Category Archives: Undead sexist cliches

Rep. Max Miller, running for re-election in Ohio, is allegedly (not that I doubt the allegations) a slimy, abusive creep who withheld his daughter’s favorite plush toy, the one she can’t sleep without. For some reason, that kind of petty cruelty creeps me out even more than the openly brutal abuse he’s accused of (no, I’m not excusing that). An article in American Prospect shows that much like the Toddler in the White House, Miller has an (alleged) track record of being spiteful and vicious to everyone who crosses him.

Nevertheless he’s choosing to stay in the race so Republicans are stuck with him. His best defense so far? Well, if Emily Moreno had been abused, would she have cooked him dinner? Yeah, it’s not like women with psycho partners ever make nice out of fear, hoping to defuse them.

In any case, Florida State Senator Joe Gruters, chair of the Republican National Committee says the abuse not an issue: ““We’re gonna support our nominees …We need to make sure we hold the majorities. Max, I’m sure, is on that side.” He dismisses the accusations by saying “there’s not many things worse than divorce.” Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s father in law, did come out against him but as I mentioned last week, he took his time, presumably hoping the scandal would blow over.

Given the Toddler of the United States has shielded multiple creeps and sexual harassers from federal investigation this is not surprising. Even for a sane political party, there’s pressure to be cold-blooded and practical, to turn a blind eye. And if it’s something like adultery that might be the right choice; even if we disapprove, we typically don’t have a better candidate to pick.

But if, like Gruters, we have no lines in the sand, we also have no principles. At worst, Gruters is one of those shits who think a man has every right to treat a woman that way; at best he opposes abuse in general, just not when he’s forced to criticie a fellow Republican. Come on, don’t you have sympathy for his position? He has no choice but to back Miller.

Wrong. He does have a choice. And the choice me made says he doesn’t oppose abuse, even if he tells himself otherwise. “Against abuse when it’s politically safe” is no better than “honest when convenient.”

Power cannot be the only standard. Democrats abandoning a credibly accused rapist such as Graham Platner was the right move, even if it had guaranteed Susan Collins gets re-elected (from what I’ve read, the seat is still in play).

Paul Campos at LGM quotes a commenter who makes another relevant point re Miller and the Toddler: “as a rich and powerful person, outside of a very narrow range of actions, you are largely protected from consequences, and other elites will seek to shield you from consequences to maintain the fiction that elites are deserving of their status. If someone like Trump were treated like a regular person, this would threaten elite status generally.  Trump learned he could do what he wanted, and others would simply clean up after him, because this was easier, and it maintained a lot of fictions that were very valuable to other people.” That’s not an attitude we should encourage.

I see a lot of that attitude in the way our society deals with rape. We live in a country where judges have said flat out that they don’t want to prosecute a teenage rapist because it would ruin his future. If Brett Kavanaugh hadn’t gotten his SCOTUS seat, he’d still have had a lifetime position on the federal bench. Even a slight bump in a man’s career over rape allegations was too much for some conservatives. Drawing lines in the sand and responding appropriately when those lines are crossed matters. Show that this shit is unacceptable and, ideally, that there are consequences. Miller has avoided them for most of his life.

As commenter Murc says at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Platner, rapist or not, would still be better in the Senate than Collins. When earlier allegations about Platner’s cheating and bad behavior came to light, “still better than a Republican” was one of the defenses raised. As Murc says, “the flip side of that is ‘there are in fact actual red lines beyond which this calculus no longer applies’ … Standards matter. There are more important things than the naked pursuit of power, and frankly orienting yourself purely towards power seeking is almost going to completely eliminate your ability to effectively USE said power.”

Someone else at LGM linked to a post at Slacktivist about the temptation to divide people into “ours” and “theirs”: “one of the obsessions I obsess about here became one of the obsessions I obsess about there — the toxic danger of distinguishing between “people” and “our people” and the realization that no good can ever come of pursuing such a distinction. And so now, for me, “Taking care of our people” is just “Taking care of people.””

As the Prospect article shows, the media have been astonishingly supine about Miller. The author suggests reporters just gave up because there’s no “shaming the shameless” and none of the coverage he did get has to date hurt his career. I think that’s inadequate as a reason. It’s unprofessional as far as news coverage but it shows the advantage the right-wing noise machine has. They’ll repeat accusations against Democrats day in and day out until it defines them and even the mainstream media start to accept that framing.

As I want Republicans to have increasingly little power, I hope Miller goes down. But I also want him to go down because if the allegations are true he’s a horrible human being. He does not belong anywhere near power or, well, other human beings he might hurt. I hope Ohio’s voters agree.

As I’ve written before, that so much of our society embraces a hierarchy of races, genders, religions, etc. is perhaps America’s greatest weakness (though it’s not unique to us). “Back when I was born, every WASP man knew even if he wasn’t at the head of the line, he’d never be at the end of it. Jews, African Americans, Asians, women, they would save him from being a loser. At least, he could imagine so.”

I think that’s one reason for the old line that Americans don’t see themselves as poor, they see themselves as billionaires having an off-year. If a man can look up at the wealthiest people or the Washington power wielders and see men like himself, hey, he’s part of the ruling class! Ditto for white people. Feminism, black power, gay rights, everything that threatens to level the hierarchy, they take that fantasy away. They mean a white man could indeed end up at the bottom of the heap, the biggest loser. And that’s unacceptable.

As I wrote at the link, hierarchy is so bedrock to our culture, many people can’t imagine a world without it. If feminists don’t want men ruling over them, it can’t be that they want equality — they must want to replace men at the top. Hence the many SF stories and dire predictions I’ve seen over the years where feminism really means men will wear aprons, stay home to cook and clean while women go out to office and factory jobs. The hierarchy cannot change, all that matters is who’s on top.

In that light, change is not just about losing power and status, it’s about the fear that if someone else is on top, they’ll be as ruthless as you are, only now you’ll be on the receiving end. Muslims can’t possibly want religious freedom, they must want to establish theocracy, just like conservative Christian leaders (Muslim theocracy is a thing in parts of the world but there’s no sign of American Muslims imposing sharia law).

Another way in which men imagine themselves ennobled by the achievements of other men is when they look back at the past. Who achieved everything? Men. Who performed feats of daring? Men. Who built America? Men, specifically white men (that much of America was literally built by black slave labor goes unmentioned). Any examples to the contrary? Outliers.

So men accomplished everything. According to sexist scholar Roy Baumeister there were no barriers to women doing the same — but why bother when “men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.” So the history of male accomplishment proves that men are the superior gender because there were no laws or culture pressures or anything like that restricting women. Which is the equivalent of looking at when the Ivy League didn’t accept women and pointing out that all the Harvard and Yale grads are men.

Like the current hierarchy, some modern men think this endows them with heroic status: they’re men, men created and organized everything, therefore they share in that awesomeness. Never mind they’ve never accomplished anything equivalent. By this thinking, since all the science and crafts and everything were developed by men and built by men and all the innovations were by men (they weren’t), therefore women who assert equality are taking these male fields away from men! Men did all the sciencing ever (this is not true) so by what right do women get to whine about sexism? Wouldn’t society already be egalitarian if women were really equal? Or blacks, or any other group not at the top?

This kind of thinking makes leveling the hierarchy an even longer labor than it has been.

A Baptist News article about Men-Only Christian gyms got me thinking about how some men want a safe space, by which they mean a space free of women.

Conservatives love to shit on the idea of safe spaces — colleges, classes, groups, cons — that don’t tolerate harassment, bullying, hate speech, intimidation, etc. What’s the matter with these liberal wimps? Can’t they exist in the real world? They are, however, very fond of the idea of safe spaces for themselves. As I put it almost a decade ago, “they want the entire world, or all the parts they might use, to be ‘safe.’ And ‘safe’ doesn’t mean ;no death threats, no harassment, no bullying’ it means the absence of anything and everything they dislike. Women. Blacks. Latinos. Gays. Atheists. Muslims.”

Celeste Davis has pointed out that for many men, their homosocial bonds with other men are more important than their relationships with women; they don’t like women and don’t want to be around them. And by “don’t want to be around them,” I mean they don’t want women in sight (possible exceptions: wait staff, family, girlfriends, but not consistent exemptions). Not in their workplace. Not in their online discussions. Not at their sports events. Sometimes they offer flimsy justifications — they can’t complain about you harassing or discriminating against them if they’re not there! — but they often don’t even bother.

Misogynist Warren Farrell, for instance, has declared men in IT are perfectly justified in not wanting women coworkers: “The less safe the environment is for men, the more they will seek little pods of safety like the tech world.” I admire his chutzpah in making a multibillion dollar industry sound like a treehouse some boys erected in the backyard.

As for sports, reporter Julie DiCaro has talked about how men go ballistic hearing her read sports news on the radio — they go to sports to be away from women, dammit! Economist Stephen Moore — misogynist, alleged deadbeat dad and adulterer — had a similar meltdown when a basketball game had a woman referee. He’s also prone to rants about how co-ed games similarly impose on all men, and coed soccer in schools is traumatizing generations of boys. Why must women pollute everything with their girl cooties?

The story about men-only gyms includes a quote from one gym founder that it was just too hard to coexist with women running around the gym stark naked (which, obviously, isn’t what the women were doing). “I had to choose between honoring the Lord, honoring my wife, and guarding my eyes, or training my body. So I quit four gyms.” As the reporter says, there’s no suggestion that he has any duty to honor the women by not seeing them as a piece of meat or by keeping his lust for them in check; it’s his wife that matters. I think this reflects the idea that men’s attraction to women isn’t something they feel as much as something women do to them. Consider the Pence rule, the idea a man should never be alone in an office with a female subordinate or have lunch with one. To avoid scandal. To avoid temptation. To avoid sexually harassing her. Somehow the point of this policy is not that the man can’t control himself, it’s that women are too tempting.

The thing is, as someone observed online recently (I don’t have the link), men are capable of behaving decently. They are capable of being better than the bear (it occurs to me that references to “choose the bear” may look very weird a decade from now. I’m still going to make them). We know because they can treat other men decently, with loyalty, respect, consideration and sympathy. Not always — men gender-policing other men is a thing — but frequently. They can do the same to women, if they choose.

As for male-only spaces, men absolutely have the right to get together for a boy’s night out, for the big game or to have a private guys-only D&D group/cigar club/science club. This does not translate into a right to have anywhere they want to be turned into a no-women-allowed space; guys hanging out at their home is one thing, a bar (or restaurant or sports arena) that bars women is usually illegal.

No Chicks! has more consequences than misogynists admit. The Pence rule, for instance, women out from mentoring sessions, building connections with their boss or having any sort of private. As former Facebook exec Sheryl Sandburg says, if a leader insists on the Pence rule, they should give up on closed-door meetings or one-on-one lunches with anyone, male or female (or intersex for that matter). It’s the only fair way.

Case in point, while working on Undead Sexist Cliches (the book) I came across a story in Harvard Business Review. A man and a woman joined the same investment firm with roughly equivalent qualifications. Suddenly the guy rocketed ahead and acquired all kinds of high-powered clients. Why? It turned out the all-male partners had invited him to play in their all-male racquetball games after work. During one match they’d mentioned a nonprofit that needed a financial manager and suggested he volunteer — lots of important people on the board so he’d make good connections. They’d been rights. The woman was never invited to hang out the same way and never got that kind of tip. That’s why gender segregation matters and why DEI is needed. The partners weren’t consciously trying to give the guy a leg up over the woman but it happened anyway.

I also think segregation matters because it sets up a barrier between men and women that shouldn’t be there. It furthers the idea that women don’t belong in public or to be treated as equals. Not having coed sports cuts off the chance to build male/female friendships (for many misogynists that’s a win). Men who stick to a guys’ only gym for fear of their own lust may never learn to see an attractive woman as anything but The Other, The Temptations, The Vessel of Sin. .

Segregation also matters because it makes male/female relations worse. The men who go to a guys-only gym will probably keep seeing women as The Other, The Temptation, The Danger. It won’t help them learn to see them as people. To paraphrase Fred Clark, assuming men haven’t reached the point where they’re an actual threat, they’d be healthier going bowling with women. Or performing in community theater. Or playing D&D or chess. Bridge the gap. Don’t seal it up tighter.

I’ve blogged multiple times about the misogynist horror of women having sex “without consequences.” Using birth control, in their eyes, is slutty and irresponsible. Having sex while using birth control is loveless, no different than rape, and traumatizes your children (one right-to-lifer wrote years ago that showing your children you don’t want more implies they’re a horrible burden — you should prove your love by having lots and lots of kids!).

None of this has anything to do with the supposed goal of the forced-birth movement, saving fetuses from the “American holocaust’ of abortion. Nor do arguments that if women choose to use birth control, they’ve already committed to not having a baby, therefore they’ll have more abortions. The stats show birth control and good sex ed cut the unwanted pregnancy rate and the abortion rate. What it’s really about is right-wingers’ absolute horror at women becoming sexually active before marriage, let alone without any risk of pregnancy. To be sure, there’s a slut-shaming strain in the rest of society but like most misogyny, the right wing takes it and makes it a fundamental principle.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that along with enthusiasm for teen marriage, the Toddler’s administration is refusing to issue grants to sex-ed groups unless they go abstinence-only (if the gift link is dead, click here). Abstinence-only education is ineffective — Texas clung to it for years and had the country’s highest teen pregnancy, teen abortion and teen STD rates — but it sends the message that sex is bad and icky un less you’re married. At which point anything goes, including marital rape.

Here’s another bit of bullshit that was equally predictable. When the No Trans Girls In Sports bullshit kicked off, several feminists pointed out that the sudden rush to “protect” women’s sports was coming from people who didn’t give a crap about it — the kind of sexists who are the reason Title IX, guaranteeing funding for women’s sports, exists. Unsurprisingly, they came for the trans girls in women’s sports, now they’re coming for women’s sports. Misogynist whiner Scott Yenor wants schools to switch girls out of competitive sports, which he imagines conflict with their real nature — their “gentle, graceful, cooperative tendencies” and being “oriented toward motherhood and traditional feminine graces.”

Instead of competition, why not give girls ““cheerleading, dance, yoga, hiking clubs, recreational intramurals”? Which sound great as options, not as replacements. And they should be options for boys too — I’d have been happy to join a yoga club in school. Instead Yenor wants schools to protect and expand sports for boys — men’s soccer could be world-class except the feminazi Title IX requires spending money on chicks playing soccer! To be fair, he does talk about providing sports-alternatives for boys; however if schools don’t do that — boys get sports, women get yoga and cheerleading, end of story — I can’t imagine such a raging misogynist will fuss about it.

Yenor brings up that sports can affect women’s fertility; Mother Jones says the research isn’t conclusive. But we know school sports can inflict harrowing damage on men, too, from broken bones to brain injuries. I doubt Yenor’s going to the mat to protect them. It’s about the misogynist view that the female body is just a support system for the precious womb.

The boom in girls’ sports isn’t because they’ve been shanghaied into them. A lot of women enjoy playing sports and a lot of women can be as cutthroat as any man. Mia Hamm, Serena Williams, swimmers such as Esther Williams and Annette Kellerman And lots of men have objected, as this screenshot from the book Swimming Pretty shows:

Sound familiar?

The point of the “undead sexist cliche” label is that sexist and misogynist beliefs shamble on, refusing to die no matter how often they’re disproved. Case in point, the idea that being a dick to women — or a dick, period — makes you cool.

Until I started this post, I didn’t realize how much I’ve already blogged about this. For example, idea that if you’re a genius, you’re entitled to be a jackhole (and many geniuses and great men were jackholes to their wives). And geniuses certainly shouldn’t suffer for something as minor as rape.

I also wrote about an economist defending his colleagues talking sexist smack about women: “There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex. …” Dude, I stand by what I said then: “Just because academics are told they shouldn’t be sexist pigs, that doesn’t make being a sexist pig an act of rebellion. Being a sexist pig is just … being a sexist pig.”

As Andi Zeisler put it during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, 1980s pop culture was all about the glories of being a sexist pig, “modeled, with varying degrees of malice, the notion that good, clean teen-boy fun isn’t just about objectifying women. It’s also about laughing at them and mortifying them in a sacrifice to the larger cause of male bonding and group identity … So many of us either knew that girl or were that girl, which makes me consider that perhaps Kavanaugh is telling the truth when he professes not to recall these alleged incidents. In the rarefied milieu of elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges that nurtured him, jokes like these wouldn’t have been shocking or even particularly remarkable. They were the unacknowledged collateral damage of male bonding, blithely enacted on young women who didn’t have the luxury to forget about it.”

As a regular movie watcher back then, I can say Zeisler is absolutely right about how spying on naked girls or putting them in their place was a common theme in pop culture. At Atomic Junk Shop, the late Greg Hatcher makes the same point (I’ve linked to his column before, I know). Writing now, it strikes me it’s simultaneously treated as good, clean fun and as edgy rebellion. Rape apologist Camille Paglia, for instance, once wrote that “feminism with its solemn Carrie Nation repressiveness cannot see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.” Of course feminists do grasp that men find rape fun and erotic — they just don’t think that’s an excuse, or that rape is any less of a brutal crime because the rapist enjoys it.

As I wrote back in December, “there’s nothing edgy or daring about supporting patriarchy or defending rape — it’s evil, but it’s trite evil. The New York Times spent far more column inches discussing men’s fears of #metoo ruining their lives. than what it was like for women to face less harassment.” Our culture gives rapists a free pass and judges frequently do too. Feminists are not running the show; they are the insurgency rebelling against the system. Just consider that anti-feminist hacks such as Katie Roiphe can get articles in major media complaining that if feminists stamp out sexual harassment, office life will be drab and beige: “Maybe it’s better to live and work with colorful or inappropriate comments, with irreverence, wildness, incorrectness, ease. Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from the risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal?”” A woman who won’t accept Mr. Creepy’s comments on her boobs is setting herself up for heartbreak! Why can’t she see Camille Paglia was right and enjoy the “wild, infectious delirium of guys ignoring her boundaries!

Recently we had bro-type leftwingers gushing about Graham Platner and how his adultery and edgy drunken behavior made him edgy and authentic — not one of those “smoothgroin” guys who never put a sexual foot wrong (even after the rape allegations, some pundits are outraged his authentic working-class campaign crashed and burned). Other leftwingers think Democrats appealing to the manosphere appeals to the working class which is the key to winning elections — never mind that lots of the working class are female. And that women are the bedrock of the Democratic vote; somehow consultant, centrists and left-wing bros never consider appealing to the female side of the electorate important.

Showing again the undead nature of this bullshit, a year ago, the NYT offered an explanation why Dems were losing young men: they avoid saying things like “retard” or “faggot” which means they’re not authentic! “If there’s one issue that unites the bro-casters — beyond the need to find three hours of content — it’s a disdain for wokeness.”

Being woke and not calling people slurs is, apparently not authentic, just like Platner wouldn’t have been authentic if he’d been a faithful husband. “Modern bro-caster culture emerged in part as a response to the enforced sensitivity of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which left many young men feeling vilified for their purported privilege.” Criticizing the bro-casters validates their stance as spokespeople for the oppressed! Erik Loomis, despite being liberal, grumbles that the right-wingers are indeed “cool and funny and hip” so maybe the way to beat them is not fuss about language and not worry about offending people (though he’s also argued that offending people who buy into traditional gender stereotypes is a mistake and we should meet them “where they’re at”).

In another post on Platner, I pointed out how very gendered this idea of authenticity is. A woman who ran wild like Platner wouldn’t have a shot at the senate; woman aren’t supposed to have wild sides. When women call out men for being rapists or rape apologists, that’s not seen as daring, edgy or challenging the status quo, even though they are. No, when they do it it’s “enforced sensitivity.” Nor do they get any plaudits for being willing to offend men by speaking out. Edginess, in this worldview, is something only men get to do. When women do it, it’s a variation on Margaret Atwood’s old line: women’s greatest fear is that men will kill or rape them, men’s greatest fear is that women will criticize them. And a large party of our society accepts that as normal.

For more on misogyny and how stupid it is, pick up a copy of Undead Sexist Cliches. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights to image are mine.

“Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.” — Rebecca Solnit in 2025.

Which leads me to Frederick Douglass discussing the Founding Fathers: “They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was ‘settled; that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression.” Though they were as blind to women’s rights as they were to the rights of slavery, the principles the Founders embraced should nevertheless apply to all. Justice, liberty and humanity are final; not slavery, oppression and rape. We need to end rape.

Given how widely spread rape culture is in our society, that won’t be easy. Hell, Jesse Watters of Fox News thinks it’s hilarious to imagine American soldiers getting testosterone treatments running around committing rape. The misogynist Tate brothers have a massive fan base including the White House yet they’re allegedly (not that I doubt it) monsters: “The unsealed complaint against Tristan Tate alleged that he regularly choked, beat and raped a woman with whom he was in a romantic relationship in 2012 and 2013. She told authorities that he regularly choked her to unconsciousness, gave her a black eye and whipped her with a belt on multiple occasions, causing welts and bruises, the complaint said.” As I’ve said before, too many people swallow the idea the Tates are edgy and cool. (Here’s a discussion of the legal aspects).

As I wrote a couple of weeks back, I’ve no idea how to end rape but putting forward the proposal is the first step. Even with a time-frame — reduce rape 10 percent a year for 10 years, say — it’s a tall order. It will be taller than it should be because many people who have raped and gotten away with it, or enjoy the thought that they could if they chose, would scream bloody outrage. So would those who believe that punishing men for attacking women is fundamentally wrong. Celeste Davis: “Masculinity is not in crisis because the definition has changed. It is in crisis because it is currently predicated on being ranked above women and femininity in an increasingly gender equal world.” Not being able to rape women is a sign we’ve taken another step towards equality.

And, of course, even good political aims get derailed by politics and cronyism. North Carolina provides millions in grant money to agencies helping human-trafficking victims. In 2021, the Republicans transferred control of the money to a GOP-dominated branch of the government, despite protests from its employees they couldn’t manage that many grants. They couldn’t, and victims paid the price.

There are already men on the right dedicated to rolling back gender equality, like pastor Joel Webbon: “So long as we have democracy coupled with universal suffrage, you’ll constantly be going against the grain. You’ll constantly have half of the population voting for temperance, tolerance, suicidal empathy.  I don’t think you’re going to get people to vote away democracy. It has to be taken. I think that men, virtuous, ambitious, masculine men have to climb the ladder of power and forcefully take away from the people that which is their detriment.” Did I mention he wants the death penalty for women who make false rape charges? I’m sure he’d be fine if that resulted in even fewer rape victims speaking up. He’s one of many (though much as I despise the religious right, there are plenty of rapists and rape-apologists outside it).

When the rape apologists speak out, the media will treat their arguments seriously. “Critics says president’s call to end rape is really an attack on masculinity.” “Plan to end rape will offend believers in traditional gender roles, centrist Dems say.” Etc., etc. So we’d need to be ready with answers, and thoughts on how to deal with a media that, like much of our society, defaults to male dominance as normal. In the meantime, a couple of quotes:

“What many of us can do is try to construct a world in which survivors matter & concrete boundaries regarding abusers exist.” — from a Bluesky thread by Mo Ryan

“No abuser sustains a career of abuse alone. At every stage, they have people willing to give them second, third, 30th chance while the survivors keep being unable to pay their bills. those are also choices, and you don’t get to be automatically loved for them. Who gets all the chances speaks volumes” — Mo Ryan again. “Compassion without accountability is a form of enabling”

““How dare you consistently ask that political candidates have the kind of judgment & maturity that the average high school social studies teacher possesses?? Why are you being so mean to this smol bean white guy who displayed awful judgment many times over the years, including right now???? Ughh!!” — another thread by Ryan, on Graham Platner. “When the bar is set below hell, and somebody still doesn’t clear it, yes, of course, the people pointing that out are the problem, absolutely, makes sense.”

“A Texas man is facing federal charges after prosecutors say he created and distributed AI-generated pornographic images depicting women – including celebrities, public figures, and people he personally knew. Federal investigators accuse Arturo Hernandez of Bedias, Texas, of publishing more than 100 online albums containing explicit AI-generated content over more than a year. According to court records, the images allegedly portrayed victims performing sexual acts without their consent.” If he’s guilty, I hope he goes up for a long time.