BE THERE.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 14.
7 PM.
SAN FRANCISCO.

SUPPORT DIVERSE VOICES.

(AND YER FIRST DRINK IS ON US!)

Holy shit though.

Russell Simmons. Lars von Trier. Al Franken. Charlie Rose. Garrison Keillor. Matt Lauer with the hidden button heard round the world. Roy Moore. Jeremy Piven. Jeffrey Tambor. Kevin Spacey. Louis C.K. Dustin Hoffman. Brett Ratner.

…which of course begs the question on everyone’s lips. Just when does President Trump have to respond (or apologize, be impeached, go to jail, formally self-destruct) to the more than TWELVE WOMEN who accused him of sexual assault or harassment?

Bueller…? BUELLER?!

And The List, of course, goes on much MUCH longer than even thishandy dandy one The Washington Post has rolled out — constantly updated with a seemingly never-ending throng of sometimes-sinister, sometimes-manipulative, but always-handsy men keen to touch bodies that aren’t their own!

(My personal forever and ever gut-thorn is a male teacher at my boarding school who lived in the girl’s dorm with his wife and many daughters. He liked to call me a slut. “I see you with all those boys.” He liked to walk into my room without knocking. He liked to smirk, “why don’t you put on a shirt before you come down to the lounge?” glancing down at my double-A, 15-year-old breasts as I tried to lunge into my t-shirt.)

In my mind, I imagine each and every one of these shitty humans in an elaborate domino line; an endless sinewy path of smooth white tablets extending to the horizon.

Women have been trying to topple it for centuries to no avail; we’ve been met with shame, disbelief, firings, silence-ings, and open mockery instead of solace or justice.

But now? All we can hear is the resounding click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click as each man falls, toppled by the truth.

And honestly? It sounds like music. Like a hot track I can’t stop shaking my ass to. Or a ballad where everyone is weeping in the rain and they lift their faces to the sky Shawshank style.

But a lot of folks — mostly men — have a newfound worry. They don’t understand what’s appropriate anymore.

They’re worried this whole #metoo thing is actually a PC man-hunt masquerading as a watershed moment, and when the smoke clears we’ll all just be openly menstruating and/or cackling over their steaming corpses I guess.

But you know what? In lieu of your understanding I will take your fear. In place of you being a good person I will take your worry. Gladly. If you don’t know how to be an appropriate being in the world — “not masturbating in front of my colleagues is the easiest thing I do all day” quips Samantha Bee — I’ll take your sweet sweet fear if it means it’ll keep your tongue in your mouth and your dick in your pants.

Let the tales keep coming. Let’s rewrite these horror stories with happy endings — with recourse, redemption, and a touch of revenge.

With love + rage,
Katie Tandy
Co-founder | Creative Director

Dear Al Franken: I’ll Miss You, But You Can’t Matter Anymore

By Ijeoma Oluo

Al, I’m so very sad at you. Is that a thing? I mean, I’m mad at you too, but mostly, I’m very very very sad at you. How fucking stupid and selfish of you to ruin yourself for us like this. We really needed you.

I’m not surprised you felt so safe doing it. I’m not surprised you also felt safe trying to kiss other women without permission, or grabbing their asses or boobs. I’m just deeply disappointed that you wanted to. I thought you’d be good enough to not want to.

I live in Seattle. Right now I’m surrounded by good liberal men who are lining up to say how much they believe women. While they are expressing their outrage, they are secretly hoping that their name won’t show up in a woman’s story.

The Remarkable Intersection Of Anal Sex And Toxic Masculinity

By Katie Tandy

Before I knew it I was happily drunk, drinking whiskey, and chatting with the human equivalent of a pitbull-meatball — a hulking, thick man with a Bic-ed head. He was dressed as, perhaps, an intergalactic monk?

In truth, I don’t know how we got onto the topic. No one believes me, but I really don’t. But we started talking about butt stuff. Straight cis men butt stuff.

And suddenly I heard myself say, “Oh man, my dear friend is a straight guy and he’s very intrigued by his asshole, but he can’t just, like, set himself free. He is so hung up on it. I feel like he’s got all this….” I waved my arm around, “maybe, homophobic shit around his own ass? And it’s just so sad because, like, ass stuff is the best!”

My new companion’s face lit up. Like Christmas.

The Ghosts Of Atomic Past: Nuclear Terror Is Back

By Katherine Cross

For all the talk of how “unprecedented” the Trump era is, what we’re actually seeing is the Greatest Hits album of right wing Americana turned up to 11. What has been so terrifying is not quite that Trump and his sycophants are doing anything new, but that they’re forcing us to relive terrors we’d buried, and amplifying existing ones.

…

In November of ’83, a NATO military exercise called Able Archer (this one was more of a communications and paper exercise, rather than one involving tanks and ships) got underway.

We came perilously close to the apocalypse.

Taking Down Medicine’s Monuments

By Vidya Viswanathan

In 1845, surgeon James Marion Sims purchased slave women with fistulas and housed them on his property for the purposes of medical experimentation geared towards gynecological research.

In his memoirs, he names three of the at least 11 slave women he kept to experiment on — Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey — brought to him by their owners. For the next four years, he did a series of experiments on them without anesthesia.

According to physician-historian Vanessa Northington Gamble, “there was a belief at the time that black people did not feel pain in the same way.”

Writer Aya de León Tells A Different Story About Sex Work

By Jenee Darden

“Sex work sits at the intersection of gender, commerce, race, nationality, and socioeconomic class,” de León says. “By creating this sex work community, it became a way to comment on all of that — to comment on sex trafficking, the collusion between corporations and sex trafficking.”

De León’s books are published by Dafina, which is known for its catalogue of urban lit, or street lit, books — a genre defined by an inner-city setting, Black main characters, and themes like drugs, violence, sex, gangs, and poverty.

The books — which de León points out have a high readership of young women of color — are sold in Walmart and major bookstores, and can be found in libraries in Black and brown communities.

Despite talk of how ‘unprecedented’ the Trump era is, what we’re seeing is the Greatest Hits album of right wing Americana turned up to 11.

Modified from pixabay/ wikipedia

T his week, the United States and South Korea are conducting a joint exercise of their air forces—dubbed Vigilant Ace—involving some 12,000 personnel and hundreds of aircraft.

In a depressingly familiar news cycle — this is the third such exercise in as many years — North Korea warned that such exercises are provocative and may bring us all “to the brink of war.”

What’s different now is that, for the first time in a quarter century, nuclear attack sirens are blaring over the city of Honolulu. We have lurched back into an era that once seemed safely confined to history: that of nuclear terror.

For all the talk of how “unprecedented” the Trump era is, what we’re actually seeing is the Greatest Hits album of right wing Americana turned up to 11. What has been so terrifying is not quite that Trump and his sycophants are doing anything new, but that they’re forcing us to relive terrors we’d buried, and amplifying existing ones.

Case in point: all of our urgent discussions about nuclear war. The Trumpian twist is that we now have to worry about the terrifying, almost infantile fixation of our own president on the nuclear weapons he commands.

For younger people, the nuclear fallout advice of hiding under your school desk for air raid drills seems like it belongs in the ‘50s.

But throughout the ‘80s, nuclear terror was as pervasive as ever, ritualized into neverending drills, dramatized in film, and flooding earnest instructional videos.

Even in my own childhood, in the early ‘90s, I remember “shelter drills” where we had to line up outside our classroom and then crouch against the blue tiled walls, hands over our heads. The school bell rang out like that of a church; slowly, deliberately, instead of with the rapid pace of a fire-drill bell. It felt maudlin, even to lil’ ol me without words for such things.

The tensions of the Cold War traveled through peaks and valleys. The first summit was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The second occurred around 1983, and is less well remembered by those who didn’t live through it — but it is far more instructive for our current moment.

In November of ’83, a NATO military exercise called Able Archer (this one was more of a communications and paper exercise, rather than one involving tanks and ships) got underway. It was an annual ritual, one meant to simulate the lead-up to an actual nuclear strike against Warsaw Pact nations. But this time, a noxious combination of tensions, posturing, and miscommunication led the Soviet government to think the exercise was cover for a very real nuclear attack.

We came perilously close to the apocalypse.

Critical to this entire scenario was how profoundly each side misunderstood the other, and how otherwise disconnected events all added up to a rational calculus for Armageddon.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

Reagan’s infamous “evil empire” remarks—meant to pander to an audience of right wing Christians—read to the Kremlin as rationalizing a forthcoming attack; the Soviet Union shot down a civilian airliner, murdering hundreds, fearing it was an American spy plane and earning international condemnation; the U.S. invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow a Marxist government (continuing a long tradition, of course), providing a timely reminder to the Russians of the U.S.’s willingness to strike first; and the U.S. put its own facilities on high alert in response to the bombing of a U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut.

Then Able Archer happened, and paranoia truly blossomed among the Soviet leadership — all while the U.S. was blissfully unaware of the profound effect its actions were having.

As the final day of Able Archer unfolded—which simulated a NATO nuclear strike—the Soviet premier and his top generals all had their fingers poised over the Button.

It’s a fascinating—if deeply terrifying—story in its own right. The U.S. and USSR had embassies in each other’s countries, as well as high-level envoys that could—at least in theory—speak to each other. But despite all this, a miscommunication so vast and deep occurred that two nations were brought to the brink of destruction.

Part of this dynamic, of course, was a combination of Soviet paranoia and American arrogance; the latter was founded around the naive and self-serving idea that “everyone” must know the U.S. would never attack first, after all. We’re the good guys. And they went right on believing that even as Grenada was invaded. Even at the highest levels of the Reagan Administration, there was a chronic unwillingness to grapple with the non-Western perspective on the matter, which saw the U.S. as an aggressive and even warlike nation. Being a tribune for this perspective, it informed the highest levels of Soviet strategic thinking.

Based on what we now know—and despite Reagan’s millenarian prophesying—the U.S. neither wanted a nuclear war, nor would’ve initiated one. Indeed, in his memoirs, and despite his own infamous posturing, he wrote of those generals who thought nuclear war to be winnable, “I thought they were crazy.”

‘Everyone’ must know the U.S. would never attack first, after all. We’re the good guys.

But Reagan communicated that fact rather poorly to a world that had no reason to believe him anyway, even if he was only using these threatening tactics to bolster the bluff of America’s “deterrent.” And his own newfound fear of nuclear Armageddon caused Reagan to accelerate programs like SDI/Star Wars, which served only to exacerbate tensions.

It nearly cost us everything.

When I think of how the lines of communication between NATO and the USSR were a roaring river compared to those between the U.S. and North Korea, I find myself very alarmed indeed. We have no embassy, no consulate, no diplomatic office. The “New York Channel” —a diplomatic link exercised at a New York City office during UN convocations—has long since been shut.

What’s worse, thanks to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s shambolic tenure, the State Department is so demoralized and hollowed out that it is virtually a non-entity on the world stage. Amidst soaring tensions with North Korea, we do not even have an ambassador to South Korea in place yet — so eager was Trump to fire Obama’s appointee.

And to top it all off, we have a president who truly seems to treat the nuclear arsenal as an elaborate toy collection — and who wants the U.S. to have as many as it did during the 1960s. “Then why are we making [nukes]?” Trump asked of an MSNBC interviewer who questioned his sabre rattling, “Why do we make them?”

Why indeed.

In 1983, both sides of the nuclear equation were rational actors who did not want a nuclear war; it still nearly happened. In 2017, both North Korea and the U.S. are led by notoriously mercurial men with tyrannical temperaments whose appreciation for the horror of nuclear war is questionable at best.

Not only is miscommunication a certainty, but a significant percentage of that communication is being conducted by President Trump on his Twitter. The North Korean government is paying attention, but it doesn’t quite know what to make of the tweets (Who would? Who does?). From their perspective, the safest move is to assume Trump is ambling up to the brink of war. It’s “evil empire” times 10, if you like.

Provocative words that they interpret as paving the way for bloody deeds.

The Damning Moral Consequences Of Twitter’s Refusal To Ban Trump

The gulf of misunderstanding is wider as well. The Iron Curtain was, at least, porous. With North Korea, by contrast, it’s harder for information to get in or out. Substituted for that is a culture where North Korea is a never-ending slapstick gag, ripe for a kind of grotesque comedy that occludes both the brutality of its Stalinist regime and the horrible reality of what renewed fighting on the Korean peninsula would look like. A conventional war with North Korea could almost certainly be “won” by the U.S. and allied forces; the problem is that any victory would be of the Pyrrhic variety—essentially ruinous to the “victor”—even by the standards of such wars.

A refugee crisis that would eclipse Syria’s, nuclear fallout, millions of civilians dead, the devastation of Seoul, the destabilization of Manchuria, economic hardship throughout the Far East—all are near certainties of a new war.

North Korea and the U.S. are led by notoriously mercurial men whose appreciation for the horror of nuclear war is questionable at best.

Nontrivial possibilities include attacks on Japan and Guam. That Guam, a colony of the U.S., could suffer so devastating a blow because of its colonizer’s flag is a hideous irony. The violent overthrow of the Kim regime would create unpredictable geopolitical crises that will take well over a generation to resolve.

And, just maybe, North Korea might manage to launch a nuclear attack on the continental U.S. as well, before all is said and done.

A nuclear attack remains unlikely, but it’s a nonzero probability now in a way that should disturb us all.

We, as a nation, have chosen to waltz the entire world up to the brink of a new nuclear crisis. But even if it’s a low probability event, the past teaches us that nuclear terror preys on the minds of ordinary citizens in ways that can alter our democratic habits of heart. Air raid drills serve a propaganda purpose as well, after all—not so much to drill citizens in safety, but to drill into them a permanent consciousness of alien threat, to maintain what was once called “a delicate balance of terror,” a civic fear that was useful for many in the upper echelons of politics.

Just look at Japan.

The return of Cold War-style terror, after all, is by no means confined to the U.S. Northern Japanese towns and cities, which have experienced direct flyovers of North Korean missile tests, are now compelling their citizens to participate in regular air raid drills.

‘A delicate balance of terror’ is a civic fear that’s useful for many in the upper echelons of politics.

It certainly feels necessary — North Korean missiles aren’t known for their stability — but it is also a boon to the freshly empowered government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who seeks a mandate to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution, which prevents the military from being anything other than defensive. He belongs to a faction of Japanese ultranationalists who view the constitution’s pacifist provisions as a humiliating and unjust imposition by foreigners. How useful might that “delicate balance of terror” be to a prime minister who needs his people to support a militarist revision to the constitution?

How useful is Trump to such an endeavor, when he himself infamously said that Japan should arm itself with nukes?

It’s at this stage where we start to see how the shockwaves of instability emanating from Washington are having serious knock-on effects, even in unexpected places. We’ve seen what nuclear powers locked in a mis-interpretive dance can do; what happens when the bigger of the two powers is all but spoiling for chaos and bloodshed and cares nothing for even trying to communicate?

The early 1980s were a frightening time, and I only know the fear through the accounts that emanate from pages and old video; I wasn’t yet born. I didn’t gain an appreciation of the real, apocalyptic terror instilled in people during those years until fairly recently. Even the music—with its upbeat, unrelenting pop and synth—makes more sense. It feels like a bit of ironic dancing before the apocalypse — which is to say nothing of more overtly anti-nuke anthems. Faithless hedonism and dancing. In 2017 it feels all too familiar and resonant.

And now we get to do it all over again.

I could end there, it’d be dark and artsy. But I’m not here to further the terror. The ‘80s also provide a way forward, after all. If we’re doomed to relive this history, then let us relive it in the way that averts calamity: it’s time for a new worldwide “No Nukes” movement, and to ratchet up the anti-war pressure on global governments once again.

We may be reliving an all too familiar fear, but history also teaches us that we need not be powerless before even the most terrible of our own creations—whether it’s nuclear weapons or Donald Trump.

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