am i the only person who identified with this girl?
Hey, friends! Ever been accused over being “too smart”? That’s not a thing, right? This month on Twitter I was called: “‘a know-it-all bitch”, a “pasty-faced snob’ who ‘ruins Twitter with her “better than thou” attitude’, as well as “smug, superior and condescending” , and “annoying and boring with words nobody understands”, and a “traitor who likes to use big words”. Also this month, a friend of mine lost her writing job because, wait for it…..she used “too many big words”. She also threatened the attenuate sexuality of her male co workers (lest you think Hollywood is some sort of progressive bastion open to all types, there’s no business like show business, unless, of course, you’re a woman; and then it’s just like every other fucking business in the world), bitter, woman-hating rage robots, witty male observers of the screwy and crazed female other who make a pastime of unmoral, vicious observations, as if womanhood was grotesque, magnificent fodder for the amateur ethnographer.
Usually when dudes are threatened by dames who are cleverer than them it is less about ability than gender. Obviously, intelligence is not “masculine” and it does not reside solely in so-called ‘male brains. Yet, patriarchy dictates that all the intelligence (and the centers of power that come with that intelligence), should reside in the heads of men. Men such as Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawkins, are all respected because of their intelligence and not because of their biological sex, but women can never escape their biological sexual definitions. Virulent, women-hating invectives are being levied at us because we threaten male supremacy. Women claiming intelligence must be nipped in the bud otherwise patriarchy will be overrun with uppity women claiming intellectual equality with men so we must be subordinated to ensure the hierarchal male supremacist society continues unchallenged. Smart women are dangerous, too clever for their own good and are asking to be challenged, negated and put down. “Histrionic, you say? Maybe you heaven’t noticed, in which case you are probably a man, a mushroom cloud of retro-sexism appears to have bloomed above the country, a nasty little subculture.
I was talking to a friend of mine this morning who is a senior engineer at at major space tech company. She was spewing with rage levied at the repugnant misogny at her workplace – a place not populated by sub-educated comedy writers unhappy with their home lives – but with actual NASA engineers. Yet our experiences were depressingly similar. The countless mundane betrayals that mark our encounters with so many men in our professional life: the accusations of emotionally driven, “feminized” interactions (anger/sadness over the more “male” petty resentments/steroidal rage), the long-suffering groans that meet any attempt to contextualize sexism and refute the idea that such indignities, grim though they all may be, are not necessarily equally oppressive.
I am smart. Being “smart” is a thing, like being beautiful, or athletic, neither of which I am. Being born “smart” is being a recipient of what societal standards other than this country’s deem a genetic lottery. Now I know that it is something of a fever dream, but there was a point where we as a society at least gave lip service to the idea that you can be smart and still be not threatening to your co-workers, “boring and annoying”, an ineffective worker or even “treasonous”, a least a willingness to operate fact from fiction and eschew the false dichotomy of equality between the two. Can we finally call men who despise women with IQs teetering in the triple digits what they truly are: intellectual terrorists? And Republicans, too, they are also intellectual terrorists, because they are so dumb and because they think that dumbness renders them superior because they live in an alternate reality. They “want their country back”? Well, I want MY country back. The kind that educates people and values knowledge, pays no fealty to an uninformed politic nor kneels at the altar of ersatz individeualsomething.
We are now teetering on the worst precipe of my lifetime – a glorification of sexism and stupidity.
One of the two presidential candidates popular with men is Donald Trump. It is an appalling and upsetting development that this person – given his history of manifestly false statements, grotesque lies, fanaticism, treason, religious intolerance, and colossal low-IQ ignorance, is given any credibility at all. An eighty year Alzheimer’s victim standing in any main street in America screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs would and should be of more interest and concern. Donald Trump, like Sarah Palin before him, is not merely a raving ignoramus, he is the very worst kind of demagogue. He is also both a cause and a symptom of the state of the Republican Party right now. I detest every member of the Republican party and every individual who ever voted for one of these maniacs, for everything from President to local dog catcher, for carelessly turning him loose on the country. I am a staunch supporter of voting rights, AND YET, it is indeed unfortunate that people who are so poorly educated and lacking in critical thinking as to see a role model in someone like Trump, Palin, Bush, or Limbaugh should be allowed to vote at all. Trump is the mix of low intelligence and primordial sexism that is bringing our society down to level xxx. once said that “smart women” act “feminine and needy” but that on the inside, they’re “real killers.” It is, he advised men, “one of the great acts of all time.” The description comes from Trump’s chapter on women from his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback.
“The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers,” wrote the erstwhile reality TV star. “The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naïve or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye — or perhaps another body part.”
Last month, the real estate mogul and former host of NBC’s The Apprentice said of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton that the:
“only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card.”
In the late ’90s, Trump explained to Fox News that Bill Clinton was being unjustly accused by a bunch of very unattractive women. (Net worth and beauty are the only standards by which Trump can rank women, and ideally, a gal should be rich and beautiful.) He simply couldn’t get over what a bunch of Uglies those broads were:
“The whole thing, it’s just so unattractive,” the orange-hued demagogue told host Neil Cavuto, according to transcripts. “Linda Tripp may be one of the most unattractive human beings I’ve ever seen — not women, human beings. She’s just an unattractive person. This [Lucianne] Goldberg person, her agent or whatever she is, is just a terrible woman. You look at Paula Jones, I mean the whole cast of characters.”
He added: “It’s like it’s from Hell. It’s a terrible group of people.” Seconds later, Trump felt the need to reiterate his obsession with their appearance.
“The whole group, it’s truly an unattractive cast of characters — Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg — I mean, this woman — I watch her on television, just vomiting. She is so bad. The whole group — Paula Jones, Lewinsky — it’s just a really unattractive group. And I’m not just talking about physical, but I am also talking about physical.”
He did at least acknowledge that maybe Clinton’s accusers could be tolerable if they weren’t so butt-ugly, like if they looked like “supermodels”. Thank goodness they’ve either gotten better looking, or at least more useful to him, in time to help him smear Hillary as a monster who ruined women’s lives. Weird how Hillz didn’t simply kill them like she did the other victims she and Bill racked up.
Am the only one whose irony meter assplodes every time Trump calls someone not attractive? Trump looks like a baboon-human-Tribble cross double crossed with a tomato. I never can understand that level of cognitive dissonance. It’s like Germans following a short, dark-haired, ugly little man with a coarse Bavarian accent, in pursuit of the Aryan master race. I think the God of irony committed divine suicide when Drumpf was in charge of the Miss USA pageant. Trump is also a bimbo. And rather stereotypically a hysterical 1950’s stereotype of a lady. He’s vain, catty, banal, easily distracted by shiny objects, money hungry, spends too much, buys ridiculous shit he doesn’t need, whines, is terrified of metaphorical mice (ISIS), is constantly afraid of people wanting to attack him and he spends more time on his hair than an aging power rocker. How much do you want to bet that Trump has an apron under that ill fitting suit from China? He’s so fucking thin-skinned you could stab him to death with a spork; and he hasn’t ever had a nasty comment that he has kept to himself.
Waxing pornographic about his infant daughter “legs’ and future boobs. Evaluating the sex appeal of an infant is paradigm-shifting alright, especially when said infant is one’s own child. This pattern of behavior—a vulgar inclination to objectify and even humiliate his very own progeny—is an anathema to most women, most mothers.
When I look at the attacks against Clinton by both Trump and Sanders, I think of all the times I have been made to feel that what I did was less relevant than that of men, to feel vulgar and presumptuous by my own ambitions, by my own demands. The constant stinging reminders of our second-class status. Men somehow always get what they want without ever been accused of being opportunistic. This the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck. Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a dogged, anxious bullet of outrage and derision. The obdurate refusal to believe, to internalize, that my bewilderment is not manufactured – an inflexible rejection that the possibility that my point is a valid one and my outrage authentic, in favor of consolatory belief that I am “upset” and requesting something I am not entitled to.
Republicans have been making a concerted effort to dumb us down since Ronald Reagan ran a scorched-earth campaign against the University of California in his bid for Governor of California in 1970. Using long-haired Berkeley students as perfect foils to crystallize all of his ideological themes into a single figure for disorder, a subversive menace of sexual, social, generational, and even communist deviance, Reagan assailed the Free Speech and antiwar movements – HE ASSAILED PROTESTS AIMED AT ENDING THE VIETNAM WAR – with comments like, “They are spoiled and don’t deserve education”, and that the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,” and warning audiences of “sexual orgies so vile that I cannot describe them to you,” whining about left-wing subversion at the university. This hysterical and immoral campaign had him win in a landslide. Fourteen years later, Reagan was elected president, running against a host of mythical foes from “welfare queens” to an omnipotent “Evil Empire,” and never shedding his antipathy toward “elitist” campuses and the young folks who dared question the system AND THE VIETNAM WAR. When Reagan took office, he Set about doing exactly what he had promised, devising tools to make sure the spirit of 1960s protest would never again erupt on campus, cutting state funding for higher education, laying the foundations for a shift to a tuition-based funding model, and calling in the National Guard to crush student protest, with unprecedented severity. Reagan ushered in a dramatic shift in tone and expectation that has corrupted this country ever since. Public goods became private services, and by the end of its reign of terror, the anti-tax, infra-structure-crushing, neoliberal Weltanschauung meant that states slashed their budgets and support for education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good. Reagan had successfully shifted the political debate over the meaning and purpose of public higher education in America. Rather than seeing the education of the state’s youth as a patriotic duty and a vital weapon in the Cold War, he cast universities as a problem in and of themselves—both an expensive welfare program and dangerously close to socialism. He even said that if students had to pay their own tuition, they’d value their education too much to protest. The Vichy Democrats, for whatever they were worth, cheered on the success of their neo-corporate educational system, because it always takes more than one person to screw up the world’s greatest economy this badly. When millennials graduate from college, they will have taken on burdens that are almost impossible to negotiate much less erase, no matter the shape of the economy. Reagan’s name ought to be emblazoned on fine brass plaque hung over the debtors prison he built for the nation’s young.
Something harsh and uncaring, unrealistic about modern life, came in with Ronald Reagan. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” didn’t fail; it was undone. Things that were making a difference in a changing country were undone. A few programs that survived are being ground away, and are perpetually in danger. The Republicans, as soon as Obama took office, started acting like a man I know who was fighting every step of the way in making a property settlement with his ex-wife. Whenever she agreed to, or gave up, one little thing, thinking that finally the “negotiations” would be done, he took it as a sign of weakness and demanded something else…always more and more.
Now we have shit like “anti-choice feminism,” “Tea Party feminism,” and “Sarah Palin feminism,” what comes next? “Phyllis Schlafly feminism?” “Patriarchal feminism?” “He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?” I mean, how long until Fox News hosts a “feminist” argument for repealing the 19th Amendment (there’s no truly pro-woman party anyway, don’t you know?), or widening the pay gap so more men can be sole breadwinners again and more women can freely choose to stay home) or, I don’t know, reclaiming the word “chattel”? Perhaps we ought to coin a neologism to describe self-identified feminists who oppose a Femogynist Agenda that promotes women’s right to bodily autonomy, actual technical sex education and access to affordable, reliable contraception. There really should be a word for people who find such an agenda abhorrent — something like “misfeminist,” maybe? No, wait, I’ve got it! “Misogynist.”
As basically every conservative who knows how to type without CAPS LOCK and spittle politely notes that Donald Trump is a sad fraud and Palin is an angry, stupid clown, the unwashed hordes of AOL imbeciles spew their impotent rage, who then have to suffer through a week or two of the usual Internet mass psychosis, what with the death threats and the “UR MAM SHOULDA ABORTED U ‘N SHIT ON YR DEAD FACE” and the “ILL FUK U UP WHER U LIVE?” “ABORT KILLARY BENGHATTZI$%$@&” that basically define modern American life and create an overwhelming, unimpeachable argument for eugenics. Palin’s alarming ignorance of American history, government, science and of anything else is crucial to her political career just as Bush’s alcoholism and ignorance of the world was helpful to his. Republican voters are equally or even more ignorant than Trump or Palin are and feel identified with them. The vast swaths of failed American society that support these Morans are resentful about their fate but impotent to do anything about it, since this would involve addressing their lack of education and utter ignorance. They are to their supporters beacons of hope just as Bush was a beacon of hope to failing students, alcoholics and drug addicts. If you want to know how revisionism starts, look at any Republican candidate for the past 2 decades. With life being so complex and history so simple they can’t just admit to being human and erring. By “doubling down” on the falsehood that Paul Revere was some sort of prototypical NRA lobbyist, for instance, Sarah Palin was not only turning an understandable (if comical) verbal gaffe into a lie, she is also proving – incontrovertibly – that she refuses to take responsibility for her own mistakes. I can think of few clearer proofs of her fundamental unsuitability for higher office. The GOP has cynically and literally adopted this stupid, uneducated thing where history is too “erudite”, and therefore bad. History is not simply erudite and interesting, it is relevant. Like, whether or not you like it, you can’t simply defer to the second amendment – which gives people the right to bear “arms”–not pistols, not shotguns: arms. Muzzle loaded guns without rifling. Are you in a militia that is regulated? Are you providing security connected to your free State? No? No gun for you. Sorry pal. Don’t be mad at me, it’s right there in the ignored part of your favorite Amendment.
Hillary Clinton is “Too ambitious” and definitely “Unqualified to be President”, according to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump
I had lunch recently with a colleague, probably the most intelligent and educated person I know. She had one question about Bernie Sanders “What was he doing between the years 1965 and 1981?” Commence Google.
Bernie Sander’s parents sent him to the University of Chicago, and when he graduated in 1965. After that, he never had a real job, collected unemployment. Bernie was a radical and an agitator in the ferment of 1960s and ’70s Vermont, a tireless campaigner and champion of laborers. He tried and failed and tried and failed again to run for government office, until he finally succeeded- he became a socialist mayor who somehow got elected in the immediate wake of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. That is pretty fckng amazing, indeed. Mayor of Burlington, Vt., 1981-1989; A list of things Bernie Sanders has achieved in his political career — four-term socialist mayor, eight-term congressman, two-term senator — could fill a post-it.
Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton graduated Wellesley College in 1969, Yale Law School, 1973; attorney; counsel, impeachment inquiry staff, House Judiciary Committee 1974; Rather than gong to work for a prestigious law firm, After law school, Hillary could have gone to work for a prestigious law firm, but took a job at the Children’s Defense Fund. She worked with teenagers incarcerated in adult prisons in South Carolina and families with disabled children in Massachusetts. It sparked a lifelong passion for helping children live up to their potential..
First Lady of Arkansas 1979-1981, 1983-1993; First Lady of the United States 1993-2001; As first lady of the United States, Hillary fought to help pass health care reform. When that effort failed, she didn’t give up: Hillary worked with Republicans and Democrats to help create the Children’s Health Insurance Program. CHIP cut the uninsured rate of American children by half, and today it provides health care to more than 8 million kids.
Standing in front of a U.N. conference and declaring that “women’s rights are human rights” was more controversial than it sounds today. Many within the U.S. government didn’t want Hillary to go to Beijing. Hillary speaking out about human rights abuses became a rallying cry for a generation.
Elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 2000;,When those assholes attacked NYC just months after Hillary became U.S. senator from New York, she worked to make sure the 9/11 first responders who suffered lasting health effects from their time at Ground Zero got the care they needed. She was reelected in 2006 and served until her resignation on January 21, 2009, to accept a Cabinet position; an unsuccessful candidate for Democratic nomination for president in 2008; Secretary of State in the Cabinet of President Barack Obama, 2009-2013.
As secretary of state, Hillary made LGBT rights a focus of U.S. foreign policy. She lobbied for the first-ever U.N. Human Rights Council resolution on human rights and declared that “gay rights are human rights.” Hillary worked across the aisle to expand health care access for members of the National Guard and reservists—making sure those who served and their families had access to health care when they returned home. And she worked to expand the Family Medical Leave Act, allowing families of those wounded in service to their country to take leave in order to care for their loved ones.
Hillary Clinton negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.As our nation’s chief diplomat, Hillary didn’t back down when the stakes were high. As Hamas rockets rained down on Israel, Hillary went to the region immediately. Twenty-four hours after she landed, a ceasefire went into effect—and that year became Israel’s quietest in a decade.
SO I have a confuzed….she isn’t qualified how? I don’t see any years unaccounted for.
Sanders has managed to focus on what fueled him without compromising his abiding Yankee sense of privacy. He’s never given in to discussing publicly significant details about his personal life — like that he didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was an elected official pushing 40 years old, and the fact that the mother of his one biological child is not his “ex-wife” as he claimed. Even though he considered his personal life off limits, he still relentlessly solicited attention, sending to newspapers and radio and TV stations onslaughts of screed-like, typewritten press releases. That these kinds of basic biographical details are unimportant is a point of sharp contrast with the woman he’s running against, the most unceasingly scrutinized citizen of her generation. THAT’S FAIR.
Also, according to the Sanders people, Madame Secretary is “Tearing The Democratic Party Apart”. I have another confuzed. How is a woman who has worked for Democratic causes and supported the Democratic party since 1971, who was a Democratic Senator, who was the Secretary of State of a Democratic administration, who is the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, who is currently funding down-ticket Democratic races, tearing the Democratic Party apart? Because she’s running for president? And who is making that accusation? A dude who works for a dude who has been a Democrat for 4 months? Who is not doing anything about down-ticket races and has not supported the party in general? So confused. It must be my lady-brain. I’m sure there’s a BernieBro somewhere who can mansplain it to me. Oh I know, she is too ambitious and unqualified because she lacks a penis. That is IT. And don’t give me your rolling eyeballs and your wounded, unyielding denials, tiresome pronouncements of similitude between men’s and women’s experiences, or belligerent insistence that men are sometimes fucked over, too, and other equivalencies that conveniently and stupidly ignore institutional unfairness that mean X rarely equals. And if utter “PLAYING THE WOMAN CARD”, I WILL CUT YOU. Because I am smarter than you and I am also more violent and dangerous.
So when Sanders makes his puerile statements like ” This System Is Rigged,” I see it as an indicator of his lack of intellectual heft. YES Bernie, the system IS RIGGED. And when he states he is “Against All Fracking”, I kind of roll my eyes. YES BERNIE, FRACKING IS BAD. Hillary is not “FOR” Fracking. Hillary’s position on fracking goes beyond what virtually any state has done, pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to pay for her ambitious climate plan, and intends to install 500 million solar collectors in four years. If and when Obama’s Clean Power Plan is upheld in the federal courts, now a likelihood after Justice Scalia’s death, that will bring a even greater change. Meanwhile, Bernie’s “AGAINST ALL FRACKING” begs the question of… like, ok, great. HOW? His energy platform is comprehensive, but he offers no strategy to implement the Paris Summit in the short term. Instead, Bernie will call his own summit of experts in the first hundred days he is president. There is no recognition of the overwhelming wall of opposition from the Republican Congress, which can only be broken on state-by-state organizing. The climate clock is ticking towards doomsday. Where are we moving next, beyond waiting for the overthrow of Citizens United? But those buzz words – like “build a wall” “destroy ISIS” – “system rigged”, “against all fracking” is all that today’s undersized, ADHD brains can handle. That’s the way it is with Sanders. The issues. The issues. Stick to the issues. The rich are too rich. Those with power have too much. The middle class is withering. Inequality is a crisis, and the system is rigged. With Sanders, what you see is what you get— and that’s almost all you get. The world is a fucking complicated place. If you stopped your education after undergraduate school and frittered around for the next 2 decades, perhaps you do not have to tools or faculties for the job. Listen boys, turning a plutocracy into a democracy is a very messy business that involves a lot of people with limited information deciding how we regulate human behaviour so that we can all live together with too much conflict.
If the basic premise of your campaign is leading a revolution that will include Universal Health Care, breaking up bank too large to fail, free college tuition for all, fixing the student loan crisis, campaign finance reform, raising the minimum raise, etc. it seems that your past legislative record be might predictive of future successes. This is not to say that Senator Sanders has not be enormously successful on Capitol Hill. But let’s be serious, the heavy lifting that will need to be done to enact a President Sanders agenda will not be done through amendments. The elephant in the room of qualifications looms large. Any President will need willing partners in both houses to introduce legislation to shepherd their agenda through Congress. Hillary Clinton’s depth and breadth of experience is unmatched. She has a record of that is worthy of any person who ever sought the office of the presidency. Her service as a Senator is the experience needed in understanding the mechanics of government. As Secretary of State her background will serve the Presidency and the country well as we negotiate the unsettled waters of world affairs and diplomacy. Or the GOP can talk about the cost of all his proposed programs- 20 trillion dollars. Never mind the details, that number will sink him like a rock. Or try telling the middle class that their taxes will go up to give someone else free healthcare or free college or any of the other freebies he’s proposing. HAHAHAHA. He will be sunk before you can say “FeeltheBern”. Whether or not those things can pay for themselves is immaterial- to paraphrase the old saying, that smear will have traveled halfway around the world before your explanation has put its shoes on. He’ll be the big spending Commie taxing the American people and stealing their hard earned money to give it to those undeserving “those people”. This barely touches the surface of what the GOP would do to him.
This horrifying election has proven that Hillary is disciplined and classy enough to not swing at a low pitch.As for the smearing of this woman – this first female presidential candidate – by a fellow Democrat….what a disappointment. She handles him with kid gloves because A) she doesn’t hate him, B) she risks alienating his supporters and C) she is classy. Meanwhile, GOP super pacs have been funneling money towards helping Sanders, because they’re licking their chops at the idea of running against him or him to running third party. You couldn’t draw up a better target for the GOP smear machine if you tried. And no, Hillary didn’t do the “same thing” that Sanders is doing now in 2008. At this point in 2008, Bamz was holding a pretty solid 4-5 percent lead over McCain throughout May, while Clinton was underwater by April and was consistently 3-4 percentage points down to McCain in those same hypothetical matchups. Why the fuck would she use “the exact same” argument against Obama when she was on the short end of that argument? There are such things as empirical facts.
I am really, really REALLY tired of being told that I have to understand this or that about Bernie supporters. Why don’t they have to understand that I’ve been waiting all my life for the whole “you can be anything, even the president” line that we give kids to actually be true for gyno-Americans? That I’m afraid that if this immensely qualified and experienced and talented woman can’t be elected, there’s probably no hope for getting any woman in the White House in the next generation or two? That it’s insulting to be told I’m voting with my vagina when I’m simply tired of women being completely underrepresented since forever, and I think it’s stupid not to elect the most prepared person running, who happens to be female? I look forward to at least 4 years of Republicans actively disrespecting the first female President. I love that “conservatives” are going to be calling her a bitch on a daily basis, and that someone will forget the hot mic and call her a cunt. There are too many women who have been voting Republican because they haven’t had a chance to see just how misogynistic and despicably discriminatory the party is. A few million women furious with those assholes’ treatment of another woman would end the political power of those pricks.
I recently had a heart to heart with a young woman, an aspiring writer who faced rejection directly associated with her gender, over and over again. It broke my heart. I thought to myself, who wouldn’t want to be a female in a roomful of angry shut-ins embittered because the harlot to whom they had entrusted their shared space to might ,are them feel a little less secure about their flimsy manhood? But then, writing for TV is not my calling. I suppose people said the same thing to my mom back when she applied to medical school in the 1950’s as the only woman. It’s scary, opening those lofty portals to include women – what happens if we are exposed as not being all that talented, and our empire, like all empires, falls? It is hard to be sympathetic to a bunch of whiny jackholes complaining that feminism has ruined manhood by daring to advocate for women to be treated as full-fledged human beings and not underpaid, overworked fetus incubators with no agency over their bodies and their reproductive decisions. Jesus himself put these comical fellows on Earth to make their tried and true observations into an art form for centuries, mostly revolving around the same tired truths: Women are illogical, given to outbursts, love chocolate and relentless shopping and PMS and disgusting vanity and inability to stop talking and disinterest in Important Things like sports and karaoke and golddiggerism and false rape. It’s so old….it’s hard to think who came up with it all first t – was it a Brontosaurs, or was it Jesus Christ himself?
For now, I proudly wear the scarlet “E” of erudition on my vagina.