The beautiful and very, very thin Maggie Q stars as a badass FBI agent. She is in hot pursuit of the bad guys. She gets into a physical fight with one of the baddest of the bad guys (I know, I’m really plumbing the depths of my thesaurus here.) Pretty and skinny Maggie is taking this guy on with no weapons at her disposal! WOW! And I should mention, the bad guy is an ex-serviceman—of the ‘trained to kill’ type. And he’s BIG. So this BIG guy picks skinny Maggie up and throws her on the ground, and Maggie—who looks like you could break her in half like a twig—hops right back up and kills the bad guy! Points for girl power and skinny Maggie!

But here’s the problem: that would almost certainly never happen in real life. Big, brawny trained killers are very unlikely to be bested by women in hand to hand combat—no matter how fit they are. In fact, men in general are very unlikely to be bested by women in hand to hand combat. Maybe if the women are REALLY well trained and the guys are paunchy basement dwellers who play video games all day, but still.

This is lie #1: that badass women can best badass men in a physical fight. This is RARELY true. My fellow females—males who have gone through puberty are usually STRONGER than we are. Like, a lot stronger. Even if we work out and they don’t. I know, it’s what we New Englanders call a wicked pissah. All the ‘girl power’ messaging we’ve fed to Millenials and Gen Z is kind of just to make them feel good.

This was apparent when one of my sons wrestled in high school. There was a girl competing in the high school boys wrestling matches. Because, at the time, there wasn’t a girls wrestling program, she was allowed to compete with the boys. She appeared to be muscular and well trained. And she lost. Every. Single. Time. She wore all kind of girl power t-shirts, but she was absolutely no match for the boys, who would pin her in seconds. But you go, girl!

All of this came to mind as I was reading about the absolute disaster that is the “Cornell 7” alleged ‘gang rape’ story. What an absolute disaster! For the unfamiliar, two years ago a young woman at Cornell consented to a sexual threesome with two guys at a fraternity. This part is uncontested. More guys entered the room and more depravity and debauchery ensued. The following day, text messages from the girl indicated that she had consented to this. She said the ‘non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal,’ and ‘we have nothing to be ashamed of.’ She texted about how times are changing in terms of what is acceptable regarding sexual mores and that, basically we all have to stop being so uptight about sex.

You see, Jane Doe had apparently been reared, hopefully not by her parents, but by ‘progressive’ society in general, to believe in ‘sex positivity,’ this notion that all consensual sexual activity is just great and should be enjoyed without shame. Whatever your kink, it’s all good! You can have sex with as many people in whatever ways you want. As long as, in the moment, everyone says they’re fine with it.

And it turns out, some colleges and universities seem to be encouraging this. I’ve been reading about actual college courses on this type of ‘sexuality,’ as if horny young adults need help with arousal. Please. I’ve been reading about ‘sexploration’ tents, in which students are given BDSM tools and sex toys. Is this why we’re sending our kids to college?

This is lie #2: Sex is just an urge to be satisfied by whomever is convenient and willing. No—sex is not just craving like wanting pizza at 2am. The sex act is a powerful thing. It can both create life, and it has the potential to destroy it. It’s not something we should be having casually. I don’t care if the parties claim to be consenting—consent is an insanely low bar, as is apparent in the Cornell case. Jane Doe clearly claimed she had consented in the immediate aftermath of the debauched orgy at the Chi Phi house. There are numerous texts to prove it. She changed her story later on, however. When the incident was investigated, no charges were brought, despite Jane’s later insistence that ‘90%’ of what transpired was ‘not consensual.’ She now says she is ‘100% confident’ that she was raped. She has now, two years later, brought a civil suit against the men, Cornell, and even the bar that sold her drinks before she went to the fraternity house. Leave no stone unturned, I suppose.

To be clear, the men involved behaved deplorably. They should be ashamed of themselves. But despite what you may be reading in the press, I don’t see how anyone can read criminality in the case. The whole situation is a total mess.

And by ‘the whole situation,’ I don’t just mean this specific case. It is the whole sexual ethic that is on trial. For the past 10-15ish years, campus sexual assault has been a national issue. The response on the part of colleges and universities has been to wash the children in consent seminars. Consent consent consent! You must make sure you have consent. A verbal ‘yes’ to whatever you’re getting up to. But here we are more than a decade later, and nothing seems better.

In the meantime, we’re being schooled in the importance of ‘teaching men not to rape.’ Back when I was at a ‘progressive’ institution of higher learning—and mine was at the vanguard of progressiveness—we women were taught to protect ourselves, to look out for ourselves and one another. We were told to watch how much we were drinking at parties, to never go to said parties alone. Always go in a group, look out for one another, make sure everyone gets home safely. And we did. We took it all very seriously. I’m not saying we didn’t all get a bit squiffy from time to time and that things didn’t happen—they did—but it wasn’t a free for all. There was some containment. And the fact that we were in groups looking out for each other was probably a deterrent. Bad actors will look for the vulnerable. We had strength in numbers.

But this kind of thing isn’t fashionable anymore. We’re told that women are never ‘at fault’ for rape, which is true, but teaching us to look out for ourselves and one another doesn’t mean we are to blame if the unthinkable happens. Of course, we should teach men not to rape, but we should also be honest with girls and women about their vulnerability, because a drunk young woman at a party with no friends looking out for her is vulnerable.

This is lie #3: You have no agency. While it’s true that being drunk or wearing a short skirt DOES NOT MEAN a man can have his way with you, you are more vulnerable when your judgement is impaired by alcohol or drugs. We do girls and women a HUGE disservice when we don’t exhort them to take care of themselves. Saying ‘don’t tell women to protect themselves, tell men not to rape’ is like saying ‘let’s do away with the Department of Homeland Security and tell terrorists not to terrorize.’ It’s ridiculous. Most men aren’t rapists, but there will always be bad actors. Why are we now discouraged from exhorting girls and women to look out for themselves?

The fact is we empower girls and women when we train them to be aware of their surroundings, to watch how much they’re drinking, to not leave drinks unattended, to not wander off and get naked with some guy they barely know. It’s empowering to go out with your girlfriends and have a fun night and make sure you all get home safely. Why is that now considered unacceptable?

If women are fully autonomous adults—and we are—we need to be responsible for our own safety, and our choices. My heart breaks for Jane Doe. She has been deceived, and she exposed herself to a humiliating and degrading experience. But I’m having a very hard time seeing her as some feminist heroine victim. What needs reform is our broader sexual ethic, because just teaching consent is obviously not cutting it.

There is usually one fairly big story that goes viral in the month of August each year. This year, it was academic fraud Jason Arday and his presumable suicide. Last year, it was the Coldplay Kiss Cam scandal, both of which we’ve talked about before.

The year before that, it was Raygun.

The name might ring a bell, but for those who are struggling to place it, Raygun is the ‘stage name’ of Rachael Gunn, the break dancer who represented her native Australia in the Paris Olympics in 2024. Gunn became famous for her embarrassingly cringe performance at Breaking’s Olympic debut. From a technical standpoint, she was light years behind her fellow competitors, earning absolutely no points. But it wasn’t just that she was, relatively speaking, a poor quality dancer. Her performance was ridiculous. She was hopping around like a kangaroo and imitating a lawn sprinkler. It was, at best, embarrassing. At worst, it was disrespectful.

Immediately, the world erupted in laughter. Gunn became the butt of jokes, memes, and late night talk show skits, some of which were quite cruel. Then people started asking questions—how did this woman even qualify for the Olympics? Was this all some kind of sick joke? A middle-aged, middle-class white woman almost seemed to be mocking an art form invented by poor black and Hispanic inner city teenagers. The optics of the situation were BAD.

Gunn did try initially to lay low and ride out the storm, and then she appeared to be good naturedly dancing with her fellow Aussie Olympians, but the headlines just would not stop. Neither did the rumors—the most pernicious of which was that her husband and coach had fixed the Olympic trials that qualified her to represent Australia.

To add insult to injury, Gunn began publishing self-pitying video diaries, which really didn’t help her public image. Many people did have compassion for her—it seems pretty clear, at the end of the day, that Gunn was not intentionally mocking breaking as a sport or an art form—she was actually a university lecturer and had written her doctoral dissertation on breaking. It’s one of those ridiculous academic tomes, of which we are familiar thanks to the recent Arday scandal, but I do believe her intentions were good.

However, she just couldn’t seem to get out of her own way. Gunn lost a lot of support last year, when she elected to sic her legal team on a comedienne who had created a parody show about the whole debacle. It was originally titled, Raygun: The Musical, but Gunn’s lawyers sent legal threats. Gunn had trademarked her name and even her iconic kangaroo pose. Aussie attorneys say there is no legal leg to stand on here—parody is a protected free speech platform—but the comedienne, Steph Broadbridge, just didn’t want to risk a lawsuit, so she reworked the show. The ensuing publicity was a boon for Broadbridge. She was featured on Australian Stories, an Australian Broadcasting Company series. Australians don’t take kindly to those who can’t have a good laugh at themselves, and especially considering Gunn had attributed much of the heat she got to misogyny, it really didn’t look good for her to be legally threatening a female artist’s work. For her part, Broadbridge seemed to have actually somewhat admired Gunn, and the show appears to have been a fairly kind representation of the whole sorry saga.

Anyway, none of that is mentioned in the Netflix documentary, which dropped yesterday. It is very much from Gunn’s perspective. In fact, her management team was behind the whole thing… and can I just say I find it weird that she has a management team??

But it was an interesting watch all the same. I appreciated hearing directly from Gunn. I did find her somewhat sympathetic, and the doc cleared up a few things.

Firstly, Gunn did qualify for the Olympics fair and square. The reality is the ‘breaking community’ in Australia is quite small. Population-wise, Australia is quite small, so it’s not surprising that the depth of talent for a niche activity like Breaking is not deep, particularly among the women. Her husband did not have any undue influence over the qualifying competition, and Gunn is accepted to have been the best ‘b-girl’ (a female breaker) on the day.

She also realized pretty quickly that she was not up to scratch compared to the world class competition she was going to be up against in Paris. With only 280-something days from qualifying to the opening of the Olympics, Gunn was trying to catch up to the level of the literal teenagers who dominate the… sport? Art form? I don’t even know what to call it.

I’m going to take a moment to say I struggle with some of the stuff we call ‘sports’ these days. I’m going out on a limb and saying that video games are not sports. I don’t even think car racing should be considered a sport, but I understand that it is widely accepted to be so. Dancing of any kind, to me, is more art than sport, though I recognize that dancers are athletes. But anything involving a motor, a joystick, or a computer mouse is a hard no from me… but I digress.

Despite her great effort, Raygun had to accept that she could not meet the technical standards of the other competitors, so she tailored her performance to reflect her… creativity. She drew heavily on Australian imagery, like kangaroos and… lawn sprinklers. And that’s how she ended up as one of the top Halloween costumes of 2024.

The Netflix documentary did feature two fellow Australian B-girls, and they said the quiet parts out loud—that Raygun was never particularly good, and that her Olympic performance felt very mocking and disrespectful. While I know pretty much nothing about Breaking, that was definitely how it seemed to me at the time. Plenty of Olympic athletes aren’t especially good. There are tiny countries that send a handful of athletes and they usually aren’t anywhere near the medal podiums. Even Olympic powerhouse nations like China and the United States don’t churn out medal winners in every sport.

Someone on the Australian Stories show suggested she never should have gone to the Olympics because she just wasn’t good enough. I can’t go that far, though. I would absolutely love to go to the Olympics! It’s a life dream of mine that will surely never happen. I’m not proud to admit this, but even if some terrible dictator offered me quickie citizenship to represent his country in one of my zones of genius—which are pretty much limited to being snarky or being good at picking paint colors—I would seriously consider it. But since snark and picking paint colors are unlikely to be Olympic sports, I’m probably safe from that particular moral quandry.

Anyway, I don’t fault Gunn for going to the Olympics. This whole sad tale is just another example of how crappy it is to be in a situation where you’re out of your depth. It’s just a bad, bad feeling to know you’re not good enough. And it’s an awful feeling, I am sure, to be the butt of jokes across the globe. I do truly feel for Gunn and the mockery she experienced.

At the end of the day, Gunn’s biggest fault is handling her PR very, very badly. I can completely understand that she felt hurt and humiliated—who wouldn’t be? And I can believe that she does truly love Breaking. She’s really not terrible at it, at least, not compared to ordinary people. She could definitely whip out the kangaroo move at a hen party and she’d be a real hit.

I just can’t work out why she couldn’t have written a nice, polite statement early on, clarifying that she never intended to disrespect Breaking, and that she had great respect and admiration for her fellow competitors. Would that have been so hard? Instead she really doubled down and haughtily insisted that she was just misunderstood, or victimized as a woman…. which is kind of rich considering this was an art form created by people far more disadvantaged than she’s ever been.

Once again, we confront the question of public shaming and how harsh it can get… but I’m afraid that’s just a by-product of the internet. Everyone gets to have their say in the social media world, and we do! We give our opinions… early and often. When you consider people used to be placed in literal stocks and had rotten vegetables hurled at them, internet shaming doesn’t look that bad… though I am sure it’s extremely unpleasant. I just don’t know what can be done about it? I mean, sometimes people do embarrassing things. And those embarrassing things travel around the globe at the speed of sound and we can all weigh in. Sometimes people do things that are really questionable… like picking paint colors at the Olympics for horrible dictators. If you’re ever in that situation, some public opprobrium might be coming your way… but wouldn’t it be fun to go to the Olympics?! A paint color picker can only dream….

.

Anyway, the film was, it’s pretty safe to say, most people’s first exposure to autistic savantism, and probably even just autism in general. Back then, autism wasn’t understood as a ‘spectrum.’ The people who were diagnosed with autism exhibited behavior that was markedly different from that of the typical person.

Autistic people were largely in the shadows back then… their world was behind a veil and most of us had little knowledge of, or interaction with, this world.

Rain Man lifted the lid on autism, and suddenly everyone was talking about it. Hoffman’s character Raymond had always been in an institution, such that his younger brother Charlie, played by Cruise, didn’t even know he had an older brother until their father died and left the family fortune to the institution that cared for Raymond. Charlie is incensed that he can’t get his hands on the family money, so he checks Raymond out of the facility and plans to take him across the country to Los Angeles, where he will supposedly care for Raymond and pocket the cash.

Except Raymond freaks out at the airport because he can’t handle getting on a plane, so Charlie has to rent a car and the two brothers set off on an epic road trip across the United States. They make a stop in Las Vegas where Charlie inadvertently learns that Raymond has a super power—he can count cards, which means he can make Charlie big bucks at the casinos.

Raymond is autistic, and he is also a savant—a person who also possesses a super human skill. Roughly 40-50% of savants are on the autism spectrum, but most autistic people are not savants. Many hyper-focus on particular areas of interest and memorize facts and statistics about their pet topics, which can be impressive, but that’s not the same as being a savant. Savantism is actually quite rare—less than one percent of the general population exhibit savant-level skills in areas like math, music and art. It makes a person truly exceptional.

Rain Man was an entertaining film, and it raised public awareness of neurodiversity, but it also promulgated the idea that autistic people possess these kinds of superpower skills, which is just inaccurate.

I’m the mother of a child with multiple disabilities, though not autistic. I don’t like to talk a lot about my son’s disabilities as he deserves privacy, but I mention this just because I have been involved in the disability community since he was born. I’m noticing more and more that people seem to want to discuss disability in terms of super powers. It’s like this weird way we try to soften the blow of disability by asserting that people with disabilities have these amazing traits just waiting to be discovered. I suppose it’s well intentioned, but I have come to find it extremely unhelpful, and even harmful.

The reality is having a disability—whatever it may be—makes everything harder. Yes, humans are remarkably resilient and we can sharpen certain skills to compensate for others. People with vision impairments, for example, are famous for having sharpened other senses, like hearing. But it’s actually not that a child born blind is also born with exceptional hearing, it’s that the child’s brain relies on other senses, like hearing, to compensate for not having good vision. So the keen hearing isn’t exactly a super power, it’s a compensatory strategy.

I love that people try to frame things positively, but sometimes I fear that in so doing, we minimize the struggles of people with disabilities, and we set unrealistic expectations for what people with disabilities can achieve.

I used to be the chairperson for a disability awareness program at my children’s school. We would invite people in to talk about their particular disability to educate the kids and give them a firsthand account of what it’s like to live with this or that condition. The blind lady with the seeing eye dog was always a hit, as well as the high school girl who talked about her type one diabetes while juggling. I mean literally juggling.

One woman spoke who had dyslexia. She was also a professor at MIT. She had actually written a book about her dyslexia, framing it as a ‘super power.’ It turns out that while she had a lot of difficulty with reading in school, she had a unique ability to recognize shapes and patterns. This enabled her to see something scientific in some special way that I can’t understand that made her good at being a professor at MIT. I mean, can you tell that explaining this isn’t exactly my super power?

The point is she was very inspiring and positive and that’s great. But part of me wondered if there were any kids in the audience with dyslexia who were really just struggling to read at grade level? I don’t want to take anything away from this woman and her accomplishments, but does this necessarily translate to every child with dyslexia?

I really don’t want to be negative, or yuck anyone’s yum or whatever, but living with a person who has multiple disabilities gives me pause on all these inspiring stories. Again, having a disability makes things harder. It takes longer to do things, if you can do them at all. And sometimes you can’t. You need help. You need accommodations, you need patience from the people around you. Those who love you have to walk that delicate balance between trying to work out where to push you to see what you can achieve, and accepting how things might just have to be. That this—whatever ‘this’ means—is the best we can do.

As a parent, it can be heartbreaking. You desperately want the best for your child. You worry about what’s going to happen to them when you’re gone. You hope. You worry that hoping is fruitless.

I mention all this because I’ve read a couple of really good substack articles (here and here) from mothers of kids with disabilities or other delays in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal. I know everyone is probably sick of that whole situation, but these articles highlighted an aspect of that case that isn’t getting a lot of traction, and should. Arday claimed to have been autistic and said he was non-verbal until the age of 11, illiterate until the age of 18, yet went on to earn a PhD only a few years later. Which is ridiculous, but whatever.

The point is these claims, and his alleged accomplishments, gave hope to some parents of non-verbal children. There are screenshots floating around from comments sections of articles published within the last few years touting these claims. Comments from parents who were inspired by Arday’s fiction, hoping, believing that maybe one day their children would speak! Maybe even go to university! Or even become a professor at a place like Cambridge! Wouldn’t that be amazing?!

This cohort of parents are among the people who are disillusioned by this scandal. There are people who hired Arday who should have been qualified to pop this balloon years ago. Experts are now talking about how Arday’s story is ‘medically improbable.’

So maybe we can stop with these fictions. The OG myth is that of Helen Keller, the deaf-blind woman who almost certainly didn’t achieve all that she was touted to have achieved. Maybe that’s a post for another time, but this kind of ‘disability inspiration’ is not a new thing. And it remains unhelpful.

I don’t want this to be some Debbie Downer of an article, because I do firmly believe that every human being is an image bearer of God, and is poised to make a unique contribution. Maybe those with disabilities bless us by teaching us to slow down, to be more patient, to notice things we might not otherwise. My neighbor has a child with significant disabilities, and watching her parents delight in her is a joy to behold. She’s not splitting the atom—and she doesn’t have to. Her parents love her and she brings light to their lives, just because she is.

Rain Man has a redemption arc—the road trip with Raymond changes Charlie, not just his bank balance. Charlie is less of a prick thanks to his interaction with Raymond, and Raymond seems to grow to love Charlie.

My son is the Minister of Fun in our family. He’s got a great sense of humor, he loves puns. He gets us to play board games instead of retreating to our devices. He gets us to go places and do things we wouldn’t otherwise. I don’t know what the future holds for him. Sometimes it’s hard to think about, because I know it’s going to be different from what’s ‘typical.’ He doesn’t have a ‘super power,’ but he is a delight to us, and to others. Isn’t that enough?

However, I don’t think it follows that Arday should be held up as a martyr, and predictably, there are quite a few people who believe that he should be. That he was driven to this end by a cruel media. I know it’s tempting to blame ‘the media.’ They are an easy scapegoat, but I believe that is misguided. Blaming journalists for reporting on a legitimate news story is ultimately quite pernicious.

You see, it seems pretty clear that Jason Arday was a fraud. It can be very sad that he is dead, and that he was still a fraud. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

Arday lived in a house of cards, one that he constructed. It was inevitable that it would fall down around him. You can’t plagiarize your doctoral dissertation, claim literally unbelievable athletic feats, boast false altruistic claims, and assert bogus diagnoses and hardships without people fact checking. That he got away with it as long as he did was a legitimate thing to report on.

Yet those who tried to do so sooner were met with legal threats (by a law firm hired by Arday himself) and a police investigation (that Arday initiated.) The resulting news stories, once he was exposed, were inevitable. The press should be encouraged to report of stories of fraud, particularly when they involve alleged malfeasance on the part of vaunted institutions like the University of Cambridge, not dissuaded from doing so.

Yet I am reading countless comments blaming the press and the media for Arday’s death. As though he were an innocent lamb falsely accused of wrongdoing, rather than the architect of his own mythology. I am sorry for those who loved him, particularly his two children. But we have to be willing to hold two uncomfortable truths at the same time. He did wrong things. It’s sad that he died.

One commenter likened his death to that of Diana, Princess of Wales, who was being pursued by paparazzi photographers in 1997 when the drunk driver of the car in which she was a passenger crashed in a Paris tunnel. Diana’s younger son, Prince Harry, loves to advance this idea that Diana was killed by the press. He said recently that his mother was “essentially murdered.” While I am sorry for any child who loses a parent under any circumstances, that is an absurd thing to say. Murder?! In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

The photographers were part a a rabid press environment back in the 1990s, but the truth is more nuanced than Harry and this commenter are willing to believe. Diana was indeed hounded by the press, but she participated in this media frenzy. Indeed, she often played cat and mouse with photographers. She called the ‘paps’ on herself—frequently. She played favorable journalists to put out her version of events on any number of topics. She often very skillfully manipulated the press to her advantage. But the press cannot be controlled. Not in anything resembling a free society, at least.

On the very sad night of her death, she was being pursued by photographers, that much is true. But it’s also true that Henri Paul, the driver of the car, was drunk. He had been plucked from the bar at the Ritz hotel, instructed to drive the princess and Dodi al Fayed, her friend.

Any sober and responsible driver would have realized that these photographers chasing them just wanted to take her picture. They did not pose a threat to her life. Why would they?! Photos of Diana were worth big money. They had no incentive to harm her, quite the opposite. They just wanted to take her picture. They carried cameras, not guns. Paul’s blood alcohol level was well above the legal limit. He could have crashed the car whether they were being chased by photographers or not. I’m not defending the rabid acts of a rapacious press, but to blame them for Diana’s death is misguided. They played a role, but the driver was drunk. She died because her driver was drunk and he was driving recklessly.

The fallout, and revelations of press misconduct in the 2000s, resulted in reforms of the press in the UK, and that was a necessary correction. The landscape is now very different since the Leveson Inquiry of 2012.

Do journalists sometimes get it wrong? Do they sometimes go too far? Of course, but the Fourth Estate remains a critical pillar of a functional society. Journalists must be free to ask questions, to seek clarification of audacious claims, to publish articles about criminals, fraudsters, con artists. That Arday may not have been unable to withstand that process is not the fault of a free press.

I’ve been thinking of that this week as I’ve been reading about the curious case of Jason Arday. I had never heard of this guy until a week ago. I read an article in The Guardian, a famously left-leaning British newspaper. Arday was, until very recently, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge. Yeah—that University of Cambridge… one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Arday was hired at the age of 37, and was celebrated as the youngest black professor ever to be hired at Cambridge.

This is just an aside, but why do we celebrate the ‘youngest person’ to do anything? I just don’t think doing something young is necessarily a flex, but maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, Arday was apparently an inspiration. He claims to be autistic and says he was mute until the age of 11. He says he couldn’t read or write until he was 18. He managed to catch up mighty fast, because he earned a PhD in 2015 and was hired shortly thereafter by Cambridge.

He also claimed to have written books that were never actually published. He said he taught at universities in the UK and the United States at which he never actually taught. He claimed to have been a professional footballer, snooker player, and elite distance runner. He said he ran six marathons in six days. Another time he said he ran thirty marathons in thirty-five days—the last few with a broken leg. All while writing his doctoral dissertation! Which, by the way, contains broad swaths of material previously published by other people. In other words, plagiarized.

When these allegations were brought to the powers that be at Cambridge, and Liverpool John Moores University, which conferred the PhD on Arday, he was vociferously defended. Arday, who is the son of Ghanaian immigrants, claimed this type of criticism was racist. He, and others, suggested a black academic is more unfairly scrutinized than whites are, and isn’t this a prime example?

The alleged persecution didn’t end with scrutiny, he said. He claimed a pigs head had been left at his parents door. He claimed a knifed assailant threatened him at Cambridge. However, there is no evidence to support either claim, and Arday didn’t call the police in either case—not even when he said an attacker with a knife was on the loose. He did, however, call the police when a journalist politely emailed him, asking for clarification on some of his wild claims. Arday told the police the journalist was harassing him—apparently three emails constitute harassment. A four month long investigation ensued—all for a journalist simply doing his job. Eventually he was told by the police never to contact Arday again, as it was bad for Arday’s ‘mental health.’

Throughout it all, Cambridge stood by Arday, his bosses and some colleagues sticking up for him, until finally last week they announced they were conducting an investigation. Two hours later, Arday said, in a defiant letter crafted almost certainly with the help of AI, that he was resigning his post, due to the unfair scrutiny. He tells us he needs to ‘heal.’ Oh. Ok. (I’m rolling my eyes in case you can’t tell.)

The case it getting a LOT of press in the UK, and some here in the US and elsewhere. Of course, race is a factor, and that is calling into question DEI initiatives. I’m not particularly interested in that aspect of the story, though. Surely Arday has used his race to his advantage, it seems largely as a shield to deflect criticism. For a long time, it worked. However, Arday’s ascent is due to more than simply his race. He claimed to have an intoxicating mix of characteristics—black, yes, but also the son of immigrants, neurodivergent, early childhood hardship and disadvantages overcome to achieve extraordinary success. Like a Horatio Alger story for the 21st century progressive. Alger’s protagonists were often heroic and virtuous, and Arday’s false image was no different—he said he was involved in numerous charitable initiatives and even boasted of having raised a whopping five and a half million British pounds for charity. (He didn’t, by the way.)

What I’m finding extraordinary about this case is how willing some people are to sympathize with Arday. He is being subjected to relentless mockery online, but listen to any news report or podcast about Arday, save some hardcore rightwing commentators, and you will hear expressions of compassion for Arday… even from those who willingly acknowledge that he is a plagiarist, a fraud, and a fantasist. I’ve heard people say they feel sorry for him, that he was used by Cambridge and others as a posterchild for their progressive ideals. One journalist bemoaned the mockery that Arday is receiving, saying, ‘it’s not like he killed someone.’

Um, what?! No one is saying he killed anyone. He’s not in prison awaiting trial for murder. So why are we likening this to such a crime? It isn’t. But he did do some really bad things. He has lied, repeatedly. He’s taken positions others who were actually qualified should have been offered. He’s made money off his lies—he even has a memoir coming out this week with Simon and Schuster, who allegedly paid him an over one million pound advance! And they are still publishing it! Even though it’s almost certainly a pack of lies. I can’t help but think of Belle Gibson, the Australian grifter who faked cancer and claimed she healed herself through healthy eating and even wrote a cookbook detailing her protocol. When she was exposed as a fraud, the publisher pulped the book, no doubt at considerable expense, and ended the whole sorry saga with a significant amount of (free-range organic) egg on their faces. But apparently in 2026 you can publish a totally fake memoir and nobody bats an eye.

I do agree that the people who propped him up at Cambridge have a lot to answer for, and they should be held to account, but let’s be clear about one thing—sure, Cambidge used Arday, but Arday used Cambridge, too. It was a mutually parasitic relationship. I don’t mind Arday’s reputation being shredded—it’s the consequence of his actions. Is it unpleasant for him at the moment? I’m sure it is, and quite frankly, it should be. This is unpleasantness of his own making. The only pity I can muster is for whatever warped his mind into thinking this was acceptable. Everyone wants to be ‘kind’ these days, but I’d argue it’s a profound unkindness to give someone a pass for this kind of behavior.

In The Guardian article I read last week, entitled Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor, journalist Lanre Bakare writes, “When Arday was asked about his claims by The Guardian, he stood by them. ‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.’” And, there’s the rub. This guy has been getting away with lying through his teeth for years—despite his claims being truly incredible, in the true sense of the word. He’s now feeling the effects of not having been caught earlier… his tone has been defiant, but I wonder if he wishes he’d been caught a bit sooner?

What do you think? Am I being too mean?

Interestingly, of that twenty-five percent, forty-eight percent of the working age adult cohort fall into the mental health category. So nearly half of working age adults with a disability suffer from the mental health variety, much of it anxiety and depression. This is a sobering statistic.

Before we go on, I should take a moment to clarify how this UK survey defines a disability—”survey respondents are asked whether they have a physical or mental health condition or illness that has lasted or is expected to last twelve months or more, and whether the condition and/or illness reduces their ability to carry out day-to-day activities. A person who answers yes to both questions is considered disabled.” So it’s important to note that this based on a self-reporting survey, not that a quarter of the British population has been diagnosed with a disability by a qualified professional.

Still, I find this to be incredible, particularly when you juxtapose this with the mental health of Britons during the Second World War. As the British were preparing for what would be an epic battle for survival (and I’m not being dramatic when I write that—it really was), authorities did express concern for the psychological toll it would take on the population. Yet despite the fact that, during the Blitz, bombs rained from the sky nearly every night in London and other major targets, admittance to psychiatric facilities actually declined relative to the years preceding the war. That’s right—despite the extraordinary stress and privations visited on the British people from September 1939 until May 1945, fewer people were admitted to mental hospitals than before the war began. The reason for this? The country rallied together during the war. Aided by the stirring oratory of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the people banded together, helped each other out. Duchesses sat beside charwomen in air raid shelters, people in the countryside opened their homes to children and refugees, men and women of every class volunteered in various capacities, strangers sang songs with one another as they slept in tube stations to escape the bombs—not knowing if their homes would still be there when they got back.

I don’t mean to suggest these weren’t exceedingly trying times—obviously, they were. There was tremendous death, destruction, grief, and sorrow. And yet, many British people reflected on that challenging era with some degree of fondness in later years. They remembered how powerful it was to bind together as a nation, to work in concert with their neighbors to defeat a common foe.

Poor mental health is often a complicated thing—I don’t want to make it sound like all we need to do is volunteer once in a while and everything will be fine! Of course, it’s more involved than that. But I do wonder how we got where we are… where so many of us, living really very comfortable lives in the peaceful, prosperous West are so unhappy. How did we end up anxious and depressed when, compared with those two generations ago, we have such easy lives? And if you are inclined to argue with me on that point, please take a minute to research a little bit. Our lives are VERY EASY. Even if your life is hard, in the material sense, our lives are easy compared to our predecessors. I would refer you to air conditioning, welfare benefits, 24 hour supermarkets, antibiotics, vaccines, Neflix… I could go on, but I’ll stop there.

I’m going to venture a few theories. These are just ideas I’ve been bandying about in my head. I’m not an expert, but it’s my substack. I pretend to be an expert on substack. I think my last point is particularly insightful, but you can tell me if you think I’m full of it in the comments.

So here we go….

1. Community ties have weakened considerably. This is actually a fact. I don’t know if this is true in the UK, but among my social circle in the US, people are moving around. A lot. Almost no one I know has lived in the same area for their entire lives. Even just a generation ago, that was not the case. Every time you move, you have to start over, make new friends. It’s harder to keep up with your old friends. Family ties weaken, you don’t see your elderly relatives as much as you used to. You can’t have family dinners as often. We are physically removed from one another. This is obvious, and while it can be nice to get a fresh start somewhere, it does take a toll… one we often don’t realize until later.

2. A lot of people don’t go to church anymore. Regular religious observance is down—in most faiths, it seems. I know someone will chime in and say, ‘not this one! Or that one!’ But overall, fewer people are attending churches/mosques/synagogues/temples, etc. I don’t think people realize how destabilizing this is becoming in society. Just today I was reading about the misbehavior of audiences at live performances. People—not just kids!—don’t seem to understand how to conduct themselves in public anymore. What does this have to do with church, you might ask?? I’d say, a lot. If you go to religious services weekly from infancy, as I did, you get used to sitting still and being quiet. You learn that your behavior, if poor, negatively impacts those around you. Church attendance is also a strong component of a healthy society—people meet together weekly and develop relationships. Houses of worship are open to everyone, of every age. Older people mix with children and everyone in between. Particularly for older adults, who see their spouses, siblings and friends dying around them as they get older and older, going to a place every week where there are younger people can be extremely life-giving. We give up a lot when we give up church… and I know, some are hurt by church, and some churches are not good churches, but I’m speaking generally here. We’ve lost a lot, and we don’t seem willing to admit it.

3. Social media… and the internet, in general. Sigh… I know it’s here to stay, but I am so conflicted about social media and the internet. I’m old enough to remember life before it, and while I do enjoy keeping up with old friends with whom I’ve lost touch over the years (see point #1), it’s not the same as being in the presence of your friends. It’s just not. It gives us the illusion of connection, but it’s not the real thing.

4. Lastly, I think we have disparaged conformity to an unhealthy degree. The 1950s were considered ‘the age of conformity’ by those iconoclasts of the 1960s. We’ve all been taught that being a conformist is bad, and it’s not just by ‘the liberals.’ I’m noticing those on the right who are tantalized by conspiracy theories love to fancy themselves renegade free thinkers. Those of us who chastise them for their complete and utter lack of evidence are chided as ‘naive sheeples.’ Just this week, someone told me it’s ‘people like you who keep everyone in line and asleep.’ All this because I asked for a shred of evidence for this person’s outlandish hypothesis. Dear God, what is becoming of us?

   I recognize there is something in all of us that wishes to be unique… we like to think we’re ‘rare.’ (I admit I was a bit pleased to learn that my Myers-Briggs type is the rarest of all.) We all want to be special, and I think in the attention economy of the 2020s, being unique is especially prized. I have a little theory that perhaps the reason we’re seeing such a spike in diagnoses is related to this. Who wants to be ‘normal,’ when you can have a diagnosis?! Especially if that diagnosis comes with delightful goodies such as accommodations for your specialness. I want to be clear that I’m not saying everyone is faking their depression or anxiety—I don’t believe they are, at least not most of them. But the reality is that it’s normal to be anxious sometimes. It’s normal to be depressed sometimes. Especially if you spend most of your waking hours on your phone, not engaging with other human beings in your physical proximity. If you’re doom scrolling and reading about late-stage capitalism and how the deck is stacked against you and you don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting ahead, you’re going to be anxious and depressed. In 2026, that doesn’t make you special—it makes you painfully normal.

What if we celebrated being healthy? What if we made that the goal? Being really healthy, mentally, socially, physically. What if we delighted in it? What if we acknowledged that being sad sometimes is just part of being healthy? That being anxious is a normal response to certain things, but sitting in it for days or weeks or months is not. What if we washed our faces and got on with life a little more often, if we just met a friend for coffee and had a wee chat about it and then moved on? I just wonder if that would move the needle…

Lastly, (I know I said that already, but this time I mean it) I think it’s just all getting a bit ridiculous and there is going to be a backlash. It’s coming. It’s already here, actually. If mental health becomes a punchline, those struggling will suffer all the more.

Speaking of punchlines, I will leave you with this little skit. It’s very funny. And apt.

Am I being too mean? Let me know…

Case in point, matriarch Kris Jenner recently had a facelift. There is no denying it—the woman is in her 70’s and she emerged recently with a face that is as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Rather than remaining schtum, or chalking it up to an eye-wateringly expensive face cream (link in bio!), she not only owned that she had gone under the knife, she even shared the name of her surgeon. He’s apparently now booked into the next century.

Yes, the Kardashian clan are plucked and trussed to the nth degree, and they will tell you all about it! Apparently Kim, Kris’s daughter, is willing to try EVERYTHING in the anti-aging universe—every new laser, injection, and potion. She’ll try it and tell you all about it. The Kardashians are paradoxically authentically inauthentic. And, you know, there’s something to be said for that. I suppose.

One who is less forthcoming is Bethenny Frankel. She’s another one I mysteriously know a lot about. She became famous on Real Housewives of New York, which I didn’t watch, but apparently she peed into an ice bucket in her wedding dress. And for that, you are rewarded with fame and economic opportunity. Where’s the dignity? Never mind. We’ll talk about that later.

Anyway, Bethenny is in her mid-fifties, as am I. She recently turned up at a Sports Illustrated swimsuit fashion show looking like this:

Which is fine. Bethenny can do what she likes. Where she loses me, however, is her unwillingness to admit to all that she does to look this way—not only does she not admit it, she lies about it. Frankel claims that her look is ‘natural.’ When asked about her workout routine, she claims she doesn’t really exercise, she just goes for ‘long walks on the beach.’

Right. If you believe that, I have some land to sell you in Florida. Beachside! For your workout.

Anyone with any familiarity with the female anatomy will tell you those boobs are not ‘natural.’ Unless you mean natural silicone. Bethenny also doesn’t appear to have a single line on her 55-year-old face. That is not natural. Unless you mean natural botulinum toxin. Again, she’s free to do what she wants. And she’s free to not tell us what she’s doing—everyone has a right to medical privacy—but don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

Undoubtedly, Bethenny is doing a lot more than just working out (otherwise known as ‘walking on the beach’), getting Botox and breast implants. There is A LOT going on here. And again, that’s fine. What’s not fine is the message this stuff is sending to the world, and the relentless pressure it puts on women to feel like we have to do all the things, that we are supposed to look preternaturally youthful, well into middle age. In 2026, there is no mercy on the aging female. We’re not, apparently, allowed to slide into a collection of caftans and enjoy our Mrs. Roper era.

Most of us know it’s all BS. We know Bethenny’s body is not natural, however she tries to convince us otherwise. But some people are easily deceived. A commenter on an Instagram post praised Frankel for being willing to ‘put the work in.’ To which I responded that this was a whole lot more than just diet and exercise, that she had obviously invested a considerable amount of money to achieve this look at the age of 55. The commenter said, ‘what money? A gym membership?’

Oh sweet summer child… this is so much more than burpees and kale. And again, at some level, that’s fine. If women like Bethenny can afford it and that’s how they want to spend their disposable income, that is entirely their prerogative. And you know what? I get it. If God blessed me with fabulous riches, I might be tempted to do all the things. Which is probably why I’m not rich. What I am trying to say is I understand the ambivalence about aging. I know the feeling of looking in the mirror and wondering what happened. I, too, get ads for injectables and lasers and contouring and micro needling and vampire facials and creams and lotions with ever increasingly weird ingredients. Snail slime, salmon sperm, stem cells from circumcised foreskins, eye of newt, raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, etc.

The anti-aging industry is worth billions and billions and billions of dollars. Tiny South Korea, which roughly fits into the area between Los Angeles and San Francisco, is the world leader in cosmetic surgery, and their k-beauty industry is one of the country’s top exports. They’re the ones who came up with snail slime moisturizers (elegantly called ‘mucin’.) Which I have tried. It’s actually nice. And not terribly expensive. Apparently the snails don’t know their worth—they shouldn’t let their slime go for so little.

I admit I’m a bit of a pot calling the kettle black. I thoroughly enjoy skincare. I actually find it quite fun, and I have a number of pots and jars and one or two gadgets on my bathroom counter. I recently had a facial from an adorable Korean lady who has the skin of a five year old (locals—PM me if you want her details—she’s running a summer special!)

The hard part is where to draw the line. It is a very slippery slope, greased with snail mucin, from a moderately priced drugstore serum to getting your blood drawn and injected back into your face. And this industry isn’t just targeting middle aged women with some disposable income. The skincare world is coming for kids. I recently listened to a podcast in which the host mentioned his 11 year old daughter has a nine-step skincare routine. Nine steps! Apparently all the products are suitable for young skin, but nine steps? Really?! Eleven years old is awfully young to be on the hamster wheel of consumerism and self-improvement. By all means, let’s encourage our kids to take care of their skin—learn to wash it properly, and especially use sunscreen. We could nearly eradicate skin cancer if we got kids into the habit of wearing sunscreen everyday, but a nine-step routine at the age of eleven just seems really unnecessary. And expensive.

Women devoted to their routines get a little defensive when people start asking these questions, I’ve noticed. To be clear, it’s a personal choice, and I respect that. But one woman said, “I don’t know why people are bothered by whether or not other women get facelifts or other procedures. It literally doesn’t affect their lives at all.” But I disagree. If you live in an area where a critical mass of people are doing Botox, for example, it skews what natural aging looks like. A natural 50 year old is going to look significantly older than her Botoxed peers. If it just comes down to ‘fitting in’ socially, that’s one thing, but when your livelihood is on the line, is it something else?

There’s a saying now—’you’re not ugly, you’re just poor.’ The same is true for aging. You’re not old, you’re just unable or unwilling to get injections or Fraxel or cool sculpting. And for those of us who have the disposable income to try these things, is it good stewardship to use our resources this way? Where’s the line? We’re living longer these days… have we saved enough for retirement? Am I going to have to say to my kids ‘I need to live with you because I didn’t think I’d live this long… but doesn’t my face look great?!’

I don’t know, friends. I want to be clear that I don’t have the answers to these questions. I don’t think it’s wrong to spend some money on your appearance. I certainly think it’s great to take care of yourself, your health, your wellbeing. I just don’t know where the line is. But I know what it isn’t—it isn’t lying. It isn’t pretending we’re ‘all natural’ when we’re not. At least be up front about it. What it’s costing, not just in dollars and cents, but time, energy, and effort. We’re all in this together. Let’s at least be honest with each other.

The first time I did a Beth Moore Bible study, I confess I was a bit conflicted. I couldn’t deny she was a very gifted teacher and the study content was very good and very sound, but I had difficulty with the style.

For the uninitiated, Beth Moore is a little firecracker of a lady. She’s ebullient, funny, and charming, but the fill-in-the-blank workbook and emo music just didn’t quite jive with my crusty, frozen chosen self. Which is fine. There was a lot of good to be had in her studies, so whenever my women’s Bible study voted to do a Beth Moore study, I went along with it. Sometimes you can’t have everything the way you want it. Christians like me, who have mostly always lived in hard soil territory, know this well.

The point I’m just trying to make here is that I wasn’t a stan.

Fast forward twenty years and I will now say that Beth Moore is one of my heroes. She has shown herself willing to stand up and speak out against wrongdoing. “Speaking out” is a big thing these days. Everyone seems to feel the need to “speak out,” and I admit I often roll my eyes because I don’t think we always need to speak out. Often it’s toothless and performative virtue signaling, and that isn’t only on the left. People on the right do this, too. But speaking out on some issues is admirable, particularly when it comes at great personal cost, as it did for Beth.

You see, Beth Moore found herself in the crosshairs of the pharisees of her former denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Before I go deeper into this story, I’m going to be pretty hard on the SBC in this article, but I want to be clear that I know there are many, many, many good people in SBC churches. People who are earnest and humble and love God. But there seems to be an ever growing faction in this denomination, and others, that is quite bent on policing some of the finer points of their theological convictions at the expense of the essential, but more on that later.

The drama broke open in 2019 when the Houston Chronicle published a series of articles about rampant sexual abuse within SBC churches. The stories are heartbreaking, infuriating, sickening, and plentiful. Stories that will turn your stomach, and the worst of it was the denomination’s responses, or lack thereof, to these hundreds of accusations.

As a denomination, the SBC is a little tricky—their theology and church polity prides itself on the autonomy of individual congregations. They have a VERY decentralized structure. Ordination in SBC churches, for example, is granted at the individual church level. There are a few requirements—you must be a man, you must be ‘called’ by the local church and assent to certain theological convictions, to name a few—but you do not need any formal theological training (though many do have degrees from an SBC or other seminaries, it is not a requirement.) The way the SBC is structured, there is not a lot of denominational oversight, and I’ve generally found that Southern Baptists are very proud of this fact.

There are disadvantages to this point, however. The Houston Chronicle’s reporting revealed that sexual predators were able to exploit this aspect of SBC culture to move freely from one church to another. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, which involved offending priests being moved from one parish to another, SBC pastors could do the same on their own. Maybe there wasn’t a church official doing the moving, but there was also nothing stopping these predators from moving around at will. Make no mistake—for predators, this a feature, not a bug.

Anyway, back to Beth Moore, American Christendom was rocked by these scandals. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, so this was a big deal. As we were learning about what had transpired over the decades of abuse in the SBC, Beth Moore was invited by her (obviously male) pastor to speak to the congregation on Mother’s Day. Beth didn’t regularly speak from the pulpit, but she did on this occasion, presumably because she’s a gifted speaker and a mother. She tweeted about it shortly afterwards and all hell broke loose.

How can a woman be allowed to preach from the pulpit! It’s a travesty! Beth Moore was accused of all kinds of heinousness. The conservative flank already had some issues with Beth. She had spoken out about many in the church’s enthusiastic endorsement of Donald Trump, even with all of his unsavory characteristics and misdeeds. I won’t belabor this because that man already gets more oxygen than he deserves, but her exposure of the hypocrisy had already marked her as a problem.

I will pause for a moment to say that the issue of women’s roles in the church is point of considerable debate. I can write more on this another time, but I do think it’s possible for two Christians to love God, to earnestly seek and study His word, and come out in different places on this matter. The zealots on both sides will say their position is ‘clearly’ the right one, but careful study of the totality of scripture belies dogmatic certainty, in my opinion. The particulars of women’s roles, however, are not seminal to my argument in this article.

What seems to have been particularly shocking to Beth—and to many of us—is, in the midst of these crushing revelations of sexual abuse in this denomination, and a not insignificant amount of institutional coverup at the national level—these men (and women!) were deriding Beth Moore for speaking from the pulpit on Mother’s Day.

To say this outrage was misguided is the understatement of the century. I mean, talk about burying the lede. Don’t look over there—look here! There’s something in the Bible about logs and specks. Some of these people had entire forests in their eyes. I remember reading the denunciations of Beth with shock and horror. One particular pastor commented that his ‘greatest accomplishment as a pastor this year is getting Beth Moore studies out of my church.’ Really?! That’s your ‘greatest accomplishment?’ In my opinion, that doesn’t speak very highly of this man’s pastoral ministry, but who am I to say… I’m just a little woman.

Three years later, an independent report on the scandal was released, and we were shocked all over again by the stories of abuse, silencing of victims, applause for offending pastors and shame heaped on the teenagers they abused. It was sickening, appalling reading, and the following year at their annual meeting, the SBC voted in a number of safeguarding measures, including developing a database of abusers so churches can more effectively vet their new hires.

However, three years on, many these initiatives have proved to be pretty toothless. The SBC has effectively abandoned the database. It’s “not a focus” right now, they said. Lifeway, the publishing arm of the SBC, released an article claiming, Most Southern Baptist Churches Use Background Checks, Fewer Receive Abuse Training. By ‘most’ they mean 58%. That’s only slightly more than half. Background checks are not enough to prevent abuse, but it’s pretty low hanging fruit. It’s really the least a church can do, but 42% weren’t bothering. The wording is interesting, no? Here’s the direct quote: “Almost 3 in 5 congregations affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (58%) use background checks. More than a third (36%) are trained in reporting sexual abuse, while 16% are trained in caring for survivors.” There’s a little button you can press to post this on X! Are we proud of these stats? We shouldn’t be. They’re pitiful.

It just doesn’t seem like a whole lot has been done to safeguard the SBC flock from predators. To be fair, I am sure trying to implement and maintain a sex offender database is difficult. I bet there are a lot of legal hurdles and legitimate concerns about due process. However, if I were in charge, which I’m not because I’m just a woman, I would make these safeguarding reforms priority #1. Like, we wouldn’t be doing a whole lot else but getting some sound protocols in place.

However, that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening. The SBC annual meeting was just held and the big story was not sexual abuse reform, but an amendment to the SBC constitution to prohibit women from preaching before ‘an assembled congregation.’

To be clear, the SBC already disfellowships churches that have women as lead- and co-pastors. According to one pastor who spoke during the debate portion of this amendment, ‘we have zero churches’ with women pastors. He said ‘what we’re already doing is working.’ But this is not enough for Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He said not only should women not be ordained, they should not be speaking before an assembled congregation at all, they should not be ‘functioning’ as pastors, which I guess to him means preaching. I think there’s a lot more to pastoring than preaching, but what do I know. Hashtag woman.

I’ve been reading the stories of many women who have fallen afoul of the rules in their SBC churches. One was castigated because she was invited to speak to the youth group, but some of the young men present were over 18, thus she was teaching men. At another woman’s church, the threshold was 13, and she had to get special permission to assist her husband, the youth pastor, with a particular event. There are many similar stories. Many.

Meanwhile, only 58% of SBC churches conduct background checks. Maybe more do now (the Lifeway study was conducted in 2024), but I’m a bit skeptical that they’ve made a whole lot of progress in these areas. A Christianity Today article from last year attributed the abandonment of the database to ‘denominational apathy.’ Sounds about right!

Beth Moore and many others, including me, are not being silent on this distraction technique of ‘look over here, not over there.’ Many Southern Baptists are very defensive of their denomination. I include some of the justifications, along with my hot takes:

“If you are not in the SBC, this is none of your business.” As previously mentioned, the SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. By dint of sheer numbers, they are hugely influential. Are other believers in Jesus not allowed to have thoughts about this? I find this quite extraordinary, because when the Catholic Church was embroiled in it’s sexual abuse scandals, every Protestant I knew had something to say about it. But I guess when it’s the SBC, we just have to shut our mouths. Sorry, but that’s not going to fly.

“The sexual abuse issue and the women’s roles issue are two separate things.” No. They’re not. They are directly related to one another. Just read the victim stories. Men were frequently given a pass, while the women were denounced, silenced, and shamed. Over and over and over. Offending pastors were given STANDING OVATIONS and GOING AWAY PARTIES while victims were treated as temptresses and jezebels. When a church does not welcome the voices of women, when it prioritizes institutional survival over people, the flock is not cared for. And even if it were true that the two issues are separate, I’ll refer you to one of my points above—if you have an abuse problem in your denomination, safeguarding the flock should be priority number one! This issue of women’s roles in ministry reeks of a distraction tactic.

“Individual churches have autonomy, but the SBC is just ensuring adherence to Biblical teaching.” Again, there is disagreement among earnest believers on women’s roles. Just because someone doesn’t fall exactly where you do doesn’t mean he or she is doesn’t ‘know the Bible,’ or ‘believe the Bible’—those were constant retorts to anyone who didn’t wholeheartedly agree with the SBC’s amendment. Apparently total strangers on social media are clairvoyant! There is a strange arrogance here. I was told by an SBC man, ‘if you knew the history’ of the Anabaptist movement and the SBC, I wouldn’t hold the opinion I did. Maybe it’s my pride, but that stuck in my craw a little bit. As it happens, I have a master’s degree in church history. I did my dissertation on women’s benevolent work in the area of abolition in 19th century America, so I’m pretty familiar with the SBC’s origin story.

Does the SBC have the right to set standards for it’s churches? Sure, but don’t tell me you value the autonomy of churches, then vote to micromanage how individual congregations deploy the gifts of the women in their congregations. Al Mohler even said women shouldn’t be discussing sermons on podcasts! Where is the line going to be drawn? It’s not consistent, it grows ever tighter. The goalposts will continue to shift.

Sigh… there’s a lot more I could say, but I have to get on with my day. I just want to close with one parting thought—I feel like conservative Christians are so afraid of ‘liberal drift.’ But in responding as they have on many issues, they are missing the real threat. Jesus reserved his strongest invective not for the libertines, but for the legalistic religious people. The ones policing everyone else’s words and actions. The ones who prioritized rules over people. I’m not saying churches shouldn’t have doctrinal positions and standards, but I don’t think the wolf at the door is what they think it is.

This week I got into a few… er, discussions with strangers on the internet. I try not to do this, but sometimes I can’t seem to help myself.

The topic was the practice that has come to be known as ‘The Billy Graham Rule,’ henceforth to be called ‘the BGR.’ Before I explain what this is, let’s get into a little background.

For anyone unfamiliar, Billy Graham was an itinerant minister primarily active in the mid- to late-20th century. He was married to Ruth and they had a few children, but Graham spent a considerable amount of time on the road, preaching in what became stadium-sized events called ‘crusades.’ I know, but let’s move on.

People under the age of forty may not realize what a big deal Billy Graham was. He had a huge influence during his decades-long ministry. He preached all over the globe (he’s even a character in an episode of The Crown). Back when we only had three channels, Billy Graham Crusades were televised on one of the major American networks. He was called upon to advise presidents, and gave the invocation at practically every presidential inauguration during his active ministry years. He did so, as far as I recall, without ever expressly endorsing a politician—something I particularly admire in this day and age. But I digress.

Billy Graham wasn’t perfect, of course, and I am sure there are things he did and said over the years (including calling his meetings ‘crusades’) that we could criticize, but I would argue there is a fair bit to admire about Graham, expressly his commitment to ensure there was no impropriety within his personal life and ministry that would sully the message he was called to bring—that God loves us, gave his life for us, and thus we may have communion with Him for eternity. This is what we Christians call the gospel, which means ‘good news.’

Graham and his ministry partners took great care to ensure everything they did was above board. In 1948, they developed a series of rules in response to what they noticed were common pitfalls for itinerant ministers. These included strategies to ensure there would be no financial mismanagement, protections against greed or materialism, a commitment to accurate reporting of crowd sizes, what kinds of accommodations they would stay in while on the road (nothing too fancy), collaborations with local churches, and so on. Also, Graham committed to never being alone with a woman who was not his wife.

This last one was devised expressly because there were some unscrupulous journalists who tried to engineer photos of Graham with women just for a scandalous scoop, so the ministry took very strict precautions that he would not be in a situation that might compromise him. All of these protocols were enacted to ensure the highest degree of integrity and to avoid any appearance of wrongdoing of any kind. These were rules designed for Billy Graham, for his unique and public ministry, and I am confident, based on what I have read, that he never intended these rules to be adopted by everyone.

However, over the years, this one rule—never be alone with a woman who is not your wife—has become known as ‘the Billy Graham Rule.’ The others seem to have fallen away from large scale use among Christians. I guess we’re less bothered by the appearance of megachurch pastors flying around in private jets or being paid multi-millions of dollars. We just don’t want to be seen alone in the sanctuary with the children’s ministry director.

In case you can’t tell from my mild snark, I have some issues with the BGR. I’ll start by saying of course we want to maintain integrity in our dealings with others. Of course we want to have appropriate boundaries to safeguard our marriages and reputations. However, I would argue that there are significant problems with the rank and file strictly adhering to the BGR. And I should point out that most adherents are men, often pastors, but not always.

First of all, the BGR is a man-made rule.

It is not in the Bible. Jesus, in fact, contravened the strict gender segregation of his time and place and interacted alone with women. He met the Samaritan woman at the well, which would have been considered a shocking interaction at the time. She wasn’t just a woman, she was a woman of some ill-repute, and a Samaritan! Samaritans and Jews were like the Sharks and the Jets. But Jesus saw her—he ministered to her. He didn’t call for a chaperone. That’s just one example, but there are quite a few in the Bible. Jesus was great to women. He flouted convention to see her as a whole human being. He didn’t fret about his reputation or ‘what will people think.’

Anytime we Christians get too hung up on any extra-Biblical rule, we’re in dangerous territory. In the apostle Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he says, “Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to it’s rules: ‘Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!’? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” (Col. 2:20-23, NIV, emphasis mine)

That last line is key—they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence. Several commenters on social media praise the BGR as a means of avoiding sexual scandals. There would be no scandals or marital infidelity, they say, if only everyone practiced the BRG! Except they are wrong. There are still scandals by it’s adherents, the most shocking of which is Ravi Zaccharias, the disgraced Christian apologist who was implicated in a disgraceful scandal that involved acts of the non-consensual variety. He, it turns out, claimed to have followed the BGR. Obviously, he didn’t follow it faithfully, but there’s the rub—this type of rule can be (and for some, is) only performative. You can commit to not being alone with a woman and still have a porn problem, for example. It gives them the appearance of virtue, spiritual clout in some Christian circles. But these outward, manmade rules do nothing to mold the human heart towards virtue. They don’t change us, they don’t make us more like Jesus, more loving, more humble. They just don’t. Requiring, or even strongly encouraging, fine-sounding rules that are extra-biblical doesn’t make us more holy.

The BGR Presumes Some Really Awful Things About Men and Women

This idea that men and women shouldn’t be alone together unless we’re married or biologically related assumes, when you think about it, some pretty unsavory things about us. It suggests at some level that women are inherently objects of temptation for men, that we are threats to their chastity or their wives and marriages. It suggests that men may be unable to control themselves in our presence. Some argue this is not what they mean at all, and that this rule exists for women’s protection as well as men’s.

I certainly agree that human beings, at our base level, can be pretty depraved. But I don’t think it follows that all of us need to guard and protect ourselves at all times against EVERY member of the opposite sex, or the same sex, as the case may be. I have faith that most men with whom I interact can control themselves around me, and I know I can do the same. That said, I don’t think any sensible Christian believes we shouldn’t have some reasonable guardrails in our interactions. I don’t invite men over by themselves when my husband is out of town, but I might have a coffee with a man for one reason or another at a local coffee shop. If you’re saying ‘but we must avoid the appearance of evil!’ I would suggest that such an anodyne interaction does not suggest evil, and if you think that, I believe your mind needs a good cleaning more than does my character.

When I first learned of the BGR, I thought it sounded more or less fine. We want to upright in our relationships with others. Sexual impropriety does happen and it’s incredibly destructive when it does. Why not seek to be very above board in these matters? But then I lived among men who strictly adhere to this practice. And it was… whoa. A lot. Some of these men were pastors in churches I attended. Women’s interactions with them were very stilted and limited, and if I wanted to talk with them, I needed a chaperone. It made me, and other women I knew, very uncomfortable, as if we were viewed as temptresses or threats. I want to stress that most of these men were lovely people, and their wives were great women. I know they loved us and cared about us, and if you asked them if we were decent, honorable women, they would have said yes. Yet their actions suggested they believed otherwise.

It’s Totally Impractical. And Sometimes Illegal.

While some churches and Christian organizations can try to set up their processes to enable men and women never being alone together, it is totally impractical in most job situations. Sometimes men and women have to work alone together, it just can’t be helped. When I call a plumber, a guy usually shows up at my door. Sometimes I arrive early for meetings and there’s only another man present until others show up. There are myriad situations we can find ourselves in that violate this rule. And it’s fine! There is no inherent danger, it’s just life. What are we supposed to do, run screaming from the room? Demand a chaperone? It just can’t always be helped.

And other times, trying to live this way results in serious problems, as evidenced by a lawsuit filed in New York state. A Christian HVAC technician filed a wrongful termination suit against his employer when he was fired for refusing to work alone with a female technician. Previously, all the technicians were men, but when the company hired a woman, the Christian technician requested a religious accommodation—he said his Christian faith prohibited him working alone with this woman. As we’ve previously noted, this rule is not Biblical, so I don’t see how he can even argue this with a straight face.

Former Vice President Mike Pence observed the BGR, and while I appreciate he had a high-profile position that has seen more than a few sex scandals and he wanted to avoid any appearance of impropriety, critics noted this policy put male staffers at an advantage over their female counterparts. If Pence could more easily engage with the men, they had more opportunity for face time with the VP, mentoring, etc. It’s worth noting that if you’re going to live this way, you may have to impose upon others to chaperone you. One of the BGR pastors I know was staunchly supported by his wife in this. Whenever he needed her to accompany him in some interaction with a woman, she would literally drop everything to join him, and she appeared happy to do it. Fine, but that’s just not feasible for everyone. It can severely curtail your ability to do your job, to show up for people, to be a good neighbor.

It’s Weird

As I’ve been ruminating on this subject, I’ve been thinking back over the past few weeks of my, and my husband’s, interactions. We’ve both been in situations where we were alone with members of the opposite sex for limited periods of time. I will strongly defend all these circumstances as normal, healthy, respectable encounters. There was just nothing wrong with them, and I don’t think either one of us gave them a second thought. To have absented ourselves from these situations would have been, in some cases, very awkward, strange, and just unnecessary. So why do it? Why be weird if we don’t have to be? To be clear, I don’t mind being weird if need be. Christians are sometimes going to seem weird. There are things in the culture that are pretty whack, and I don’t think it’s wrong for us to say, ‘hey! That’s pretty whack!’ But I don’t think having to fix the Smith’s air conditioning unit with a female technician is worth being weird about. The world isn’t looking at that and saying, ‘wow! These Christians! Such integrity!’ No, they’re saying, ‘wow, these Christians are a bunch of uptight weirdos.’

But! But! Our Reputations!

Yes, I know, people talk. Sometimes people are accused of things they swear they didn’t do, and maybe they didn’t. But there seems to be a lot of fear about our reputations, and I just have to wonder about that… I know it must be awful to have your reputation severely challenged, and I don’t lack sympathy for that. But are we more concerned for our reputations than we are about caring for people? Especially if you are a pastor, tending to your flock is your job. Do there need to be safeguards? Sure, but are the safeguards appropriate? Are they excessive? I’m not pretending to have all the answers here. I think this is one of those areas where we need to think and pray and be sensible.

I just know, as a member of the rank and file, that I trust my husband and he trusts me. Neither of us has given the other anything to worry about regarding fidelity. We’re open with each other. He tells me about his day and I tell him about mine. When he travels, which is not infrequently, he ‘introduces’ me, sometimes via FaceTime, to his colleagues—male or female. It’s not that he’s making a big show of transparency, it’s because he wants me to know about his life, his work, who he’s hanging out with. It’s just normal. It’s no big deal. We’re naturally transparent with each other, and that facilitates trust.

So those are my thoughts on this subject, for whatever they’re worth. I’ll finish by recounting a story a woman told on social media that I found telling. She said when she was in graduate school, she was expecting a baby and she and her husband shared one car. She would typically walk to and from the campus where she studied, but as her pregnancy progressed, these uphill-to-home walks became more difficult. One day, she tried to reach her husband to see if he could pick her up in the car, but he was unavailable. A male classmate kindly offered her a lift home, which she gratefully accepted. Her husband, a practitioner of the BGR, upbraided her for this. He felt it was inappropriate and ‘looked bad’ for his wife to be alone in a car with another man. He forbade her from accepting any more lifts with this classmate. The classmate was puzzled and confused that this man would have such an issue with this. What do you think? Is this the heart of Jesus? Since we’re so concerned with appearances, what does a scenario like this do for our reputations? It’s worth turning over in our minds….

Ok so maybe that subtitle is a bit rich for someone who is about to give her spicy opinion, but I think there’s a case for what I’m about to say.

Kristin Cabot…. do you remember her? Yeah, neither did I. Cabot is the woman who, along with her boss, Andy Byron, got caught canoodling on the kiss cam at last summer’s Cold Play concert in Boston. Cold Play lead Chris Martin made a joke when they ducked out of sight that they were either shy or were having an affair. Hahaha what a little laugh everyone had…

Except indeed, the latter was true. Byron was the CEO of a tech company, and Cabot was… wait for it… a HUMAN RESOURCES executive and yes, they were having an affair.

The whole sordid scene made for quite the story for a few days last August. Anyone who had ever been on the wrong end of a CYA initiative in the corporate world had a field day with this story. Anyone who’s ever been cheated on had a field day with this story.

It did turn into a MASSIVE thing. Kind of a ridiculously massive thing, actually. I’m not someone who thinks adultery is no big deal. I think it’s wrong, but these people were private citizens, and really, whatever they are doing is none of my business. Eventually, after a few days of shame and public opprobrium, it all died down and we went on with our lives.

However, naturally, it wasn’t business as usual for Cabot and Byron. They both lost their jobs and at least Cabot is now divorced. Apparently Byron is still with his wife. There were definitely consequences for them—more than most adulterers experience. And adultery always comes with consequences.

The remarkable thing is that Cabot is now talking. She was featured in a New York Times article a couple of months ago discussing the fallout from the kiss cam incident. To add insult to injury, she recently appeared on Oprah (who else?) talking about her public shaming, and blaming misogyny, specifically the ‘internalized misogyny’ of other women, for her enormous present suffering. She says Byron has been presented with several job offers, while she cannot get work. (I don’t know how she knows about Byron’s career options. Surely they’re not still friends? Going to concerts together? How does she even know this?) She posits this is the case because women are judged more harshly than men when they have affairs.

Ok, where to even start with this? I guess I’ll begin by reiterating that I, and 99% of the world, had forgotten about you, gurl! It was a blip in time, and while it’s true that the internet never forgets, if you don’t react, it shortens the life span of a story. If you react, you feed the beast. But Cabot clearly feels aggrieved, and to some extent, I agree. People were sending her death threats. She said people—women—yelled at her while she was at the gas station. Which is ridiculous. But whatever. If you keep your head down, it will die out faster. She, however, felt differently. She told the NY Times that ‘her silence was no longer serving her.’

I suppose it’s possible that she’s a victim of sexism, but I have another theory that I think is far more plausible as to why she can’t get a job—she’s in HUMAN RESOURCES!! She was having an affair with her boss! (She says it wasn’t technically an affair—no sex, just canoodling. She and I can agree to disagree on that. If my husband were engaging in public canoodling, I’m calling it an affair. But I digress.) Regardless of what exactly transpired between these two people, it brought shame and embarrassment to the company, and it particularly undermined her professional credibility, not because she’s a woman, but because she’s in HUMAN RESOURCES! Of course no one is going to want to hire you for an HR position if you got caught in a public maelstrom for behaving in flagrante delicto at a Cold Play concert. And now you’re discussing it at length to the NY Times and Oprah—a decision which reflects little wisdom and no discretion—virtues a company usually looks for in a human resources executive.

There is certainly a conversation worth having about public shaming. Even when a person’s behavior is very poor, though perhaps not criminal, I would suggest it’s to be expected in the age of social media that people might have a comment or two. But the pile on can become quite extreme and unpleasant. One could argue the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. I can sympathize with that, but by continuing to talk about it, Cabot just fans the flames. By trying to cast herself as a victim (even if she maybe is a little bit), she makes herself a very unsympathetic figure to many.

The fallout may have lasted longer than she thought was fair, but she has, inadvertently, made the fallout much longer and harder than it would have been otherwise. She may have had to pivot career-wise, revert back to a previous surname (Cabot is her second husband), move once the kids are grown, but she could have rebooted her life and gone on to live fairly normally, I would have imagined. She told the NY Times that, after the initial hoopla, that her teenage children didn’t want to be seen with her. Does she think continuing to talk about this is going to help with that?

Many years ago, I lived in a charming little village outside the city of Lyon, France. There were rows of shops down the main street, one of which was a cheese shop. The fromager was a delightful man called Christophe, and he loved cheese! He was extremely knowledgeable about cheese. He could tell you everything you wanted to know about whatever cheeses were on offer in his shop, what went well with what, etc. Christophe was an EXPERT.

Fast forward twenty plus years and our reverence of expertise appears to have waned. A good example is interior designer Joanna Gaines launching a cooking show in 2021. I have never watched this cooking show, but it was an interesting choice of venture for Gaines, who, with her husband Chip, had become extremely rich and famous from their blockbuster HGTV show Fixer Upper. Gaines is a self-taught designer, but she had a platform to learn the trade through her husband’s construction business. She honed her craft over the years, landed a show on TV, and eventually changed the landscape of American homes forever. If you’re thoroughly sick of shiplap, blame Joanna.

I heard her speak at an industry event a couple of years ago, and she remarked that she took a tremendous amount of heat for her cooking show. She was quite taken aback by the furor because, in her words, she likes to cook and just thought it would be ‘fun.’

I will admit, I am sympathetic to Gaines’s critics. Joanna may be a talented and skilled designer and tastemaker, but she is only an ordinary home cook. Why should she get a cooking show? We seem to have arrived at a time in American culture in which we have little respect for true expertise. I don’t necessarily mind if someone is self-taught. I mean, I don’t want a self-taught surgeon, but plenty of skills can be learned through trial and error, weekend workshops, books, and YouTube. You can even document your evolution from amateur to expert on YouTube. It’s a wonderfully democratic platform, and if you manage to amass a significant following, good for you! You may just be well on the road to expert status. Joanna’s show might have been more successful if she had been willing to admit her limitations and bring along an actual trained chef. Even Julia Child featured other chefs on her later shows! Julia Child! A legend! That Joanna felt she had the chops for a cooking show requires a certain arrogance. I don’t know her—she may indeed be a lovely woman, but she’s not a trained chef. Sometimes we need to stay in our lanes.

Which leads me to Meghan Markle. Her new series on Netflix, titled With Love, Meghan, debuted last week. It is an eight part series devoted to the domestic arts—cooking, hosting, arranging flowers and the like. Sadly for Markle, the series has been nearly universally panned. One reviewer likened it to watching a hostage video. There are some very entertaining reviews out there, but I do find myself feeling a tiny smidgeon of pity for Markle. It is devastating, I am sure, to work very hard on something only to have it ravaged by viewers and critics alike, but one wonders what exactly she was thinking? Did she think that viewers would be in awe watching her transfer Trader Joe’s peanut butter pretzels from one plastic bag to another? Did she think our minds would be blown when she told us we could transform a Ziplock into a piping bag by just clipping the corner off? Or that flower stems should be cut at an angle? Aren’t these little tips and tricks widely known among the general populace?

To be fair, Markle did bring in some experts on her show, which was essential considering she was cooking some ethnic foods. She would have gotten her clock cleaned if she had tried to make kimchi on her own, since while she is many things, she is not in fact Korean. So she brought in Roy Choi, a Korean American chef from LA. Choi’s episode is widely regarded as the best of the bunch. She also featured a couple of other chefs, including legendary farm-to-table pioneer Alice Waters. One wonders why Markle didn’t think to do this on all the episodes. Apparently she took a class in flower arranging at her star-studded baby shower. Oh. Ok. I guess one class made her an expert. I’m rolling my eyes, in case you can’t see.

Apparently both Markle and Netflix are disappointed at the poor reception of With Love, Meghan, but why should they be surprised? This is Netflix—a huge platform for which subscribers must pay an ever growing amount, yet Markle is really just an amateur. Many of her projects appear to have been mined from Pinterest ten years ago. I can do that. Where’s my show? Oh right, my husband isn’t a prince (though he is a prince of a guy.)

Markle does have her supporters, and they claim anyone who criticizes her is just a ‘hater.’ But I am flummoxed by these accusations. Markle lacks expertise. This is a fact. She didn’t work her way up the ranks like Martha Stewart did with her catering business. She is famous only because she married well.. at least, from a social strata perspective. The vast majority of people had never heard of her before she married into the British Royal Family. She had some success as a TV actress and kept a moderately successful lifestyle blog as a side hustle, but she does not possess any particular expertise in the areas she covers in her show. Rather than being a terrible victim, I see Markle as someone who has been given absolutely extraordinary opportunities for no reason other than her famous husband. She is hardly the victim her sycophants claim her to be. When she and Prince Harry left the royal fold for California, companies like Netflix and Spotify were throwing money at them, yet they were completely untested, untrained, and wholly inexperienced in the areas of content creation.

I hope that the backlash to both Gaines and Markle signifies a shift in American entertainment. We are a DIY loving culture, to be sure, but the DIYers have their place and that is platforms like YouTube and TikTok. If they achieve great success there, by all means take advantage of greater opportunities beyond those platforms. There are thousands of highly trained, skilled, and talented professionals out there. The media giants need to be tapping those people over famous hobbyists who need something to do

.

ACV is a dramatization based on real events, detailing the rise and fall of Belle Gibson, a young Australian woman who claimed to have been healing her stage four brain cancer with food.

A generation ago, we all would have rolled our eyes and declared her a nutter, but in the social media age, such claims find traction remarkably fast. Belle managed to swiftly find a community of like minded people who were inspired by her story. She not only found a following back in 2014, she parlayed her story into an award-winning app, which was slated to be one of the handful of apps pre-loaded on the forthcoming Apple Watch, and she published a cookbook with Penguin. By all accounts, both the app and cookbook were great. They not only sold the inspiring story Belle was peddling, the app interface was well designed and the cookbook was a beautiful collection of great recipes.

Except none of it was true. Belle Gibson had faked the whole thing, presumably for riches, but also attention and validation. One could say a lot about Belle, but she’s a clear villain and she has been quite thoroughly canceled. You could argue her difficult childhood makes her a sympathetic character, but there’s no doubt what Belle did was diabolical.

However, ACV is not just the story of complicated Belle Gibson. The series also introduces us to the fictional character of Milla, another young woman who claimed to be healing her cancer through food. Milla is based on an actual person—and her story is far more complex.

Jessica Ainscough, like Milla, was a beautiful young woman working in publishing—her dream job—when she was diagnosed with epithiliod sarcoma, a rare, slow-growing cancer that affected her left arm. The Milla character’s recommended treatment is amputation of her arm at the shoulder, which carries a nearly 90% survival rate, we’re told by her oncologist.

Unlike Milla, however, Jess’s prognosis was not as optimistic. Jess was to have a far more radical amputation—not just her full arm, she would be losing her entire shoulder, including the shoulder blade. This would be a very debilitating amputation, and her prognosis was still not nearly the 90% survival rate that Milla was offered in the show.

Jess opted out of the surgery, and chose instead to pursue alternative treatments—juicing every hour on the hour, and five coffee enemas a day. She began blogging about her ‘journey’ and she found an eager following, inspired by her positivity and commitment to natural healing.

Jess did look well in many of the inspiring photos she posted over the six years she lived with this disease. A growth on her arm would come and go—if a nodule shrank, she believed this was proof that her treatment was working, but it was just the natural progression of the disease. She claimed, numerous times, that she had ‘cured herself’ or that she was ‘healing.’ She also managed to make quite a nice income off her blog and related deals.

The cracks began to show, however, as critics noted she was not showing her affected arm in photos as the years went on. She would hide her arm behind people or objects, or she would wear long sleeves despite the fact that it was warm Australian summer. Critics began questioning whether or not she was really healed? Or was she just deceiving her following? Jess even went so far as to delete even kindly worded questions and appeals for transparency on her blog and social media posts. Sadly, she passed away in February of 2015. She was only 29 years old.

Jess leaves behind a complicated legacy. As I was reading about the story behind ACV, I was struck by some of the harsh criticism of Jess from primarily Australian commenters, many of whom had followed her story back in the day. She was called a scammer and a grifter. That seemed kind of yikes to me, as I saw her in sharp relief to Belle: at least Jess actually had cancer. She may have been misguided, but she was so young and hopeful… I can understand the allure of alternative treatments given the conventional treatment path looked so bleak.

However, a deeper look at Jess and her “Wellness Warrior” influence has given me pause. Of course, she had every right to look into alternatives, and to share her story online. But Jess didn’t stop there—she made claims that were blatantly false. She stifled critics, and she profited from her claims. She most definitely led others down a path that was not as she made it out to be. Surely she bore some responsibility?

Yet I still can’t help but have some compassion for Jess. Towards the end, her arm was riddled with this disease, and it had spread throughout her body. She was staring death in the face, and from the sound of it, she couldn’t handle it. Maintaining the illusion that all was well kept her going. Was it wrong? Yes, but I find it difficult to judge her…

The story is heartbreaking all around, and it shows us the dark side of social media. It is becoming increasingly difficult to face up to true things. The hard true things, because we can just go online and find someone else who will prop up the ideas we want to be true. And they often look so good! So inspiring! Jess Ainscough and Belle Gibson gave millions of people hope—false hope. They appeared to be beautiful, vibrant young women, beating dreaded disease with food. They showed us stunning pictures of themselves and their meals. They wrote inspiring words. They were at least temporarily successful… because people want to believe these things.

As I’ve been chewing on this topic over the past week, it’s caused me to wonder what other things we might be believing that aren’t true. In the social media age, it’s very easy for delusional people with a knack for photography and marketing to sell us these ideas that are simply false.

And this is why we must maintain relationships with real people—people who can see and touch us, who love us, who will tell us the truth. Because it’s just too easy to go online and follow a lie.

But then my mom friends at the tot lot started talking about it. I felt left out, so I gave it another shot. I decided to approach it as an anthropological dig to help me relieve my cognitive dissonance.

“Vulnerability” is a big theme in this ridiculous reality show—they really prize being vulnerable, sharing your heart, not having a ‘wall up.’ Of course, they do this because it’s good tv. Sensible women aren’t going to throw themselves on the floor crying because they didn’t get invited on the group date. Sensible women are not good tv.

They’re not entirely wrong about vulnerability. It is important to be vulnerable. It’s not healthy to go through life with your heart encased in an impenetrable shell, but there is an important caveat—it’s really only wise to be vulnerable with people you KNOW and TRUST. Being vulnerable with total strangers is a BAD IDEA.

And this brings us back to family vlogging and the HBO Max documentary, An Update on Our Family, which I discussed in my last post. This three part series chronicles the rise and epic fall of the Stauffer family and their YouTube channels that documented their daily life with their children, one a special needs child adopted from China, whom they eventually ‘rehomed’ (their word, not mine.) While I had some issues with the series, I will say it is worth watching. The filmmaker, Rachel Mason, could have taken many different slants on this harrowing story, but she seems to have settled mostly on how the internet masses responded to what happened, but I’ll get to that later.

Mason featured a couple of other family vloggers in the series. She interviewed a very chirpy couple from Georgia, Harold and Rachel Earls, who at the time of filming had three little boys. They now have four sons and they are expecting a fifth child. A recent video teases the gender reveal of baby number five, but of course, I don’t care.

The Earls seemed to have been a bit in the dark about the subject of this docuseries. Presumably they were told it was just a doc about family vlogging and they thought, sweet! Exposure for the channel! They seemed a bit unnerved when they were asked about the Stauffers. Harold turns to Rachel and says, ‘be careful.’

Harold is not wrong to be wary—he and Rachel seem to pride themselves on their positive contribution to the world. They don’t want to be associated with the likes of Myka Stauffer. The Earls family motto is “love God, love people, make a difference & be thankful.” They even have a foundation! Their content appears to be, in my opinion, rather nauseatingly syrupy. We’re treated to numerous scenes of them performatively playing with their kids and generally oversharing about their lives. Harold does make an insightful comment about how the YouTube algorithm favors extreme content, and he emphasizes that they strive to avoid that kind of thing, but he does seem to enjoy the oversharing. I did a little digging and found a video from their wedding which they had uploaded to YouTube. As part of his vows to Rachel, he promised to have sex with her every night like he was about to go on a trip. Or something to that effect. But whatever the exact wording, I was back to hiding under my sofa in extreme second hand embarrassment. Harold—please, none of us need to know about your intended marital sex schedule. Why do people feel the need to say these things out loud?! I don’t understand this. And then post it to the internet?!? Dear God… I found another video of them talking about their wedding night. It was mostly Harold going into far more detail than any of us needed while Rachel appeared to be sensible enough to be embarrassed. Dude, stop it. We all know what people do on their wedding nights. I just can’t with these people.

Anyway, then Mason asks about internet trolls and generally negative comments and Harold says, “if we stop being vulnerable, the haters win.” Soooo…. let me get this straight—you need to regularly upload videos of your very young children so ‘the haters don’t win.’ This logic is dizzying. It seems Harold thinks ‘being vulnerable’ and using his children for profit on YouTube is some kind of noble act.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that vulnerability is what draws viewers in—one of Myka’s videos apparently involved James checking to see how dilated she was towards the end of one of her pregnancies. ??? What the actual? I should mention James is an engineer by training, not an obstetrician, but apparently this video did well?? I just can’t.

In the social media age, people really seem to appreciate this kind of oversharing, but it is dangerous, and the Stauffers found out the hard way. You see, once you have shared on the internet, you cannot unshare. Once you have invited the public into your life, it’s hard to get them out. Fame hungry people seem to think you can turn public interest on and off like a tap, but it just doesn’t work that way.

The third episode of the docuseries details the public opprobrium to the Stauffers situation. Faithful viewers of the Stauffer’s channels noticed their adopted son was no longer featuring in their videos. They noticed his car seat was not in the car anymore. Fans started questioning where he was, was he alright? The Stauffers responded by deleting those comments, which frightened and angered their fans. Other YouTubers sounded the alarm that not all was well in Staufferland. Some fans even called the police in their home county to do a welfare check.

It was then that the Stauffers finally broke their silence and released the now infamous video titled An Update on Our Family, which is where the title of the docuseries originates. The video was a trainwreck. There’s really no other way to say it. James and Myka revealed that they had found a new home for their adopted son, and exhorted the public to respect his privacy—rich coming from the two people who had grossly invaded his privacy for over two years. The most appalling aspect of the video was the fact that it was really all about James and Myka—specifically how hard it was for Myka, how hard she had tried, how sad they both were. How mean people were to them, etc. The narcissism was off the charts, and to be frank, that appears to be common among family vloggers.

What we see among this cohort is not healthy vulnerability, it’s self-absorption run amok, and children are caught in the crossfire. The doc is, in my opinion, far too soft on the Stauffers and their ilk. It went on to focus considerably on the extreme ends of the internet backlash. Of course, the death threats, doxxing, and wild baseless conspiracy theories that ensued were wrong, but plenty of people were genuinely worried about this little boy, and their fears were not without merit. Former family vlogger Ruby Franke is currently in prison for having abused two of her six children. Just because you see what appears to be a happy family on social media doesn’t mean that is real. When the Stauffer’s adopted son went missing from the internet, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to worry.

It’s also understandable that the internet was ANGRY. People were very angry. The Stauffers made serious money off the public’s clicks and views—enough to buy a new house, jewelry from Cartier, and a trip to Bali after they’d offloaded their son—yet they seemed to expect that they could just shut down at will the interest they had created. They even tried to keep the channel up and continue to profit off their videos. Finally they dismantled two of their three channels (the ones featuring the family content) after a petition calling on YouTube to remove the channels collected hundreds of thousands of signatures.

Family vlogging is particularly worrying because it involves children. Children cannot legally consent. To anything. They are just too young, their brains are developing, they don’t know or understand the ramifications of this kind of thing. We rely on parents to act in their children’s best interests. We all get it wrong sometimes, yet most loving parents do alright most of the time. But family vloggers literally make money off their kids, and in most states there are no legal protections for these vlogged children—presently there is nothing but public outrage stopping parents from exploiting their children and pocketing all the cash they make from it. And the children are the draw—make no mistake about it. I watched a video of a dad who used to have a family channel. When he came to his senses and stopped featuring his kids, the channel hemorrhaged subscribers. (Thankfully, he’s a good enough dad that he doesn’t care about the channel. He cares about his children.)

If Harold Earls wants to overshare about his life, I suppose that’s his prerogative. I think it’s an extremely bad idea, but this is a free society and he can do what he wants, within reason. But to do this to your kids? I don’t care how cute it is. Sure, people like Myka and James Stauffer are on the extreme end of family vlogs, but just because you’re not that bad, doesn’t mean you’re good.

The thing about the Stauffers is they put out SO MUCH CONTENT over the years—particularly Myka. There are hundreds of hours of footage floating around on the internets, even though they deleted the channels—the internet never forgets. The docuseries shows a lot of damning material, and they barely scratched the surface—there is a lot of bad stuff from Myka’s own mouth that I have seen that the series doesn’t show. Myka truly hoisted her own petard, and any wise person should heed the warning.

Apparently Harold Earls tried running for congress a couple of years ago. He received a fair bit of public criticism when he released a campaign ad in which he seemed to be exploiting gold star families. He withdrew his candidacy. There’s a lot out there about Harold and his family, put out by their own hands. Maybe eventually he will realize that his wanton ‘vulnerability’ wasn’t the best idea.

When my first child was born, I relied on the little cohort of other mothers and nannies in my neighborhood. My living room window overlooked our neighborhood ‘tot lot,’ and after my son woke up from his nap, I would peek out to see if the other kids had gotten up and out for their afternoon run around. Those women kept me going in those first couple of years of motherhood. But SAHMs are becoming a rare breed, as more and more families rely on two incomes to keep the lights on.

Understandably, mothers at home are lonely and many are cash-strapped, trying to stretch that one paycheck in this increasingly difficult economy. Many are looking for ways to supplement their household income, while others are just looking for someone—anyone—to whom they might relate in that precious and exhausting season of life.

Enter the family vlogger. For the uninitiated, family vloggers are parents (again, usually mothers) who film and upload regular videos about their daily lives, and those of their children, to YouTube. Many family vloggers post at least once a day about the very mundane aspects of life—going to the grocery store, the park, Jenny lost her first tooth! The content is typically extremely banal and, in my opinion, mind-numbingly boring. I have truly never understood this genre of YouTube—why people make these videos and certainly why anyone watches.

But watch, they do! Family vlogging is big business. There are many such channels on YouTube and plenty of them are very successful. So successful that the primary breadwinner might even be able to leave the ‘normal’ workforce and join the vlogging spouse in this type of work. They not only earn ad revenue from the videos, they can also secure lucrative brand deals. There is serious money to be made in this niche of YouTube content creation, but the cost of doing business is high. You need to be willing to sacrifice your privacy and that of your children. You might also have to sacrifice a lot more, but I’ll get to that.

Family vlogging has come under fire in recent years, however, and the calls for it’s eradication, or at least regulation, are getting louder. There have been several family vloggers who have crossed the lines of basic human decency in pursuit of clicks and views. Once you get up and running, you have to feed the insatiable beast of YouTube’s algorithm, and that can result in unscrupulous and unhinged parents doing horrible things.

One such family was the Stauffers, an Ohio couple who are the subjects of a new docuseries on HBO Max called, An Update on Our Family. The series chronicles the rise and fall of this very successful family channel. Mother Myka Stauffer started vlogging when she was the single mother of an infant girl. She tried numerous different niches to set herself apart from this growing crop of content creators, from raw veganism to ‘clean with me’ videos, eventually settling (as many do) on procreation. Yes, once she married husband James and got pregnant, she saw her YouTube following expand in concert with her waistline.

Apparently plenty of people are fascinated by the ins and outs of pregnancy. Since I began researching this topic I have seen more people’s pee sticks than I ever thought possible. Myka brought her viewers on her pregnancy “journey” (everything is a journey in family vlogging land, FYI) and while that definitely helped to jack up her numbers, the three kids she eventually produced from her own body weren’t quite enough to catapult her to stardom. I mean, three kids… pffttt… Kate Gosselin says ‘hold my beer.’

The Stauffers then decided to… wait for it… adopt! Well, that makes for a nice thumbnail, doesn’t it?! Myka spoke openly of having studied the analytics of her videos carefully and the adoption announcement must have performed well, because they really leaned in. Viewers were treated to regular videos about the '“adoption journey.” They made an early video discussing from whence this lucky child might be procured. They ruled out foster-to-adopt because, in part, their career as YouTubers would be impacted if they couldn’t film the child—foster parents are prohibited from posting video or pictures of foster kids online. To be fair, they also cited James’ reluctance to fostering because he wouldn’t be able to handle a child possibly being restored to his or her birth family. This is a perspective I completely understand, however, they did actually say they couldn’t consider fostering because of the impact on their YouTube careers. I mean, they actually said it.

Eventually, the Stauffers settled on adopting a child from China. At the time, almost all adoptees from China were children with special needs. Myka was a registered nurse pre-YouTube fame, so she felt ‘comfortable’ with almost all the conditions on the list. They eventually settled on an extremely cute little boy with some developmental delays. Based on Myka’s video descriptions of this cute little fella, she seemed to think he was just slightly delayed and with some extra love Chez Stauffer with a camera in his face, he’d catch up just fine!

However, pre-adoption, Myka shared the medical information she had on this little boy with some local physicians, as is common practice with special needs adoptions. Myka shared with viewers that the doctors were far less optimistic than she was about his condition. They warned her that he might be severely delayed and that there may be many unknowns… was she really sure she wanted to go through with this? Myka told viewers that ‘her heart sank,’ but then the doctors words just ‘went in one ear and out the other.’ (Yes, she said that.) She assured her fans that she just knew this little guy was meant to be her son, and no matter what, ‘he was not returnable.’

Those words have haunted Stauffer, as two years after she and James made bank off this child—documenting everything about their trip to China to bring him back to the United States, his medical diagnoses and prognoses, his tantrums, his progress and his setbacks—Myka and James finally took to YouTube in the spring of 2020 to share that they had actually relinquished the boy to a new ‘forever family.’

Predictably, the internet went nuts. The Stauffers were ripped to shreds from every quarter, and considering it was the height of pandemic lockdown, plenty of people had little else to do. Myka tried to issue a mea culpa, but she was not forgiven. While James still maintains a car detailing channel on YouTube, Myka’s and the family channel have been shut down. Myka, at least, has been thoroughly canceled.

I know it am barely containing the snark, but it must be said that the story of the Stauffers and what transpired with this very traumatized special needs child is horrifying. The more I have learned about it, the more I am shocked. I will have to break this out into multiple articles to fully explore the scope of what has transpired with this case, and that’s why I think so many find it interesting. The tale of the Stauffers is the intersection of so many horrors of the internet age. We can—and quite frankly, I think we should—hold the Stauffers to account for their actions, but there are more villains in this than just Myka and James. The old saying, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is never truer than it is in this sad tale.

I’ll be back to review the docuseries…

Shortly after I quit my job, I went to the dentist. The hygienist and I made small talk as I settled into the chair, just before she stuck her hands in my mouth. She had asked what’s new, and I told her I had gotten married and I may or may not have mentioned I wasn’t working outside the home, I can’t remember. She then stuck her hands in my mouth and proceeded to take full advantage of my status as a captive audience. Apparently, she had gone through a nasty divorce. She had been a traditional wife for many years, keeping house and raising children as her ex-husband advanced his career. When the marriage ended, she had had to start over with no education or credit history and what sounded like a pretty crappy divorce settlement. As she continued to pick, prod and floss, she lectured me about the importance of having ‘something to fall back on’ and a credit card in my own name, among other warnings.

I walked out of the dentist’s office in a swirl of emotions. Part of me felt quite sorry and sad for the hygienist and the many others who found themselves in similar circumstances. I can imagine women who have gone through that kind of trauma feel compelled to tell newly married women all the things they wished they’d known. I also felt quite annoyed. Not only is it pretty unprofessional to behave in this way, it’s also (in my opinion) disrespectful to suggest that every newly minted wife or mother is a wide-eyed ingenue, completely ignorant of the ways of the world. Maybe my irritation was driven by my pride, but I made the choice to quit my job and keep house. I was a fully grown woman in my early 30s with two advanced degrees and a decade of work experience under my belt. Feminists bang on about choice for women, but when a woman makes a choice they deem regressive, she is talked down to as if she were a child.

So I understand why women, especially conservative women of faith, are inclined to celebrate the ‘trad wife movement.’ I’d argue it’s more of a trend, or perhaps even a fad, than it is an actual ‘movement.’ But these TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube videos of lovely young women in prairie dresses making bread from scratch with babies on their hips tap into some deep longing in women who are fatigued by the #girlboss hustle culture of the last decade. They’re tired. Tired of trying to find affordable, decent childcare so they can go to work and pay off their student loans, and contribute to their massive mortgage payments and heck, the cost of peanut butter. The stay at home moms are tired of conversations going dead whenever we’re asked what we ‘do’ and we say we’re ‘home with our kids.’ As if we have absolutely no brain or anything interesting to talk about.

However, I can’t say I find the ‘trad wife’ trend entirely benign. These accounts are, let’s be honest, a fantasy. Trad wife content critics are not wrong when they remark on the considerable effort that goes on behind the scenes to make this material and bring it to the masses. And it is, after all, work. For which they are being paid. In some cases, paid A LOT. I do wish the ‘trad wife’ content creators acknowledged this, whether they identify as trad wives or not. It’s the dishonesty, the inauthenticity of it all that really chaps my hide.

And I should also own that the dental hygienist made some decent points. Many trad wife critics have noted that you never see trad wives in their 40s and 50s talking about the beauty of being a housewife… some say the reason for this is because, ‘it sucks.’ Well, I don’t think it sucks, but it sure doesn’t look like they make it look, and it is certainly more nuanced than many younger women are being led to believe. There are absolutely protections women should ensure are in place before they leave the workforce (or choose to never enter it) in favor of a life keeping house and raising children. Husbands die, sometimes well before we expect. Some marriages don’t last. Some husbands become incapacitated for one reason or another. Sometimes husbands lose their jobs and can’t find another one.

And so, if anyone cares to listen, I will always cheer for the women at home, and I will always exhort them to make sure they have life insurance. Make sure you have a credit history. Make sure you have some marketable skill, and maintain it even if you don’t think you’ll need it. (You might have a degree in accounting, but if you don’t think about it for 20 years, QuickBooks will move on without you.) Disaster might strike, but even if it doesn’t, it’s good to have other things to think about, other ways to develop your own gifts and interests. It might even grow into a little side hustle, which is nice. It’s interesting.

I know we want to affirm the keepers of the home, but I will argue that it is foolish to do so at the expense of their long term well-being. There is risk associated with taking decades out of the workforce to raise children and to cook and clean for another fully capable adult. There just is. Yet we can mitigate that risk, and we should. See? That wasn’t so hard. And I didn’t even have my hands in your mouth.