For what it's worth I believe Amber Heard. So many don't because for some reason some of us feel the need to protect men.

I haven't followed the story, I haven't seen any of her movies, yet I have seen many and often enjoyed Depp films, but enjoying a film isn't the same as liking everything about a person acting in the film.
Isn't it the function of actors to adopt a persona distinct from themselves?

Constantly we see women receive huge amounts social ridicule based on them telling us their stories.

This includes Joyce Maynard who wrote about her relationship with JD Salinger in her memoir.
And pretty much everything Hillary Clinton said was turned into a joke.

The sexism women who put themselves forward in testament against a man is horrific, whether it is if she is raped, the ordeal she must endure to get any form of justice within the legal system is indeed horrific. From the rape itself, the collection of the sperm sample, then the court system, the lawyers, the defendant staring at you, and the often pathetic sentence the perpetrator receives - why would a woman put herself through that?

Or if a woman kills her violent husband it is never treated as self-defense, because a woman seldom can take her husband on in hand-to-hand combat, she will pretty much always lose. She cannot stand her ground, the castle law doesn't apply, it is 'his' home after all...

The legal system is really about maintaining social hierarchy, and has little to do with actual justice.

Because this all comes down to he said/she said, and as I've said in this blog before, he is always the poor innocent victim and she is always the vengeful harpy.

So any woman brave enough to accuse a man of abuse of any kind is truly brave and so yes, I believe Heard.

But what is worse is now they want to take away a woman's right to be able to determine her own life. They don't target 'do not resuscitate' orders or men who don't wish to wear face masks, but probably the most powerless in society, poor young women.

No doubt Putin was emboldened by his success in the US and with Brexit to launch this war on the Ukraine. But Putin wasn't alone and no doubt was only successful because libertarians amplified and perpetuated his misogyny with their own.
I am so sorry Clinton wasn't elected in 2016 because I am sure many more Americans would've been alive today if Trump hadn't been elected and Putin would never have invaded the Ukraine if it wasn't for his success meddling with the 2016 election of Trump.
What I find bizarre is how many people never bothered to read Clinton's platform, never bothered to fact check any of the stream of lies spewed about her, yet ignored and refused to believe the stream of truths about Trump.
We have photographic evidence of Trump's creepiness yet people believed in droves the ridiculous pizzagate.
I remember some of the nonsense I heard which included Clinton was the reason for her husband's infidelity. I said to the man who said this tragic piece of stupidity: so if your wife cheats on you, we should blame you for her cheating?
There was no response. Yet we know there was cheating with Ms Daniels and suddenly cheating is completely irrelevant.
I don't know how many libertarians were actually Russian hackers, some, many... but there were plenty of Americans who believed the lies and propagated them, including Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Klein, who really should have known better. But Libertarians have never been credited with an over abundance of intelligence despite their self described superiority (are there better examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect?)
Yet libertarians kept offering alternatives to Clinton who had no hope in hell of being elected, which resulted in the election of Trump, and thus emboldened Putin to invade the Ukraine.

I often watch the murder channels, ie Investigation Discovery (ID), and they really do paint things differently for each of the genders, for instance a man should not have to live in fear in his own home, is one quote from one of their talking heads, I think this was a woman "expert". Of course I agree, no one should have to live in fear in their home, but that should include women and children too. Such a statement was never heard on ID.

I am currently reading a book 'Mothertrucker' by Amy Butcher, where she claims about 25% of women live in a dangerous home. And while I am sure there are men who also live in dangerous situations (a lot of them in gay relationships), is it likely that 25% of men live in such dangerous situations with their female partner?

A lot of this abuse comes because of religious teachings, that women are the source of temptation, the bane of male existence, and no doubt gay males feel at odds with their partners because the church has taught them that men shouldn't lie with a man...

Of course there are many wonderful religious people who believe in loving one another and accepting differences, but these wonderful people are often eclipsed by the not so tolerant fundamentalists.

I have been watching some old skool Perry Mason also, and I am shocked at how flippantly they treat domestic violence and predator husbands (and the overt sexism often on the show) - has it taken 60 years, really, to know how dangerous family environments can be?

However, I do recommend you read Mothertrucker, which is being turned into a movie. It is a difficult read at times, but definitely worth knowing the truth of the daily horror many women experience in their homes. I guess it is not surprising that it's only been 60 years since the sexism of Perry Mason, when you read some of the reviews of MotherTrucker on Amazon, and the quote from Rebecca Solnit:

"Countless women are being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever."

Especially in light of the experience Joyce Maynard had with her memoir of JD Salinger, At home in the world. So many people outraged that she would write of her experience.

But back to ID, one of their talking heads (a woman, because she was elected by women to represent them all) said women deny they live in a dangerous situation when in fact they do. So basically the quote went something like, if a woman says she's being abused, she's lying. Putting 'domestic violence' into the google search bar very quickly brings up how to defend yourself against false domestic violence claims. I could find no actual evidence of the statistics of false domestic violence accusations, but I am guessing it is a he said/she said situation, so he is always the victim of some vengeful harpy... after-all all men are innocent and all women are bitches :( The only known instances of domestic violence are when the women is found murdered by their (former) partners. And it very much seems on ID at least, the only good woman is a dead woman.

Or could it be that men are oblivious to how violent they can be? We see shouting as violence, and they see shouting as lively discussion? We see physical violence as violence and they see a substitute for affection? We see sexual violence and they see us being coy about saying yes because then we'd be sluts??? Perspective?

I often wonder at why they paint women so badly on ID and someone suggested it was if you build private female prisons you have to put women in them... and there is a good reason law firms want men to fight all those 'false accusations of domestic violence' - men's money.

And there is very good reason men want to keep money out of women's hands, power.

Mothertrucker teaches us that money gives us independence. Independence is the domain of men, men like to think of themselves as something like islands and I once said before that money frees us from social engagement. (It gives men the illusion that makes them think they can say stuff like: I built this all by myself.) To live without money means to be completely dependent on others. Women know in fact that we are totally dependent on others, and the economy teaches us how inter-dependent we are. Money gives us the illusion that connection is irrelevent because, you give me what I want and I don't know anything about you (and you have to deal with whatever shit I dish out to get my money). Without money we have to talk to people, we have to ask them questions, it is time consuming and emotionally draining (see the book: kindness of strangers by Mike McIntyre. Another road trip book about a guy who travels across the US without using any money). It's the stuff that women do, because more than anything, we have to. Thus money affords us the opportunity to pick and choose who we want to connect with.

The reality is happiness is found in our quality relationships with each other. 'Love' is a fairytale we teach girls so they chase it, it disguises connection and stops loneliness. Love is the domain of men, it is a luxury only they can really engage in because they have the power of time and money and once they are done, they can move on... Movies teach men that men have to do little to earn love.

Jane Austen made all this clear in her book 'pride and prejudice' when Charlotte Lucas goes hard for that job interview with Mr Collins, a man who thinks he's entitled to whoever he wants as a wife (or slave).

As a scientist I know are how important logic and testing/experimenting ideas and theories is, but it seems to me that charisma is required to sell a scientific idea and make it accessible to the field and then the public.

Men really like to line up behind other men especially when it comes to thinking. And the man's appearance seems more important than the idea itself.

And I think this contributes to the idea that some lay people have that science is just another belief system, after all we don't follow through all the thinking others have done before us, we listen to teachers, lecturers or professors and then repeat what they have to say, so it is easy to assume that it is nothing more than a belief system because it can sound like we are parroting what others say.

At the bottom of this science allows us to trace back through the logic and reasoning to see how an idea is substantiated. But the problem is what are the assumptions that allow us to come to that same conclusion.

For example, Richard Dawkins claims there is no god. I assume Dawkins laid out a proof but he is assuming we know everything about the universe. And we know we don't know everything about the universe. In my opinion, atheists can only ever be agnostics, depending on your definition of 'god'.

But Dawkins has a lot of charisma or enough that people line up behind him. There is no one lining up behind me agreeing that the best we can be is agnostic, perhaps I am just not charismatic enough, perhaps I am a female, perhaps I don't look like what you expect female scientists to look like. But my logic is sound and avoids the problem of assuming we know everything about the universe, when we definitely do not (although if you want a glimpse into the full rabbit hole, I assume I know as much about the universe as the next person, and that scientists working on learning about the universe don't know everything there is to know about the universe otherwise why would they still be researching the field? Of course I am assuming other people really exist and that I am not the only conscious being in the universe - would that make me the goddess then? hmm - who knows?)

The problem with Dawkin's argument is his assumption. This article claims science has superstars, what I've called charismatic proponents of a theory and Planck said it's when the superstars die that allows new ideas to flourish in a field.

I think we underestimate the importance of touching so much so that we often disguise it as something else, especially for men. I've said many times, it's okay to have sex as a man, but there is no way a man could ever *need* affection. Men like to think of themselves as islands with no need for anything... especially not *affection*. Indeed, there is something *creepy* about needing to touch and/or be touched. So it's okay to tickle little kids (but not touch them because that sounds creepy), it's okay to be violent perhaps (if you're a man), but it's not okay to need affection, when in reality, there is nothing all of us need more.

So many of our problems could be solved if we just realized we need to touch and be touched - we are mammals - we were in-utero for 9 months before we were born. If men accepted they need to touch and to be touched, perhaps they would stop their need for violence, war, rape... if we could call our needs what they are, needs, perhaps men could realize they are not entitled to sex. If men could realize no one is asking for it.

Sex therapists and others tell women they should give their husbands sex, which in my opinion is the equivalent of saying men are entitled to sex, and we are told constantly that sex is a metric for how well a marriage is doing, nevertheless google tells us sexless marriages are a thing and not necessarily a sign the marriage is in trouble. If a marriage is based on the realization that affection is fundamental rather than sex, then it would remove so many problems for women, because women carry most of the burden for birth control even in marriage, which despite the variety of birth control methods available are often invasive and dangerous for women. Sex is only necessary for procreation and if we feel the urge... it can be satisfied in so many ways other than by having (often painful for women) sex.

But would men feel manly if all they get is a cuddle and a kiss? Perhaps we should first ask why does a man need to feel manly? When life has been harsh? I think perhaps if the mans needs are actually met he'd actually feel happier. If his partner puts her (or his) arms about him he might actually feel more comforted than to disguise his feelings with pretend machismo.

We all know thoughts lead into each other, it's like one tangent leads to another, so it's pretty much impossible to say where anything begins or ends, and perhaps all things echo throughout the universe endlessly... in light cones (aka Einstein), but we know vibrations do end and so we're left with the impression that things do separate into distinct units, but at least on a quantum level they don't and perhaps because our experience is pretty much limited to friction world, a planet spinning seemingly endlessly in a frictionless environment. oh the irony.

I digress (of course).

So I was thinking about the cruelty of small children, and/or adult men.

But men are the ones who get to re/write history because women don't get much downtime and it takes a specific kind of person to do the writing. Then my mind slipped off to Austen's Mansfield Park were she likens poor dependent (female) relatives to slaves. After all she wrote about women, their status and how females gain employment, aka get married (and then possibly die, a lot of Austen's mothers die). But this is pretty much irrelevant to men because they are looking at the younger women anyway. (Is this why women go through menopause so they wont die in child birth? Although menopause comes too late for many women.) Anyway men live on to write the books because they are alive and have time and enough status that what they write matters. But I digress again.

I was thinking women have always been treated as slaves, and it's not just poor dependent female relatives. Women get to do so much of the scut work, cleaning house, toilets, kitchens, then meal prepping... and it's mostly very low paid/unpaid. Then they give birth to the next generation, raising that generation into the inheritors of the mess some adult men leave behind. I generalize of course. Some men do clean house and are paid well to do so, and there are women who refuse to do the scut work of cleaning and having children.

I like books and as such I spend some part of my day getting free books from Amazon and I have noticed that when men write a love story it's deemed literature (thus lofty and noble), but if a woman writes one it's chick lit (at best) or a romance. All signs of: run away, run away! (The equivalent of other culture - you know like mainstream culture is for a white male audience, and how white people don't watch other cultures' TV...)

Austen is often declared to be a romance writer. This infuriates me. She wrote about the female economic situation, not always but often. Men who write about economics are exalted (because they turn what is truly luck into a magic 8 ball with ridiculous formulas), but women, it's romance (which is so easy to dismiss). Austen wrote about more than getting married, and her books weren't morality tales either.

I realized that 'systems' is a kinda huge buzz word amongst scientist-wannabes, along with 'AI', 'quantum', even 'computer'... and apparently a Nobel prize was recently awarded for these dour faced men (as these men are always dour faced - seemingly so beyond us they don't have emotions, if a woman won a Nobel prize she'd be smiling) for systems.

My eyes roll.

If you want systems, go ask a woman who works in the home about systems.

It has occurred to me that men just can't think in systems. My husband has been carrying the housework load for a little while for us and he just can't get his head around the idea of multitasking - a concept so fundamental to women who manage a household. My husband is a super smart guy, he has a PhD in astrophysics, but he just doesn't manage multitasking when it comes to solving housework problems. Although he is getting better.

My guess is he has learned the importance of optimizing time with the multitude of tasks that need to be performed.

I know I have read these accounts of emotional labor and men's helplessness when it comes to doing housework. Perhaps some of it is men feeling annoyed they have to contribute during what they thought would be their downtime, housework is beneath them - besides there is a really interesting game on TV and here he is in the laundry, so they put the clothes in the washer and never turn the machine on... then he can say he put the clothes in the washing machine (literally. Of course that'd be extremely passive aggressive if it's intentional. But my husband is nothing like this)... I think it's more likely men just do not understand the problem.

Men seem to have a really hard time managing systems. Whereas women think men can do systems as well as they can because hey - all she is doing is housework... anyone can do this - right?

Well I think we've bought the lie that women have to live up to men's ability and standards. We think men can do all the things, and women have to prove they can.

The idea that computer software must have a bug in it is based on men writing the code for a system and the problem is men just can't do systems. I have written heaps of bug-less code. And I am talking about telephone systems and neural networks, symbol translators, code that writes other code... all completely bug-less, easy to maintain and upgrade.

This realization came to me when I saw on brain-games a segment about men having better spatial reasoning, that they can pack a car trunk for an outing more quickly and efficiently than women can in general. And perhaps that's true - if you don't mind the diaper pail next to lunch. Perhaps the women on the segment were solving the real problem - if you are going to access food during the journey, perhaps you don't want to have to pull out everything to get to a squashed lunch, to get to the diaper pail, or to find where the clean diapers were stored in the first place.

In my opinion, men are basically peacocks who love showing off, and tell how wonderful they are at showing off. In general, women prefer to just get the job done and hopefully get some recognition for it. Perhaps our assumption is wrong, that men cannot do everything as well as women can.

I heard somewhere that the best looking face is the average face. It is possible, because as Jane Austen said, people's appearance improves on getting to know someone (Persuasion). So if you see your spouse's face more often than anybody else's face, then their face will become more and more attractive to you. (Their face approaches the average face, for you.)

And this is the idea behind artificial neural networks, we hope the neural network will learn something of an average of what it's learning, and this idea is probably behind the Platonic ideal, because we all know what a dog is when we see one but as we know, there is much variation behind members of the canine species.

We each of us hear about things we don't know much about, we build idealized images of what we have no firsthand experience of in our heads. So if you grew up with stories of how dangerous a forest is, that it is full of big bad wolves or lyme disease.... you will probably not want to visit a forest. If every representation of a group of people you hear of is fear inducing, you will no doubt believe all people of this group are the same. Similarly, if you only see wildlife on nature shows, you'll probably have an idealistic (Disney-fied) impression that nature. I think it's the same for (human) babies.

If you know few women then how they are represented on TV becomes extremely important as Dr King understood when he convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek. While it was important to see black women as something other than house maids, women on TV had primarily been on TV purely as decorative. Even relatively recently a 37 year old actress was deemed too old to play the love interest of a 55 year old man. Seriously! (I have often thought mainstream media assumes the audience is all male so old men are making TV or movies for men.)

Men are routinely portrayed in a variety of roles, doing all the interesting things, yet women's primary function is to be an ornament or a prize for a man. While this is becoming better for movies and TV ocassionally, if you turn on the channel ID (I call them the murder channels) you quickly get the impression that the only good woman is young, pretty and dead. On ID we are told, women will say pretty much anything and are always to blame - whereas men are portrayed as good, the victims even if they are the murderer.

but, in general, too often the bad things men do are described as being done by 'people' whereas if we are talking about nobility in quotes it is often ascribed to 'man', 'men' or 'mankind'. Like the above quote, no part of that includes women. Do a google search on 'man' and 'nobility' - the quotes refer to pretty much any man - all men can be noble - whereas 'nobility' and 'women' will bring up paintings of queens - a very rare status that a very few women luck into.

Some while ago I wrote a blog entry about how 'crazy trump' or 'crazy republicans' were almost entirely accompanied by pictures of women. 'Crazy' is a word applied to women. So what do you think of when you hear the word 'crazy'? I feel annoyed when women say women can be as bad as men - yes indeed they can be, but on average they are not.

Look for the statistics of people who murder and yes, people who murder very much tend to be male, murder victims also tend to be male, yet the murder channels would have you think murder is a woman thing, that only women murder and they murder women. it happens, but on average it doesn't. Look at the statistics of women in prison for violent crimes verses men in prison for violent crimes. Then compare the numbers of prisoners, 97% of prisoners are male, 60% of those male prisoners are in prison for violent crimes. Yes outlier women can be as violent as men, but they are rare exceptions. And judges may have some bias but I doubt they are that biased.

Of any group of people there are good and bad examples, but when you see pictures of serial killers, there is one Aileen Wuornos for a whole raft of male serial killers. For example I recently watched this series on HBO about serial killers, and Wuornos was described as 'evil' while no such description was given to Gacy, Dahmer or Bundy....

The sciences are working hard to find historical women scientists yet still underplay women's achievements. For example if you read about Grace Hopper you will find she had something to do with developing COBOL and coining the term 'bug'. Whereas it was her team that invented the first compiler (if there had been no compiler there would be no internet, and there would be no computer in your home now). A man in a similar position probably also had a team but it'll never be mentioned.

The point is that women need to be represented in many ways, not just as ornaments instead of being stereotyped and set up for even more misogyny.

No one likes to feel trod upon, no one likes to feel crushed under the weight of another person's metaphorical foot, and I think that is the basis for all our -isms. Racism, sexism, body-ism... whatever the -ism, it's based on feeling better about your life and making others feel bad about .. whatever.

If you don't feel bad about whatever dishes up to you, it means you probably haven't been crushed by others as much as others often are.

When I drive with my husband he is unperturbed about winning at traffic lights, feels no need to drive superfast, does't care about overtaking or being overtaken, and whatever goes on in the minds of the oppressed when they feel the need to win at stupid stuff like traffic lights and overtaking the slower cars.

My guess is when you see a white supremacist you see an abused child, or a nurse who looks with derision at the disabled, you see someone who has been treated badly by the medical system.

The thing with a group of people in a minority is that they make a group of people you can get away with giving a hard time to. The people you don't give a hard time are people who you probably won't get away with it, like rich people, the good looking, the famous, older men, white in the west (or otherwise depending on where you live) rich old powerful men will get away with more because they'll be the ones who get away with bad behavior. Have you seen the lengths people had to go to to bring Weinstein to justice and these were powerful women he was raping/assaulting, indeed it seems like it was easier for them to bring Sandusky to justice despite the layers of belief society had to cut through. How many more women are routinely being assaulted/raped that society is still indenial about given how hard it was to bring down Weinstein?

Believing boys over women seems to be part of social hierarchy.

Men benefit from their reputation violence even if they personally aren't violent, because a random stranger doesn't know in advance if this man is violent or not, whether the man is litigious, how violent/dangerous his friends might be... same with women with a man/men, she gains their power via the same assumption. Perhaps this is the basis for the mother/son relationship that Fraud mythologized. Perhaps a woman's son was the first male she knew would truly be on her side and go to extraordinary lengths to protect her.

It's probably safe to give a woman by herself a hard time, she will probably have to suck up being the victim of bad behavior, she will have the choice to get litigious, but a lawyer will probably tell her to get over it, she could get violent, but society seriously frowns on female violence, besides she was likely raised to feel guilty so she will blame herself for whatever you might do to her. (If you don't believe me, just watch 'deadly women' on ID. Other shows on this channel will tell you women who are routinely beaten at home will deny it, so any woman who says she is beaten is therefore lying. (I kid you not!) and they paid a woman to say this piece of disgusting nonsense. So according to this logic, never believe a woman - wtf?)

Fortunately things are shifting. The important thing is remembering everyone is equally important despite possibly belonging to a minority. In any group of people there will be people of all kinds. One example doesn't necessarily apply to all people with a type of characteristics, e.g. degrees of melanin in their skin doesn't mean it's okay to give these people a bad time just because you have been made to feel put upon at some stage in your life. That is the characteristic of a bully.

When we recognize all people as equals we will suddenly be so much less stressed. There will be no need to win at traffic lights and make ourselves feel better at someone else's expense. People don't choose to have how much melanin they have, their disabilities, their gender... just to make other people's lives more difficult. And it should only be a difficulty for you if you choose to see it as such.