Note: Reading about stuff liberals care about may trigger revulsion, pity or uncontrollable laughter. If any of those feelings last for more than four hours, consult your doctor.
Oh, Samantha Bee! That makes a lot more sense. I was getting worried about the National Spelling Bee.
Samantha Bee has an alleged comedy show on TBS. She doesn’t think Ivanka Trump should sharing photos of her spending Sunday morning with her son because immigrants or something. So with her characteristic charm and incisive wit, she called Ivanka a “feckless c*nt.” (She also alluded to the liberal hothouse theory that there’s incest going on in Trump world, but the C-word drew attention from that slimy innuendo.)
Oh well, another unhinged liberal spewing Trump hate. Nothing to see here. But wait! The Washington Post informs us that “some women want to reclaim” the c-word. Reclaim it. Maybe they want to make it into hats for next year’s Women’s March?
The Post quoted a tweet from Sally “You like Me!” Field:
“I like Samantha Bee a lot, but she is flat wrong to call Ivanka,” the c-word, Field tweeted. Her reasoning was seen by some as surprising. The c-word, Field said, is “powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.”
I’m guessing the Flying Nun didn’t learn that at the Convento San Tanco. (You’ll be unsurprised to note that a CNN political analyst applauded Field’s tweet: “HA! Okay...best tweet of the day young lady,” replied Brian Karem. This is CNN!) The Post also quoted actress Minnie Driver:
“That was the wrong word for Samantha Bee to have used,” Driver said. “But mostly because (to paraphrase the French) Ivanka has neither the warmth nor the depth.”
It might be shocking if anything still had the capacity to shock. The Post assures us, “their arguments are not new or unique. For years, many writers, feminists, gender studies scholars and others have argued that women should re-claim the c-word, assigning it a meaning that empowers women.”
Know what else many gender studies scholars have been arguing for years? That they’re baristas, not just coffee jerks. But I digress.
See, there’s nothing so base, so crass and vulgar that it can’t be rationalized into a weapon against patriarchy/racism/colonialism/heteronormativism/the gender binary/late-stage capitalism. Plus, you get to feel all “transgressive” and edgy. The Post finds a whole bunch of experts to tell us so. quotes Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash University:
“Linguistic, psychological and neurological studies all confirm that it’s forbidden words that are the most arousing, memorable and evocative of all language stimuli,” Burridge wrote in the Conversation. “They also confirm that this effect depletes with word repetition.”
“If you want to diminish its potency,” Burridge said, “just use the word, and frequently.”
In the meantime, the world gets courser and uglier.
And now, more little blue pills for the lefty mind,
Quick Take: May I suggest a nice hobby? “Zines are a form of therapy—a therapeutic way to share our struggles associated with racism, sexism, abuse, culture, and colonialism." From “3 Zines Celebrating the Complexity of Being Latinx” on Broadly.
Satire Really is Dead. Five years ago, liberals would scoff if you tweeted that kindergarteners would soon be learning about the birds and the bees. "Conservative panic." "Paranoia." Perhaps they were right. Now they’re actually teaching kindergarteners the birds and the birds.
According to The Guardian, an “expert panel” has decreed that Wales will soon be “leading the way” in teaching five-year-olds about homosexuality. And clearly, sex education in Wales is stuck in the Dark Ages. According to gay activist Andrew White, a member of that expert panel, “our research shows that a majority of LGBT young people here in Wales have heard nothing about LGBT issues in the classroom.” And yet somehow they managed to become gay without help from the state. It seems the can-do spirit is alive and well in Wales.
Still, all the experts agree Welsh kindergarteners display a shocking ignorance of the emotional upside of gay sex. Some can’t even fill out a sexual consent form.
The announcement follows a report by Wales’s sex and relationship education expert panel, which concluded that SRE was often too biological and too negative, with not enough attention given to rights, gender equity, emotions and relationships.
“Too biological?” Progressives claim to “F*cking love science!” until science doesn’t love who they f*ck. But if government insists on usurping parents’ right and duty to teach children about sexuality, it really should include something about how babies are made.
But, like all progressive obsessions, the new indoctrination will reach into as many aspects of children’s education as possible.
The panel’s chair, Emma Renold, a professor of childhood studies at Cardiff University, said the changes would mean sex and the issues surrounding it would not be limited to biology lessons. “It will broaden it out so you can cover the issues in humanities and expressive arts as well as science for example,” she said.
Excellent. They’ll be reading “Heather Has Two Mommies,” “Darren Has Two Daddies,” Ethan Has a Mommy and What Used to be a Daddy …” The y’ll probably paint colorful gender spectrums and then be encouraged to find some special place on it.
According to Wales’s education secretary, Kirsty Williams,
The world has moved on and our curriculum must move with it. Sex should never be taught in isolation for the simple reason that it is about so much more than just sex; it’s also about relationships, rights and respect and that must go hand in hand with a much broader understanding of sexuality.
I’ve known a few five-year-olds. They need a broader understanding of putting their Legos together by themselves -- or at least of putting them away before Dad steps on one. The do not need an introduction to the smorgasbord of liberal sexuality. But that expert panel has its shiny new sex ed curriculum that’s sure to be the envy of progressives everywhere. Lead the way, Wales!
It’s a depraved new world.
Quick Take: News you can use! “Bongs of the Summer, Ranked” om Noisey.
How I Became a Bitter Scold in Grade School. Forget comic books -- this is the origin story you’ve been waiting for. At Slate, Christina Cauterucci shares how an experience at nine-years-old on a co-ed pee wee soccer team made her the sunny, happy-go-lucky feminist she is today.
We were sponsored ... by a local small business—in our case, a dental practice. Instead of simply printing the name of the dentist’s office on our jerseys, as was the custom, our coaches opted for a cutesier take. They printed a dental-adjacent team name—the “Molar Men”—on the front of our shirts instead.
Cauterucci wasn’t pleased. She protested. “My coaches, however, were unmoved. I got a few smiles and laughs, mostly of the kids-say-the-darnedest-things variety,” she relates. “Neither of the other girls on the team joined my crusade, and none of the boys much cared.” Gosh, can’t imagine why.
That was the moment she became a feminist. “Kids absorb social cues from adults like dry sponges; at 9 years old, I absorbed that all it took to make the male leaders in my life name their sports team as if the girls under their care didn’t exist was convenience and alliteration.”
And -- odd for a feminist, I know -- she still bears a grudge.
But while writing this piece, for the first time, recalling the Molar Men provoked in me an unreasonably urgent wave of rage. What group of adult men sees a mixed-gender soccer roster and decides to name their team Men? What people entrusted with the development of young girls don’t think hard about what it might mean for those girls to be treated as nothings in a space that should be a site of hard work, accomplishment, and pride? What parents would watch their children play with female teammates on the Molar Men and decline to request a more gender-neutral name? Did nobody wonder what it might do to the self-esteem of 9-year-old girls to see themselves erased from their own team—not even when one of us went so far as to make a protest T-shirt about it?
The rest of the article tells us how she’s come to blame co-ed sports. That’s neither here nor there. But I think she’s wrong about her coaches. They were heroes. Their insensitivity produced a woman who spends “way too much of my time unraveling the complex and insidious ways societies undermine women—the self-blaming Lean In advice, the bosses who call men by their last names and women by their first.” They helped create a writer who can use phrases like “hegemonic masculinity” and “gendered hierarchy” with no apparent sense of irony.
To those callous patriarchal ogres, across the gulf of years and miles, I salute you.
