Gail Z. Martin

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Warren’s experience mirrors every professional woman’s life and career

Guest post from Gail Z. Martin

Here we go again, proving that we as a nation can’t handle a competent woman in charge.

The most telling paragraph from an article about Warren’s drop from the race: “She was hypersensitive to public criticism and tended to overcorrect in her efforts to ensure her competence. Her responses often earned her more criticism, not less.” OMFG, that’s the story of every professional woman’s life and career. Remember the old joke that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did—only backwards, and in high heels? The gallows humor about women needing to be twice as good to get half as far? Those are painfully funny because they’re true.

When Hillary lost to DT, we showed that we’d decided the presidency was an entry-level job, no experience necessary—that we would accept a reality TV star and many-times bankrupted failed businessman rather than a woman so competent she scared the Russians. Now Warren is out of the race. Who do you think worried the Russians more—Biden, Sanders or Warren?

Warren had a plan for everything—-which got criticized—-as men without a detailed plan or the guy who doesn’t believe any experts keep winning. Baggage? Nothing that even compares to almost all of the male candidates at every level that have ever gotten elected (and re-elected).

Yes, I will vote for whatever blue candidate gets nominated, which at this point is certain to be another old white guy—-maybe even the one who says he’d take a Republican as his VP. (And how, exactly, is that going to create any change at all, when we’ve seen no willingness for the GOP to rein in Dear Leader, no matter how he shreds the constitution?)

Please, no attempts to mansplain why Warren is so much worse than the men. I am just so fed up with this country’s utter disdain for women that I could howl at the moon.

Gail Z. Martin is a novelist who writes thrilling fantasy and science fiction adventures. Her web page is here.

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Why women remain silent about sexual assault

by Guest Blogger Gail Z. Martin

I’ve seen some posters say “I don’t know why women who run into a Harvey Weinstein don’t just say ‘no’ or report him.”

For the same reason that a bunch of powerful, wealthy white men (senators and congressmen) are putting up with our Abuser-in-Chief. Look what happens to the people who say no. weinstein trumpThey are fired, mocked, publicly humiliated, demeaned, have their qualifications discredited, their character assassinated and get pilloried in the court of public opinion. 45s loyalists troll them on social media and in sympathetic news media. They’ll be cut out of lucrative deals and not invited to business and social events where important things happen and movers and shakers talk. Favors and contracts will be withheld. A whisper in an ear will close doors on new jobs or plum appointments. And while 45 may not swing a punch, we see plenty of angry sympathizers ready to escalate to violence with a hint of permission that are scary enough to make anyone hesitate to rock the boat.

This is how abusers work, whether it’s a small-town bully, a gaslighting boyfriend or an emotionally abusive father. The pattern against those who are targeted or who dare to speak out or say no is ignore, mock, discredit, isolate, demean, destroy.

Intimidation is abuse.

So if Congress can be intimidated by a master abuser, let’s not throw shade on young actors and actresses who knew that no one would have listened to them when they were ‘nobody’ against a powerful person who had the ability to destroy their lives.

Gail Z. Martin is a novelist who writes thrilling fantasy and science fiction adventures. her web page is here.

 

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Clock blocked

by Guest Blogger Gail Z. Martin

I know there are good public school teachers and good principals. My kids have had some great teachers over the years, and I have friends whom I know are fantastic teachers.

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Do you think the fact that this was a Muslim boy named Ahmed instead of a freckle-faced blonde kid named “Skippy” might have made a difference?

And then there are the paranoid idiots. We’ve had some of those through the years, too. My two oldest daughters, both straight-A, Advanced Placement students, were so excited that when they went to college, they no longer had to have an armed guard assigned to them in order to use the bathroom.

Yeah. We call it ‘partner peeing’. Even the guards seemed to be embarrassed about it, but it was school policy because…..bathrooms.

As a parent, you have to protect your kids by anticipating how idiots think. I warned my kids not to turn in any creative writing assignments that might be interpreted as violent or depressed because there’d be a teacher out there speed-dialing DSS unable to believe someone could have imagined something not real (see definition of ‘imagined’). My son wanted to wear his trench coat one day when it rained and he had to wear a suit for a presentation. I didn’t let him because I didn’t want to run into some teacher who thinks trench coats are evil (google ‘trench coat mafia’ if you don’t remember). Ditto doodling. When I was in high school, the boys used to doodle all kinds of weapons, explosives, and …ahem…anatomically correct elements on the covers of their notebooks. Now that would be a fast-track to the front office, with a paddywagon waiting.

One year, the school district banned the wearing of plain white t-shirts because….gangs. (Apparently gangs with absolutely no fashion sense.) Last year they sent home threatening letters promising to suspend any kid who didn’t wear his/her school photo ID to school (and then didn’t actually issue the photo IDs for two months, and dropped the whole thing by January). There’s plenty of crazy to go around.

The White House response

So here we have it, a smart kid who will probably end up founding the next Apple or Microsoft or inventing a break-through artificial organ or building some kind of amazing new technology, not only arrested for building a clock, but facing a police chief who made this statement: “Chief Larry Boyd said that the teen should have been ‘forthcoming’ by going beyond the description that what he made was a clock.” (CNN). HOW, exactly, can you be forthcoming about saying a clock is a clock? Perhaps a thesaurus listing of synonyms?

We need not only more money to hire better teachers and retain good teachers, but also a shift in our culture to value smart people instead of seeing them as someone to be mocked or frightened of.

I hope this kid and his parents sue the school and the cops and win a big enough settlement to send him to the best engineering schools in the country. And they’d better get that ‘arrest’ expunged from his record while they’re at it.

Gail Z. Martin is a novelist who writes thrilling fantasy and science fiction adventures. Her latest novel is the steampunk adventure “Iron Blood.” Read my recent interview with her here!