Ice, Ice Baby

When you study intelligence via books and movies like I do, you tend to notice a pattern that is not true in real life but is true in media. It’s a technique called “fridging,” which is killing a woman simply to advance a man’s story. Susan Plummer was Robert McCall’s grounding wire, so the easiest way to move forward narratively in “The Equalizer II” was to kill her off early. Here is the email I wrote to Aada after I saw it in its entirety:

Susan. No. NO. NO. NO. NO…….. NO AGAIN.

Because I read about real-life intelligence, I can tell you that during Gina Haspel’s tenure at CIA, four of the five directorates under her were ALSO headed by women. I think that you’ll find in most countries that women are better spies. Because what it takes to be successful in a crowd is not what it takes to be a spy. You do not gain information directly. You gain it through osmosis. I believe that women are better at it because often men’s egos are at stake…… no one even thought to talk to the woman next to him, anyway.

When we win wars in the Middle East, it is always because of female intelligence networks. Always. I’m probably overstating it because I’m giving you an educated guess, but my view is that women’s networks are mostly unwatched. Surprise. It’s not all falafel recipes, you dense motherfucker.

In the Middle East, a woman’s opinion would have to be validated culturally first for it to matter as much as it does to CIA. Of course, it always varies country to country. Some countries want more help from CIA than others, and I am also respectful of that part of it. I focus on the operations where countries are asking for help and that’s why they betrayed their own. There are more of those stories in places like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq than there are in Iran because CIA is not known for goodwill there….. nor, I’m convinced, should it be. I don’t agree with Iran’s sources and methods, I just think that they, also, have a valid point.

The United States is not understanding good boundaries right now because the president is three raccons in a trench coat.

You cannot find crazy like this in the DSM, but you know it when you see it.

“Lake America?” “Gulf of America?” GTFO.

What has happened to me is that I am an American political science student, but my first girlfriend was Canadian….. so I think of myself as 48.6 percent American now (any excuse to invoke Hunter Biden). What I mean by this is that I study what is happening in political parties, history, international relations, etc…… but what I do not do is assume that America is always right and I am very watchful for bias in the text. Meagan (the Canadian ex) was a wonderful thinking surface to push back on because we didn’t talk much about politics at the time, but what we did rubbed off.

She’d note an observation about America that was weird to her, and I would spin out for three days trying to figure out why. I have an obsession with understanding America from the outside, because it’s the only way to love something properly. That is one of the reasons I love spies so much. They are citizens of the world, but come back home and VOTE.

Their brains can make connections that people who do not travel internationally don’t. I am sure you can live in the bubble that America is always right when you don’t have meetings in Toronto Monday-Friday. And Canada is just one country out of many. I cannot think of many countries in which I’d have an American flag anything visible.

When I travel, I want to be part of the female network. The one that observes and writes things down. The one who is perfectly fine with being thought of as crazy because most women with an opinion are. You’ll just have to accept that I am nonbinary, so that’s like being female except I hate masking. You fix your hair, doll yourself up, and be the eye candy in the world that you want to see; leave me to my Dockers and t-shirts and stop bugging me to wax my eyebrows. And yes. I know I need a pedicure. Thanks for that.

Please expect me to enjoy talking to you about all that girl stuff, as long as it is limited to “this is what I like.” It crosses a line when it feels like, “I expect you to like all this, too, and if you don’t, you’re weird.” Believe me, just because I don’t want to go to the nail salon does not mean I have never been there and cannot discuss in detail what it feels like to be dressed down in Vietnamese. I am pretty sure my technician had never seen eyebrows as cartoon as mine and had become confused about what to do next.

Women are my emotional spine. I am not the Susan in this equation. I’m the Robert. The one who stands outside female culture and understands it, trusts it. I am clearly not “one of the girls” because of the way I present, but that does not mean I cannot laugh about what goes on in the culture from the way I understood it.

Masking female and being female are two different things. I learned my lines, but that movie is over.