Warning: This is for those who still don't Get It. Not the others. Also, I have just met a work deadline. Also, I have just had a glass of wine. Therefore, this diarist is in a take no prisoners, no apologies mode.
Read my lips.
Courage and masculinity are not the same. Men are not any braver than women.
Courage and "balls" should not be used synonymously. Doing so is a huge insult to women. So STFU with that stuff already.
Hey -- what set HER off?
This.
"
There's a pair of testicles somewhere between the Capital Building and the White House that fell off the president after Election Day [2008]," said Davis, an Air Force colonel who spent two years as the chief prosecutor of Guantanamo military commissions, during an interview at his Washington, DC, office over the summer and in email correspondence over the past several months.
Extra resonance in the metaphorical de-balling of a man who also happens to be black? I'm not even going to go there. I don't freakin' even have to go there.
Men don't freakin' own the quality of courage. Equating the quality of courage with the possession of a couple of dangling appendages -- precious as they are to their possessors (and some of the rest of us!) -- is a freakin' insult.
"Balls" and "recklessness," yeah, we could probably justify that. They're not synonymous, but at least there's a correclation. "Balls" and "violent crime" -- a statistical doddle. "Balls" and "courage," no.
You want proof of that? Well, open your eyes and ears. There are so many examples out there -- in pertinent part, among whistleblowers -- that if you require them pointed out to you, you are actively resisting, and there is no point in our engaging.
You want "proof" that equating "balls" with "courage" is a freakin' insult to more than half of the human race? If you don't get it when it is first pointed out, you're likely hopeless too, but try imagining a world where "brave" and "vaginal" are synonymous, while "brave" connected with "balls" is ridiculous, and how you would like THAT.
Yeah -- Davis is military and we all know how military guys in basic training are or used to be (I hope used to be) motivated to try harder by being called "pussies" and the like. For decades military men were trained to define themselves as admirable versus the despised female, the lesser beings, the convenient acessories and (especially if non-white and foreign) disposable recreations of the male military machine.
Davis should be ashamed to talk that way. He owes an apology.
Truthout (the website with the story) should be ashamed to quote him approvingly. They owe an apology also.
And for all the unregenerate, this is for you:
1) "I bite my thumb at you." --Shakespeare
1) "Bulls have no balls." -- Hemingway
2) "Nice marmot." -- "The Big Lebowski"