How To Destroy A Lesbian Bar - Atlantic article by Helen Lewis

[Brefugee]

Couldn't find a thread about this - an article about how left-wing activism eats its own young. It is how a Lesbian bar that announced mask free evenings (as the Covid pandemic was waning) was absolutely slaughtered.

How to Destroy a Lesbian Bar - The Atlantic

archive article here

archive.today/rkPpg

Thanks. Having terminology for the constantly offended critics is useful. I like mimophant.

yes, that was interesting. I'd never heard it before, but Mimophant is about to enter my regular lexicon.

The complainant in that case was such a perfect example of the cult of victimhood as to be almost satire… wonderful stuff. The People’s Front of Judea! SPLITTERS!

It's a brilliant article and illustrates that for some ppl it doesn't matter what you do, they will always find a reason to keep on insisting that they are victim and you are a hideous fascist oppressor

their victimhood is their life's work and they protect and nurture it very very carefully

I had to double check the date that this was a recent article. This bar announced they're making covid masks optional, in summer 2026, and people got angry about that? These people are like those soldiers in the jungle who didn't know the war was over. Or maybe things are different in the US. I have not seen someone wear a mask in a bar for years! Even in the actual pandemic we took them off, sitting in our outdoor bar huts. How can you drink with a mask on? If you're so afraid of infection, why go to a bar at all, why not have a drink over zoom?!

I understand the author's point that these people were just finding any excuse to have a go. But it's just so ridiculous, I don't understand how anyone could entertain it even for a moment

Completely agree. I wish more people understood how deeply invested some people are in their identity as victim. They literally don't know who they are without it. Rationally dismantling their perceived victimhood feels like an attack on their very souls, it feels life or death because in a sense they recognise the person they thought they were will cease to exist.

Another article about the bar (because I needed a bit of context!)

https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2026/sep/24/last-ditch-bar-lesbian-massachusetts-viral

(To be clear, I don't agree with the tone of the guardian article - but it just explains the context.)

After reading the guardian article I'm feeling less sympathetic of the bar owner. What do you expect when you make business decisions like they did.

For a start, I don't think this kind of bar is "inclusive". It's clearly the opposite and that's why it was losing money. If you make your whole vibe a hyper-political one, you won't appeal to a broad variety clientele. And surely that is what "inclusive" should mean

If “Inclusive” just means “people who I agree with and therefore include” then they’re very inclusive 😆

the recordings have just surfaced.

The article is ostensibly about a lesbian bar, yes. It is also about the way things and people get cancelled

Yes things are different in the US. Helen Lewis explains that a bit in the article. Wearing a mask means you are a leftist/liberal.

"Across the United States, some small subcultures live as though it’s still April 2020. That’s because pandemic protections and mitigations quickly became left-coded, to the extent that Donald Trump now has to pretend he didn’t oversee the successful vaccine program. In this context, perma-masking is every bit as much a political symbol as wearing a MAGA hat or a keffiyeh."

Yes I did read this - my point was that these "small subcultures" are like soldiers in the jungle who don't know when the war is over.

The article's explanation of mask-wearing in 2026 (2026!!!) is really illuminating and makes me think of parallels in the trans debate.

Because of the right's absurd mistrust of covid protections, Lewis explains, mask-wearing became 'left-coded'. No longer a realistic response to relevant facts but a costume.

You can say the same about 'being a trans ally'. Just a couple of decades or so ago, men who sought to present as women WERE 'the most marginalised ... (etc.)'. They were harassed, discriminated against and often terribly isolated, lacking a political or social home. The feminist groups that embraced them could reasonably perceive them as victims of the same authoritarian gender conservatism that marginalised and harassed women (since both groups were being persecuted for breaking restrictive gender norms) .

Embracing them was a realistic response to conditions at the time, and to a hostility that was arguably right-coded and anti-feminist-coded. So the embrace became left-coded and feminist-coded. That coding has persisted WAY after the external conditions changed. The laborious centring of 'trans vulnerability and pain' is precisely as reality-respecting as routine use of anti-covid masking in 2026. But still compelling for some people, just as mask-wearing seems to be for these strange types in the article.

Yes absolutely - and the way that once it's been decided that someone/a bar/a business etc is going to be cancelled, it doesn't matter what they do to try and appease the cancellers, it doesn't matter. There's no apology big enough, no abasement deep enough, no mea culpa that can be made that will satisfy those whose victim status is their identity.

The demands will always change, the next purity test will always appear - it's absolutely impossible to satisfy them

And not even simply making masks optional, I believe it was making masks optional one day a week, with their existing rules staying for the other 6 days.

Ah... Greenfield! 😂 That explains so much. I won't go into it, because far too outing, but Greenfield is so far up its own ass and "progressive", it makes Brighton look positively Reform Central!

Greenfield has nothing else to do other than gaze at its own navel and wait to deal with the 5-6 feet of snow they get every winter. So, in the past 20 years, apparently they have worked themselves up to... a lesbian bar stuck in 2020. Interesting. 🙄

It's such a good article. I hope that she is right that we are all building up an immunity to viral purity-performance.

Spiked have an article to
https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/09/24/that-lesbian-covid-conscious-bar-is-beyond-a-satirists-wildest-dreams/?utm_source=Spiked+Subscribers&utm_campaign=ee57626b8a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_09_25_05_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-ee57626b8a-297412971

"When a struggling Massachusetts bar dared to loosen its masking rules, it prompted the mother of all woke struggle sessions."

Instead, though, she optimistically subjected herself to a struggle session—sorry, a mediation-and-accountability process—so that everyone could air their grievances.

That's just utterly depressing and infuriating.

Julie Bindel wrote that similar things were happening as early as the 1970s.

x.com/bindelj/status/2103126957990826304?s=46&t=ZX_bLozRqm8etdGICMcAvA

Absolutely bonkers.

https://graziadaily.co.uk/celebrity/news/why-does-violet-affleck-wear-a-mask/

What a piece. Just about has everything you need to know about the modern derailed age.

This article is just really sad. It's celebrating Violet's choice to wear a mask (she says she had post viral illness and medicine doesn't have all the answers) but actually it's just anxiety that wins, and people are applauding that. I've posted before on MN about how post partum anxiety was something I had to struggle against but I made the decision that I'd take a miniscule chance of disaster over a certainty of restricting my children's lives.

And the "subculture of victimhood" that is discussed upthread has a big overlap with anxiety i think. It's a subculture in which people tell themselves that the odds are stacked against them. They've definitely got a minority of entitled complainers (the Soe Noire described in the article does sound particularly difficult) but I think the majority within this lefty-inclusive culture are just very anxious people and it's a vicious cycle that breeds more collective anxiety. They're anxious about illness, but also anxious about being excluded from the group.

I'm not sure about how it works, wearing a mask in a bar. How do you get the drink in? Are they all drunk through straws? That'd ruin any draught beers, wouldn't it. Or is there a method; take several deep breaths, hold (or exhale?) on the last one, lift drink, lift mask, drink, quickly replace mask, breathe normally until next sip?

It must be a bugger to order on those, apparently vanishingly rare, evenings when the bar is busy and noisy. The barthem wouldn't be able to lip read. Music would be right out.

I'm assuming food, even crisps and pork scratchings are off the menu. Unless you stuff them in your mask and eat them like a nose bag.