Welcome to your weekly tour through the primordial swamp of far-left thought. Please keep your hands and feet inside the boat at all times.
Man, being “woke” is a full-time job. You’ve got to get a handle on the outrage du jour and how it intersects with all the other stuff you’re supposed to be outraged about -- the fight of Zoroastrian little people for the right to work in Tajikistan’s steel smelting industry is of a piece with the struggle of Portland’s gay Asian ice cream vendors for the right to scoop in leather Speedos. And then you’ve got to get ready for it to change.
Take Dana Mathis’s recent article on The Handmaid’s Tale for The Week. “Last year, Hulu's standout feminist series was praised by critics for its chilling depiction of "what could happen" to women in the Trump era.” Got it. Trump era = bad. Evil Christians impregnating women and forcing them to carry the babies to term, female servitude, bad hats. Makes sense.
But the show was “also panned for refusing to acknowledge race in its vision of a dystopian future. But now, in season two, the show can't even acknowledge race in present-day America.”
Apparently, the book had no black people and Season 1, set in the dark future, only had a few. Reacting to complaints, " [Showrunner Bruce Miller] made the decision that there would be many more multiracial relationships than there had been, since it was in the present time,” according to original author Margaret Atwood.
Miller added them, but only half-heartedly, it seems, because he didn’t make them obsess over race. It’s just not an issue. It might have made Martin Luther King proud. It gets Mathis cheesed.
Miller's attempt at a more diverse cast might have been well-intentioned, but by refusing to have the show's characters even see race, he has created a racial utopia that's only getting more fantastical with each passing episode.
Imagine a story in which a theocratic totalitarian government takes over America and enslaves women being fantastical!
She aghast that in one scene, “Annie is a black woman, but there's not even a hint of racial tension when she confronts June in public after a yoga class.” … “Nowhere in the exchange was the obvious fact brought up: A black man was leaving his black wife for a white woman. None of the parties appear conscious of their race, even when hurling their most hurtful barbs.”
Not one N-word? Not even a Mandingo reference? This cannot stand!
The show's utter refusal to adopt any critical viewpoint regarding race turns every interracial connection into an idyllic, burdenless bubble for June. She never has to confront what it means to mother a black child as a white woman. She never has to consider any privilege as the wife of a black man in a white supremacist society.
Sounds an awful lot like Mathis wants to punish June for being white, or at least for not being as miserable about race as Mathis herself is. And punish The Handmaid’s Tale for taking on only one liberal bugbear at a time. But maybe she wants her country punished -- irredeemably racist as it:
In their faux utopian, postracial re-imagining of "the before," Miller and Atwood haven't just erased race. They've erased America.
Now, more items bubbling up from the progressive ooze.
Quick Take: Like Wearing a kilt to a Scottish Wedding? “To some, this controversy might seem like it’s much ado about nothing, but it’s a pretty significant part of the LGBT party culture.” Why ‘Shirts Off’ Matters at Queer Parties from Vice
“I’ll take ‘Unnecessary Studies’ for $500, Alex.
SWM Seeks SF for Fun and Romance
Caring, funny cisnormative guy enjoys long walks on the beach, dogs and having fun with transphobia.
Turn-ons: Intelligence, sense of humor, real lady parts
Turn-offs: Five o’clock shadow
It turns out -- and you’ll be floored to hear this -- most normal people won’t date transgender people.
Yes, someone surveyed 1,000 people and asked if they’d date a “trans woman” and/or “trans man.” Vice’s queer site Them reports the findings, as published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. (At newsstands everywhere!)
Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender.
Them professes to find these results “no surprise,” and calls it “the first study to ever attempt to quantify the extent of trans discrimination when it comes to romantic and sexual relationships.”
The high rates of trans exclusion from potential dating pools are undoubtedly due in part to cisnormativity, cissexism, and transphobia — all of which lead to lack of knowledge about transgender people and their bodies, discomfort with these unknowns, and fear of being discriminated against by proxy of one’s romantic partner.
“Cis” is the moonbat term for “normal,” so “Cisnormativity” is normativing (I guess) the normal. It’s redundant as hell, but what would progressivism be without important-sounding but ultimately meaningless jabber? “Cissexism” means, I don’t know, the belief that normal people are better drivers than trans? And “transphobia” is another garbage word, since most people don’t actually have a fear of Bruce Jenner.
It is also possible that at least some of the trans exclusion is due to the fact that for some people, sexual orientation might be not (just) about a partner’s gender identity, but attraction to specific body types and/or judgment of reproductive capabilities.
Well that’s big of Them. I guess some of us were “born this way.”
But note where this is heading. If you’re not turned on by people who have mutilated themselves into resembling (to varying degrees) something they’re not, your behavior needs to be analyzed. If you’re hesitant to enter a romantic relationship with a person you know is mentally ill (whatever the World Health Organization says), you’re manifesting a whole bunch of gobbledygook isms and phobias. You must change.
We’re well beyond tolerance, past acceptance and we’re headed for Date’Em or Hate’Em territory.
Quick Take: The Moon never sets on the British Empire. “‘Don’t drink, undress or defecate in public’ – how Magaluf is trying to tame its British tourists. From The Guardian.
Y’all Need Jesus. Speaking of hate, the left hates humans.(Unless they’re cute little moppets whose televised tears can impact the midterms.) According to Slate’s Sam Adams, Hollywood’s recent output reflects that disdain. The 40 or 50 apocalypse movies it feels like Tinseltown churns out a year seem to suggest that we’re doomed and it serves us right. “Perhaps repetition has just inured us to the idea,” writes Adams, “but popular culture seems to have gone from treating humanity’s demise as calamity to a fait accompli: an inevitability to be absorbed, even celebrated.”
Makes sense. You combine the left’s environmental doomsaying and its devaluation of human life -- beyond abortion and euthanasia on demand some are choosing not having kids to save the planet -- with the bleak nihilism of the post-Christian West and watch the moon crash into the plague-ravaged, mostly submerged earth every night down at the multiplex..
Jurassic World, WestWorld, Blade Runner 2049 and War for the Planet of the Apes either suggest we’re doomed and that’s okay.
Adams certainly seems on board:
The year’s highest-grossing movie, Avengers: Infinity War, ends with beloved comic-book characters turned to dust by the dozens, as the regretful villain Thanos, arguably the movie’s main character and certainly the one who gets the most screentime, pursues his plan to ease the universe’s burden by wiping out half of its inhabitants. Given the earth’s exploding population and its overtaxed resources, the most frightening thing about the movie’s melancholy monster is that he might have a point.
Adams also dutifully catalogs the litany of humanity’s environmental sins and even brings up the Nuclear Doomsday Clock. All on the way to explain why Hollywood (and a good portion of progressives in general), have given up on “our own hopelessly flawed selves.”
His most interesting example is the Planet of the Apes movies. The last two installments, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and last year’s War for the Planet of the Apes, slowly shifted its sympathies from human to ape, from a species that’s already doomed itself to one with at least a hope of getting it right this time.”
By the last movie, we’re effectively cheering for our own destruction .. But by War for the Planet of the Apes, that spark has sputtered out, and what’s left is two species at war—one still evolving, and the other at the end of its rope. In War for the Planet of the Apes, humans are the antagonists, not the heroes, and the only question is whether they’ll kill themselves off or die of natural causes.
And environmentalists, Hollywood producers and Slate writers are cool with that. If you believe in the perfectibility of human nature, you’ll inevitably be disappointed. And if you believe that humans aren’t created in God’s image or for a divine purpose, you’re likely to take that disappointment to heart. I suppose, by logical extension, that’ll cause you to root for the extinction of your species. But what do I know? I’m a home team kinda guy.
