A Dyke A Broad, #2
Impending U.S. Election, France’s Pathetic Covid PSA’s, Dykes Getting It Done, and... What's that Thing in my Fridge?
Happy Friday!
Before I launch into thoughts about this hellacious week, whatcha doing on Sunday?
I’ll “be” at the Lambda Lit Book Club in Los Angeles. Here’s the Facebook event link. It’s at 3 p.m. Pacific time, 6 pm EST, and, shudder, 11 p.m. Paris time. So no judging my yawns and coffee jitters on Zoom.
I spent most of the week trying not to think about the assassination last Friday of Samuel Paty, a French middle school teacher stabbed—then beheaded—after an Islamist parent called for his punishment online. Paty’s “crime?” Using two Charlie Hebdo cartoons, among other things, in a lesson about free speech.
Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, a recently radicalized eighteen year old Chechen immigrant, decided to act on the call, planning and carring out Paty’s murder, easily recruiting friends to help him buy knives and give him a lift to the murder site. Two students were paid between 300 and 350 euros to point out Paty. After posting images online and boasting of the murder, Anzorov was later killed by police.
All this during the ongoing trial of 14 people for their roles in a spree of Islamist attacks in Paris in January 2015. They killed 12 people alone during an assault on the humor magazine Charlie Hebdo, but they also murdered a policewoman, and attacked a Jewish store killing four people.
I’ve started writing about this, but the piece is too long for a crowded newsletter. Hopefully, I’ll share that with you soon.
Right now, my brain is also full of the impending U.S. election.
Though I admit, I’m not as freaked as I was in 2016 when I spent several months warning my friends that they were underestimating the effect of misogyny on Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. People were talking about the role of post-Obama racist backlash, but largely ignoring hostility toward women which was actually one of the strongest predictors of Trump support besides political party.
What concerns me now is, even if Biden defeats Trump, have we really learned our lesson enough to prevent Trump redux, or dismantle his legacy? Or are we just gonna make a donation to Planned Parenthood and consider the chapter closed?
After all, we did a good job of ignoring our woman problem after Clinton’s first bid against Obama. New Yorkers ignored it, too, after Christine Quinn’s loss to that incompetent turd of a man Bill de Blasio, who is now mayor. Even now, in an article explaining why people who rejected the monstrous female Hillary Clinton were happy enough to support Joe Biden, the New York Times only mentions misogyny resentfully, before largely discarding the idea. Which means it’s only a matter of time before this delightful history repeats itself.
I know why men ignore it—it’s in their interest. As for women, I think we shut our eyes because we just can’t believe how deep it goes, and how persistent it is, this fear and loathing of females. In 2016, most women thought there was absolutely no way on earth a significant chunk of the U.S. was really going to vote for the pussy-grabbing, big-mouthed, ridiculous, reality-star Trump. The Girl and I were even persuaded to get tickets to Hillary’s election night event at the Javits Center where we stood in line with women of all ages wearing ironic pantsuits and wheatpasting stuff on the walls.
When we finally got inside, we bought some overpriced pasta and a couple of beers, and planted ourselves on the bleachers in a huge crowd of mostly Black women in their fifties and sixties who were absolutely sure the U.S. would follow up it’s first black president, with its first woman.
Well, you know how that ended. We all felt gut-punched, even me. Even if I never really believed she would win, I still hoped she would. So we just slunk home, nauseated and afraid.
Not this time. This time I’m gonna be prepared. For better or for worse.
Suggestions for an Election Night Survival Pack
(Which really might be Election Month Survival Pack, depending on how many people vote in person, whether or not it’s a landslide, and how litigious Trump decides to be)
A bottle of champagne. If Joe and the glorious KAMALA (check out her reaction to a fly question from Rachel Maddow !!!!) win, they deserve more than a can of shitty, second-rate beer. If they lose, you’ll drink it anyway, to console yourself, and will be left with the empty bottle as incredibly thick and heavy, and effective, as any brick you might be tempted to throw.
A bottle of Maalox (good for either victory or defeat and can be carried with you at all times)
Chocolate (ditto)
Tissues (ditto)
Whistle and other ear-piercing noise-makers (ditto)
Spare masks (for those neighbors who rush out into the street in joy or despair)
Xanax or cyanide pill (your choice)
The address for immediate protests in the event Biden wins, but Trump refuses to concede. New Yorkers might want to hook up with my pals at Rise and Resist.
Long-term plans to overthrow the patriarchy.
Dykes Getting it Done
First things first, getting Biden elected. If you’re in the U.S., there are still things you can do.
Be like Martina.
Or the two long-time activists and Lesbian Avenger alums Valarie Walker and Laurie Arbeiter who travelled from New York to DC to help rouse some rabble against Trump, spending a few days handing out 300 TAKE TRUMP DOWN tee shirts and so many signs. (That’s Laurie and Val on the right.)
Targeting the wannabe dictator since he was installed, Laurie’s posters have become so famous they were denounced by Trump himself.
Pretty sure she’s still waiting for her Soros check!
For more images check out Valarie’s Instagram.
And one more encouraging image from Belarus where women have been leading the demonstrations there, and that I offer just because it makes me happy…
Now, back to France which is not great on the Covid front. Partly because…
France’s Anti-Covid PSAs Are a Misleading, Misogynistic Mess
In one, a teenage boy puts on a mask to go visit his grandma, who bakes him a cake, and patiently listens to the little vector’s attempts to play guitar just three feet away from her on the couch in a room with no apparent source of ventilation. But golly, gee, isn’t it nice he went to visit her? Isn’t he a hero for masking up in her presence?
Then there’s the one with scenes of people breaking all the rules of social distancing and masking, only to end up at their grandma’s house where they hug and kiss her and feed her birthday cake, and send her, in the final scene, to the hospital where she’s hooked up to a million tubes.
Again, the play on smarmy love for a cardboard grandma, plus the guilt you’ll feel if you kill the poor hapless thing.
If these Public Service Announcements are your only source of information, you can be forgiven if you believe that
Covid is only dangerous to women older than 65.
The only time you need to wear a mask is when you go see them.
You’re a saint for protecting them because older women are simpering, empty-headed numbskulls utterly incapable of slamming the door in your bare, germ-ridden faces.
I’m starting to suspect that French culture will come tumbling down if somebody points out that men are not invulnerable. Though how can they miss it? The entire (mostly male) intellectual class practically melted with rage last week at the mere thought that one lesbian writer, Alice Coffin, was going through a period of only reading women, an admission in her wonderfully titled new book, Le génie lesbien (Lesbian Genius).
If France wants to stop Covid, they’re first going to have to say plainly that men not only get Covid, too, but are actually more likely to die from it, because male immune systems don’t work as well against viral threats.
Priority #2, informing the public that it’s not just elderly people of either sex filling up hospital beds anymore, but young and middle-aged people. And even asymptomatic people are ending up with lung or heart damage that could last months, or years, or until the end of their lives. Some are even having strokes from invisible blood clotting issues.
Priority #3, warning women, who are more prone to autoimmune diseases, that they are especially vulnerable to what scientists are now calling Long Covid that includes the usual symptoms plus a range of neurological ones like ongoing fatigue and brain fog, which means we’re gonna have to do battle with a medical system that likes to tell women we’re nuts, and problems like these are all in our heads.
If PSAs must show vulnerable older women, let it be nursing aides, or women in the service industry, like the West African or Eastern European cashiers at my grocery store, or the women working in the freezing cold in the outside markets who have to deal with entitled dipshits of all sexes and ethnic origins who only wear the mask over their mouths and not their noses, or proudly refuse to wear it at all, like this guy I saw last Wednesday when I was buying apples at the Charonne market.
As for grandma, just leave her out of it if you can’t make her look as much like a real person as the poor twenty year olds in year twenty twenty that Macron practically wept over in a recent speech. You think older women don’t have friends that they want to see, or places they want to go? Cafes they miss? Music they want to hear? Trips they want to take?
Hell, you can argue Covid restrictions are having a bigger effect on older people because they don’t have as much time left. It’s why some grandmas have done their calculations and decided they’re going to ignore Covid altogether. I’ve seen them in cafés sipping a nice glass of wine as the ambulances go by, and digging into the lunch special which does look appetizing enough for a last meal.
And on the lighter side…
What on earth is in that bag in the vegetable crisper?
Now that I’m buying masses of stuff at one time to reduce human contact, I’ve started losing track of things—is it endive? Or slimy mushrooms? Or…?
If you feel like it, leave a guess in the comments, or just check out my IG for the big reveal, and what I did with it.
That’s it for this time. Thanks for letting me write for you. And if you know of other Dykes Getting it Done anywhere in the world, drop me a line so I can give them a shout-out, and maybe more.
Disgruntledly yours,
Monsieur-Madame… Gogsvale