On February 9, 1927, Mae West was arrested after a performance of her play Sex, which she had written and in which she starred. In fact, the New York Police Department’s Municipal Vice Squad arrested the whole cast, and carried them off in black vans.
“I was the first one ever to say ‘sex’ on stage,” Mae West told Anjelica Huston and Peter Lester in 1974. The play in question, which West wrote, was “a dramatic play with a jazz band in it,” originally called Follow the Fleet, she told them, but when she brought it to the director, Edward Elsner, he couldn’t stop saying how sexy it was. “I was hearing the word sex so much I was beginning to like it,” she said. “‘Gee,’ I thought, ‘this might be good for the title, Sex.’ So I tell my manager I want to change the title to Sex. He says, if only we dare… so we do! Then there was a lot of trouble.”
At first, it was only publicity trouble. “When it opened, the newspapers wouldn’t use the word,” West said. “They said, ‘Mae West in that certain play.’ Finally we had to hire those sticker guys, you know. You’d leave your car for ten minutes and there’d be Sex all over it.”
But eventually, when the play had been running for almost a year, the complaints piled up and the morality hammer came down.
On April 19, 1927, West and two producers were fined and sentenced to ten days in jail, while the nineteen other cast members were given suspended sentences. The official crime? Giving a performance that “tended to corrupt the morals of youth and others.”
“The jury was instructed by the Court to render a verdict based upon their conception of the moral standards of today as they exist in this city, of which they were representative citizens,” the trial Judge commented. “Their verdict, based on this standard, ought to silence forever those who are continuously maligning the fair name of New York.”
He also described New York City as “the most moral city in the universe.” As for West, he argued that “she seemed to go to extremes in order to make the play as obscene and immoral as possible.”
West was sentenced to ten days in jail, but was released after eight, no doubt for charming behavior. Of course, the publicity from the whole affair only made her more famous. “She knew that in showbiz, crime paid,” writes Frank Rich. “Festooned with white roses, she rode a limo to incarceration on Welfare Island and boasted of wearing silk underwear throughout her eight-day stay there. When Liberty magazine paid her $1,000 for an exit interview, she used it to start a Mae West Memorial Library for female prisoners.”
The writing was on the wall. Soon she’d be a superstar.
In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.
There’s a good chance you have some story about your relationship to the word fuck. You asked a teacher what it meant; you used it inappropriately in a professional situation; you were thrilled to learn a story about its origin (probably false—see “Where It’s Not From,” below); you were disciplined by a parent or guardian for saying it; you discovered that a romantic partner liked—or really did not like—hearing it, or used it in a way that had a strong effect on you.
How has this word, which has been around for many hundreds of years, maintained both its intense interest and its uncommon power?
There is no simple answer to this question; too many factors come into play. Sex is certainly one factor. The vast majority of uses of fuck in modern English are nonsexual, but it has retained its sexual meanings and connotations across many centuries, and sex is something that’s always hovering around our consciousness. The word has amassed a great many other uses, though, and so the reasons for its singular force and appeal are likewise diverse and complex.
Fuck has an enormous range of uses across many parts of speech, as this dictionary details: sexual and nonsexual, positive and negative, literal and figurative, funny and violent. For any situation, there’s probably some sense, some expression or catchphrase, some proverb, some intonation that can be brought to the table.
That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and emotive words in the language makes it all the more fascinating—and deserving of the attention given to it in this volume.
And it just feels good to say. It feels good in the mouth, giving shape to catharsis; it can also feel good in the brain, satisfying a strong emotional need or a desire for personal expression. It can help us bond with peers, gain or direct attention, persuade listeners, and establish or test intimacy.
Psycholinguistic research shows that using certain kinds of swear words can even improve the body’s physical strength and resistance to pain. (But the more you swear in daily life, the smaller the analgesic effect.)
Words such as fuck are often criticized for being “bad,” or we are told that we should avoid them. But what is appropriate depends on context—and sometimes we want to be inappropriate. This word is an important part of our culture, our vocabulary, and our heritage, and that is always something worth knowing more about.
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Etymology: Where It’s From
The word fuck is of Germanic origin. It is related to words in several other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, Norwegian, and Swedish, that have sexual meanings as well as meanings like “to strike” or “to move back and forth.” The English word is the earliest recorded member of this family, but this does not imply that the other languages borrowed the form from English; rather, the words are all cognate.
Ultimately these words are members of a group of loosely related verbs having the structural form f plus a short vowel plus a stop (a consonant such as k, d, g, or t, in which the flow of air from the mouth is briefly interrupted), often with an l or r somewhere in between. These words have the basic meaning “to move back and forth,” and often the figurative sense “to cheat.” English examples of this family—all arriving later than fuck—are fiddle, fidget, flit, flip, flicker, and frig.
Fuck has no connection to some superficially similar words in other languages—Latin futuere, and its French derivative foutre. Though the Latin word is vulgar and means “to copulate,” it is almost certainly not related to fuck. Theories attempting to tie fuck to words in other languages, sometimes via a proposed Indo-European root meaning “to strike,” are possible, but for now remain uncertain.
Nor is fuck an “Anglo- Saxon” word—that term refers to the earliest period of English (now called Old English by scholars), before around 1100 A.D., and fuck is simply not found this early.
There are various claims that certain words in Middle English represent early examples of fuck, but these are usually unlikely. For example, Carl Darling Buck, in his 1949 Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, cited a 1278 example of the name “John le Fucker.”
But he did not cite the source of this name, and no one has found a reference to it. More important, even if the source is authentic, there are many other possibilities for the name (the word fulcher “soldier,” or a misreading of the name Tucker, are the most likely).
However, if the bird name windfucker noun (or fuckwind noun) is ultimately related to fuck, it is interesting to note the name Ric Wyndfuk and Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous, found from 1287 in documents related to Sherwood Forest, which may show another form of the bird name. Use of the word in the sense “to strike” could perhaps also be reflected by the surname Fuckebegger (also 1287); compare the Anglo-Norman surname Butevilein (literally “strike the churl or wretch”), found in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Two recent discoveries have changed our understanding of the word’s earliest history in English. The historian Paul Booth found court records from Cheshire in 1310 and 1311 concerning a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele, who was charged with a serious (though unspecified) criminal offense.
As authorities tried to apprehend him, his name entered the records several times over the course of many months, showing that this was a real name rather than a one-off joke. The most plausible interpretation would seem to be sexual, with Roger either believing that copulation should be done through or next to a partner’s navel, or having attempted such an act.
And in 1373, a charter from Bristol gives us an unusual placename: a field called Fockynggroue, i.e. “Fucking Grove.” While there are other interpretations, “a grove where one copulates” is the most likely, and is supported by various parallels.
Early evidence for our word is relatively slight, and may have more than one explanation. One possibility is simply that the word isn’t much older, that it was a new development in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The usual Middle English word for sexual intercourse was swive—itself considered vulgar—and fuck could have arisen to take its place as that word became more rare.
The most likely possibility for fuck, however, is that the word carried a taboo so strong that it was rarely written down in the Middle Ages. The fact that its earliest known non-proper-name appearance in English, around 1475, is obscured by a cipher lends support to this interpretation.
Since many of the earliest examples of the F-word come from Scottish sources, some scholars have suggested that it is a Norse borrowing, Norse having had a much greater influence on northern and Scottish varieties of English than on southern dialects.
But the fourteenth-century examples, the 1475 ciphered use, and the 1528 example of “O d [probably damned] fuckin Abbot” (at fucking, adj., sense 1) are all from England, proving that fuck was not restricted to Scotland in its earliest days. The profusion of early examples in Scotland is probably because the taboo against the word was less strong there.
(The 1528 quotation, found in a marginal note to a manuscript—that common source of bawdy jokes—has been referred to repeatedly in popular articles as the first use of fuck, despite the many earlier examples.)
Taboos against particular words or types of speech are not new. There is ample evidence from the earliest times in England that certain forms of speech were restricted. As far back as the seventh century, there are records of a law from Kent reading “If anyone in another’s house…shamefully accosts him with insulting words, he is to pay a shilling to him who owns the house.”
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Where It’s Not From
The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think. Acronyms are extremely rare before the 1930s, and etymologies of this sort—especially for older words—are almost always false. (Posh does not come from “Port Outward, Starboard Home,” cop is not from “Constable On Patrol,” and tip is not from “To Insure Promptness.”)
To this editor’s knowledge, the earliest suggestion of an acronymic etymology for fuck appears to be in the New York underground newspaper The East Village Other, on February 15, 1967:
It’s not commonly known that the word “fuck” originated as a medical diagnostic notation on the documents of soldiers in the British Imperial Army. When a soldier reported sick and was found to have V.D., the abbreviation F.U.C.K. was stamped on his documents. It was short for “Found Under Carnal Knowledge.”
The more usual variant along these lines is “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge,” abbreviated to fuck and allegedly worn on a badge by convicted adulterers, rapists, or prostitutes in some mythical Olden Tymes; other variants include “Found in Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” (specifically for adulterers) and “Forced Unsolicited Carnal Knowledge” (for rapists).
The word fuck definitely did not originate as an acronym, as many people think.
(The publication of a play in 1965 titled “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” led to a controversy when the University of California, Berkeley, tried to ban its sale; but the play seems not to have suggested that the phrase was the true origin of fuck.)
The other common acronym is “Fornication Under Consent of the King,” said to have been some form of royal license, often specifically to repopulate the country after a plague. This variant is first found in the May 1970 issue of Playboy:
My friend claims that the word fuck originated in the fifteenth Century, when a married couple needed permission from the king to procreate. Hence, Fornication Under Consent of the King. I maintain that it’s an acronym of a law term used in the 1500s that referred to rape as Forced Unnatural Carnal Knowledge.
When acronymic origins are suggested, the original phrase usually sounds artificial, not like some real phrase that would be common enough to be abbreviated. “For unlawful carnal knowledge,” however, has the ring of a stilted legal expression.
In fact, “unlawful carnal knowledge” has appeared in legal sources for some time. It was used in definitions of rape under English Common Law, can be found in Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and is present in Northern Ireland’s current statute on sex offenders.
This formula appeared even earlier in criminal statutes throughout the southern United States, attested from the 1870s and 1880s from Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. The full phrase (with “for”) is first found from the late 1880s in US statutes.
All of which still does not mean that the word fuck derives from this or any other acronym: it does not.
A far more absurd entry in the category of folk etymology is the “pluck yew” story, which conflates the origin of fuck with earlier folklore about the origin of the offensive backhand two-finger gesture, the British form of what is usually an extended middle finger in America. In the original form of the tale, before the battle of Agincourt in 1415 (immortalized in Shakespeare’s Henry V), the French taunted the English longbowmen by waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers—used to pull back the bowstring—could never defeat the mighty French.
After the English longbowmen convincingly showed their superiority (ten thousand French dead to a mere twenty-nine British, in Shakespeare’s exaggerated count), they waved their two fingers back at the French in the now familiar gesture. The fact that longbows were traditionally made of yew has produced a recent twist in the telling: to claim that drawing back the bowstring was called “plucking yew,” and thereby to assert that the victorious English not only waved their fingers at the French but shouted “We can still pluck yew! Pluck yew!” at them.
A convenient sound change and a respelling brings us to the familiar phrase “fuck you.” This story, totally ludicrous in any version, was popularized on the NPR show Car Talk, where it was meant as a joke; it spread on the Internet in the 1990s as a serious explanation.
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The Taboo Status of Fuck
Early Modern English
The demand for bawdy humor throughout history has meant that writers have always found ways to use certain words, even if they were prohibited by social conventions. In Shakespeare, for instance, one can find two clear references to cunt.
In Twelfth Night (II.v), Olivia’s butler Malvolio receives a letter written by Maria but in Olivia’s handwriting; analyzing the script, Malvolio says, “My my life this is my lady’s hand. These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s.” With the and sounding like “N,” Shakespeare not only spells out cunt, but gets a pun on pee in there as well.
And more famously, in Hamlet (III.ii) the prince uses the phrase “country matters” in a manner clearly alluding to cunt (Hamlet’s next crack is about what “lie[s] between maids’ legs”).
Though Shakespeare never actually uses fuck itself, his plays contain several examples of probable puns on or references to the word. A Latin grammar lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.i) gives us the focative case (punning on the vocative case, used for direct address), followed up immediately with a raft of lewd wordplay, including sexual puns on Latin words and references to various English words for the sexual organs.
In Henry V (IV.iv) the notoriously bawdy Pistol threatens to “firk” an enemy soldier; though firk does have a legitimate sense ‘to strike’, which is appropriate here, it was used elsewhere in the Elizabethan era as a euphemism for fuck, and it is likely that Shakespeare had this in mind as well. In several places he refers to the French word foutre, which is the literal (and also vulgar) equivalent of fuck; the most notable is this passage in Henry V (III.iv), in which Princess Katherine is having an English lesson:
Katherine: Comment appellez-vous les pieds et la robe? [What do you call le pied and la robe?]
Alice: De foot, madame; et de cown [a French pronunciation of gown; these English words sound like the French words foutre “fuck” and con “cunt”]
Katherine: De foot et de cown? O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique! [Dear Lord! Those are bad-sounding words, wicked, vulgar, and indecent!]
Shakespeare elsewhere (2 Henry IV V.iii) has Pistol say, “A foutra for the world and worldlings base!,” and in at least one place (Merry Wives II.i) he uses foot as a probable pun on foutre. As the Henry V passage shows, Shakespeare was well aware that this word was vulgar—at least in French—and there is a good possibility that these examples are intended to represent the taboo English word fuck.
Though the evidence clearly shows that fuck was considered vulgar in Shakespeare’s time, it’s hard to tell just how bad it was. But we have a remarkably informative example of its status from a source unexpected in the late seventeenth century: pornography. Though there is little truly explicit English erotica before the Victorian era, one exception is the 1680 The School of Venus, a translation of an earlier French work.
This graphically illustrated book—surviving in only a single copy, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich—is presented in the style of a dialogue between a sexually experienced older woman and her young niece, this format (common especially in the eighteenth century) allowing highly explicit discussions to appear in the guise of instruction. The author appears to have been unusually interested in language: at one point the characters discuss the precise differences in meaning among occupy, fuck, swive, incunt, and other verbs, and elsewhere the older woman explains why men use offensive words like cunt during intercourse.
We are also treated to a clear statement of how offensive fuck was:
There are other words which sound better, and are often used before Company, instead of Swiving and Fucking, which is too gross and downright Bawdy, fit only to be used among dissolute Persons; to avoid scandal, men modestly say, I kissed her, made much of her, received a favor from her, or the like.
Late Modern English
Certainly fuck was considered literally unprintable throughout the nineteenth century, except in obscure, secret, legal, or privately printed publications. Important early authors known to have used the word include Lord Rochester in the seventeenth century and Robert Burns in the late eighteenth; Burns was probably the latest important author known to use the word before the twentieth century, and he uses it only in The Merry Muses of Caledonia, a bawdy manuscript intended purely for private circulation.
Even Captain Francis Grose—a friend of Burns—felt compelled to spell it f—k in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785 and later editions; the word was expunged from the 1811 edition by a different compiler).
In a striking example of some Victorians’ unfamiliarity with bawdy vocabulary, we see that the poet Robert Browning egregiously misunderstood one common word. He encountered the couplet “They talked of his having a cardinal’s hat, / They’d send him as soon an old nun’s twat,” in a seventeenth- century poem. Erroneously believing from this passage that the last word referred to a part of a nun’s habit, Browning wrote of “Cowls and twats” in his 1848 poem Pippa Passes.
This does not imply that fuck was unused, of course. John Farmer and W.E. Henley’s monumental Slang and Its Analogues (privately printed; the volume with fuck appeared in 1893) included the use of fucking as both an adjective and an adverb, described respectively as “A qualification of extreme contumely” and “a more violent form of bloody.”
These are labeled “common,” despite the fact that this editor has been able to discover hardly any earlier examples. No doubt this and various other senses were common but unprinted for some time previously.
While there seem to be a large number of new senses that are first found around World War I, it is likely that these were in use earlier, and their appearance in the 1910s is more a result of weakening taboos than of an actual increase in the number of words coined in that era. For although fuck may have been strictly taboo in mainstream usage in the nineteenth century, it was extremely common in the flourishing world of Victorian pornography.
Many explicit F- words are found in such sources from the 1860s onwards, often in ways that are scarcely different from their use in the hardcore pornography of the present day. And recent research has shown that various forms or senses that were thought to have emerged later were indeed in use in the nineteenth century.
In two remarkable incidents, fuck even found its way into the very proper London Times in this prudish era. Reporting a speech delivered by Attorney General Sir William Harcourt, the Times printed on January 13, 1882:
I saw in a Tory journal the other day a note of alarm, in which they said, “Why, if a tenant- farmer is elected for the North Riding of Yorkshire the farmers will be a political power who will have to be reckoned with.” The speaker then said he felt inclined for a bit of fucking. I think that is very likely.
It took the stunned editors four days to run an apology for what must have been a bit of mischief by the typesetter:
No pains have been spared by the management of this journal to discover the author of a gross outrage committed by the interpolation of a line in the speech of Sir William Harcourt reported in our issue of Monday last. This malicious fabrication was surreptitiously introduced before the paper went to press. The matter is now under legal investigation, and it is hoped that the perpetrator of the outrage will be brought to punishment.
And later that year, on June 12, 1882, the following advertisement appeared in the Times: “Everyday Life in our Public Schools. Sketched by Head Scholars. With a Glossary of Some Words used by Henry Irving in his disquisition upon fucking, which is in Common Use in those Schools.”
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Current Norms
The twenty-first-century Times still holds its nose and avoids publishing swear words whenever it can, at least in theory. If they must be included, its 2022 style guide says, writers must “soften them with three asterisks: f***.” Though it acknowledges that the practice looks “horrid,” for the Times editors this is a reason to avoid not the asterisks but the entire swear word.
Other text-led “broadsheet” or “quality” press in the UK are more or less matter-of-fact about printing fuck and other taboo terms. Meanwhile, the so-called red tops—image-led tabloids with a sensationalist tone, and a red masthead that gives them their informal collective name—are more inclined to apply asterisks even to relatively mild swear words. This approach can sometimes pose a puzzle for readers: is “b*******” meant to be bastards or bollocks?
Different kinds of language have been considered incendiary at different times. Several centuries ago religious blasphemy was the most unforgivable type of expression (we observe that in the 1528 example we’ve mentioned, it is the word damned, not fucking, that is elided).
Parentage based insults were also considered extreme, with bastard often written with dashes in place of some letter. In more recent times, words for body parts and explicitly sexual vocabulary have been the most shocking: in nineteenth-century America even the word leg was considered indecent; the proper substitute was limb.
Now slurs, such as racial or ethnic epithets, are the scourge; recent surveys in multiple countries, including the United States, UK, and New Zealand, show them rising to the top of the offensiveness charts. One prominent professor told US News & World Report in 1994 that if she used fuck in class, no one would bat an eye, but that she would never dare to use any racial epithet in any context.
This trend has only accelerated: simply mentioning the word that we euphemize as the N-word is usually forbidden even in educational contexts, while the unrelated word niggardly, tainted by similarity, has fallen into disuse, itself often specifically banned. Research has found that exposure to slurs, uniquely among taboo words, can cause measurable psychological and social harm.
Today it seems that the taboos against the F-word are weaker than ever. Regular surveys of public attitudes published by British broadcasting regulator Ofcom provide a useful barometer of the word’s changing taboo status in the UK.
Today it seems that the taboos against the F-word are weaker than ever.
In its recent reports, older people are more likely to rate the F-word as a strong swear, while middle-aged people consider it moderate, and young people see it as becoming more acceptable in public use. Equivalent research in New Zealand shows “significant declines in unacceptability of fuck– words” even from 2018 to 2022.
While a few publications still refuse to print fuck regardless of the circumstances, most have no such qualms. The more literary magazines have printed the word for some time, and by the early 2000s even Newsweek and Time had started to do so; the publication of the Starr Report in the New York Times, and a notable comment from Vice President Dick Cheney in the Washington Post, has meant that even the proper papers consider fuck fit to print.
Even commercial television, though still subject to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations, is becoming more open in its use.
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Excerpted with permission from The F-Word IV Edition, edited by Jesse Sheidlower. Copyright @2024 by Oxford University Press.
Jesse Sheidlower
Jesse Sheidlower is the editor of the previous editions of The F-Word. He was Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1999 to 2013; since then, he has remained active in linguistic matters. He has served as President of the American Dialect Society, and now teaches lexicography at Columbia University. He has written about language for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Lingua Franca, Playboy, Esquire, Slate, Boing Boing, MBookforum, and various scholarly journals, including American Speech, Dictionaries (journal of the Dictionary Society of North America), and The Journal of English Linguistics. He is also the editor of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, an online resource which launched in 2021.
Many people all over the country have been involved with the “No Kings” movement and rallies. We had more than 1,000 participate in our small town of Willits, California. I have been a rebel with a cause my whole life. My parents were active in the human rights and labor movements in the 1950s and my father was one of the black-listed writers in Hollywood who stood up against McCarthism. My causes have involved love, compassion, and dignity for all people and true partnership with the communities of life on planet Earth.
Timothy Snyder is a widely respected professor and author of numerous books including On Freedom and On Tyranny. He says,
“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
Snyder goes on to ask,
“What does it mean to be commemorating 250 years of the American republic? To an uncanny degree, what the Trump people in this 250th year are doing is repeating the abuses that the American founders complained about: arbitrary taxation; taxation without representation; imperial attitudes; wars without consent.”
He calls us to fight for democracy in the same way our founding fathers did.
“To honor the origins of our republic, says Snyder, “doesn’t mean going back to the eighteenth century. It means being rebels in our own time. It means demanding freedom, aiming for something radically better in the future.”
Certainly men are not the only ones who can fall under the spell of fascism, but there is a reason historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said in her prescient book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present published in 2020,
“Ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They use masculinity as a symbol of strength and a political weapon. Taking what you want, and getting away with it, becomes proof of male authority. They use propaganda, corruption, and violence to stay in power.”
In her book she described seventeen examples of authoritarian leaders, all of them men including:
Benito Mussolini, Prime minister of Italy
Adolph Hitler, Chancellor of Germany
Saddam Hussein, Prime minister of Iraq
Victor Orban, Hungarian prime minister
Vladimir Putin, President of Russia
Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America
Ben-Ghiat concludes saying,
“They promise law and order then legitimize law-breaking by financial, sexual, and other predators.”
MenAlive: A Community of Rebels For Men and Their Families
Another step in my own “rebellion” occurred during the birth of our first child on November 21, 1969. After coaching my wife through the pre-birth Lamaze breathing methods we had learned, I was told she was ready to move into the delivery room.
“Your job is done, now Mr. Diamond,” the nurse told me. “You can go out to the waiting room, and we’ll let you know when you can see your wife and child.”
The hospital rules had been explained to us both: Fathers were not allowed in the delivery room. That was OK with me. Although I felt I was able to coach my wife during the first stages of birth, I was afraid I might pass out or otherwise be more of a hindrance than a help during the actual delivery.
I hugged my wife and wished her luck as she was wheeled one way toward the delivery room and I went the other direction toward the waiting room. But I never made it through the waiting room doors. I felt a calling from my unborn child: I don’t want a waiting-room father. Your place is here with us.
I turned around and walked back the way I had come and found the delivery room. I walked through the doors and took my place at the head of the table. There was no question of leaving, if asked. My child needed me and my response was more important than following the rules. Amid tears of relief and joy our son, Jemal, came into the world and he was handed to me.
Holding him for the first time I made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where fathers were fully healed and involved with their families throughout their lives.
When we met and fell in love in college, my future wife and I talked about our desire for children. We decided we would have one child then adopt a child. Even in 1964 we felt the world was becoming overcrowded. Three years after Jemal was born, we adopted a 2 ½ month old African American little girl we named Angela.
My website MenAlive was launched in 1972 as my window to the world. The purpose of MenAlive is to share ways we can come together to create a world of true partnership. I want everyone to live fully authentic lives, to love deeply and well, and to make a positive difference in the world.
My first book, Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, was published in 1983. I have now written 17 books including international best-sellers, Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Surviving Male Menopause, and The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression.
I write articles and interview experts on various aspects of men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. One of my recent articles, “Father Time: How Dad’s Are Being Called to Change the World for Good,” featured one of my colleagues, Dr. Sarah Hrdy. Dr. Hrdy is an anthropologist and primatologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates. She has recently turned her attention to men.
After seeing how her own sons were connected to children in ways she had previously assumed was what came naturally only to women, she researched and eventually wrote a book called Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. She found that fathers are as biologically capable of nurturing small children as mothers are.
She said, “My unexpected finding is that inside every man there lurk ancient caretaking tendencies that render a man every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother. It is a journey that has forced me to rethink long held assumptions about man’s innately selfish, competitive, and violent nature, what Darwin described as his ‘natural and unfortunate birthright.”
At MenAlive we have always known that men and women may be different in many ways, but when it comes to loving and nurturing children, we are as biologically programmed and capable of developing the same skills that mothers learn to develop. I will soon be introducing our MenAlive community to other expert colleagues. I describe what is coming in my recent article: “The Future of MenAlive: From Men’s Health to Relational Healing and Transformation.”
Come join us. You can read my latest blog posts here. If you feel called to change the world for good, I invite you to join us.
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Apr 19, 2026 Daniel Bourke is the author of Telepathic Tales and Apparitions at the Moment of Death. A poet and songwriter, he also has a background in the natural sciences, the arts, and the video game industry. His newest book is Déjà Rêvé & Love at Second Sight: The Experience of Meeting in Dreams before Meeting in Life. Daniel discusses the phenomenon of meeting people in dreams before encountering them in waking life, drawing on hundreds of cross-cultural and historical accounts. He explores distinctions between déjà vu and what he calls “déjà rêvé,” along with evidence suggesting these experiences may be more common than previously assumed. Bourke also examines precognitive dreams, spiritual encounters, and the possible implications for our understanding of time, consciousness, and human relationships. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:01 Precognitive dreams and origins of research 00:06:22 Patterns across hundreds of dream encounters 00:10:01 Psychological interpretations and risks 00:11:30 Spiritual reality and nature of time 00:15:14 Historical accounts and dream divination 00:18:15 Veridical dreams and recorded evidence 00:23:29 Dream imagery and encounters through images 00:30:08 Crisis apparitions and parapsychological research 00:48:30 Conclusion (Recorded on March 21, 2026)
Amrit Sandhu ???????? Apr 19, 2026 Inspired Evolution Podcast ???????? Dr. Heather Ensworth PhD — clinical psychologist, shamanic practitioner, and evolutionary astrologer — takes us on a sweeping journey through the 24,000-year precessional cycle and reveals why the window between 2025 and 2032 may be the most consequential period in human history. As Heather puts it, this is an incredible time and opportunity if we harness it, given all that’s happened since the Age of Taurus. ???????? Your birth chart is your medicine wheel — and when you come to the centre of it, you remember who you actually are. 1-in-12,000 year shift. ✨ ???? It’s collective AND it’s personal — it’s in your chart right now. If you’d like Amrit’s support to understand what’s being asked of you in this time, what’s ready to heal, and where you’re being called next… ???? YOU CAN BOOK YOUR ASTROLOGY READING directly here: ???? https://amritsandhu.com/reading
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, known as Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875 – December 29, 1926), was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. Wikipedia
In 1977, a man working on a drilling rig in Alaska, far from his home, sat down and wrote a letter. He’d been working as a “roughneck” handling the drill in freezing Arctic conditions and every day after his shift finished, every spare second he had, he’d been reading. He would wash the oil and mud off, make a coffee, light a cigarette and at the back of the rec room, or lying on his bottom bunk in close quarters with other men, he would turn back to his book, The Hite Report: A National Survey of Women’s Sexuality.
The Hite Report, published in 1976, was written by Shere Hite, Playboy model turned DIY sex researcher. Though it has sold upwards of 50 million copies, the book has now been largely forgotten.
But in 1977, this man was gripped by its revelations. He read that most heterosexual American women were sexually dissatisfied and 70% of women could not orgasm from penetrative penis-in-vagina sex but required clitoral stimulation, but most women didn’t speak up about that. Shere explained why: Women had long been expected to get the most pleasure from sex the way that men had, from penetration. That was because “sex is sexist. A woman’s place in sex, resembles her place in the rest of society.”
So, for sex to be more pleasurable required assertiveness from women and sensitivity from men, but most of required society to be reshaped along feminist lines. The Hite Report was the first feminist book this man had ever read, his entrée to women’s liberation.
Men, many men, seem to hate feminism.
After getting almost to the end of the 500 page tome, he began his letter to Shere:
“My wife gave me your book to read…My first reaction was “What is my wife trying to tell me?” Until reading your book I felt I was a great lover and all-round good guy. With the honesty of various women, I have found my shortcomings… Maybe your book is my wife’s way of communicating with me. At least opening the door.”
In the papers of Shere Hite there are hundreds of letters from male readers, these spill and bulge from the 300 boxes that make up this archive. This correspondence has only been read by Shere and by me. This pile of letters complicates the story that is usually told about men and feminism. The story usually goes that the vast majority of men were not touched by the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s at all, they responded with hostility or stunned silence.
The present seems to corroborate this. Men, many men, seem to hate feminism. Feminism, the men of manosphere suggest to their millions of followers, is a conspiracy so powerful that it has destroyed masculinity and stacked the world against men. Perhaps even more than feminism, many men seem to hate women. The first months of the year have passed in a swirl of revelations about abusive men, reminiscent of the first explosive days of the #MeToo movement. Epstein of course, and Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of iconic British department store, Harrods.
But while being wildly wealthy brings entitlement, valorises inequality, offers systemic protection and so encourages abuse, this is not just a rich guy problem. The nice men list, the catalogue of comrades you can count on has lately been torn up too, a fantasy in pieces. Just last month it was reported that Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers organiser, raped women and girls, and Noam Chomsky—one of the left’s foremost intellectuals whose most popular book is called Manufacturing Consent—is right there on the Epstein private jet.
The photos show him leaning over his arm rest, clutching his bottle of Voss water, his grandfatherly hair threatening to fall in his eyes that seem to look on admiringly as his cool guy friend Jeff holds court. Noam defended him against “the horrible way” the “vultures” in the press were treating him against the mounting evidence of his crimes of rape and trafficking which, in survivors’ own words, made them want to die. And some of those women are now dead.
In this moment, I feel my conviction that most men I encounter consider women their equals slipping away. Any certainty—my certainty—about most guys being good guys seems naive. This belief that I clung to like a life raft seems to be stone around my neck. You could be forgiven for wondering if the most extreme radical feminist polemics were right. Perhaps, under patriarchy, men can only think of women as ornaments and objects, degraded whores out to seduce and then sabotage, at once stupid bitches too dumb for STEM subjects yet also the cunningest cunts that ever walked this earth.
But against our terrifying misogynistic present, these letters to Shere from male readers flip the script. Men’s responses to The Hite Report show that feminism did reach men, and not just the men you would expect. Most of the men who wrote to Shere were not educated men from big cities, but men working on the line at the Ford plant at Dearborn, Michigan or men employed at strip mall legal firms. There are a few executives writing from corner offices among the taxi dispatchers and sports coaches.
Indicative of her wide reach are a smattering of extraordinary letters from incarcerated men who had learnt about The Hite Report from the porn they read in prison. In these letters they offered intimate biographical accounts of life before jail and their hopes beyond: “I am single, 30 years old . . . I am at the present time in for burgling a dwelling. I’m half American Indian, one quarter French Canadian. When I am free, I travel the rodeo circuit and am on the road all the time unless I’m minding some broken bones, which I have done a few times . . .”
But, in the late 1970s, in this moment before the backlash really took hold, there was a moment of radical opening.
This man agreed with Shere’s perspective on sex: “I hear complaints from dudes like ‘man, all she did was lay there and no action’ and my first thought was that this dude was probably the one who didn’t know what he was doing.” Others wrote to praise the book: “I have been delegated by 7 other prisoners at the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory to write this letter…We say ‘Right on Shere Hite. Right the Hell on.’”
Many male readers of The Hite Report found its feminism profoundly disorienting. They wondered and they worried in their letters to Shere, how could they be men in the wake of this movement? Later, in the 1980s, conservative media, politicians and faith leaders would argue that they could not, that feminism emasculated men, and blamed them for their biological instincts, so to save themselves, they best shun it.
But, in the late 1970s, in this moment before the backlash really took hold, there was a moment of radical opening. Men’s letters to Shere overflow with complex feelings. Many began their letters with a list of the range of emotions that flooded through them as they read: “I felt angry (scapegoated), guilty, understood, hopeful and excited.” The book was particularly painful to read when it seemed to contradict how men saw themselves. “Could it be true that I had been conceited enough to believe I was being a complete sexual partner?”
The power misogyny offered was conditional on them subordinating women and on cruelly ranking men against each other.
Sometimes, men were overwhelmed, and many opened up to the possibility of feminism, doubled down, then opened up again, oscillating wildly between solidarity and oppression. A particularly stark example: “I finished The Hite Report two minutes ago. I saw myself described on its pages so many times by your uncommunicative respondents that…I hope you got some input from a few hairy beasts (adult males to you, you libber!).” Shere slashed through his angry missive with green pen annotating “NO! No!” But then he added a P.S. “All kidding to the side, please accept my deep and awed congratulations.” She decorated this with stars, hearts and ticks.
The Hite Report was sexy and its author was beautiful. This made its feminism a little more palatable. Men’s female partners thrust the book into their hands, and the women’s movement demanded that they take notice. All this took men to the precipice. But the men who jumped and began to change did so because they realised that feminism had riches to offer them too. “Men need the book to become more human themselves,” one correspondent wrote.
Across their letters they discuss how misogyny pressured men to conform to rigid and limiting standards of masculinity to be, “a cross between John Wayne, the Chase Manhattan Bank and Hugh Heffner,” as one reader put it. They wrote of the violence they had endured at the hands of other men, their jostling to reach the unattainable standard of masculinity.
One man recalled sexualised bullying at the hands of his cousin, how years of insults about penis size resulted in sexual dysfunction and stomach ulcers. Another discussed targeting others as “sissies” to avoid the taunts himself. Men told Shere how in sex they acted “as they thought men should act.” They got on top, shut down emotionally and minimised affection. The power misogyny offered was conditional on them subordinating women and on cruelly ranking men against each other. They told Shere that it just didn’t seem worth it anymore.
One man wrote honestly, “I’m frightened because I don’t know how… but your work has set the wheels in motion for a desire to break away from predictable patterns of action and thought.” Another “You are incredible. The only suitable thank you is to try to develop my own support systems for real, humane, vulnerable, aware contact. In an insane society, this is a project of years, not weeks. But the way is clear, my bags are packed.”
The story of The Hite Report shows us how feminism reached men, took them by the hand and led them somewhere new, more interesting and frankly, more pleasurable. Feminism is a movement for the liberation of women, sure, and for everyone else. The invitation it holds out to men to do it differently, in sex and in life, remains open.
Rosa Campbell is completing her PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. Her work explores the global history of feminism. She writes on a range of platforms for adults and children. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The White Review, Meanjin, Public Books, History Workshop Online, Feminist Review and Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She tweets @rosa_v_campbell
“Under and behind the universe of time, space and change is a fundamental reality.
–Thane of Hawaii
I asked ChatGPT, “If the body replaces its cells every 7 years, what causes aging?” Here is the response:
ChatGPT:
The idea that your body “replaces all its cells every 7 years” is catchy—but it’s not really true, and even if it were, it wouldn’t stop aging.
First, the myth
Different cells turn over at very different rates:
Skin cells: weeks
Gut lining: days
Red blood cells: ~4 months
Liver cells: months to years
Neurons (brain cells): many last your entire lifetime
Heart muscle cells: mostly lifelong
So your body is more like a patchwork of old and new parts—not a full reset every 7 years.
So why do we age?
Even when cells are replaced, the system that makes and maintains them gradually degrades. A few key drivers:
1. DNA damage accumulates Every time a cell divides, it copies its DNA. Errors creep in, and damage from radiation, toxins, and normal metabolism builds up. Repair systems get less efficient over time.
2. Telomere shortening Telomeres are protective caps on chromosomes (a classic example of a telomere). Each time a cell divides, they shorten. Eventually, cells can’t divide anymore and either stop functioning or die.
3. Cellular senescence Some cells enter a “zombie” state—they don’t divide but also don’t die. These cells release inflammatory signals that damage nearby tissue.
4. Mitochondrial decline Mitochondria (your cells’ energy producers) become less efficient and leak more harmful byproducts.
5. Protein and cellular “junk” buildup Cells accumulate misfolded proteins and waste products they can’t fully clear out.
6. Stem cell exhaustion Stem cells—the source of new cells—become less effective at replenishing tissues.
7. System-level changes Hormones shift, the immune system becomes less precise, and chronic low-grade inflammation increases (sometimes called “inflammaging”).
The key idea
Even if you swap out individual parts, aging happens because:
The blueprint (DNA) accumulates errors
The repair systems weaken
The environment inside the body becomes less stable
It’s like renovating a house continuously—but using aging tools, imperfect instructions, and worn-out workers.
And ChatGPT on fundamental reality:
1. The Upanishads (nondual “something”)
From the Upanishads:
There is a fundamental reality: Brahman
It is unchanging, eternal, beyond time and space
Your true self (Ātman) is identical with it
Core insight:
Reality = One eternal essence, and you are That
2. Buddhism (nondual “no-thing”)
In Buddhism, especially later Mahayana traditions:
There is no permanent underlying substance
Everything is empty (śūnyatā) of independent existence
All things arise through interdependence
From the Heart Sutra:
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”
Core insight:
There is no fixed essence beneath things—only process and relation
Key contrast with Upanishads:
Upanishads: “There is an eternal Self”
Buddhism: “There is no eternal self”
3. A Course in Miracles (radical reinterpretation)
From A Course in Miracles:
The world of time, space, and change is not ultimately real (it’s a kind of illusion or misperception)
Only God / Love / Spirit is real and changeless
The separation we experience is a mistake in perception
A representative idea:
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.”
Core insight:
Ultimate reality is perfect, changeless love, and the world we see is a misperception of it
Where they overlap
All three agree on something big:
What we normally experience (time, change, separate things) is not the deepest level of reality
Where they sharply differ
Upanishads → There is a real, eternal Self (Ātman/Brahman)
Buddhism → There is no enduring self or substance at all
ACIM → There is a real divine reality, but the world itself is largely illusory
A simple way to feel the difference
Upanishads:“Behind everything is One thing.”
Buddhism:“Behind everything is no thing—only emptiness and interconnection.”
ACIM:“Only God/Love is real; the rest is a mistaken perception.”
On April 17th, 2026, the New Moon in Aries meets Chiron – the wounded healer – at 27° Aries.
Since 2018, Chiron in Aries has been pressing on one of the most existential questions of them all: Who am I really, and why am I here?
In this period, we’ve seen the rise of influencer culture, the visibility of minority groups, the explosion of gender discussions – all different faces of the same wound:
Identity that doesn’t feel seen, that doesn’t feel allowed, that is refusing to stay quiet.
That’s how Chiron works. It tears apart the comfortable version of yourself until you can no longer ignore what’s underneath. Until you can no longer pretend that THIS – this particular quality, this particular way of being – is not part of you.
Because you can only be You once you embrace all of you.
And when the Sun and the Moon – the 2 identity planets – meet with this Chironic ache, looking away is no longer an option. The answer can no longer be researched, postponed, or outsourced to someone else’s opinion.
There’s an immediacy, almost pressure, to this New Moon in Aries. A sense that something is asking to be reclaimed – now.
“I am what I am”
Because when Chiron moves out of Aries, the next opportunity to go this deep, to meet this particular wound this directly, won’t come until the next time Chiron returns to Aries. And that’s in 2068.
With Chiron in Aries, we’ve been sensing – even if not always consciously – that the only way to be ourselves is to actually be ourselves.
And that without this, without this fundamental honesty about who we are, nothing truly fulfilling can take root, because it’s not being built on the right foundation.
That Aries shout out doesn’t have to be to the world. Aries is not about getting a reaction, requesting feedback, or waiting for permission. It’s simply about being witnessed into existence.
I am here – and the world has no choice but to accept that.
If the world has been treating you as invisible or optional – tough luck, because you’re not.
If the environment you’re in glosses over who you are, or tries to fit you into a shape that was never yours – that’s not your environment.
If your friends can only accept the version of you that aligns with them and their views – they are not your friends.
At the same time, if we want the world to accept us for who we are, we have to actually BE who we are.
Because Aries energy doesn’t flame in mixed signals. It needs clarity and commitment to itself.
So – who are you, underneath all of it? Behind the filters, the curated pictures, the diploma on the wall, the job title on the business card?
For the past few decades, these things made sense to lead with. All the outer planets were moving through collective signs – Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces.
Whether we realized it or not, we’ve been living in a climate that rewarded conformity, credentials, and fitting in. The diploma and the job title were the language of that era.
But that era is over. Now Neptune is in Aries. Saturn is in Aries. Chiron is in Aries. Eris is in Aries. Uranus is still in Taurus.
And Pluto, while in collective Aquarius, is this time supporting the individuation process unfolding in Aries – rather than imposing another system to belong to.
What once pulled us away from ourselves – toward the collective, toward conformity, toward whatever version of ourselves was most acceptable – is losing its grip. With this much energy in Aries, we need to start from the source.
“I am what I am”
Because you – behind the mask, behind the AI, behind all the things designed to make life smoother and more palatable – are faaaar more interesting than any of it.
Your unique style, your quirkiness, your particular way of seeing the world, your unique bird song is what makes you, you. There is only one person born with your natal chart. THIS is what this Aries world needs right now.
The New Moon in Aries conjunct Chiron is an invitation to strip back the layers of identification and distill your essence.
Nothing needs to be added, nothing needs to be removed. Only recognized: I am what I am.
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