The only attack is on your sanity

Muslims aren’t banning red tulips
Atheists aren’t banning Christmas
Feminists aren’t waging war on men
Jacinda Ardern didn’t abuse Australia
Jews aren’t forming a Blarite conspiracy
Charlie Hebdo didn’t attack immigrants
Monsanto didn’t release a “terminator gene”
Anti-harassment isn’t anti-Humanism
Metal music isn’t harming your children
The UN isn’t a Satanic conspiracy
Pizzagate was never real
Wind farms aren’t a health hazard
Jordan Peterson isn’t a Nazi
Anti-retrovirals aren’t a eugenic plot
Vaccines don’t cause autism
Encryption advocates aren’t terrorists
Internet filter opponents aren’t child molesters
Criticism of Hillsong isn’t bigotry
Trump’s impeachment inquiry isn’t a coup
Veganism isn’t an anti-masturbation plot
Opposing “sex-work” doesn’t “demonize sex workers”
Loathing Pell isn’t anti-Catholic
”GLB” doesn’t magically make someone anti-“T”
Considering elders isn’t anti-millennial.

The attack is on your brain
Get your adrenalin firing, use you as a tool
wind you up, watch you go, do what they want.

Maybe they need a bulwark in the comments
Maybe they need a useful fool
Black and white thinking helps you oblige, makes you feel good.

The slightest suggestion of truth and you let the dopamine surge,
in withdrawal, after the let down, you’ll deny your own rage.

The cycle repeats. The army of binary thinking flesh-bots has another new recruit.
Demagogues of all stripes ratchet things up another notch.

~ Bruce

Creeper

Creeper makes too much eye contact
He’s a bit too eager to talk to women.
He sits alone in his seat, waving to strangers,
mooching off of common courtesy.

Leaning over he pesters a French couple…
”Are you tourists?”
It’s asked bluntly, with dismissive tone.
Yes, they’re tourists. No, they don’t want to talk to him.

Creeper’s advances are unsolicited.
Creeper’s interests are boring.
Creeper won’t take a hint.
Creeper doesn’t respect boundaries.

Bordertown; ironic waypoint signifying boundaries.
Creeper gets a passenger to sit with;
a captive audience for his indulgence;
a sounding board for the self-centred, banal and inane.

Creeper questions the senior woman’s ethnicity.
Proceeds to lecture her on her heritage.
Explains he’s studied war at University.
Tells his captive he’s a writer.

Creeper paws her shoulder.
Creeper asks about vampires.
Creeper hints at undead conspiracies.
Creeper lectures about “girls” and life decisions.

Sweating and writhing, he looks like Gollum on a bad day,
and as wise as the lovechild of Ed Wood and Alain de Botton.
Senior woman asks “how do you know?”
Creeper doesn’t like the questions of philosophers.

Creeper affects chivalry towards service staff,
lunges at senior woman’s neck for a joke;
calls her beautiful with hands lingering over her chest.
She doesn’t terribly mind.

Creeper got the encouragement he craves.
Creeper will do it all again…

~ Bruce

…assuming the mantle.

I didn’t get it, and I haven’t got it for most of the time. I’m only just getting it – the faux-masculine shibboleths that I’m expected to observe, in order to be ‘one of the guys’.

Especially the degradation of women as rite of passage.

Don’t get me wrong…

I’m nobody’s knight in shining armour (I think this will be the last time I repeat this for some time), and I don’t believe in chivalry towards women – chivalry, as opposed to decency, assumes that women are frail objects to be protected like delicate porcelain in a world they’re not equipped to deal with. Women are no such thing.

I’ve got an interest in this. If pseudo, and actual misogyny, are used as defining criteria for what it is to be masculine, then I consider that an imposture. I don’t want that group identity lumped on me, and moreover, I’m willing, if imposed upon, to fight for my stake in masculine culture to the exclusion of other men.

Gentlemen, if you’re going to make an asshole out of yourself in the first instance, I’m not going to take much notice when you make squeals of indignation, when you get a little comeuppance. That is unless, I find it justifiable, useful, and entertaining, to laugh at you.

Seriously though, some men really shit me. The things that some of you expect me to take on board as normal, or healthy, or unappealing-but-otherwise-not-rebarbative.

[Trigger warning: There isn’t anything explicit beyond this point, but the subject matter is rather dark, delving into the dank, unsanitary world of misogyny, as it does].

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