II have been feeling frustrated lately, and I think some of it comes from my friends not understanding what’s going on with me... So I am going to tell you a little bit about that... about  what is actually going on with me.
 
I am disabled. I have celiac disease, which I inherited from my mother. Born in 1920, she was one of the first diagnosed cases of what they used to call “sprue.” Her doctors hadn't realized that gluten was the problem, but they did realize that these sick babies would start to thrive if they were put on a diet consisting of nothing but bananas and oatmeal for the first three years of their lives. So that's what my mother ate.

She did survive, but, sadly, she grew up believing that sprue was a childhood disease that she had outgrown. No one outgrows celiac... at least, not to my knowledge. Because of this misinformation, my mother ate wheat all her life and, consequently, suffered from a huge number of mental and physical disorders. It never occurred to her to have her children tested. As infants, we were not noticeably sick. We grew up eating wheat.
 
I was forty before I realized that I had inherited celiac from her. It took a while for me to connect the dots back to my mother’s “sprue.”  By the time I realized what I had, I was suffering from a wide range of conditions related to poor absorption of nutrients from a compromised gut.  I was running serious deficiencies in the B vitamins, in zinc, in magnesium… and I was severely anemic.  And I wasn't metabolizing fats very well. Every year, I was becoming more and more malnourished.

My condition was compounded by Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).  I was stricken with ME/CFS in the fall of 1987.  It came on like the worst case of flu in my life… except I never recovered. I was desperately sick for about seven years: encephalitis, petit mal seizures, strange rashes, neurofibromyalgia, debilitating migraines, sleep disorders, extreme irritability, vision problems, multiple chemical sensitivities (allergies to everything), cognitive disorders, and fatigue. Fatigue so serious I could not clean the litter box and get the mail from the mailbox on the same day. And an inability to bounce back from even mild physical exertion (post-exertional malaise).
 
I am better now, but here’s the thing: I’m not normal. Not even close. Most people aren’t around me consistently enough to realize the extent of my disability, but it’s like this: I start every day with a certain number of energy chips… let’s say 60 chips. That’s all I’m going to get for the day. And if I try to do things that require more than my allotment of energy chips, I can become incapacitated for more than a week. It's like I go to energy debtor's prison.  It’s really important for me not to spend beyond my limit. 60 chips. No credit cards. No checks. Strictly energy cash, pay-as-you-go.

So most normal folks start their day with, say, 300 energy chips. On an average day, an average person only needs, say,  about 200. Most people never even have to think about it. They do a bunch of things all day until it’s time to go to bed. They end their day with a pile of unused energy chips. They have an abundance of energy for whatever they want to do.
 
But I have to budget. I have to  scrimp. I have to rob Peter to pay Paul.  There’s a whole  lot of calculation and negotiation that goes on in my daily activity log. When I get up in the morning, I look at what I absolutely have to do that day. That gets the first allocation of energy chips. Then I look at the things that have to be done sometime. That’s the next round. If I have any chips left, I can budget for something fun. I am mostly retired, which is a great relief, but just routine cleaning and cooking and keeping up with things like oil changes or dental visits takes much of my energy. I also have to eat a very specialized diet that precludes gluten, dairy, sugar, and prepared foods. I end up needing to cook a lot. It gets exhausting, but if I am not careful, I will wake up in the morning with only 50 chips instead of 60.

Anything emotionally strenuous or physically demanding will run through all my chips and land me in bed. I can’t do aerobic exercise. I can’t deal with dysfunctional dynamics. Drama is a luxury I can’t afford. And travel, because of all the unknowns, crowds, toxins, and changes in plans, is incredibly challenging for me.
 
If you ask me at the last minute to do something, I am very likely going to have to say no. If you ask me at 2 PM about going to a party that night, I probably won’t have saved up the energy chips for it. I was planning to be done with my day by 6 or 7, so most of my chips have already been used up. If you had asked me two days earlier about the party, I could have budgeted, but now it’s too late.
 
Also, as an introvert, I am drained when I am around people, even close friends. Like other introverts,  I recharge my batteries by being alone. (Extroverts are the opposite.) I  have to budget the plans I make to be with people. It can use up all my chips just to host a visitor for a day, or even a half-day. If you come to visit me, come prepared to entertain yourself without me for much of the time. I need most of my time for myself.  Introversion + celiac + ME/CFS = the main reason why I have been single for most of the last 30 years. I just don’t have the energy.

If  I am visiting you, and you have planned a whole bunch of activities, I will probably have to say no to most of them. I can budget for, possibly, one a day.
 
I love the saying, “If you see your glass as half-empty, pour it into a smaller glass and stop bitching.” That is exactly what I have done.

I have moved to a little village where I am two blocks from the library, the post office, the grocery store, the hardware store, and the town hall. I live on an island where there is a national park. I can access breathtaking day hikes in just fifteen minutes. I rarely leave the island… and my cup runneth over with beauty and gratitude.

I write for a limited amount of time every day. I’m often done with my day by 6 or 7 at night. I keep things as simple and easy as I can… and I still feel vulnerable. A flat tire or an emotional tiff can blow the energy budget for the day, and a day of energy debt can cost me an entire week.

Am I controlling? I experience that as an unfair question. I have to live within my energy means. The penalties for overdrawing the account are very severe. How I live isn’t micromanaging to me. It’s prudent self-care. And it's not optional.
 
So, if you are my friend, that’s how I tick. I am disabled all the time. I’m on the energy clock all the time. If you know this about me, and you have empathy, that is a bonus for me. It's fewer energy chips I have to expend when I am around you. And sometimes, believe it or not, I actually get  an extra chip or two from your concern and consideration.  And that is something exquisitely rare and precious to me.

So, there it is. Thanks for reading.

Mia Merrill, a human resources manager, happened to see a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it upset her so badly that she started a petition to have it taken down. Her petition garnered more than 10,000 signatures in less than a week. (see below) She did not ask that it be destroyed... just taken down. In fact, she was even okay if it stayed up:  “I would consider this petition a success if the Met included a message as brief as, ‘Some viewers find this piece offensive or disturbing, given Balthus’s artistic infatuation with young girls'.”

And here is the Met's response:  “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present, and encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression.”

And here is my response: "Oh, for f*** sake." Literally.

The painting is titled Thérese Dreaming by Balthus.

Here's the thing...

There was a real Thérese. Her name was Thérese Blanchard, and she was eleven years old in 1936, when she had the misfortune to catch the eye of her Parisian neighbor, Balthus.  She was the daughter of a restaurant worker, and her family may have welcomed, or even needed, the extra income to be had from modeling. In any event, Therese posed for Balthus for the next three years. He made ten paintings of her. The art world considers them his finest work.

Let’s get back to Thérèse. She was a child. She posed for Balthus on numerous occasions for three years. We cannot know if she wanted to pose for him or if she was ordered by her family to do it. In the case of Thérese Dreaming, the child had to hold an awkward and physically uncomfortable position (both arms held over her head) for long stretches of time. She also had to hold an emotionally excruciating position… exposing her elevated crotch and underwear with her legs wide apart. I would submit that the physical and emotional discomfort of the subject were components in of the painter’s choice of pose.  I would also submit that, if Thérèse is dreaming at all, it is of something to make it stop. In fact, the subject’s eyes appear to be squeezed tightly shut, her eyebrows contracting from the effort.
 
Non-consensual voyeurism is a form of sexual abuse, and a twelve-year-old child is not of age to give consent to exposing herself in her underwear to a painter. Repeated non-consensual voyeurism constitutes stalking. Thérèse Dreaming is actually evidence of a crime—documentation of the crime scene. And, yes, harm is happening. The child is being objectivized, fetishized. In posing, she is being compelled to participate. What is happening to her is a violation of her personhood and of her rights to privacy.

The Met appears to be unclear on this point.
 
Seven years ago, the art world was very unclear about a film by Larry Rivers titled “Growing.” The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, but in 1910, it was just sold, with the archive, to New York University.
 
“Growing” was a film in which Rivers filmed his daughters every six months over a period of at least five years. According to one of his daughters, when she objected at the time, he called her “uptight” and  “a bad daughter.”  When she confronted him as a teenagers, he gave the justification that his “intellectual development had been arrested.”

Rivers edited the footage of his naked daughters into a 45-minute film that he was intending to include in a 1981 exhibition of his work. The mother of the girls stopped him.
 
Initially, New York University refused the now-adult daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. They did agree to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, insisting that “Growing” was the work of a great artists and not child pornography.  The public did not agree, and the story went viral. In the end,  NYU did not want the controversy, and they returned the film to the Larry Rivers Foundation. The Foundation has said they will never allow the film to be shown publicly.
 
The simple fact is, “Growing” is child pornography, and it is illegal to buy it or to own it. This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began, like Balthus’ paintings of Thérèse,  when one of the subjects was eleven.

I blogged about the Larry Rivers situation at the time, and in my blog I made a radical proposition intended to break the deadlock over, “When an important artist makes child pornography is it still art?”  I will repeat that proposition here:
 
I propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.
 
Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how the socialization of the child is really about her colonization. It’s easy for us not to think about children this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will.  Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity… and nearly endless opportunities for exploitation.  

“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.
 
“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.
 
This obscene film by Larry Rivers was an artifact of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhoods. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University had no right to acquire it. It belonged to the daughters.

Thérèse Blanchard is not alive today. She, unlike Rivers’ daughters, cannot stake a claim to the documentation of her abuse. But in continuing to display works like this (and much of Balthus’ canon), we perpetuate the prurience of the perpetrators.
 
Children have a right to their lives, to their experience, to their privacy. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting and monetizing their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization. And if the child victims are no longer here to stake that claim, then we should make sure that these crime-scene artifacts, no matter how "tasteful" or "masterful" the execution, will never be revered as works of art.

At the age of thirty-five, I conceived the idea of a museum to commemorate the war against women. I was recently “out” and on fire with radical feminist theory, which electrifying my brain with new synaptic connections between previously isolated storage files of experiences and observations.
 
In light of the #MeToo movement, I thought I would dig up the proposal for this museum and work it into a blog. Reading through the documents, I have decided to just put them up, as they were written thirty years ago.
 
So… direct from 1988, The Women’s Rape Museum

I am enclosing a proposal for a project I initiated in 1988, which officially died in 1991.  It was for a national Women’s Rape Museum.  The project was inspired by and modeled after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
 
I feel that we women have allowed men to establish the terms of debate on the subject of war, and in allowing them to define “war” in terms of military campaigns between nationalities, we forfeit our own experience. 
 
Andrea Dworkin points out that in the US, only seven women out of a hundred will not experience sexual assault in her lifetime.  Estimates for child sexual abuse for girls run between 30 and 40%.  Women’s art, culture, history, and spiritual traditions are largely censored in most parts of the world.  Certainly our values are not prioritized by governments who are run by men and tokenized women.  We are, in effect, all colonized by the foreign and hostile culture of men.  We are controlled psychologically by images which show women as perpetual victims of sexual terrorism. 

The literature by male veterans about their experiences at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington stimulated my interest in a memorial for women who have been victims of rape.  We are not allowed to define male aggression in political terms.   This is insane!  Women continue to define each act as a behavioral aberration on the part of some deviant male, when the truth is that our legal system does not seriously go after perpetrators, the entire culture teaches rape, and our economy is based on the appropriation of women’s resources.
 
The reactions of individuals and organizations to the Women’s Rape Museum prospectus was instructive, to say the least.  It is as if each woman has hundreds of examples of domination and terrorism in her memory - each hermetically sealed.  When a woman begins to unwrap these experiences and allow her brain to form synapses between them, she becomes terrified of the conclusion:  This is a war. 
 
It is my belief that until women seize the definition of war and begin to confront it in terms of our own experiences with male dominance and sexual aggression, then the more aggressive expressions -i.e. the military campaigns, phallic missiles, mass rapes, etc. - will continue to increase, while women wear buttons, join male-dominated peace organizations, and in general adopt strategies which have proved ineffectual throughout history.
 
And finally, I want to make a point about veterans.  This is another word that men have appropriated.  According to male definitions of war, there are very few women veterans.  When women redefine “war,” most of us will achieve the recognition and status of veterans.  This identity would require a radical restructuring of our experiences, giving meaning to our suffering and establishing a bond, instead of a barrier, to intimacy between women.  The current vocabulary for rape is one of individual shame and confusion.  When the rape victim understands that she is a veteran, she suddenly has access to a rich tradition of activism, authority, and respect within her community

Exhibits with Practical Information:
 
The Myths about Rape:  This would be the first exhibit to greet the visitor to the Memorial.  This exhibit would challenge immediately the myths about who gets raped and who does the raping.
 
If Someone You Know Has Been Raped:  This is a display of “do’s” and “don’t’s” for friends and family of victims.  Well-meaning attempts to make light of the event or to encourage the victim to get on with her life often result in permanent alienation at a time when the victim needs support. 
 
Reporting Rape: the Legal Steps:  This is a fifteen-minute film about the procedures a woman can expect if she chooses to report the rape.  The film will show a hypothetical rape victim from the time she contacts a friend about the rape, through the process of reporting at the police station, the medical examination, and her return home.

Post-Rape Syndrome: Steps to Healing:  This is a table of steps victims go through in healing, along with a first-person narrative of a victim, describing her reactions.  The steps include her need to talk about the incident repeatedly, her panic attacks and possible agoraphobia, changes in her sexual responses, and disruption of her work activities.
 
Women And Weapons:  This is a display case of weapons which women might choose to carry.  The display carries information about the advantages and the drawbacks to the various guns and sprays, and the laws that pertain to obtaining and carrying them.
 
Self-defense Strategies:  This is a live demonstration/workshop offered at set times during the hours the memorial is open.
 

Historical Displays:
 
The History of Rape Laws in The U.S.: (or other host country) - This exhibit would be a wall mural with a time line depicting the changes in rape laws and landmark cases in the Memorial’s host country.
 
Historic Rape Resisters:  This display would have pictures of women who fought back, physically or legally against their abusers.  Visitors could press a button to hear the courageous accounts of women like Joan Little, Phoolan Devi, Inez Garcia , and Dr. Elizabeth Morgan.

The Burning Time:  This would be a display about the genocide of nine million women in Europe during the Middle Ages. The exhibit would show the implements of torture, excerpts from the Malleus Malefactorum, and trial transcripts and narratives of women who were murdered.

Religion and Rape: Representation of rape in the Bible, the Koran, and other religious writings. The priesthood child-rape epidemic.

The Medical Profession and Rape: The history of medical misogyny, and especially the misdiagnosis of PTSD in survivors of rape, especially child rape. The cover-up of incest by theories of "Oedipal" and "Electra" complexes, misdiagnosis of venereal disease in children, and pathologizing of victims.

 Slavery And Rape:  This is an historical display about the rape of enslaved Black women in America.  The display includes first person narratives including Linda Brent’s story of hiding in a garret for seven years to avoid rape by her master.  Rape of enslaved women was a special horror in a system where the rapist had rights of legal ownership of the victim’s children.

War And Rape:  This display will focus on recent and current wars. This display will document the rape of women in Vietnam, the mass rape/suicides of women in Bangladesh, the Japanese "comfort women,” and the rapes of women in Bosnia. Rape as a method of torture. "Ethnic cleansing." Rape in the military and the denial of benefits to survivors of Military Sexual Trauma.

Trafficking and Prostitution: Historical and current. Paid rape.

Pornography: Statistics about the industry. The harm of pornography. The teaching of rape and the propagation of rape culture.
 
The Art of Survivors:  This display would include samples of the work of artists like novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and poet Chrystos.
 
The Culture of Control:  This is a display of articles used for the cultural control of women.  It would include traditional foot-bindings from China, the chador worn by Islamic women, chastity belts from the Middle Ages, high-heeled shoes, boned corsets, and various styles of dress (hoop skirt, hobble, mini-skirt, etc.) that reflect a cultural control of women. This display would also include the implements used to excise the clitorises and infibulate the vaginas of women in Africa.

Resources:
 
Rape Survivors' Library And Resource Center:  This would be a reference library with a reading room for women who want to read about some aspect of sexual aggression towards women.  The librarian could refer visitors to other legal and therapeutic agencies, both in the community and internationally.
 
Counseling Room:  The Women's Rape Memorial would have a trained therapist on staff who could respond to requests for help from visitors who are experiencing emotional distress during their visit to the Memorial.  This therapist would be able to provide references for legal advice or therapy.
 
The Rape Narrative Archive:  Women who visit the Memorial may have the opportunity of writing or telling their story on tape in privacy and leaving it in the archives of the Memorial as a testimony to their own personal courage as a survivor.  They may or may not choose to make the narrative anonymous or to have their story available to other visitors to the Memorial.  Testimonies will be preserved and valued without judgement.  The survivor's story, in her own words, is accepted at the Women's Rape Memorial.

The Ritual Fire: There will be a fire that burns perpetually where rape survivors can bring clothing or other artifacts associated with the violation and throw them into the fire.
 
The Rape Survivor's Memorial Garden:   This will be a quiet garden area where survivors and their friends and family can come and pay tribute to the courage of the women and children who have been raped.  The garden provides a place for leaving poems, photographs, and flowers.

Something significant happened today. 
 
Today a senator resigned because six women who claimed he had harassed them were believed, and thirty-two senators of his own party—the Democratic party—called on him to resign. Thirteen of these were female and nineteen male.
 
Many folks felt that his offenses were mild considering that the current President has bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and has been accused of all kinds of groping, voyeurism, crude remarks, and assaults. This same week there is a Republican candidate running for the Senate who has been credibly accused by multiple women of child sexual abuse.

But still, the senator resigned.
 
Many people felt it was a shame because he supports feminist causes and because he is an outspoken liberal in a time when conservatives are controlling both House and Senate.
 
But still, the senator resigned.
 
I want to remind people that we are still living in patriarchy. What that means is that, when women are abused, there will always be something more important going on. There will always be a reason why women should set aside our issues and our grievances to work for some greater good or more urgent need. Always. I mean always.

In this country, women had to wait for suffrage until all men could have the vote. In England, the Suffrage Movement was completely derailed when its leader, Emmeline Pankhurst ordered her followers to redirect their zeal in support of recruitment for the frontlines of World War I. Suffrage could wait. It was not the time.
 
Today, between 9 and 33%  of women in the US military report experiencing an attempted or completed rape during military service. Let me emphasize the word “report.” Consider that this year, 58% of victims who reported experienced reprisals or retaliation. Congress has been holding hearings on this for decades, but nothing changes. Why?  Because the military is focused on the “real” enemy, the “real” violence. These women reporting are disrupting chains of command, generating divisions and distractions, and undermining morale in a time of war. Now is never the time or place to accuse a fellow soldier or commanding officer of sexual violence.

I remember watching Ted Kennedy at the Clarence Thomas hearings when Anita Hill was being called on to describe in detail Thomas’ harassment of her. Ted Kennedy who had, according to him, been driving a campaign worker to the ferry to get home after a party… only the worker had left her keys and her purse at the party and Kennedy was not driving on the road to the ferry. In any event, he drove off an unlit bridge into a pond.

He got out of the car, but she did not. He waited ten hours to report the incident to authorities. In the meantime, she was struggling to survive, contorting her body to catch the last pockets of oxygen… no doubt waiting for Kennedy to get help and rescue her. Some estimates say she survived more than ten minutes.  What she did not understand was that now was not her turn. The priority was protecting the senator from scandal.
 
And Anita Hill was also told that now was not her turn. There was an African American man up for the Supreme Court. That was the priority, not his descriptions of Long John Dong pornography. 
 
But Anita Hill had not waited her turn, and after the hearing that confirmed her harasser (who referred to the hearing--including her participation--as a “high tech lynching”), there was a very serious effort to have her academic career destroyed. Fortunately, a “We Believe Anita” grassroots campaign was birthed to counter the attacks.

Sexual harassment is, like rape, largely an issue of male aggression against women. Congress is predominantly male.  Not surprisingly, they have made their own rules about the handling of sexual complaints against members and staff, passing laws that exempt them from practices that would apply to other employers. Let’s look more closely at this.

Since 1995 a law has been in place allowing accusers to file lawsuits only if they first agree to go through months of counseling and mediation. Counseling?  For “False Memory Syndrome?”  Or perhaps projection of unresolved daddy issues?  Mediation? As in a case where two parties cannot reach agreement?  What would that look like?  She said he did it; he says he didn’t. In mediation they agree that he may have done it, but has amnesia, or she agrees she experienced it, but it might have been a lucid dream?  Fortunately for We the People, a special congressional office is charged with trying to resolve these cases out of court.
 
And, yes, it appears that even with all this counseling and mediation, settlements do occur… but the members of Congress do not pay them from their own office funds. Unbelievably, confidential payments come out of a special U.S. Treasury fund.
 
Actually, this is not unbelievable at all. Again, these are important men, elected by their constituents, to make the laws that run this country. Aides and interns need to understand that now is not the time.

I remember the protests and the boycotting of the film The Color Purple, because Alice Walker had had the temerity to depict an African American male abusing an African American female. This was so not the time. The New York Times quoted the editor of a Black Chicago paper: ''No, it is not just a movie. It is a statement made out of context used as a pretext to take one more lick at society's rejects.'' 

But I have a personal ax to grind. An arsenal actually. I was sexually abused as a child by a man who was an attorney and then a judge, a man who served on boards, taught in a law school. I was sexually abused by a man who, after his death, had a chair named in his honor at his law school, whose funeral service was packed with hundreds of colleagues, and who was honored with a joint resolution passed by his state legislature, mourning his death. When I named him as a perpetrator, I was not believed and I was discredited and disinherited. It was not the time. He was one of the good guys.
 
When I taught at an elite college, one of my students reported to me that she had been raped by a student on campus. Turns out this was not the first, or even the second report for him. But he was still there. He was an athlete. It was his third time, but, still... it was not the time. Obviously he was a credit to the college. Better she should leave.

My housemate was raped a knifepoint by a man who had stopped his car and begged her for directions. His wife and children sat by him in the courtroom, smiling. He was a middle-class man. My housemate was a hippie student. Not the time. He was a productive member of society, a family man. The issue was her boyfriends.

I was harassed by the head of the theatre department at my university. The year was 1970. Sexual harassment laws were six years away from being on the books. I dropped out for ten years. I never even attempted to report it. I absolutely knew that it was not the time.
 
As a teaching assistant, I had a student react poorly to feminist perspectves of Shakespeare. He sent me a pornographic/slasher paper on “Desdemona, the Cunning Whore of Venice.”  I was terrified. I took it to the professor for the course. He met with the man and then removed all the male students from my class. These young men were protecting their right to an education that reflected their perspective. This was not the time for me to make them sounding boards for my pet theories.
 
Well… I could go on. I have worked  almost exclusively with women for more than thirty years, because I was running out of oxygen waiting for my time.

But here’s the thing:

Today, there was nothing more important that the women who were claiming to have been harassed. And thirty-three senators made that clear.
 
This is huge. I know, I know… there are millions across the country who are wringing their hands that this is not the time to lose a senator with his liberal record. There are millions who are trashing these women and their selfish priorities for not realizing that this was not the time. 
 
I know that. But still…
 
Today, a group of powerful women said, “Nothing is more important and now is the time.” And, miracle of miracles, the harasser stepped down.
 
Nothing will ever change for women as long as we keep believing that our pain is not as important as protecting the so-called good guys.