Note: This column is an excursion into the funhouse of progressive thought. Kids under 18 must be accompanied by an adult.
Nobody can say these twilight years of Western Civilization are without their entertainments -- just try not to laugh as public trust in the media drops faster than Ted Kennedy’s pants in a South American brothel. And the best is yet to come.
We’re building toward the Main Event. I mean, of course, the giant steel-cage grudge match between lefty victim groups -- a no-holds-barred, chair-slamming, pile-driving SnivelMania! pitting the gays against the trans against the blacks against the browns against the white feminists against the Muslims against the atheists against whoever the hell else has an axe to grind. Intersectionalism will break down. And when it does, it’ll be a bloodbath ending when the most powerful grievance group (ie. the one that makes the most convincing case that it has no power) stands in grim triumph over its broken opponents.
Here’s an undercard bout for a taste: “How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability,” a bizarre piece in The Guardian by one Ruby Hamad. Hamad is an Arab woman in Australia burdened by “the manufactured reputation Arabs have for being threatening and aggressive that follows us everywhere.” It’s very traumatic.
“Trauma,” Hamad writes, “assails brown and black women from all directions. There is the initial pain of being subjected to gendered racism and discrimination, there is the additional distress of not being believed or supported, and of having your words and your bravery seemingly credited to others.”
Sure sounds sucky. But then add “what blogger and author Luvvie Ajayi called the ‘weary weaponizing of white women’s tears,’ and those whimpering waterworks wash through the world and make it worse in so many ways. (If you’re going in for alliteration, commit yourself!)
Almost every BW (black woman) I know has a story about a time in a professional setting in which she attempted to have a talk with a WW about her behavior & it has ended with the WW (white woman) crying,” one black woman wrote on Twitter. “The WW wasn’t crying because she felt sorry and was deeply remorseful. The WW was crying because she felt “bullied” and/or that the BW was being too harsh with her.”
Hmmm.
“White women tears are especially potent … because they are attached to the symbol of femininity,” Ajayi explains. “These tears are pouring out from the eyes of the one chosen to be the prototype of womanhood; the woman who has been painted as helpless against the whims of the world. The one who gets the most protection in a world that does a shitty job overall of cherishing women.”
Forget white chicks weeping -- that resentment is what’s really potent. If you weaponized it, you would wield a whale of a … sorry.
And now, mores scrapings from the intellectual hash pipe ...
Quick Take: Not to mention God, biology, reality … As far as Parkersburg’s anti-LGBTQ residents are concerned, Jocelyn is a “biological male.” From Jezebel’s “How Transphobic Anti-LGBTQ Groups Hijacked a Small Town’s Fight for Equality”
Thanks again for that whole Sexual Revolution thing. Apparently, liberals have so messed up human relations that you need legal consent paperwork to physically interact with your children. According to a “sexuality expert,” parents need to ask infants if it’s okay to change their “nappies.” (She’s from Australia where they say “nappy” instead of diaper. And presumably you’d ask your little Shielagh or Bruce for permission after hearing some thunder down under.)
In an Australian Broadcasting Corporation segment about the country’s consent laws, “Sexuality educator, speaker and author” Deanne Carson said kids need to be taught about consent “from birth” to “set up a culture of consent in their homes so ‘I'm going to change your nappy now, is that OK?’”
Now hold on. Even a sexuality expert knows that infants can’t talk. “Of course a baby is not going to respond ‘yes mum that's awesome, I'd love to have my nappy changed.’ But if you leave a space, and wait for body language and wait to make eye contact then you're letting that child know that their response matters.”
Carson said she works with kids as young as three about consent but, "We work from parents from birth."
Which leaves the question: What the hell is going on in Australia? Asking a two-month-old for permission to tidy up the outback is stupid. But the circumstances under which you’d consult a “sexuality expert” about a two-month-old in the first place must be downright sinister.
Quick Take: Remember “Love Wins?” Good times. -- [My “LGBTQ and poly and kinky”] friends often make fun of me “for being ‘vanilla,’ and ask why my significant other and I are monogamous when we should know that humans are not supposed to be.” From Slate’s “Dear Prudie” advice column.
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bum. I hate myself. It’s a shocking thing to admit and a devastating realization. I found out when the website Vice came through with the tough love in an article about how “scholars around the world have been grappling with the profound meanings of the Kardashian phenomenon, using the family to probe into our society’s deepest pathologies.”
The article’s title lays it all out: “Scholars Say if You Hate the Kardashians, You Probably Hate Yourself.” So here I am. It’s not that I really hate the Kardashians; I don’t. I just resent knowing anything at all about a bunch of people who (Caitlyn nee Bruce excepted) are notable not for their accomplishments, but for their lack thereof. “Famous for being famous” used to be a term of derision. Now it’s something to aspire to.
But there I go again. As Vice tells readers, “It’s hard to know how much of the dismissiveness and ire directed at the Kardashians traces back to discomfort about perceived cultural deterioration, [“perceived!”] but the academic consensus seems to be that haters are probably avoiding some uncomfortable self-reflection.”
So I’m not going to be dismissive. I won’t snark about the 2015 “Kimposium” Vice reports on. I’m going to give the scholarly papers presented there a fair hearing. Like this one: Kardashian Komplicity: Beauty Work in Postfeminist Neoliberal Times. It posits that the painted ladies “‘should be both defended and critiqued’—defended against sexist dismissals based on their exaggerated beauty and sexuality, but critiqued for the ways their brand perpetuates ‘a post-feminist neoliberal rationality.’”
Nor will I be incredulous to learn:
Most recent studies in media mention the Kardashians, but whole books have also been devoted to them, from the theoretical, like [Amanda Scheiner McClain’s Keeping Up the Kardashian Brand: Celebrity, Materialism, and Sexuality] to the practical, like The Kim Kardashian Principle: why shameless sells (and how to do it right). Award-winning poet Sam Riviere even published a poetry collection called Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, a philosophical tour of the modern culturescape organized into sections titled with the steps of Kim’s makeup routine (Primer, Contour, etc.). Undergraduate and graduate dissertations have been devoted to the Kardashians, and several more are in progress around the world.
And I’ll just nod when Meredith Jones, who organized the Kimposeum explains the fascination: “They’re kind of the goddesses of our moment, and we can’t get away from that.”
No, but some of us are trying.
