't realize that a mediocre white man is the most dangerous creature on earth.

See, you'll never find a white supremacist who is confident, self-assured, and good at what he does. He would not be a white supremacist otherwise. Because white supremacy -- the belief that being white makes you automatically superior -- is logically the position of the man who is such a generic, formless pile of nothing that whiteness and the privilege that comes with it are all he's got to define himself by. Like a sad lump of dried bird shit on the windshield of society.

These are the guys you'll find on 4chan and Reddit bitching that they can't get a job and can't get laid because brown people are being given too much of an unfair leg up and white guys like them are getting deliberately ignored because "libtards ruin errything." The reality, of course, is that guys like them are so utterly, insufferably dull that as the playing field with people of color gets more even and fair -- that is, as whiteness matters less and less -- it becomes obvious that being born with the advantage of white skin is all these milktoasts have going for them. And thus, the only thing they can feel superior about.

These are men who are so painfully, invisibly mediocre that you'd find it impossible to pick any one of them out of a police lineup with any real certainty. They all look the same. They all sound the same. They all use the same buzzwords. Wear the same popped collars. Have the same stupid haircut. And they all offer the same boring, banal, old-hat excuses for why their lives are meaningless trains to absolutely nowhere.

These are the men who have been able to so thoroughly coast through life on being white that they were never pressured to develop any useful skills or foster any unique talents. "White" was all they needed. Life is graded on a curve and as long as they could maintain roughly the same level of average, they didn't need to do anything more. The bare minimum was enough.

But that's the thing about grading curves; all it takes is one person far enough outside the curve to fuck the entire system up.

For people of color who have been conditioned to be twice as good just to achieve the bare minimum that white men have been riding the brake on? Removing or at least diminishing the race component makes their hard work and qualifications stand out in stark relief against the sea of flat, boring, dull, nondescript mediocrity of your average white male.

As far as white supremacists are concerned, brown people who have been working hard all their lives have wrecked the curve. The black kid from the projects who's had to fight tooth and nail to make people see past his skin just got 100%, so now the white guy's 50% is flunking rather than average.

And damned if a lazy, average white guy is going let society tell him he needs to study harder in order to achieve what the black kid has now. Being above black people is his right and proper place as a white guy, and nobody's going to tell him otherwise.

That is where white supremacy comes from. Mediocre white men who have gotten soft and lazy due to being handed everything that non-white people have fought for, now realize they're so in over their heads that it's not even a competition anymore. Their whiteness is not an advantage any longer, and literally everything else about them sucks. When forced to stare their own mediocrity in the face, the white supremacist, being lazy as shit, knows it's just easier to beat up the black kid than to open a book.

And it wasn't just Donald Trump that tapped this well of hatred and resentment and self-loathing. Bernie Sanders went just as hard after these voters. Even going so far as to claim common ground with Trump barely a week into the nation's mourning and reeling after the election. It's no accident at all that many of the deep red states that Sanders took in the Democratic Primary -- particularly West Virginia, Indiana, and Michigan -- went overwhelmingly for Trump. It's also no accident that many of these areas are white supremacist strongholds. Since they didn't get the "Free College" Guy, they went for the "Kick Out All the Illegals" Guy. And this makes perfect sense when you realize what the root of their hatred is: if they can't crack the books, they'll crack the black kid's skull.

They're not economically anxious, and they never have been. Poor? Sure. Poverty is as pervasive in the Rust Belt and Appalachia as it is in the inner cities of Detroit, NYC, and Toledo. The difference between rural white poverty and urban brown poverty is that those in urban brown poverty never had a privileged existence to fall from; rural white poverty is the result of the loss of high-paying jobs to automation, outsourcing, and the changing needs and wants of the market; rural white people used to have it good and now they don't, so white supremacy takes root easily by giving them a convenient scapegoat. They're not economically anxious; they're culturally anxious because the world has increasingly little use for whiteness, God, or guns. The ways they've always been allowed to behave are becoming unacceptable. White supremacy is the spoiled teenage brat throwing a tantrum because his parents took away the PlayStation after he called the neighbors The N Word. Trump and Sanders are like the subversive grandpa who promises to buy them the next model if they reject their parents hard enough.

This is further amplified when you throw women into the mix. Because when you get right down to it, what all this fear of mediocrity goes back to is the inability to attract a mate and make more white babies with her. Why yes, I'm totally saying that the core of white supremacy is men who are too incorrigibly boring to be fuckable, because it's not 1950 anymore and women don't need men's permission to support themselves. Simply having a dick and a paycheck isn't enough to guarantee white men a mate, nevermind a gaggle of women desperate for their attention so they can leave their parents' house by age 25.

There is a direct correlation between white supremacy and the hatred of women, particularly women seen as independent in any way. From r/TheRedPill to GamerGate to r/Incel to /pol/, you'll find plenty of documented overlap between white supremacists and hating women who won't make babies with them. And if that isn't enough for you? Besides poor hygiene and a racist worldview, Steve Bannon, Alexandre Bissonnette, Jeremy Joseph Christian, and countless other white supremacists all have something else in common: a history of violence toward women, or at least violent rhetoric. It's a feature, not a bug; white supremacy aims to elevate white men above all other creatures, and that sure as fuck includes women.

And if you need more recent proof? Heather Heyer, the victim of the violence in Charlottesville, was subject to a vicious screed on the white supremacist website Daily Stormer (which had served as a hub to organize the riot). Because obviously a white woman who isn't busy making white babies has no value to white men who can't get laid in the first place.

Really, white supremacy is a complete misnomer. It's a movement of men who are anything but "supreme"; fragile, cowardly, insecure, lazy, unmotivated nondescript white men who are literally so goddamn worthless that the thought of having to do anything more than the bare minimum is so terrifying, they can only cope with it by waving the traitorous flags and screaming the slogans of history's most spectacular losers.

Especially when they still use mommy's Uber account.

The Affordable Care Act Is Barack Obama and the Democrats' Xanatos Gambit

And it has so far succeeded beyond any of their wildest dreams.

As we've seen since January 20th, while the House of Representatives -- being a highly polarized and deeply partisan shitshow thanks to the gerrymandering apocalypse back in 2010 -- was able to pass a bill that could actually become law, the far more moderate Senate has tried to pass their own version three times, and each time they've crashed and burned spectacularly. And unlike the Senate from 2008-2011, there hasn't been a single filibuster involved (as a budget maneuver, it can't be filibustered, and this was completely intentional). Despite having a majority in both chambers and one of their own in the White House, Republicans can't do this one thing they've been chomping at the bit and salivating to do for the last 8 years. Because rather than being a symbolic gesture they know will never happen, this time it has actual consequences because they have a stooge willing to sign it.

First, in case you don't speak fluent TVTropes terminology, a Xanatos Gambit is a plan that cannot fail, because it fulfills multiple goals simultaneously. Such that no matter how its opponents try to thwart it, one or more of the plan's goals will get furthered. They simply can't all be foiled. It's named for the character of David Xanatos, an antagonist from the Gargoyles TV show from the mid-1990s, because he had a penchant for these types of plans.

The Affordable Care Act has been implemented so far and become such an integral part of the American healthcare system that no matter what the Republicans do, Obama comes out ahead. Because there are only 3 possible outcomes. In 2 of them, Republicans are summarily fucked. In the third, they'll have to concede that the guy they've been trying to fuck over won in the end:

Scenario 1: Republicans Fail to Repeal or Replace the ACA (Status Quo)

This would, of course, mean that they've broken a promise they've been campaigning on for nearly a decade. The hardcore Republican voting base isn't going to accept this quietly. While they won't vote for a Democrat, they're more likely to just stay home and not vote at all out of disillusionment. As we inch closer to the 2018 midterms, this does not bode well for Republicans in vulnerable seats (which, as the special elections this year have proven, may be far more vulnerable than they think).

Scenario 2: Republicans Succeed in Repealing and/or Replacing the ACA

This is frankly the worst of the 3. Because for any bill to get the 51 votes it would need to pass the Senate, it would have to be cruel enough to appease sociopaths like Lee and Cruz, but restrained enough to get the votes of moderates like Murkowski and Capito. If by some miracle that happened -- and if by an even greater miracle, the House managed to pass it -- it would be a bill that would still kick anywhere from 22 million to 32 million people off their insurance. Many of these people live in Republican strongholds: the rural South, the Rust Belt, and the deep red center (Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, etc.).

These folks are going to see their situation on the ground rapidly deteriorate. As rural hospitals shutter without Medicaid. As areas hit hard by the opioid crisis -- areas that overwhelmingly voted for Trump -- suffer even more devastating loss of life due to overdose. As people who didn't even know that they have insurance because of the ACA suddenly find themselves unable to get even the simplest healthcare.

And they're going to blame the people in charge. Republicans. Because there will be nobody else responsible for their hardships. Again, as we inch closer to the 2018 midterms, this is going to become even more of a prominent issue.

Scenario 3: Republicans Amend and Improve the ACA

The most likely scenario, and frankly the only one that won't mean Republicans getting walked to the electoral guillotine next year. If, after failing like a snake trying to play Dance Dance Revolution, they finally decide that maybe it's time to work with Democrats and actually legislate to fix the ACA's flaws instead of pitching out baby, bathwater, bathtub, bathroom, and entire neighborhood, Obama will come out the furthest. Because he'll have forced their hand to build on his signature accomplishment. And history will forever remember that the Affordable Care Act was the work of the nation's first black President, whom a bunch of old racist white guys tried to blow up and found out they couldn't without taking themselves with it.

And the part that would really burn their biscuits?

Not only does Obama win, we all do.

Because even more than black folk in positions of power, that's what Republicans fear most.

The people winning.