Last month, the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl – as preordained by Soros, according to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists anyway. And for all the complaints about excessive NFL coverage of Taylor Swift, her critics made sure she remained in headlines by accusing her of Satanism. And here I thought one of her videos featured snakes because people called her one, not because she was repaying her dark master with a cameo.
I’d say I should have seen it coming, but I did. My first novel A Better Me has an appearance by a fictional pop star named Tiffany Sharp that includes everyone from the aforementioned Swift to Britney Spears (spears are sharp, get it?) in her DNA. Sharp will reappear as the main character in Fallen, the fourth book of my Masquerade series. She gets falsely accused of being a changeling, putting a serious dent in her career and squeaky clean image. The premise was partly inspired by all those doofy Illuminati rumors plaguing social media. I was going to take a break from the series to release an unrelated novel, but I feel like I’m in a race against time. If reality could avoid any loose parallels with the more cataclysmic plot points to come, that would be great.
My apologies for being facetious about the risk of the (human) world ending before I complete my artistic vision. In between working and parenting, I’m grieving for the ongoing loss of life in Israel and Gaza – and Ukraine, and Sudan, and the Congo, and anywhere else in turmoil, including the U.S. as bogus culture wars continue to threaten democracy at home and abroad.
A non-binary child was recently beaten in a bathroom matching their assigned gender at birth, and later died due to injuries sustained. It’s actually the second time teenage girls beat another teeanger to death in a U.S. bathroom, but this time it relates to dangerous ongoing rhetoric against the trans community. Surely, the same group of women who sold us out in 2016 would take a break from anti-trans rhetoric. But no…no, they have not – even when reminded anti-trans policies ultimately hurt all women, black women in particular (a feature, not a bug). And many of the same men feigning concern for the sanctity of women’s sports dismiss women athletes as inferior out the other side of their mouths. That’s when I had an embarrassingly obvious epiphany. This trans athlete debate exists to distract women from real issues like threats to reproductive healthcare (birth control is next) and self-actualization.
Just let people live – figuratively and literally.
Meanwhile one of the latest viral trends is #tradwives: influencers cosplaying as a romanticized 1950s housewife ideal for fame and easy money from angry insecure men with a chip on their shoulder – what can possibly go wrong?
The obvious grift is as icky as it is transparent. One influencer includes a lot of closeups of her cleavage. Another films her little girl training to be a housewife. I find the former too comical to be taken seriously, but the latter is horrifying considering the target audience. I’m reminded of ongoing social media issues like moms managing instagram accounts for minors and having them interact with grown men, or the Ruby Franke child abuse case.
The exploitation of minors is not limited to Hollywood.
Commodifying women and children is one of the oldest family traditions. Marriage as an institution often involved an exchange of wealth. Parents had children to put them to work or marry them off, and in some cases still do.
People who long for a return to the “good old days” romanticize the large families of bygone eras but ignore the dates on their tombstones. Child mortality rates were much higher before vaccines and other modern health innovations. Now we’re seeing a rise in anti-vax propaganda and formerly eradicated diseases.
Some politicians and corporations are working to undo child labor protections despite a rise in accidental death or injury. When they praise traditional or family values, they mean ‘value’ as in monetary. It’s as deceptive as the pro-life movement (1, 2). They don’t care about children. The so-called “party of family values” has even said their lives are the price of freedom (freedom meaning unregulated gun access.) We see similar disregard for children abroad. They’re reduced to bargaining chips and collateral damage.
Meanwhile Alabama recently ruled frozen embryos are children. As satirist John Oliver said, “If you freeze an embryo, it’s fine. If you freeze a person, you have some explaining to do.” The unfortunate circumstances demonstrate the complexity of reproduction, and the absurdity of defining embryos as children. And if the consideration is for the sanctity of life, then why is Alabama among the states rolling back child labor protections?
