If you’re unacquainted with Judith Butler, you’re in for a real treat. Judith Butler “is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.” If you don’t agree with her ideas about gender, you are a fascist.

Her latest pronoun of choice is they, but I will refer to her as she because (1.) she is a single, and not plural, unit and (2.) I  just feel like it. She is a professor at Berkeley and has received 14 honorary degrees. In other words, she is a big deal. According to many, she is among the most influential intellectuals alive today.

Let’s start with this: In her book Gender Trouble, Butler claims that biological sex, like gender, is socially constructed, with its physical manifestations mattering only to the degree society assigns them meaning. Well, no. I would say nice try, but no.  Gender critical feminists (i.e. feminists who aren’t on board with her ideas) come in for some of her most scathing attacks. They are the victims of “phantasmatic” anxieties and also are big stupid liars whom she compares to Richard Nixon, of all people.

Personally, I don’t give a shit about gender, or not enough of a shit to ponder its meaning. I came across Butler in a critique of her assertion that the events of Oct. 7 constitute “resistance.”  Reading her put forth this idea, I thought, “Who is this pretentious idiot?”

I was delighted to find that she had won first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature – a prize given to “the ugliest, most stylistically awful” sentence submitted by its readers . Here is her winning sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

You have to love her, right? I mean, she gave us the concept of gender performativity!Wikipedia notes that

Butler also explores how gender can be understood not only as a performance, but also as a “constitutive constraint,” or constructed character. They ask how this conceptualization of an individual’s gender contributes to notions of bodily intelligibility, or comprehension, by other individuals. Butler continues to discuss bodily intelligibility by means of sex as a “materialized” entity, upon which cultural, collective ideals of gender can be built. From this angle, Butler interrogates value conscription upon various bodies as determined theories and practices of heterosexual predominance.

Whatever. I suggest that you don’t waste your brain cells trying to decipher this gibberish, just be aware that you’re not allowed to object to any of it. If you’re a woman (a human born with a reproductive system that produces eggs) or a non-man, as some gender identity theorists might say, you are a TERF  for taking issue with Judith Butler. If you’re a man, I don’t know what happens. Probably you’re just a homophobic colonialist defender of the patriarchy.

Please do your own research on Judith Butler, I promise you it is more fun and rewarding than anything you can do online besides getting into arguments on Instagram. Also, note that I didn’t title this “Judith Butler: What a fucking cunt!” She’s more of an irritant, albeit a uniquely flagrant one. And I realize she is low-hanging fruit, but try to resist taking a whack at her!

© Stephan Andrade

I went to a Christmas party at the home of one of my husband’s friends, even though I was close to backing out at the last minute. Backing out of things has been my m.o. for most of my life, but I’m making an effort to get out and socialize. God knows I’m sick of my own company.

The host was a lovely and talented young man who can play any stringed instrument and cooked up an incredible feast, including a salmon mousse. His apartment is right beneath the Hollywood sign, and was cozy and festive. I greeted him and his family and went straight to the food.

I met his mom for the first time and fell in love with her. She confided that having retired, all she does is read 19th century novels and watch murder TV! THAT’S ALL I DO, TOO!!! She has read all of Trollope, twice. I would marry her if I could.

A guy named B overheard us talking and later came up to me to say, I know you like 19th century novels but do you also read any modern novels? I replied that I have no interest in contemporary fiction because I’m too much of a book snob. You’d think that would be the end of it but no.

He proceeded to mention a few writers I’ve never heard of but even their names were middlebrow. He asked, Don’t you want to know what younger people today are thinking about? I said, “No, I have younger friends so I already know their perspective.” He didn’t like this answer and then told me about Jennifer Something, who has written three novels, and went on to describe the plots of each one.

I stood politely trying not to have a heart attack from anxiety and frustration. Why was he torturing me? When he finally paused, I asked him if he likes short stories, thinking maybe we had that in common. He said he occasionally reads the fiction in the New Yorker. Now here was something I had an opinion on! I said, “Don’t you think that the New Yorker fiction is always” but he turned and walked away.

I sat down next to a nice woman I’ve met before and we talked about the stress of being online. We agreed that the current climate is especially tense and divisive. She noted that it annoyed her how many people denied there was a “genocide going on in Palestine.” As a Jewish Jew, I countered with, “Yeah, and the people who don’t believe Israeli women were raped and tortured!” Luckily, we agreed that miniature donkeys are adorable.

Later, I met a lovely couple who had family in Jerusalem. The husband, who was French, confided, “I hate Netanyahu” to which I interjected something like Duh, it’s a given, “but I hate Hamas more.” We talked about the worldwide explosion of antisemitism. They both has interesting jobs and asked me what I do. I blurted out, “Nothing. I am nothing.” Luckily my husband was in earshot and he leaned in and said, “She’s a writer.”

I noticed a very thin woman dressed in black and wearing a big fedora. Women who wear hats are one of my pet peeves so I instinctively disliked her. I heard her say, “This is my husband, Steve.” Suddenly, I recalled an awful woman on Instagram who used to keep referring to her husband Steve. I remember that Steve bought her a $10,000 engagement ring. I sat down with my phone and went to Instagram. Yes, it was that awful woman! I was so pleased with myself that I looked around to see if there was anyone I could gloat to. Obviously, I restricted gloating to my husband.

Back at the food table, I started talking to a debonair looking guy in a black shirt who had silver hair and a matching beard. I asked him if he was a musician, since most of the guests were musicians as well as the host. He said yes, and we started talking about song lyrics. He was saying something about how you often didn’t know what your lyrics were really about until you performed the song. I went on a short rant about how a bad lyric. or even a stupid word in the lyric, ruined the whole song for me. I ended with, “a stupid cliched lyric is like an electric shock!” He looked kind of bemused.

While driving home, my husband praised me for ignoring a guy named Richard, who I hate with the force of a thousand suns. I was flabbergasted. I said, “WHAT? RICHARD WAS THERE?” I  was stunned. I couldn’t believe I never noticed him!

I asked my husband if he knew a guy named Jackson, who I discussed lyrics with. He said, “Yeah, that was Jackson Browne.”

What a night! Merry Christmas to those who celebrate and even to those who don’t. xo

This morning I said “I hate you” to my toothpaste, and I meant it. Every time I use it, the tube needs to be unclogged. It’s been a while since I last said I Hate You to an inanimate object, although I scream it at the TV several times a day. Alternating with “Just DIE already!”

I remembered writing something I called a Hatefest, and when I found it, I was impressed by how comprehensive it is. I know for a fact that I’m still as full of hate, if not more so, than when I wrote it. But my powers of recall and word retrieval are shit. Yesterday I couldn’t remember the word for lint, and tried “fluff” instead.

But back to hate, I am suspicious of people who claim not to hate anyone. Ever. Have you encountered these people? I’ve married two of them. They maintain that hatred is unknown to them. They dislike people, yes, but don’t hate. I used to imagine their mommies admonishing them as children, “No, we never hate! We dislike.” I remember a childhood friend whose mom told us, “We don’t say ‘I’m mad’! Say ‘I’m aggravated!'”

But these non-haters insist that it’s not that; it’s just an emotion they don’t experience. My latest theory is that they hate as much as us haters, but they just name it something else, like anger or revulsion or something. It’s just semantics.

(Unless it’s alexithymia, i.e. the inability to express or identify your emotions, a whole other story.)

If you can’t name at least 5 people you hate, just go away. Or get a note from your doctor.

Let the Hatefest begin!

Taylor Swift
Swiftees
Madonna
The Row
Laura Ingraham
Laura Trump
IvankaTrump
Jared Kushner
Imagine Dragons
That guy in the Strokes
J. Lo
the word “cropped” when applied to clothing
“how’s that working for you?”
Tom Ford
John Hamm
flavored coffee
Mitch McConnell
pro-lifers
butterfly tattoos
new words for homeless
Shein
proving I’m not a robot
Cormac McCarthy
Golden Goose sneakers
The Kardashians
David Duchovny
duck lips
my ex-husband
TikTok
memes
Chihuahuas
celebrity interviews
“got any plans for the weekend?”
Anna Wintour
Jack Harlow
Noam Chomsky
Anais Nin
Star Wars
MAGA
erectile dysfunction commercials
Steely Dan
people who call their dogs “rescues”
celebrities named Hailey
that awful guy who was married to Lisa Bonet
Doja Cat
Coco Chanel
hard seltzer
people who drink hard seltzer

That’s it for starters.

What did I leave out?

I have already confessed to being at a loss for words to adequately describe the abomination that is Donald Trump. But recently, one thing I keep thinking after watching the news is how utterly without redeeming features he is. My default analogy is that at least Hitler loved dogs. And music. And had some actual talent as a painter.

I was thinking of this yesterday while walking my dog (shout out to Hitler!) and started to mentally review the dictators I’m most familiar with, to compare them to Trump. Qaddafi came to mind first, and he had the redeeming feature of great style. He’s one up on Trump right there!

So let’s review historic dictators to see if any are as worthless as Donald Trump.

Stalin excelled in seminary school and earned a scholarship to Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894. Good job, Stalin! Your dad didn’t have to pay to get you accepted!

Castro went to law school and was passionate about social justice.

Saddam Hussein also went to law school on his own merits and “did much to modernize Iraq’s infrastructure, industry and health-care system, and raised social services, education and farming subsidies to levels unparalleled in other Arab countries in the region.” Well done, Saddam!

Kim Jong-un was educated in Switzerland and after his father’s death, implemented some economic and agricultural reforms. Not bad, Kim Jong-un!

Mussolini was a journalist who studied Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. (Trump = Covfefe)

Mobutu Sese Seko, with his trademark leopard-skin cap and carved wooden staff, was a a true style icon, and I’m still looking for a facsimile of that hat.

Pol Pot played the violin and was fluent in French.

Augusto Pinochet taught classes in military geography and geopolitics and was the editor of a magazine, Cien Águilas (‘One Hundred Eagles’).

François Duvalier aka Papa Doc was a physician, and was active in a United States–sponsored campaign to control the spread of contagious tropical diseases, helping the poor to fight typhus, yaws, and malaria. He was also a master of Haitian Vodou! Who among us doesn’t love Haitian Vodou?

I could go on, but you see my point here. That bastard Donald Trump is the most patently worthless human being in the history of the world.  Why did god make him? I heard a guy on TV noting Trump’s “incandescent stupidity and malevolence.” Incandescent gave me a little thrill. If only I could be as elegant in expressing my contempt!

All I can do is take comfort in his notable hair-loss and commensurate panic as I try not to think of him winning the next presidential election. If that comes to pass, there won’t be enough cyanide capsules in the world to put us out of our misery.

I admit I’m not a poetry lover. I don’t even like poetry. I like it better when it rhymes, like the Ancient Mariner. Sometimes I read the poetry in The New Yorker, and inevitably sneer or mutter “Jesus Christ.” I used to think it was a failure on my part, but now I’m comfortable with all of my biases.

I once had a job that involved stupid magazines with stupid ads for suckers, like devices to enlarge your breasts overnight. One of the ads was for a poetry contest, that was clearly a scam. It was something like “YOU TOO COULD BE A POET! ENTER THIS CONTEST AND WIN $10,000!”

I showed it to my young teenager and we decided to send in a poem to find out what the scam was. It was back in 1990, but I still remember laughing as we took turns composing it. Max was reading Stephen King at the time, who was a master of the idiotic mixed metaphor, and you can see the Stephen King influence throughout.

Sure enough, our poem won an Honorable Mention! and we could see it published in a nice anthology for only $49.95! We decided to pass. *If you want to try this too, go here.

Keeping in mind my disappreciation for poetry, I was excited to discover a poem by my husband’s ex-wife, my bête noire and the Anti-me. While I try to follow her monthly column in her community newspaper, somehow the poem escaped my attention until now. “Escaped my attention” is the kind of thing she would write, so I apologize, but she would have prefaced it with “hitherto.”

I won’t pretend to “get” this poem; You don’t need to get it to enjoy it, right? But once I figured out its subject, I was inspired to write my own elegy:

Ode To The Tennessee 3

What fresh hell is this! Voting
To kick them out for
Protesting

Even the fat white lady knew how
Wrong
This was. Plus

The 2 young black guys
Are so hot!
Especially the Brother with
The earring and long hair

I even followed
Him
On Instagram.

I shared it with my friend M, a published novelist and hardcore fan of the Ex’s work, and he countered with this:

Tennessee 3 braving
and behaving
No
The guy with the Afro is the hotter of the 2

Whew! I’d hate to have to pick the winner here, but I would love to pick the winner of your entries! So, (YOU TOO COULD BE A POET!) please submit a poem about the Tennessee Three and the winner will get a nice certificate! If anyone out there is an artist, you can help design it.

Don’t be shy! There are no losers, only winners!

Annual lists of new words are usually a treasure trove of portmanteau and tech slang, with something for everyone to screech “EW!” about. The American Dialect Society’s list for 2022 is rich in both, predominately youth culture slang that slipped right by me, like “rizz.” I  generally like to keep up, but not knowing what rizz means was actually a blessing in disguise. In fact, it’s such an annoying word  that I’m choosing to believe it doesn’t even exist (like “goblin mode”).

Getting back to The American Dialect Society, its word for 2022 is the suffix “-ussy” from “pussy”

(as in “bussy” = “boy pussy,” now humorously attached to many
words) also -ussification: the process of creating new blended words with the -ussy suffix.

Runners-up included “quiet quitting”, “nepo baby”, “Dark Brandon”, and BFFR.

Words and terms about gender issues have proliferated in the last year, and here it’s hard not to sound reactionary in response to how difficult they are to navigate. In 2018, Amherst College posted a document titled Common Language Guide, with a 40 page glossary of terms serving “a need to come to a common and shared understanding of language…around identity, privilege, oppression and inclusion.”

Uh-oh. Here’s how the guide defines heterosexuality:

“A term developed as diagnosis of the hyper-infatuation with a different sex, first used by sexologist Karl-Maria Kertbeny in 1868…. [It] is used today to denote the normalized dominant sexual identity.”

Hmph! Now I feel a little less-than, know what I mean? I was comfortable with being hetero but now I see I might need to apologize for it. The definition of femininity is more strident, so brace yourselves. It includes the subtle admonishment, “Performing femininity in a culturally established way is expected of people assigned female at birth.” In this view, femininity is fraudulent, a performance, unless you’re queer or trans.

The  guide warns against “homonormativity,” or

the ever-present phenomenon where members of the LGBTQ+ community subscribe to heteronormative approximations of intimate, romantic and sexual lives that are the product of white, neoliberal (capitalist), sexist, transmisogynistic and cissexist norms.

And that’s fine, up to a point. That point would be the inability to converse with other humans without stepping into a minefield of acronyms designed to recognize categories of “identity.” Yesterday, I encountered the term “persons with male bodies” for the first time. Keep it up, you guys (okay, not “guys, how about “comrades?) and life will be one big microaggression.

Apparently, the document has been removed from the college website but I feel enriched by learning the term transmisogynoir (“the marginalization of black trans women and trans feminine people that is inclusive of transphobia, racism, and misogyny, and how all of these intersect.”) Now that’s a wonderful portmanteau, not as good  as mansplaining but still music to the ear.

Just yesterday, I read the word “manfluencer” and laughed out loud. Adding man as a prefix, like mancave and manosphere, is always fun, but I hunger for more and better manonyms, like the one I made up to describe male sulking: “mannui” (pronounced, duh, män-wee). At the same time, I can’t stand terms with lady thrown in, like “ladyboner,” ladyparts, or even Lady Gaga. Words can have different effects on different people, but some are universally disliked (moist) or enjoyed (gossamer). Just recently, I’ve been especially sensitive to “lived experience.” It’s so, so awful.

Young people today are inventing words that infantalize, like lil, smol, feels, and adulting, which handily explains their entire stance. Good for them. I’m just glad I can still use dope and wack to signal my feels, in case they are interested. And I have my own list of words that I’m ready to banish for 2023. Here they are:

Yassss (a perennial scourge, like “journey”)
thicc
thirsty
fam
main character
if I’m honest
GOAT
check all the boxes
understood the assignment
pro tip
cringe
fire

But here’s something to feel good about: Compared to their older counterparts, Gen Z are more concerned about how they use slang in conversation. Nearly half (46%) of Gen Z Americans worry about using slang terms incorrectly, compared to 32% of Baby Boomers.

Love to see it.

As I’m always saying, words matter! Unless you excel at interpretive dance, use them with care. Or to quote Jules in Pulp Fiction: English, Motherfucker!

*disclosure: Some have expressed concern about my absence. I’m finding it hard to write, due to senility and existential malaise. So don’t worry, I’m still here. Sort of. xo

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a long piece about an awful socialite nobody’s ever heard of and called her “The New Queen of L.A.” One of the descriptive terms applied to her that I enjoyed was:  Ms. Staudinger is a voracious content consumer.

In the same conversation, she’ll recommend a documentary on music in 1971, a book on Los Angeles in 1974 and a TikTok she saw about brain vibrations.

Whoever she is, there were 650 comments complaining about her lack of appeal and importance. But I now refer to myself as a voracious content consumer, because I can’t stop trying to consume “content” in the hope that I will become a better person once I know everything about everything.

This compulsive consumption takes up nearly all my waking hours. I subscribe to fifty thousand newsletters covering politics, art, pop culture, psychology, books, even one from a Christian Ministry for its philosophical essays. I have to read all of them or at least scan them. I get the NYT online, and I have to read all the breaking news, then I have to decide which features to read: the Op-Eds, the heartbreaking human interest pieces, the latest celebrity-adjacent suicide, the film reviews, the health tips, the latest tech, the bemused shit about Those Kids and Their TikTok, and more. Basically, everything but sports. Thank god I hate sports.

Then I have to open all the email from shopping sites that promise to help me look like a French It-Girl. Then I have to scroll through Instagram before googling Pete Davidson.

I still worry that I’m missing  something important. It makes me anxious. But I haven’t been able to stop or even cut back in this stupid endeavor. My brain is filled with information that I don’t have time to process or make use of.

And it stops me from writing! I can’t tell if the stuff I’m dwelling on is interesting to anyone but me. And I don’t want to regurgitate the accepted wisdom of the day. Because we live in “an Attention Economy” according to a billion think-pieces.

Here’s what is foremost in my mind though:

How long will Donald Trump be tormenting us with his existence?
Why won’t Gym Jordan wear a jacket?
Are they kidding about Hunter Biden’s fucking laptop?
Why does Elon Musk want the whole world to hate him?
Is Morpheus8 better than Softwave?
Is silicone really that bad for your hair?
Why aren’t religious people concerned about who made god?
Why did Jane Aldridge marry that creepy gay guy?
Why do we take antidepressants when they’re only slightly more effective than placebos?
Why do people now say “If I’m being honest” instead of “to be honest” ?
Why is everybody writing about the crisis facing men and boys?*
Can we value any experience without documenting it?
Why can’t we explain the persistence of antisemitism?*
Why are people still impressed by luxury brands?
What happens when young people aspire to be Influencers instead of astronauts?
Why can’t we ever get enough of Jeffrey Dahmer?

* I plan to write about these topics because they continue to fascinate me, as soon as I stop voraciously consuming more content. Do you think I should bother? Let me know.

Meanwhile, I’m compiling a file of all-new stupendously egregious denim! Stand by for that too.

I’m Glad My Mom Died is the title of a new memoir by a former child actress I’ve never heard of, and it’s a best seller. It has received more attention than any other recent book that’s not about Donald Trump, and the response to it seems uniformly favorable.

For all I know, Jeanette McCurdy is a good writer. But it’s the shocking title that seems to please reviewers most. How daring of her! Good for her! The book is a chronicle of abuse by a terrible, exploitative and seemingly mentally ill stage mother whose conduct sounds like something from a Grimms’ Fairy Tale.

But now the mom is safely dead from cancer and Jeanette is sharing her story of suffering and redemption all over the internet to hearty accolades, not least from others who hate their parents and share her bold sentiment. A piece in the Huffington Post reveals that “it’s not uncommon to feel that way.” Uh-oh.

Naturally, as a mother I find this chilling. As a mother estranged from an adult child, I can’t help feeling the title embodies my worst fears. I know my adult child wants nothing to do with me for reasons only he understands. I mean, I know I wasn’t perfect and I yelled a lot. And abuse is in the eye, and narrative, of the self-proclaimed abused party.

But it pains me to think that my death will actually be celebrated, you know? I guess it won’t matter since I won’t be around to be horrified.

Back when I learned about forums for adult children who hate their mothers, I had to stop looking at their posts when someone admitted to feeling no grief upon losing their parent. They weren’t exactly proud of their reaction, like Jeanette seems to be, but rather a little defensive. The other mommy-haters on the forum reassured the griefless adult child that they looked forward to the death of their parent and the relief it would bring.

Since I can only speak for myself, and my own narrative of my experience as both a mother and an adult child of a mother, I guess it’s not for me to judge these damaged victims of bad parents. But it seems like the title “I’m Glad My Mom Died” is somehow acceptable in today’s zeitgeist (sorry!) of proud victimhood and trauma survivors, whereas the title “I’m Glad My Daughter Died” would never be published, let alone applauded.

Is it because it’s reasonable to hate your mom but not your daughter? What about “I’m Glad My Dog Died” or even “I’m Glad My Neighbor Died’? None of these work, do they?

My guess is it’s because the Awful Mother is now a staple of our cultural landscape, from Carrie to Mommy Dearest and beyond.

Mother’s can’t win, is my feeling. The best of us are still not good enough, although Donald Winnicott disagrees. (More about the concept of the good-enough mother here.) Our mistakes engender bitter resentments that time cannot eradicate for many. But it’s my belief that whatever you do as a parent will be wrong. All you can do is try your hardest to make the best decisions you can, to get help if you see you’re fucking up, and to love your kids unconditionally.

I’ve come to forgive my mother for her shortcomings and her bad behavior with the awareness that she was a complicated person shaped by her own difficult childhood. I’m not glad she died; I’m screwed up but I’m not heartless.

Jennette McCurdy tells an interviewer somewhat self-righteously that she’s “done the work” to earn the right to her title. Whatever that means. Is she sorry she was born? I’d like to ask her that. Because she owes her existence to her mother, which is not nothing.

And now she’s making a fortune by speaking Her Truth about her mother. She also complains in the book about her Nickelodeon co-star Ariana Grande’s greater success, which could lead to another brave best seller if Ariana could only die.

Just kidding! You do you, mommy haters.

Thoughts and insults, anyone?

* Giaquinto di Corrado Bottega, Medea, 1752, Hinton Ampner National Trust

A Pat Benatar song came on the car radio the other day and I was instantly reminded of a blog post I wrote years ago about antinatalism.

Antinatalism is the belief that it’s morally wrong to have children. Why is it wrong? Because “life is harm” and because the unborn is unable to give consent.

On the face of it, this argument is just nuts. I mean, it’s unconscious knowledge that this is nuts. By unconscious knowledge, I mean instinctual knowledge. We may also find it self-evident that a person who believes that “life is harm” is a deeply unhappy person.

But in trying to refresh my memory on the lunacy of antinatalism, I came across an essay that tries to refute the idea that antinatalism is a philosophy borne of depression. Yeah, well, some depressed people may see things more realistically than an incurable optimist, but it’s inherent in the illness to see the world in distorted ways that only therapy or meds can modify. (The most well-known proponent of antinatalism is a guy who insists on strict privacy about his private life so that we can’t extrapolate anything from his history or psychological make-up. Hint: He is miserable.)

Anyway, Pat Benatar caused me to go back and read the post from 2008, and just as I recall, the comments are hilarious. Comment threads like these have kept me writing here for a million years, and while they don’t occur very often, they are pure joy. I hope you will go read that post and then laugh your heads off at the comments.

And I hope you will be moved to comment here, so we can laugh some more.

A thread on Facebook caught my attention last week. It was on a neighborhood page, where the Discourse is usually confined to incensed complaints about the homeless and reports of lost cats. This one was posted by an administrator and titled “Ask an atheist.” It was an invitation for questions, and the thread was, miraculously for fb, respectful.

One guy posited that atheism was itself a form of religion. This was so silly that I jumped in to ask how an absence of belief could be deemed a form of belief.

I learned that there is “hard” atheism and “soft” atheism, and I learned a fun new word: Ignosticism. This is the idea that the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the word “God” has no coherent and unambiguous definition. That sounds kind of petulant and argumentative, doesn’t it?

I’ve always considered myself an atheist but now I realize that I’m more of an apatheist.

Apatheism considers the question of the existence or nonexistence of deities to be fundamentally irrelevant in every way that matters.

I know that “god” doesn’t exist but I don’t care either way. Let god believe in me, if he/she wants. The whole idea is stupid but others are welcome to it as long as they don’t tell me to have a blessed day. I must say that the stupidest form of religion is the one whose adherents say, following a terrible personal tragedy, that their faith in god helped them through it. The fact that god didn’t prevent the tragedy in the first place doesn’t seem to bother them.

You probably know that in most societies, women are more religious than men, but have you wondered why? There is no scholarly consensus on this. There is the theory that this gender gap in religiosity is caused by differences in risk preference between men and women. Risk preference theory argues that irreligiousness is a form of risk taking because irreligiousness risks eternal punishment such as going to hell. Because women tend to be more risk averse than men, they are more religious.

Another argument is that women are more likely to be sanctioned for nonconforming behaviors than men; thus, choosing to be nonreligious is more socially risky for women. To avoid stigma or social sanctioning, women tend to choose to be religious. I like this one. It blames the patriarchy, and why not?

But wait! Among Jews and Muslims, men are more religious than women. In these religions, men are required to attend public religious services while women are not. So again, blame the patriarchy (or maybe thank the patriarchy.)

As an apatheistic Jew, I admit that Christians who are super vocal about their religion tend to either annoy me or perversely amuse me. I have kind of an alter ego who I call the Hissing S lady, who is very Southern and very Christian. When I do this character, it’s hard for me to stop. Luckily, my husband doesn’t mind her. You can enjoy her here.

*For extra credit, go see a category of Renaissance art that depicts Jesus with an erection.