MEDIUM VS. SUBSTACK

I wrote about you on Substack

If you’re female and write on Medium, that is (Yeah, I know. Not all women…)

This is my latest Substack article, word for word. I thought I’d post it here for fun:

First. World news. We learned men’s scrotums and testicles are filled with microplastics.

God knows how the little plastic shards- ouch- got there.

What tests on testy testes did scientists conduct to discover that?

Maybe somewhere, in a scientist/doctor’s office, a pretty PhD held up a male member of a patient in one of those gowns with the see-through back, and held “it’ in one hand while looking at her watch on her other wrist, and said:

“Cough, please.”

“Hack.”

“O my God! Microplastics!”

One more. A sad note. And a frightening trend? I hope not.

I have a 14-hour flight coming up.

So it is not reassuring to learn a 73-year-old British man was killed on a Singapore Airlines flight from New York to Singapore due to turbulence. He didn’t have his seatbelt on. Twenty others were also injured. The flight was rerouted to Thailand.

The word is, with climate change, airlines may run into more such turbulence, particularly around the tropics and high mountain areas.

I recall hitting pretty hard turbulence over the Pacific.

To take my mind off the plane bucking and shaking over the Pacific Ocean five miles below, I put on my headphones to hear the group, Kansas, singing, ‘All We Are is Dust in the Wind.’

Not. Very. Reassuring.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, I’m on the writing platform, Medium.

I’ve been there six weeks.

I haven’t monetized, and I don’t expect I will for another year. I have 160 followers and nine email subscribers, so at that rate it will take a while.

I’ve written two or three articles a day there and read a lot of Medium articles.

I’ve come away with some impressions.

There are one hell of a lot of angry women on Medium.

I’ve learned, through them, the patriarchy is alive and well.

I’ve learned men should man up and ask women out for dates. If you don’t, you’re a loser.

I’ve learned women don’t need men but men sure as hell need women but men sure as hell don’t deserve them.

One 50-ish lady with a large Medium following wrote she was considering masturbating on camera for OnlyFans, because she still has “it” and she wrote something about the patriarchy was driving her her to consider it.

Lately, a theme- you may have heard of it- of choosing whether to come across a bear in the woods over seeing a male in the woods has resulted in a few articles.

The themes: Males just don’t get why we would choose a bear in the woods. A bear isn’t going to rape you and blame it on what you were wearing.

What’s remarkable to me is that these discussions are unchanged since I was in college 30 years ago. Women on Medium are writing on these topics as if they were new.

But it is more strident now.

Medium women have really doubled down.

Maybe it’s time to write the following. A story that never made the news. I was a journalism student then. This story had to do with five angry women and sexual harassment and what you could publish about it and what you couldn’t.

When I was in college I was banned from writing one story. Well. I could write it. The publisher told me he wouldn’t publish it.

It was an unusual edict. It was the only time I had ever heard our college newspaper banning a story.

I had been the lead writer for the college weekly newspaper. I loved writing and was keen on good stories as they came up. This was certainly one.
These were wax paste-up and darkroom days. One school classroom was converted into a working newspaper office. That’s where we worked.

There was a sexual harassment case in the college that went to Court of Queens Bench.

It was a sexual harassment case.

Five female college students accused a male student of sexually harassing them.

The allegations were secret. A college hearing had been held behind closed doors. What made city news was that the male had been found guilty by college process and was suspended for roughly 3 1/2 years. It really was a lifetime suspension as the male student would need significant college approval to come back.

There wasn’t much on it in our college newspaper, except that this male student had been found guilty and suspended, with few details. Some of the females were quoted in that story.

I can’t recall exactly, but one quote was, ‘It took away a big part of me.’

Another, on the college hearing: “It was hell, especially when he was laughing at us and staring.’

The following week the inside of our paper had a few articles with the gist females need to feel safe, and criminal penalties for sexual harassment needed to be increased.

The male student was forgotten about.

It was a two-year college, after all.

The five females graduated.

That sexual-harassment college hearing took place in January. In November the case came up in Court of Queens Bench, forced there by the male student.

Well. That was interesting to me.

I attended.

The male student had a few female supporters accompanying him in court.

Long story short, he won. He was readmitted back to the college.

He had graduated with one diploma, but his plans were to graduate with three, which he could have done over a four-year period. Six years post-secondary education in four years.

Not bad.

His plans had been side railed by the sexual harassment allegations but now it was all behind him and he could continue his studies after a year delay with all the legal arm wrestling he’d gone through.

So what the hell happened?

Apparently, there wasn’t a word of truth in the allegations. Not one word.

The college had provided 10 days for the five women to prepare their case from the time they came forward with their allegations to the time they were sitting in a full formal college hearing, claiming they had been sexually harassed for two years.

There was a leader among the five women. She had, just five weeks prior to the January sexual harassment case, gathered a number of female students together at the end of the previous semester, to give false and negative teaching evaluations on an instructor she didn’t like, in order to get him fired.

That college instructor dropped into the male student’s house after the male student was suspended. The instructor who had the close call, told the male student who was suspended, that the very same female conspiracy leader had tried to do him in.

That had been unsuccessful.

But almost immediately she had followed up with a near-identical effort to gather a group of females to provide false allegations of sexual harassment to get a male suspended from the college. That effort had been spectacularly successful.

She had convinced a pack of females- not sure if they were the same group or parts of the same group- to gang up on the male student, using college authority as their unsuspecting hammer.

There were some interesting details never made public.

During the behind-closed-door hearing, the male was yelled at, bullied and berated by the committee chairman. Sneering questions were put to him. Meanwhile, the five women were purred at, reassured.

The women were well prepared. All five came dressed identically for the hearing, each in matching white. Matching white shoes, matching white socks, matching white skirts, matching white tops.

The women had ten days to put their case together, with four sympathetic college advisors. The male had 20 hours by the clock notice for the sexual harassment hearing. He was provided four pages of sexual harassment allegations, with dates and times of the offences, and four pages of college rules in a five minute information session.

There was another information session he was told to attend the following morning that would take place before the hearing, but when he went to attend that, he was kicked out. Apparently it was for the females only.

He hadn’t read the allegations before his hearing. He was too stunned, too much in shock. He was on his heels the entire time as the morning hearing progressed. The five-panel committee judging the matter, apparently took that as a sign of his guilt.

One of the five women rose during the hearing and cried out, very emotional, “What do we have to do? Stand on a chair and scream?”

When the poor fellow was able to read the allegations, which he did after the college hearing process was over- for which there was no appeal- a few things struck him as odd.

One was he knew- but it didn’t come to mind during the hearing- that the young woman who stood and cried out, wasn’t in the college for the entire academic year in which she claimed she was harassed- and for what she had four witnesses. Wearing white. She had actually been living in a city 700 kilometres away. She hadn’t been a college student that academic year. She hadn’t even been living in that city for that academic year. But she had four eye-witnesses, so her claims passed muster.

Also, none- none- of the five women were his classmates for that academic year.

It didn’t make sense that the college wouldn’t know. But that’s how little investigation there had been. Even the college attendance record hadn’t been referred to. The women were believed from the start. This was a good two decades before, “Believe all women.”

What was remarkable to me is that he didn’t understand for the longest time- a good month- was that he had been had. That this had been a conspiracy- one hell of a conspiracy, so vile, and so organized, and so supported by the college, and it had all been one big false- what would the word be?- Is there such a word to describe this? I can’t think of one.

So he went to the police.

The police weren’t interested.

He went to the Crown Prosecutors office.

They told him it was a police matter or a civil matter.

So he went to a civil lawyer.

He wanted the women brought into court.

He was told a civil case was expensive, and that the female students didn’t have any money.

One of the five women, the leader of both conspiracies, the one who tried to remove the college instructor and then himself, had apparently moved to the American state of California. He was told he would have to fly her up to Canada at his expense- she would have to volunteer for this- he couldn’t force her- then put her up in a hotel room, at his expense, feed her at his expense- and she had a child- so feed the both of them at his expense, for the duration of the time it would take to get the issue into court, which would take about a year. If he was lucky.

And that was just one of the five.

He was advised it would be best if he sued the college for unfair procedure.

The fellow thought that was insane, as it would be likely, if he did, that each of these five women would get away without any penalty at all.

Which is what happened. The women never received any admonishment. No penalty. Instead, they were thought of as exceedingly brave. They were supported.

The fellow won in court- he was lucky to have some financial resources.

That was very lucky. How many college students have that?

He returned to the college.

He lasted one semester.

He found he was afraid to walk hallways.

Sitting in classrooms gave him panic attacks.

If a female student sat near him he would have to leave and go outside.

He found it impossible to continue his education.

He was done.

That story didn’t make the newspaper.