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Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence

The Age of Bizarro Churchill, the Outsourcing of Wife Beating and the Creation of the Super-Id

Beginning in the 1890s during the Boer Wars, Winston Churchill had a consistent response to whatever ailed the British people: “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!” That plan did not work out so well at Gallipoli and caused him to lose standing among the Coalition Liberals and British people but nevertheless, when the future kingdom of what would become Saudi Arabia began his insurgency against the British puppet ruling the British mandate of Hejaz, Churchill was back on form. It was time to conscript the young men and send them into the desert to prevent the rise of the Saudis.

But the world changed around Churchill. And because the world changed, and kept changing for the worse, one day in the 1930s it came to pass that Churchill was finally right. The correct answer to what the British were facing had become, “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!”

So they made him Prime Minister and, the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we live in the age of Bizarro Churchill. The old man who is finally right is the person we are most certain is wrong.

It has been more than fifty years since Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, more than thirty since Preston Manning tried to sell Canadians on dramatic cuts to our immigration rates and nominated racist MP candidates like Herb Grubel, Randy White, Bob Ringma and Philip Mayfield. Back in those days we were right to see panic over immigration as mainly driven by racial animus and bad “slippery slope” reasoning. We called Powell and Manning racists; we held rallies against Powell’s racism and Manning’s promiscuous flirtations with racists; and we were not wrong.

Back in the twentieth century, we were still relatively prosperous; we had strong institutions; most people could still afford their rent; and we had a robust civic nationalism structuring our multicultural pluralism, with flags and outfits and festivals that included all of us. Back then, activists opposing increased immigration were overwhelmingly old and white and the movements were rife with discredited race science and belief in eugenics.

Today, a clear majority of both white and non-white Canadians want immigration levels to be reduced to where they were when Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party was in office, approximately 20% of current levels. Those most supportive of current immigration levels tend to be white seniors, those who remember the odious politics of people like Powell, Manning and Ringma most vividly. Those least supportive are young people can have been pushed out of entry level jobs by temporary foreign workers and kids from the Global South on student visas and young families unable to find housing they can afford.

But the response from the courtiers and commissars who run our societies is not the way the British people responded to Churchill in the 1930s and 40s. Instead, they argue that supporting any kind of reduction to any kind of immigration is axiomatically wrong, that no matter what the migration situation is in a country, it is, by definition morally and politically wrong to restrict it in any way for any reason.

Instead of engaging logically with people recommending temporary or permanent reductions in migrant flow, they simply label anyone with an objection a hateful bigot and their ideas “hate speech,” what they call “stochastic terrorism,” the idea that if you say or even repeat a statement deemed “hateful,” you are in effect murdering members of a minority groups to whom the statement might refer.

Similarly, many conservatives acquitted themselves atrociously during the gay liberation movement and AIDS crisis. Lifesaving medication was denied to innocent people; their same sex partners were spitefully barred from visiting them in hospital; their partners’ pension spousal benefits were confiscated; and marriage was placed out of reach. In the 1980s, Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s stand-up performances ended far too frequently with the men who had laughed at the homophobic jokes performed going out and beating up innocent gay men.

Just as I attended anti-Reform Party rallies, I fought for gay rights and organized with Svend Robinson, Canada’s first openly gay MP.

But, as I warned at the time, we were taking shortcuts for which we would pay later. Instead of arguing that people have a right to marry whomever they want, we should have argued that, extending marriage rights to gay couples was a pro-social move of intrinsic that would make our societies better, not the creation of a new kind of right. Similarly, when we argued that we should never judge people for the weird sex they like, I thought: “this is heading for trouble.”

But, the Bizarro Churchill effect is, of course, present on questions of human sexuality now. If men need to wear diapers and shit themselves in the street in front of us, dance provocatively in sexualized getups in front of grade schoolers and wave their junk teenage girls in locker rooms, who are we to judge them? After all, if objecting to one form of male sexuality showing up in public was wrong in the 80s, objecting to any form of male sexuality asserting itself in any context is inherently wrong at all times and places.

And so those of us who object to Genderwang and are trying to protect gay kids from being sterilized and mutilated are bigots, hatemongers and, most ironically, “homophobes.” Last fall, when the Million March for Kids took place, once credible journalists ran stories stating that those of us in the march were planning to hunt down homosexuals and beat them up, just like those Clay and Murphy fans in the 80s. The BC government even sent warning to daycare centres that we were coming to assault the gender-confused children there.

In the 1990s and 00s, we fought against Ronald Reagan’s Drug War, worked for safe injection sites, decriminalization of hard drugs, supportive housing for addicts and freeing those convicted of drug offenses from prison. Like my work on welcoming immigrants and civil equality for gays and lesbians, I remain proud of this work and glad I did it.

But now we face a situation where, as reported by Adam Zivo in the National Post, we have a government program in BC that allows teenagers to receive hard recreational drugs from the province and have the state act to keep that secret from parents, literally slipping children fentanyl and telling them not to tell mom, thanks to the terrible precedent set by administering Lupron to teenagers secretly.

But again, object to there being too many drugs out there, as the government increases the drug supply, as no credible academic study has ever recommended, or object to how young the people are that we’re giving addictive drugs to or even simply suggest that being a full-time unhoused drug addict is a less worthwhile life than having a job and a family and once again, one is accused of hate speech, bigotry and stochastic terrorism. The next overdose will be blamed on us—as though you can’t OD on “safe supply” fentanyl.

Again, because conservatives were wrong about something in the past, they cannot possibly be right about it now. And anyone who agrees with them now has become a “far right” “hatemonger.”

Violence Against Women and the Rise of the Super-Id
I used to think this was just some sort of cognitive error that was producing these three highly similar social phenomena where all problems caused by out-of-control immigration can only be solved by fewer immigration controls, all problems caused by drug use can only be solved by more drugs and all problems caused by Genderwang can only be solved by de-stigmatizing “minor attracted persons” and conferring on people the right to have their bodies made into surreal Japanese hentai monsters at government expense.

But a recent chat with a very important gender critical thinker convinced me that this is something darker:

The other thing that changed in our society in the 1980s was our fairly successful crackdown on domestic violence and marital rape. Wife-beating, of course, continued. But it had to be closeted in new ways. Even celebrities who publicly advocated it were smacked down hard or the media edited their backwards views out of their interviews. Male violence against women was attacked both by law enforcement with a new zeal and, at the same time, Hollywood and the news media came together to stigmatize this vile behaviour.

But we didn’t fix the men or address the underlying causes and so violent misogyny has been building up as behind a dam since the 1980s. And the inhibitions and prohibitions around white men and respectable men hitting and sexually assaulting women have never been greater, especially in progressive communities.

And so this violent misogyny has found a vent. Pakistani grooming gangs in England do have permission to rape, beat and traffic women; so do men in dresses; so do homeless men on meth. And that is why our governments are now admitting young, male rootless immigrants at a higher rate than other immigrants, proposing, as BC’s chief medical health officer recently did a chain of meth stores like our stores that market cannabis products in a friendly atmosphere, but for crystal meth.

White progressive men have outsourced their misogynistic violence to three groups of men. It is an exchange: these men enact the misogynistic violence and rage of the commissar class towards women and, in exchange, the commissar class describes them as victims and grants them total immunity from the consequences of their actions, not just legally but socially.

The Woke ideologies that enable this are a kind of Super-Id our society has built itself. A psychological force that uses ideology to push our collective behaviour beyond even where your average unrestrained male id would go.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Breast Gropes, Rabbit Punches and the Politics of Fear at Versailles: How Machiavelli’s the Prince Helps Us Understand the Paris Olympics

Every single time I write a gender critical blog post, a feel a very familiar feeling: fear deep in the pit of my stomach, rising through my abdomen and reaching up to choke my throat. Despite having begun my gender critical writing almost five years ago, not only am I still scared every time I publish an essay like this, I am no less scared than I was the previous time. That is because there is always something to lose, always the possibility of new “consequences” as Wokes call them for expressing my opinion that men cannot become women; women cannot become men; it is wrong to sterilize and chemically lobotomize children; etc.

In today’s essay I want to explore that fear more thoroughly because I grow more convinced every day that almost everyone’s experience of the strange new social movement with which the West is wrestling is being primarily conditioned by fear; and the antics we saw at the Paris Olympics are just the latest demonstration of that.

And because I remain committed to continuing to try and awaken in my former comrades the courage necessary to challenge not just Genderwang but the larger authoritarian project as whose vanguard it functions, even though every time I pen an article like this I inevitably lose another few comrades and friends, despite my views on this subject being unchanged over the past five years. Just this week since the last essay, I lost a couple more. That’s because even though my views have not changed, the danger of being publicly associated with heretical views only increases every year in the Progressiverse as its inhabitants habituate themselves to the existence of an ever more demanding grassroots Holy Inquisition.

Re-reading Machiavelli in the 2020s
So, really, what this piece is about is what we might call “the politics of fear,” a profoundly misunderstood term today. The idea of a fear-centred politics was first strongly theorized in Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince in 1513. It is my view that, from the outset, the meanings and lessons of the text were based on a fundamental misreading of the historically contingent character of its arguments because later interpreters were unacquainted with Renaissance humanist readings of Roman history.

Throughout the text, Machiavelli invokes important Roman historical actors in a series of lessons about how to do politics successfully. Most readers understand The Prince as illustrating which the author believed to be hard, permanent proto-social scientific truths. But to one with at least a passing familiarity with Roman history and with the Renaissance humanist movement’s worldview, this does not seem quite right.

Typically, when Machiavelli refers to a past actor like the Roman general Scipio, who was both successful in their politics and laudable in their principles, he uses them as an example of what not to do if one wants to succeed in sixteenth-century Italian politics. Similarly, when he wants to use an historical example of politics that would work, he typically serves up the example of a villain, tyrant or, at least, a fatally flawed historical actor.

I take this highly strategic and self-conscious use of historical references to indicate not that he is talking about what makes a prince wise and successful irrespective of when and where he rules but to relay the following subtext: “Italy has entered into some kind of hell dimension in my time; if the best and most virtuous rulers and warriors of the past existed in sixteenth-century Italy, they would fail whereas the most venal and villainous of past actors would succeed.” In this way, I read The Prince both as a piece of absolutely sincere practical advice to the warlords and oligarchs of Italy in 1513 and as an absolute indictment of the time and place in which he lived.

Maybe this is just projection but I feel the same way about contemporary politics in the Global North. And that is because how to succeed at the politics of fear has changed to Machiavelli’s from its opposite in the space of a decade.

When I was growing up in last years of Cold War welfare state society, people believed that they were witnessing the rise of a new “politics of fear.” What this meant was that, until the mid-2010s, political candidates and parties focused increasing effort on making potential supporters fear their opponent. The term “hidden agenda” was used with increasing frequency, especially against conservative parties and candidates but was used across the board. The idea was that if you could make a group of voters fear what your opponent might do to them, they would vote for you defensively.

Single women in their child-bearing years were often the targets of the most successful fear politics. We are coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Liberal Party of Canada making the “hidden agenda” of their conservative opponents to re-criminalize abortion a centrepiece of their political communication every election. Conservative parties also did an impressive job, warning of the impacts of unrestricted immigration and “soft on crime” approaches to criminal justice.

Machiavelli would not have called this “the politics of fear,” nor would he have given such a politics much of a chance of success in sixteenth-century Italy. In fact, he would predict that in Renaissance Florence, such an approach would actually help one’s political adversary. In his chapter on fear as a political force, his argument was that a wise prince rejects the love of his people in favour of their fear, that the more the popular classes fear you, the more they will support you, and that while the people’s love can be sustained for only a time, their fear can be sustained indefinitely.

As the 2010s wore on and people’s sense of financial, environmental and social security continued to wane, the politics of Florence under the Medici family was reborn. And its midwife was Donald Trump. Of course, before Trump could become politically successful, the kind of fear and hopelessness that pervaded Machiavelli’s world had to creep up. And there were signs that a growing portion of the Global North would be ready for this kind of politics to return. People had to become more psychologically and materially insecure and frightened before Trumpism could work on them.

A true Machiavellian politics of fear works on a set of interlocking psychological bases in such an environment:

The Ivan the Terrible Effect
Ivan the Terrible was a popular Tsar and remained popular long after his death because he ruled in a time when Russians were extremely insecure as the Mongol Khanates that had ruled the Pontic steppe continued their violent destabilizing breakup, following Muscovy’s successful war of independence to separate itself from the Golden Horde.

Just like the Comanche or any expansionist equestrian pastoralist society, the imperial Mongol civilization was successful because they struck fear into the heart of local agrarian and agro-pastoralist populations, often by engaging in gratuitous acts of murder, property destruction and sexual violence.

Ivan the Terrible was successful in rallying former subjects of the Horde and incorporating them into the expanding Russian state not by sharpening the contrast between how things worked in his Christian kingdom and how they worked in the Horde but by reducing it by demonstrating novel forms of gratuitous cruelty and violence.

Ivan formed the original ancestor of today’s SVR. Before the KGB, before NKVD, before Cheka, there were the Oprichniki, an army of black-clad riders with rotting dogs’ and wolves’ heads tied to their saddles, completely above and outside the law, who conducted massacres of unspeakable and pointless cruelty and debauchery. Ivan often led this host, with an iron wolf’s head mounted on his horse. Ivan was not just “terrible” in this context; he was also known for having beaten his own son to death for no apparent reason.

Yet he enjoyed considerable popular support because his subjects felt that they were, on balance, safer being led by a monster because he possessed the capacity to strike fear into the otherwise fearless Mongols.

When you are staring down the barrel of something scary that you perceive to be a terrifying external or alien force, there is a terrible logic to supporting a leader who has proven his worth by perpetrating atrocities indiscriminately against his own people.

And this appeal is a gendered one, not one unique to women but one more concentrated in women because they are more likely to have been sexually interfered with as children or physically terrorized in a romantic relationship. People who have had these experiences, male or female, often seek out romantic partners not on the basis that they will be gentle and different but that they will be so “formidable” (a more accurate translation of Ivan’s actual title) that they will frighten off the other violent abusers.

Reaction Formation
People who voted for Trump because he would stand up to China, stare down Mexican migration or kick the drug dealers out of town, were conscious in their embrace of the politics of fear: Trump was a scary, seemingly invulnerable bastard whose aggression was largely directed away from them and towards the things they discerned to be threats. But those credentials did not just come from his affect. They came from how he had treated business partners, employees, investors and even his own family members, proudly calling his daughter “a hot piece of ass” on the Howard Stern show, for instance. The people who consciously imbibed this politics of fear were largely middle and working class white men to whom Trump was not that scary in the first place.

But for women like a former girlfriend of mine who grew up with a father, and major Republican donor I might add, who made his violent sexual fantasies about her a regular part of family dinner conversation, this kind of response is less conscious and rational, more instinctive, inchoate and hard-wired.

Survivors of child and domestic abuse and violence have an instinct to placate an emotionally dysregulated, powerful, potentially violent man, irrespective of whether that behaviour makes them safer. Reaction formation is a form of double consciousness that enables and conceals this.

Because those experiencing it feel profoundly unsafe but deem themselves unable to escape or reduce their unsafety, like an abused spouse or child, they become vehement, passionate and insistent that the thing that is terrifying them is VERY SAFE, 100% SAFE. If they cannot control their safety, they can at least control their feelings about it. I first made this argument when observing that the Canadians most insistent that anthropogenic climate change is not happening are those whose lives and communities are most endangered by it. The climate has to not be changing; that’s the only way to feel safe.

As I stated at the time, I believe that the two big poll surges Trump experienced among married white women, the day he accepted the GOP nomination and Election Day, were powered by his campaign’s brilliant mastery of the intuitive logic of reaction formation.

Trump chose to give his daughter an open-mouthed kiss and grab her ass on live TV at the moment he knew the most people would be watching. He understood, whether intuitively or consciously, that he could most effectively demonstrate his power by violating the incest taboo as publicly as possible and then watch as no one at the GOP convention attempted to stop or condemn him. As I wrote at the time,

And it is in this light that we must understand the programmatic, intentional and strategic marketing of parent-child incest by Donald Trump. Trump chose to give the convention address, reserved for generations for the spouse of a presidential candidate, to his daughter Ivanka. This choice was intentional and premeditated, as was his unambiguously libidinous kissing and ass-grabbing of his daughter on national TV before the address, the daughter about whom he has been making sexualized comments in the media since before her tenth birthday. Trump is direct, clear and unflinching in notifying America that he owns that girl’s ass and has since she was conceived.

Trump successfully activated reaction formation in survivors (not all survivors but many) across the country; they denied what they saw as abused spouses often do when they see their own children abused; they became more desirous of pleasing and complying with his will; and, most importantly, they became vehement in their denials that he was dangerous and predatory.

The sad fact is that survivors who have not adequately addressed their own experience of abuse, especially those still engaged in placating their abuser on a regular basis, are more likely to speak up in favour of the abuser, as a deep-seated subconscious self-protective strategy, and, to further protect themselves, conceal from their own consciousness what they are doing and why.

The next surge, one long-debated by pollsters and other psephologists, was the iconic photograph of Trump looking over his wife’s shoulder and watching her fill out her ballot on election day, 2016.

As I wrote at the time,

As we learn—but never accept—in countless failed rape prosecutions, people who have been sexually violated, especially people who have been sexually violated by adults as children do not reliably say “no.” They do not reliably ostracize their abuser or reject his future overtures. They do not reliably resist further infringements on their bodies, dignity and sense of self. That is because one of the most powerful lessons a survivor of sexual abuse learns is this: their abuser is all-powerful and nobody will help them…

For most survivors, the way forward would be clear: dissemble and comply. Somehow your abuser will know if you tried to thwart him. In all likelihood, your abuser wants you to generate a narrative that you have consented, that he has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, the greatest performances of domination are the ones that inspire feigned consent. What if the moment, America’s survivors placed their hands on that lever, they felt their omnipresent, omnipotent abuser leaning over the flimsy cardboard privacy partition, their eyes full of malice, and knew what they must do to survive another day?

The Politics of Fear Come to the Olympics
In my efforts to explain the Democratic Party’s unexpectedly good showing in the 2022 midterm elections, I suggested that it could be accounted-for by the Democrats adopting the fundamental logic of Trumpian campaigning, of seeking to make the voters more frightened of them, of presenting as their representative, the most emotionally dysregulated, abusive person in the room. Trump, in a way, has become obsolete. He is now replaceable because the logic of his political strategy has been embraced by all.

At the start of the Paris Olympics, many of us gender critical folks were anticipating a good week because two men were going to be boxing women on TV. These men, furthermore, checked none of the boxes that characters like Dylan Mulvaney use to distance themselves aesthetically or rhetorically from their masculinity.

Imane Khelif did not merely look just like a man, complete with Adam’s Apple and a hulking manly build; he “lived as a man” in Algeria and gave interviews about manliness and masculinity directed to an audience of other men; he did not wear a hijab, as Muslim Algerian women do; he had a deep voice; he walked like a man; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of us on live TV; and he had been disqualified from international women’s boxing the previous year because he had been found to have XY chromosomes.

This was going to be a slam dunk, we thought: people will see a man punching a woman in the face. And that is what we saw. What followed, we did not expect: all kinds of people previously sympathetic to gender critical positions, including materialist radical feminists, became supporters of Genderwang and vigorously defended his status as a woman on social media. Even the Italian woman he savaged recanted her opposition to being beaten by a man and apologized for saying what happened was unfair. And that support grew throughout the week as a second male boxer also began beating women in the ring.

I want to suggest that this is best explained by two iconic images from the boxing ring:

In the first, Imane Khelif gropes the right breast of Angela Carini immediately after humiliating her in the ring. In the second, Lin Yu-Ting illegally rabbit-punches his female opponent on the back of the neck, using a dangerous attack that could have left even a male opponent permanently disabled. And the referee did nothing.

Now, whether these acts were carefully planned or merely serendipitous and intuitive is utterly irrelevant. This essay has no interest in the consciousness of Khelif or Lin. My interest is in the consciousness of the audience.

This was visual rhetoric on a par with the those two images of the 2016 Trump campaign. They said, unambiguously: men can abuse women under the justifying discourse of Genderwang in front of the entire world, surrounded by supposed professional arbiters of fairness and nothing will happen. Not only can they engage in this abuse with impunity; the will do so to thunderous applause, and even make their victim apologize to them for saying they were victimized.

Now I am not writing this to complain or lament the state of humanity today or even to grieve the latest batch of friends I have lost but as a wake-up call to critics of the authoritarians: we have to stop pretending that this is a battle of wits, of analysis, of information. Those things mean nothing at this phase of the debate. The worst argument and the best argument we can make will elicit identical reactions because if we actually put on our thinking caps and stop distracting ourselves by pretending that sounding smart and informed is going to move the needle, we have to recognize that this is a contest about human consciousness of power and safety. That’s it.

Our rhetoric must cease to address the fight we wish we were in, between the bad and good analysis, between bad and good information, and start addressing what is actually animating it: performances of power and terror, the Machiavellian politics of fear.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

This Drag Is Not Drag and These Queens Are Not Queens

The Struggle to Publish
I have dithered about putting this post on my blog for nearly two months, hoping against hope that someone else with my knowledge would write an essay that I could just point at. I say this, first, because I try to limit my posts about current debates around gender in our society to guest writing on other forums so that my blog can focus on longer-term writing projects like epistemology, environmentalism and socialism

I say this, second, because I have to disclose some things about myself that I find embarrassing, whether I should find them to be so or not.

But I have decided to break down and make this post here because the issue it is confronting remains highly relevant and because of the way cancelation campaigns against me have escalated in bizarre and new ways, increasing my sense urgency around child safeguarding.

The Redefinition of “Drag”

When you are staring down people who have achieved the power they have by mastering the art of Newspeak, it is important to examine the ways in which they tilt the table, discursively, in any debate they have with you. Those critical of the Gender Orthodoxy and other aspects of Newspeak-leavened Wokeness are better than many at spotting the embedded intellectual bad faith; nevertheless, I think some crucial points about the Drag Queen Story Hours are being missed by my comrades.

Drag is a problematic, arguably misogynistic art form that has existed for well over a century in the Global North. It was part of a larger suite of “impersonation art” that flourished during the Cold War and late twentieth century. While its origins were different than Elvis impersonation, that was the category into which mainstream culture placed it once it began to gain legitimacy as an art form in the late 1960s. Some drag performers were full time “female impersonators,” the polite term for transsexuals during the Cold War but most were gay men who did drag on the side.

Like stand-up comedy, drag acts came up through a raunchy club scene, full of profanity, sexual references and drug and alcohol use. But it must be understood that the way the acts functioned at the clubs was by way of contrast. While most clubgoers might be gay or bisexual men dressed provocatively, or at least economically, for the drag act, the drag performer, himself, would comment on this by way of contrast.

Drag performers did not merely hide any sign of their actual primary and secondary sexual characteristics; they presented in the sharpest possible contrast to their audience. This included hyper-feminized “womanface” mannerisms and make-up, in contrast to the hyper-masculine crowd before them. It also included floor-length dresses, enormous and elaborate wigs and high heels, the sort of ensemble normally associated with respectable female entertainers who performed on the Las Vegas stage in the era of the Rat Pack.

These drag performers perfected mimicry, as distinct from mockery, of the female performers they, as attention-seeking, straight-attracted gay men, aspired to but knew they could never actually be. Precision when it came to dance moves in heels, lip syncing and costume mattered. This tradition held into the early twenty-first century because that raunchy club scene of gay bars that hosted entry-level drag shows could graduate its most proficient impersonators onto the Las Vegas stage, or at least onto the stages of Reno and Carson because of the nature of Vegas. Not just drag queens but Elvis impersonators thronged into Nevada; Rich Little and the great mimics and impressionists also congregated there, in Las Vegas, an extension of the replica city aesthetic epitomized in its great pyramid of Cheops and its own Eiffel Tower.

The audiences for drag queens in Nevada were little different than those for other sorts of impersonators. As an extension of the “stays in Vegas” ethos and replica city aesthetics of the place, straight men and women comprised the vast majority of the audience in top-flight female impersonators, who compared the dance techniques, costuming and vocal ranges of performers.

While some drag show viewers were no doubt also sex tourists to Las Vegas, they would not have understood their enjoyment of drag shows as part of their sex tourism, which was taking place down the road at brothels and strip clubs.

But as the twentieth century finished, a drag-adjacent form of entertainment was on the rise; transsexual/“shemale” strip clubs began to pop up in North America’s major cities for men who missed their stay in Thailand or Brazil and those who could not afford to go. I remember when the first ones opened in the mid-00s in Vancouver and Toronto because I, a sexually ambivalent man, was a patron of these establishments for a number of years.

These were utterly unlike either the drag shows at gay bars or the top-flight drag shows of Nevada; and they did not claim to be like them. Capitalizing on increasingly available and successful cosmetic surgical procedures, these clubs were staffed by full-time sex workers whose main clientele were men like me: straight and bisexual men who were attracted to the both highly feminine and clearly uncanny physiological characteristics of the strippers who, as in most strip bars, made their real money in the lap dance rooms. These cosmetic surgeries were expensive and much of the money made went directly into servicing medical debt. Nina Arsenault, one of the most popular performers boasted a $45,000 body.

As a consequence, instead of minimizing masculine features of their appearances, the most successful of the sex workers there concurrently amplified both their masculine and feminine primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Because, unlike female sexuality, male sexuality has plenty of time for the uncanny or, less politely put, the grotesque.

Because it was so clearly work done by surgeons and carefully burnished by its sex worker recipients that had lured us to the basement of a straight strip club in Mississauga, the “dancing” on stage did not hold most patrons’ attention and was performed in a perfunctory manner. None of the vampish showmanship of drag was in evidence. We were there for the uncanny costumes and bodies and the opportunity to unwrap them to reveal forms every bit as uncanny as those in Nero’s Domus Aurea.

After all, let us remember that Dylan Mulvaney did not rise to prominence on TikTok by making videos of himself in evening gowns singing in a falsetto but by giving tips on how to show off the contours of one’s erect penis in a leather mini-skirt.

Children and Drag

So, I want to contest the idea that the thing we are calling Drag Queen Story Hour is a drag show at all. First of all, the performers are not the straight-attracted gay men of either of those bar scenes. They are, overwhelmingly, autogynephilic men, partaking of a kind of Gold Rush hypermasculine sexuality.

But beyond that, their acts resemble, in every way, the transsexual strip clubs of the 00s, not the Vegas drag shows of the 80s. The problem with these “story hours” is that they are mainly hosted by men in grotesque, hypersexualized sex worker work attire. They are no more appropriate for kids than if a professional female stripper and prostitute came in in her work clothes and did her act for a group of children.

How would we feel if that happened, if a female stripper performed her act with children, shaking her genitals at them, exhorting them to put dollar bills in her g-string and instructing them on fellatio techniques. The woman would be jailed and the town would drive her out with pitchforks and torches, and deservedly so.

So, why, exactly, is it okay for men, who commit over 95% of all sex crimes, to engage in this behaviour with our kids?

More disturbing still, and the events that provoked me to come forward about my own sketchy past to offer some firsthand evidence others might not possess, is the idea that if children watching drag is okay, then it is okay for children to do drag. I lost four multi-decade friendships in the past month because I objected to a CBC TV documentary celebrating the “career” of a nine-year-old boy working as an exotic dancer for adults and a vendor of fetish gear to adults at a sex shop.

Leading the charge in the furious denunciations, threats and harassment not just of me but of my close friends was an individual working for Carousel Theatre, a youth theatre company in Vancouver that puts on summer day-camps with government funding to teach performing arts to kids.

I actually attended such a camp in 1981, put on by a precursor organization to Carousel, when I was nine and struggling with having been interfered-with sexually as a child. And I was naturally appalled, as an alumnus of such a camp, that Carousel was running a state-subsidized “drag camp” to teach seven to eleven-year-old boys the fine arts of sexualized cross-dressing and exotic dancing for adult men.

And if someone thinks that this is something it is appropriate for children who still believe in Santa Claus to be doing, I will say of them, what I said of the ghouls at CBC promoting that Montréal child’s sideline in sex work, and what got me into such trouble a month ago, “anyone celebrating this should be dragged through the streets of Seville in chains.”

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Honey Boo Boo and the Fourth Punic War: How Gender and Climate Politics Are Linked

The Fall and Rise of Honey Boo Boo

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a deeply disturbing “reality” show took to the airwaves in 2012. It depicted the life of a child beauty queen, groomed by her mother to put on sexualized performances for audiences of grown men in her pre-pubescent body. The show’s launch was really the culmination of a set of bizarre pedophilic fads that had ripped through the heartland of American conservatism post-911. Shocking numbers of pre-pubescent girls got to experience a novel variant on Munchausen-by-proxy as abusive parents found a new way to seek attention by publicly hurting their children.

Closely coupled with this phenomenon were the father-daughter dates and dances, culminating in formal dress “prom” dates, in which men displayed their adolescent daughters as surrogate wives, again to receptive audiences that applauded these displays of Platonic incest.

But by the third season, however, ratings were falling as was the popular cultural practice the show represented. Father-daughter proms also went on the wane at around the same time.

Ironically it seemed as though, during the rise of Donald Trump, himself, an obvious abuser of his own daughter, that his base was quietly abandoning the very kind of exhibitionistic abuse in which he himself was engaging.

Today, it is the creature shambling around in the flayed skin of the Left that we most associate with pedophilic exhibitionism. We have trans child beauty queens and trans child reality shows. Dylan Mulvaney has moved on from making videos about his ability to show off his erection in a leather mini-skirt and holding summits with the leader of the free world to making videos of himself as six-year-old girl inviting you into her bed. And, of course, there is Drag Queen Story Hour, where progressive parents bring their children to watch transsexual strip club routines and slip $1 bills into the exotic dancers’ g-strings, when not being read stories from the Ally Baby series, which explains to pre-pubescent children that they can and should consent to sex acts.

I want to suggest that there is a logic to this bizarre dance with child safeguarding practices in which Anglo America has been engaged.

And, each year that goes by, less of this dereliction of child safeguarding duties is even being laundered through the discourse of the Gender Industrial Complex. School sex education curricula are teaching kids that the term “pedophile” is a stigmatizing pejorative and that the term “minor attracted person” should be used in its place. Progressive opinion leaders like University of Victoria professor Hope Cleves propound the doctrine that adults raping children is not, in fact, abuse but a mutually beneficial interaction she euphemistically calls “intergenerational sex.”

It’s the climate.

From 1996-2015, conservative Americans’ leadership acknowledged that the Greenhouse Effect was real, consequential, harmful and also not something they were going to do anything about. In other words, conservative Americans found themselves subscribing to a set of beliefs that forced them to conclude that failing to protect one’s children from a genuine threat that could ruin or impoverish their lives was okay. In fact, it was good.

“Children are resilient,” “children are hard to hurt,” “children can consent,” “children can make adult choices,” “it’s okay to hurt kids if you get something out of it materially,” “children are really just small, dimwitted adults,”—these thoughts became normalized. Publicly staging derelictions of parental duty, of the collective duty of adults to protect kids became something a huge swath of the population needed to applaud.

But by 2015, the mainstream view of the Republican Party’s leadership and of evangelical religious leaders was that the destabilization of our climate was a “Chinese hoax.” In fact, the person who most vigorously propounded the idea that there was no climate crisis was the person chosen not just as conservative America’s president but as its Caliph, a man who could also pronounce on matters of evangelical religion from his seat in the White House.

While the effects of the mainstreaming of climate denial have been devastating in many ways, they did, ironically, I believe, spare a lot of kids in places like Oklahoma from being turned into sexualized display objects by their parents.

Meanwhile, the statistics do not lie. As I explained in my previous post, governments that talk tough on climate and whose leaders march with Greta Thunberg actually build more pipelines and sink more new wells than those run by climate denialists. And, as much as progressives try to hide those ugly facts from themselves, the reality is that they cannot.

Everybody knows the German Green and Social Democratic parties are destroying people’s homes and fields, annihilating their property rights and civil liberties, assaulting and incarcerating villagers whose homes are getting in the way of the new coal mines they want to dig. They know that it was Justin Trudeau, not Stephen Harper who poured billions of dollars and hundreds of RCMP officers into forcing the Trans Mountain Pipeline through Western Canada, that oil exploration in the US is experiencing a renaissance under Joe Biden’s presidency.

In other words, progressives now hold the same position regarding climate that conservatives held 1996-2015. And so they are compelled to engage in practices of exhibitionistic, perverted child hatred to normalize their total dereliction of duty to their children, something that has only intensified since Biden returned to a level of nuclear sabre-rattling not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first term. If nuking Eastern Europe is okay; if the carbon-forced omnicide is okay; why not FGM and pedophilia?

That is why there is almost no overlap between people who believe the Greenhouse Effect is real and that it is wrong to perform hysterectomies on healthy teenage girls. Because I am such a person, engaging with this civilization is very challenging for me.

The Fourth Punic War and the Future of the West

While I vehemently disagree with Matt Walsh on gay rights and a host of other issues, I think there is one thing he and only he is saying right now that cuts right to the heart of the matter: the current progressive child endangerment movement is at war with Western Civilization itself.

While many trace the start of Western Civilization to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the civilizational competition between Greek and Phoenician city states in the Mediterranean that began in the seventh century BC, I argue that it begins a little later.

The Greek and Phoenician colonies that dotted the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from present-day Gibraltar to Crimea were vibrant multilingual, multicultural societies that traded luxury goods and slaves. But there was a fundamental difference between the two kinds of city states. While both types of colony lived and died by the commerce that was transacted in the agora, the marketplace, the core of civic life was not there.

In Greek city states, the centre of civic life was the bouleuterion, where political decisions were made by a group of citizens through a process of deliberation and voting. While some Greek colonies has small bouleuteria that only included members of the wealthiest and most powerful families, others, like Athens, accommodated as much as 15% of their resident in enormous amphitheatre-style meeting spaces.

But in the Phoenician city states, the centre of civic life was the altar to the god Baal, where the priests sacrificed infants by heating the idol’s bronze hands so that they would literally fry the bodies of babies placed in their embrace. While the Greeks found this disgusting and condemned it, that disgust is as far as it went, and, as I have said elsewhere, it is not like the Greeks were the best advocates for child safeguarding, given their embrace of pedophilia as a natural and laudable part of their formal education systems.

It is my argument that Western Civilization truly began during the Punic Wars, between the Rome and Carthage, an empire composed of Phoenician city-states in North Africa, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. While these wars were largely motivated by the conflicting commercial interests of the two maritime powers vying for control of the Western Mediterranean, as the wars grew more costly, they also became more ideological. Increasingly compelling narratives had to be presented by Rome’s senate and consuls to mobilize the volunteer citizen-soldiers on which the Roman Republic relied to fill the ranks of its armies.

And the most successful and compelling narrative, the one that caused thousands of Roman soldiers to cross the sea and fight and die in North Africa was this: the Carthaginians are sacrificing their own children to their god, Baal and that Romans had a duty to protect the children of strangers.

Irrespective of the motive for doing so, it is this moment that I choose to see as the birth of Western Civilization, the radical act of imaginative empathy that makes you want to protect the children of monstrous people and exact revenge upon them for their crimes against humanity. No doubt this belief has led to much cultural intolerance, conversion at swordpoint and unnecessary bloodshed. But it has also produced a compassionate, empathetic universalism that we also associate with the West.

That is what is on the line as we stare down the climate crisis and the psychiatric comorbidities it is generating in the human brain. And there is only one way out of this: we have to build a movement that will actually confront the omnicide, not just one like, the world’s Green Parties that pay lip service to doing so, while flooring the gas over the cliff, or one that will not just throw cans of soup at it. That isn’t climate politics; it’s post-political climate nihilism. Because, like it or not, the battle against the Greenhouse Effect is also the Fourth Punic War.

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Four Things Justin Trudeau Won’t Do But Should to Support American Women’s Reproductive Rights

Looking at Canadian Twitter today, the day the US Supreme Court formally struck down Roe v. Wade, and, consequently, limitations on the power of state and federal governments to fine, incarcerate or kill women for ending their pregnancies, I see that we are awash in the subject on which I wrote my last post, post-politics.

Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister, and Jean Charest, the former Québec premier and no-hoper candidate for Leader of the Opposition were quick to their keyboards this morning with condemnatory words for the US Supreme Court and its latest egregious decision. Normally, when Trudeau and other Canadian progressives try to piggyback US news stories, like mass shootings, by staking-out popular positions with watchers of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, I just sigh and put it down to the post-political era in which we live.

It’s not like there is anything Canadians can do about American mass shootings or Floridian children being prohibited from sitting on library drag queens’ laps during school hours, or whatever the issue of the moment is. Canadian politicians sound off and Canadians who have given up on politics but still like striking a certain pose on American issues cheer them on.

But this is not the case when it comes to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s not a choice between Canadian opinion leaders either taking to Twitter to offer harsh words and witty banter to score meaningless points in progressive image curation or declining to do so. American women’s loss of their reproductive rights is actually something to which Canadian public policy not only can respond but to which we should respond.

When I first started listening to the news on a daily basis, I was about eleven years old and I listened to the big CBC Radio news programs that were produced at the zenith of state-sponsored Cold War liberal journalism. As It Happens, The World at Six and the extended 10:00pm news before Book Time were staples of my day. The struggle against Apartheid looms large in those memories of the mid-1980s, as does the terminal phase of the Cold War; rivaling that were the Liverpool Ferry stories.

Back in the mid-80s, Ireland was still a conservative theocratic state and the centrepiece of its claim to being a Catholic nation was its absolute zero tolerance for abortion. No matter how young a girl was, no matter who had inseminated her, no legal abortions were available in Ireland. While there were decent underground abortion doctors in Ireland, they faced stiff legal penalties if caught and were, consequently, hard to find, especially for young women who were not plugged into the underground feminist networks and trust-based referral chains that could connect them with reproductive healthcare.

Consequently, the most rational solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy was for young women to board the Dublin to Liverpool ferry and have English doctors terminate their pregnancies. Liverpool has long stood as a champion of human rights, all the way back to the eighteenth century when its courts began conferring legal personhood on escaped slaves from Virginia and Georgia. And, even during Thatcherite austerity, Liverpool doctors and hospitals stepped up to help these marginalized young women.

As a result, Ireland began prohibiting pregnant women from leaving the country until they had carried their foetus to term. Police began surveilling the Dublin ferry terminal, sometimes setting up checkpoints and they began greeting formerly pregnant young women returning from Liverpool by clapping them in irons.

Ever since I became transfixed by these stories of girls, some as young as I was back in the day, I have understood that abortion is, like so many other issues connected to women’s bodily autonomy, an international issue about which bordering countries absolutely do have a role to play.

Canadians have a choice today. We can either grandstand and virtue signal or our MPs can head into parliament and start passing laws that make the kind of material difference to American women that the judges and hospital workers of Liverpool made for Irish women in the 1980s.

First of all, we need to amend our refugee legislation. American women who are currently pregnant and wish to end their pregnancies and women who have terminated their pregnancies in defiance of state abortion bans should be accepted as refugees from sex-based discrimination and persecution. Will there be diplomatic consequences to reconfiguring our policies in a way that recognizes the existence of refugees from the USA? You bet. But apparently, we feel strongly about women’s rights; so maybe we should be willing to pay a price for trying to protect them.

Second, we can be the new Liverpool for women in border states like Idaho, where abortion is currently illegal and where the governor and GOP legislative majority are planning to append abortion to the murder statute, literally meaning that women who don’t have a good enough excuse for their miscarriage will end up on death row. Canada should be inviting American organizations that want to provide reproductive health services to set up in Canadian border cities. We should roll out the welcome mat.

Third, whether they are applying for refugee status or just staying for the day to get some outpatient medical treatment, we should be waving women of reproductive age across the border into Canada, including making ID requirement exceptions for women who have not been able to secure expedited passports.

Fourth, we should refuse to share information with federal and state American government agencies that attempt to prevent or track the migration of pregnant women with a view to stopping them getting reproductive healthcare outside their state of residence. Privacy rights are central to the abortion debate; after all, Roe v. Wade was not a court judgement about a medical procedure but about women’s right to privacy.

Canada could take some risks, show some courage and make a material difference in the lives of American women of childbearing age. And any MP from any party could introduce legislation to do what I have outlined tomorrow as a private members’ bill. We could be as courageous in our defense of reproductive choice as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the mid-1980s. But I’m not going to be holding my breath.

Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |

Fighting Back

In recent weeks, I have faced a great deal of adversity. My relationship of nearly four years with my partner ended. The separation that followed did not just entail the loss of my beloved from my daily life but of my home and all of the members of the household that she and I built during our time together. Our shared life was undermined by many things, many my fault. But not all. There is no doubt that our current political climate made a significant contribution.

This was followed by the destruction of my campaign for a seat on the Prince George School Board. My campaign launch was attended and endorsed by my comrade Chris Elston, a courageous man who has made it his mission to challenge the rise of Identitarianism in our schools and, in particular, the provincial education policy known as SOGI. SOGI, among its many flaws, requires that teachers in our school system actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity and has, in the past, resulted in the use of experimental “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones on students without their parents’ knowledge or consent. These “blockers” have never been tested on children for the purpose for which they are prescribed and, when combined with hormones and “gender-affirming” surgery frequently result in permanent and irreversible sterility and the loss of sexual function.

SOGI’s confidentiality provisions and full-throated endorsement of novel and disturbing aspects of Identitarianism deserve full public debate. Unfortunately, that is not possible in our current political environment. Indeed, questioning any aspect of the Identitarian orthodoxy has been re-described in our laws and our major institutions as “hate speech” that will allegedly result in the murder and/or suicide of significant numbers of transgender people if anyone hears these questions or entertains doubts about the policy. As a result, saying to a trans-identified person “nobody is born in the wrong body. Your body is beautiful just the way it is,” can now result in a prison sentence for the person saying those words.

It was, therefore, no surprise that my opponent staged a loud protest of my campaign launch because I had invited Chris to speak about the issue. When Chris tried to converse with protesters, they, typical of Identitarians, shouted him down. For some, this decision was a mere political convenience. But, true believers, I am sure, honestly believed that if people could hear Chris’s words, trans-identified children would die in unknown numbers.

But what followed was wholly unexpected.

Some readers of this blog know that I have run afoul of Prince George Citizen editor Neil Godbout on two occasions. The first time was when he endorsed an extralegal pogrom of homeless people in Prince George and joined a small group of conservative business owners in endorsing their mass expulsion from the city. In language heavily inflected with anti-Indigenous racism, Godbout and his friends suggested that “human rights have gone too far” and proposed the indefinite illegal detention of homeless people at some location outside the city. I am proud to have mobilized opposition to this absurd and repugnant plan.

I next ran afoul of Neil when I criticized his decision to run and prominently feature a letter to the editor of the Citizen entitled “I am a racist,’ in which a local reader explained that he was tired of the lack of resolution of settler-indigenous conflict and was now proud to call himself an anti-Indigenous racist. I criticized Neil for platforming these views and, as a result, he used his influence to cancel my radio show on CFIS, the community station of which the Citizen is an advertiser and sponsor.

Following the campaign launch, Neil was approached by the politically active husband of a former student of mine from UNBC who presented him with heavily, choppily and obviously agenda-driven edited footage of a class I had taught while suffering a personal crisis and psychological breakdown fourteen months ago.

You can hear my statement contextualizing the footage here. In the footage in question, I spent time inveighing against the prevalence of the sexual molestation of children and our society’s failure to protect them. As I was in no fit state to teach at the time, the footage contained considerable profanity, which I regret. But what was truly shocking was that, whoever the editor was, a tiny excerpt was taken to attempt to remove my statements of vehement opposition to child molestation and simply include my statements that our society rarely treats the abuse of children as a crime, unless the abuser is a stranger. Neil then chose to affix a grossly misleading title to the article and grossly misleading text claiming that I was confessing to being a serial child molester and exhorting others to molest children.

As a person who suffered from sexual abuse as a child and a person who has spoken out against sexual violence against women and children on this blog for the past seven years, I was absolutely gobsmacked by this development.

Since that time, I have received more than a dozen threats of murder and assault from Prince George residents.

While still reeling from this disgusting turn of events which I can only interpret as revenge, Jennifer Whiteside, the Minister of Education entered the fray. As the person in government responsible for the school board byelection in which I was running, she chose to demand that I leave the race on the grounds that I constitute a danger to the safety of every child in the district.

I have retained legal counsel and am suing the Prince George Citizen and the Minister of Education. And I have fled Prince George, given the continuing efforts of the BC government, the Prince George Citizen and a Twitter mob of Identitarians, including individuals well-placed in BC’s major political parties, the government and organized labour to convince Prince George residents that I am a dangerous, serial sex offender against children and incite violence against me.

In essence, I am the subject of what, in the Muslim world, is known as a fatwa.

With the exception of a few feminist activists and my father and stepmother, no one is offering any public defense of me of which I am aware. That is not because I lack for sympathizers. It is because people are terrified.

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Chris Elston is routinely assaulted by Identitarian thugs in his travels around the country. Police, even when present, do not intervene and are content to watch thugs beat him in the street. His family has been harrassed. And this is not atypical. Those who question this bizarre orthodoxy are routinely assaulted with impunity. People watch as those who stand up lose jobs, homes, relationships, church memberships and volunteer positions. Careers are destroyed as Identitarian thugs go after people at their workplace. Homes are destroyed as they go after people’s children and spouses. People are terrorized by doxxing on Twitter, with which the platform seems fine with. Even celebrities like Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling are doxxed with impunity, in addition to the hundreds of public rape and murder threats they have received.

And we must situate these developments in a larger Canadian context. With the rise of candidate vetting processes, members of political parties are only permitted to seek public office if they pass muster with secret committees of party staffers whose names are not published and which never have to explain why candidates are disqualified. A few dozen people in this country control who is permitted to seek the nomination to run for a political party and are subject to no oversight or regulation whatsoever.

Under the guise of Covid prevention the vaccination pass system has been introduced. Even though vaccines exert no significant effect on the transmission of the Covid strains and variants that constitute the vast majority of cases (they do significantly affect things like symptoms and mortality, hence me being double-vaxxed myself and seeking a booster as soon as it is available), a measure has been enacted to exert unprecedented control and surveillance over the movements of citizens despite lacking any public health justification. And there are mass firings of the unvaccinated in the public and private sectors.

At the same time, our government is proceeding, under the guise of stamping out inaccurate Covid information, with a massive increase in the regulatory scope of the state to control what people are allowed to say on social media.

And this is matched by the neo-McCarthyism of Identitarians or, as some call them, “the Woke.” All that is required to direct the attention of the mob to someone’s spouse, children, employer, landlord, church or non-profit is an individual’s refusal to denounce someone the mob has already destroyed. That is how I got into this fix sixteen months ago: I said that feminist elders Judy Graves and her associates were not guilty of the hate speech of which they had been falsely accused.

All this takes place in the context of the militarization of the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en people and an occupying force using escalating violence and intimidation against peaceful protesters to force through a pipeline to carry fracked gas for Royal Dutch Shell, the folks who mobilized even more deadly force against the Ogoni people in Nigeria and, of course, the African majority in Apartheid-era South Africa. This also has taken place at the behest of the BC government, which has not only jailed Indigenous and settler land defenders in unprecedented numbers but has also jailed journalists attempting to cover this obscene overreach.

In recent weeks, associates of mine have been threatened with a range of consequences from losing their rights and membership within their political party to losing their jobs, careers, livelihoods if they do not either denounce me or end their association with me. And Identitarian activists show up on my Facebook page to place “laugh” emojis next the to news of the next setback I have faced. They want me to know that they delight in my suffering and in the threats of assault and murder that appear on my public page every few hours.

Oddly, some people seem to think that the systematic destruction and confiscation of nearly everything of worth in my life over the past eighteen months and the fatwa that now has me in hiding should teach me a lesson, that it is time to stop speaking out.

If anything, I am convinced of the opposite. The question of what people will do in an authoritarian society is no longer hypothetical. The authoritarians have arrived; they have captured our major institutions, including our political parties. Free speech and political choice are being dismantled before our eyes.

The main lesson I have taken from the Christian Bible is that if you live a morally upright and altruistic life as a public figure, it should take the government about three years to hunt you down and kill you. I have been on the loose criticizing our social and economic order for thirty-four. A pretty good run, really.

Closer to the present, my grandfather Harry Jerome Sr. was fired by the railway companies and forced to relocate multiple times for his multi-decade fight for equal rights for black rail workers. My late friend and twentieth century folks music legend Leon Bibb spent many hours with me explaining to me what he called “the assassination of Paul Robeson,” the campaign during the last episode of McCarthyism which cut Robeson, the godfather of Leon’s children, off from work, from travel and from any venue where he might spread his message by speech or song.

Someone has to stand up. And, at this point it costs me less than it would most people because so many things that I treasure have already been taken, right down to my good name and physical safety. More importantly, I see so many people like Chris and my friends at Rape Relief Women’s Shelter who sacrifice more, are in more danger and have more to lose.

But I think I will leave off with the well-rehearsed Martin Niemoller quotation about a place and time not that different from our own:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Speak while you can, folks. The consequences for not speaking will only increase. This suppression of free speech and democratic rights will not end with Indigenous people, land defenders or feminists and others who question the Identitarian orthodoxy. It is coming for your community; it is coming for you. Fight back.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

The Rise of the Canadian Porno Right: Making Sense of the Erin O’Toole “Poppers” Announcement

To some, Erin O’Toole’s “poppers” policy announcement this morning is just this side of a major political gaffe. Commentators are shaking their heads about how absurd and unserious the 2021 Canadian election’s campaign narrative has already become as the leader of her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition made a special appearance and announcement today about the need to legalize a grey market party drug popular among gay men.

The highest per-capital carbon emitter on earth is holding an election in the wake of an IPCC report essentially describing the probable end of human civilization and the extinction of most animal species in my lifetime and the campaign narrative on day three is dominated by a discussion of the sex drug amyl nitrate and its ilk.

But I want to argue that as absurd as the announcement and associates discourse are, the Tories’ poppers promise tells us something important about the dramatic shifts our politics are undergoing due to new debates about gender and sexuality.

So often, in contemporary politics, we tend to see novel political phenomena as a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem, especially here in Anglo America, land of the endless culture war. But the reality is that almost all phenomena we see at the social movement level are actually mirrored pretty closely on each side of the political spectrum.

Many people on the left see the split between trans rights activists and gender critical feminists as a scourge uniquely visited on their side of the political spectrum, paralyzing and splitting every organization the conflict touches. But in fact, the gender identity debate is, in many ways, shaping politics on the right as much or more. Take, for instance, this federal election.

In 2019, Canada had two right-wing populist parties, the mainstream Conservative Party of Canada and the upstart People’s Party of Canada. But despite the Conservatives losing the election, and the People’s Party scoring only 1% of the popular vote, less than two years later, there are two upstart parties, the People’s Party and the Maverick Party, each led by a former Conservative cabinet minister, Maxime Bernier and Jay Hill, respectively.

The People’s Party, which holds that biological sex cannot be changed women should be permitted to have single-sex spaces and single-sex organizations, has not merely held rallies opposing the current Gender Orthodoxy, it has reached out beyond traditional Christian Right allies and is actively courting gender critical feminists, even fielding feminist activist Karin Litzke in Vancouver East and actively reaching out to feminist leaders like Amy Hamm. Meanwhile, the Maverick Party proudly proclaims its support for the Orthodoxy in Article One of its constitution, which it highlights on its web site, recognizing “gender identity” as an unacceptable basis for discrimination, effectively foreclosing sex-based protections for women’s spaces.

We see this split in American conservatism too. Donald Trump’s first two Supreme Court appointees voted against each other in the first gender identity case to reach the court, with Neil Gorsuch on the gender identity side of the debate and Brett Kavanagh on the biological sex side.

Perceptive commentators in the United States have, for some time, been referring to this as an emerging split between what they have termed the Christian Right and the “Porno Right.” Indeed, Donald Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as Vice President can be seen as a direct strategic response to this emerging split.

While, until recently, the Christian Right utterly dominated the fiscal conservative, libertarian, isolationist and protectionist wings of the Republican Party, the victory of Trump and his allies in primaries over the past four years shows that it is this new alt-right approach to the politics of gender and sexuality that has presented the first true challenge to Christian Right ideological hegemony.

So, what is the Porno Right?

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While degenerate and pornographic patriarchs who treat their dinner guests to their private fantasies of sexual violence against their daughters, men like Donald Trump, are certainly the figureheads of the movement, they are not the primary constituency. The foot soldiers of the Porno Right are typically single or otherwise sexually unfulfilled natal males whose online world focuses on Reddit (the platform that banned de-transitioners and gender critical feminists for “hate” but continues to feature misogynistic porn in abundance, including an anal rape subreddit), 4Chan, 8Chan, Pornhub and its affiliates like XHamster.

In other words, the core of the Porno Right are Incels.

Incels are heterosexual natal males who believe that every heterosexual natal male deserves to have a sexually compliant female body awarded to them upon reaching sexual maturity and that some force is screwing up the rationing protocol, thereby causing an uneven distribution of those bodies and their hoarding by the undeserving. Some Incels focus their anger about this on wealthy, sexually successful males with more than one female sexual partner and inveigh against these men’s hoarding behaviour. Others focus their anger on the women from whom they want sex and who are withholding it from them for unfair reasons, maybe due to feminist propaganda, maybe due to being superficial about men’s appearances or caring too much about men’s wealth. Usually there is plenty of anger to go around.

Because Incels consume a great deal of pornography and often have very poor self-images, particular of their own bodies and finances (the things they think determine men’s attractiveness to straight women), many are autogynephiles i.e. men whose autoerotic activity is based on imagining themselves as women engaged in same-sex interaction. While autogynephile men have, for the past decade, been a key target of trans activists and the pharmaceutical industry in marketing gender transition as the solution to their woes, it must be understood that, even today, the vast, vast majority of autogynephile Incels have not undergone and do not intend to undergo any gender confirmation procedures. But this majority nevertheless identifies with the politics of gender espoused by its vanguard minority with respect to the unimportance and/or nonexistence of biological sex as a category.

Now, back to the election. Today, Erin O’Toole surprised and confused many by introducing the legalization of amyl nitrate and other “poppers” in the Canadian election. Poppers became known as a gay party drug in the 1980s and, until the past decade, was primarily associated with the gay club scene and online casual sex through applications like Grindr.

But in the past decade, the use of poppers has increasingly become associated with autogynephile Incels, used as an aid in autoerotic activity. Pull up Pornhub and any of their affiliates and search for “poppers” (if you dare) and you will find that autogynephile poppers content vastly outstrips gay content on most of these sites.

So, why would O’Toole get his health critic Michelle Rempel to raise the legalization of poppers in correspondence with the Minister of Health last week and follow up with a headline-grabbing poppers legalization announcement today?

Let me assure you: he is not going after the small overwhelmingly urban, overwhelmingly culturally liberal constituency of gay men who like to party. That’s just his cover. O’Toole is making his first intentional, programmatic, planned play for the Porno Right, the notoriously hard-to-poll, low-turnout constituency that turned out massively for Donald Trump and pushed him over the top in 2016.

Poppers safety is also a bigger issue for Incels than members of the gay party scene because, in the rare event that they cause cardiac events, solitary users are much more likely to suffer serious harm or death than social users. And you can bet that O’Toole is turning heads in online communities of frequent porn consumers as this announcement spreads to the darkest corner of the web.

Now I am all for legalizing poppers. They are not the drug for me but they shouldn’t be a grey market item like they are now.

But let us recognize that O’Toole’s announcement has very little to do with the health of gay men or even that of career masturbators. But it has everything to do with the Porno Right coming of age as a political constituency that, like its adversaries in the Christian Right, must mostly be courted through coded communication and dog-whistles, dog-whistles that arrived in Canadian politics this morning in Ottawa.

Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 4: The Politics of Privatizing Reputation

It has been a while since I have written about the public discourse around sexual and gender-based violence and abuse. That’s because most of the points I would have wished to make have been made by more prominent, respected, articulate people than me, which is good. The point of these series on my blog is to fill gaps in leftist public discourse, not to serve as a microcosm thereof. Naturally, then, it is disappointing to feel the need to write anything about this. It suggests if not a total absence, a considerable lacuna in leftist thought on a matter. In this case, the absence pertains to embarrassing comeback attempts, something that, as the Gary Coleman of BC politics, I feel I have a special affinity for and might, then, offer a clearer and more precise contribution to.

In September 2018, Jian Ghomeshi wrote an article for the New York Review of Books; true to form, it was narcissistic, self-congratulatory and deceptive. In it, Ghomeshi asked rhetorically asked how long he should continue to be punished for his acts by being excluded from the public square as a public intellectual and broadcaster, given that he had not been criminally convicted of the assaults of which he had been accused. This viewpoint was echoed by trolls disguised as newspaper columnists.

There was context for this. Fans of Louis CK, who had admitted to using his financial power over several women to get them to let him masturbate in front of them and had offered a tepid apology for the affair, substituting “admiration” for “financial power” in his statement. People wanted to know: just how long before we “let” Louis CK get back to his career as a celebrity stand-up comic.

As typically takes place when questions of gender-based abuse and violence find their way into the public square, people quickly adopted a wholly inappropriate metaphorical vocabulary: that of the criminal justice system. Somehow, not getting paid to be on stage, on the radio or on TV constitutes some form of punishment or “sentence” that badly-behaving male celebrities are serving out when their shows get canceled after they do something inappropriate. And when the sentence is completed, it follows that they get to go back to being paid millions of dollars to be on screen.

This optic is, of course, an insane one to apply to highly coveted jobs that very few people ever get to do. People have a right to move about freely; only through a grave transgression of the law are they temporarily stripped of that right. But nobody has the right to be on stage; nobody has the right to be popular; nobody has the right to have their own TV show. And, central to the Louis CK case, nobody has a right to force anyone to watch them.

And yet, this metaphor of the “life sentence” has been used repeatedly to talk about male celebrities who crossed an important ethical or legal line in their treatment of women. The same metaphor is used, the same kinds of questions are asked about Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and a host of others. And yet, when one considers Polanski and Allen, the framing seems even more absurd: Allen and Polanski continue to be famous directors in whose movies major Hollywood and European stars appear; they continue to receive flattering interviews and other media attention; they even continue receiving major international awards for their work.

What punishment, then, were they actually suffering? What, exactly, was being described as a “sentence”? The answer is this: a lot of people have kept thinking they are creeps and some of those people have stopped watching their movies. And, at the end of the day, what this is really about is that there is a shockingly large number of people who believe that not being thought-of as a creep is a right that all men enjoy, that can only be revoked temporarily and only under the most extreme circumstances.

The Incel movement shares with the mainstream of North American society the belief that men own other people’s thoughts about them, that when someone thinks “that guy’s greasy,” that thought does not belong to the person thinking it but rather to the person to whom it pertains. This is the most extraordinary breach of individual selfhood and the liberal theory of the base unit and yet, such a view epitomizes the changes in social contract we associate with late capitalism and has been, from the beginning, embedded in the project of capitalist modernity.

One of the most underestimated thinkers in adumbrating the roots of the modern capitalist state is Irene Silverblatt, a holocaust survivor writing in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Silverblatt argues that many of the seeds of an incipient capitalist modernity are to be found not in early modern Europe’s core but in its periphery, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. It is here that modern ideas of race-thinking first played out and here that modern understandings of bureaucracy – with the technocrat as transactor of knowledge – appeared at their most thoroughly elaborated.

The Spanish society that arrived in the New World was already accustomed to the highest levels of cosmopolitanism and diversity in Europe; it contained Basques, Catalans and many other ethnicities whose languages would eventually be subsumed within Castilian Spain. It contained Christians, Jews and Muslims who had been enmeshed in a seven-century religious war known as the Reconquista. Spaniards descended from Roman colonists, some from Carthaginians, some from Goths, some from Franks, Vandals, Berbers and Arabs. Medieval Spain had been a hierarchical place in which people were treated differently depending on honor or calidad; sometimes that honor was created by present-day behaviour, sometimes inherited from one’s macro-lineage group, one’s raza (the origin of the term and idea of race). Like the rest of Europe it was a world of knights, lords, kings, peasants, urban labourers and the beginnings of a bourgeoisie. Some of the labouring worked in high-status clean jobs like millers while others worked in “unclean” jobs like tanners (the clean-unclean distinction pervaded the whole civilized world and, in India, had resulted in the creation of the dalit or “untouchable” caste).

The society the Spanish discovered in the Andes was every bit as complex as their own, organized into macro-lineage groups called allyus, headed by a dead ancestor, the most powerful of whom were mummified and periodically consulted by the living allyu head. When the Spanish arrived they had to both dominate Andean culture and integrate it with their own, subordinate noble families and marry into them, perceive enough of Andean society to surveil and dominate it and yet radically simplify it legally, administratively and conceptually. Furthermore, the African slaves conquistadors brought with them had to have a place in this new world too.

One of the first consequences of this project was something known as a limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) certificate. This certificate acted upon one’s casta (caste). The Spanish crown had created six major castes in its New World colonies: Español (white), indio (indigenous), negro (black), mestizo (mixed white and indigenous), mulato (mixed white and black) and zambo (mixed indigenous and black). Anyone in possession of such a certificate was, according to the state, white, from a legal perspective, making one eligible for any political office, impossible to enslave (unlike negros) and subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition (unlike indios). (More on this aspect of Spanish imperial society two posts from now.)
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These certificates soon became a commodity in their own right. With the right amount of money, one could purchase such a certificate from a corrupt government official and make that money back within not too much time as one’s employment and entrepreneurial prospects expanded. And that is not just because of how such certificates acted in a formal, legal sense. Although Jews were not part of the North American caste system devised by the Spanish and their immigration was supposedly prohibited, it was understood that some had entered the territory as “Portuguese,” because the adjacent Portuguese Empire, which handled the slave trade for Spain, looked the other way when it came to Jews passing for non-Jews. A limpieza de sangre certificate did not merely attest to the European descent of a person—it attested to a lineage that had never been tainted by Jewish blood, Muslim conversion or work in an unclean industry.

And such certificates did not merely act on one’s fate when the law spelled-out caste-based privileges. They affected the credibility of one’s testimony in court and before the inquisition. They affected whether one was invited to a cabildo (the assembly of Spanish notables who constituted the city fathers of a self-governing town). They affected one’s marriage prospects and a host of other things to which they had no technical pertinence.

It is here, then, under the aegis of the Hapsburgs’ New World empire that we first see the large-scale and systematic modern commodification of reputation, the idea that one can, though good behaviour and good luck or though money, own the portion of others’ opinion that pertains to oneself.

But as with so many other things about the early modern world, what began in Spain came to be more fully elaborated in Britain. Whereas one can trace the spreading of false news or declarations likely to breach the peace as an offense against the state or society to the Age of the Antonines in second century Rome, the privatization of this offense in the form of defamation or libel came into being haltingly.

There does not appear to be any moment that the common law tradition from which English law descends did not recognize slanderous speech to be an injury. As I have suggested elsewhere, the Germanic wergild tradition of law, in which injuries to the person were quantified monetarily and justice meted out through financial compensation gave societies based on it a leg up in internalizing the logic of capitalism, having the foundation of a proto-capitalist legal system. But wergild quantified only one aspect of reputation: reputational depreciation. Changes in reputation that were positive or simply alterations in kind or type of status were outside the purview of the wergild system.

More importantly, the English legal system only compensated those whose reputations depreciated due to a falsehood being circulated about them. While the onus of demonstrating the truth or falsity of an accusation has moved back and forth between plaintiff and defendant throughout the history of libel and slander law, the veracity of an accusation has always had the capacity to vitiate the claim of compensation for lost reputation.

When the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi first became public, the representatives he engaged were not lawyers, rather, they were representatives of the public relations firm, Navigator, a company specializing in “crisis communications” as they pertain to people containing blood and organs, as opposed to the corporations for which the field was first developed. Under the slogan “Navigator: When You Can’t Afford to Lose,” the firm’s web site succinctly explains its purpose: “Corporations and individuals sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. We quickly pull together the right team to manage issues before they escalate into major crises. When disaster strikes, our clients depend on our custom-built communications plans to minimize reputational damage.” The site goes on to offer a do-it-yourself program under the header “Sign Up for our Crisis Preparation and Reputation Recovery Program with Ivey Business School.”

Ultimately, Ghomeshi was too undisciplined for Navigator to handle, but many prominent Canadians like Michael Bryant, the Ontario Attorney-General who killed a mentally ill indigenous cyclist with his car, have benefited significantly from the expansion of reputational management from correcting falsehood to preserve reputation to burnishing it for the same purpose. Across the border, we recently witnessed the sudden reappraisal of a group of Catholic School boys’ confrontation with an indigenous war veteran at a protest in Washington DC. Columnists and news organizations quickly issued mea culpas for their portrayal of the young men as boorish racists, following a recontextualization of some video footage by RunSwitch PR, a Navigator-like firm hired by some of the boys’ parents.

RunSwitch, which goes by the motto “to ensure the right people know the right thing,” was able to perform a kind of reputational alchemy for a hefty fee. Whereas libel law and the work of firms like Navigator has traditionally been used to safeguard a reputation with pre-existing value against depreciation, the alchemy performed by RunSwitch transformed a boy whose name we did not know, with a forgettable face into an Anglo American media star who, for the first time, was given a platform to espouse the conservative views he had gone to Washington to help advance. In this way, RunSwitch’s work did not work like an intervention by Navigator or a libel lawyer but instead like a limpieza de sagre certificate.

While the name of the boy’s school had been known, his name, Nick Sandmann, was not, until RunSwitch entered the fray. In this way, something more than the defensive action of a Navigator campaign was in evidence: one individual was transformed into a celebrity with a national reputation because fashioning this spokesperson was the most efficient way to defend his school and classmates. But within this instrumentalist reasoning is something deeper: Sandmann’s presumed right to be well-regarded, irrespective of evidence before the very eyes of those judging him.

This is what Ghomeshi’s defenders desire too: to nullify the words of the women who described his brutal acts, to substitute our prior opinion of him for one that we have come to using evidence and our God-given reason because our current opinions hurt “his” reputation. This arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what reputation is and what it is for. “Your” reputation does not and should not belong to you. It belongs to the people whom you encounter, people who are alone with you in elevators or alleys, people you split restaurant bills with, people in the passenger seat of your car. These people own your reputation because they build it; they maintain it; and they are the ones who need it. You see: the purpose of your reputation is to inform people of how to protect their safety when they interact with you. It was never yours, nor should it be.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 3: Galloway, Khomeinism and Saul’s Christian “Body:” the Anti-liberal Theory of the Base Unit

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Of the perplexing figures of the past twenty years in politics George Galloway ranks highly. A British Labour MP originally admired by the international left for his hard line opposition to Britain’s entry into the Second Gulf War in 2003, Galloway has drifted further and further from recognizable left politics over the past decade and a half. This drift began with his creation of the Respect Party in 2004, a coalition of Muslim religious conservatives and socialists, loosely affiliated with the emerging Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, a situational alliance of leftist and Islamist petro-states seeking to end the petro-dollar system of US hegemony over global oil markets.

But whereas the Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, led by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was an alliance based on mutual material interests and a shared enemy, the Respect Party was about more than this. Its ideology constituted a genuine fusion of key elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism and the theocratic ideologies of the Iranian state and its international paramilitary wing, the Hezbollah.

The Gallowayism propounded by the Respect Party sought to represent both the British left and a wide spectrum of ideological tendencies within Muslim diasporic communities in the UK. The party stood for greater community control of schools and education by diasporic communities, greater efforts to address racism and Islamophobia in the private and public spheres, a reduction in immigration restrictions between Britain and the Muslim world, an end of British alignment with US foreign policy, withdrawal from the European Union, reversal of tax and benefit reductions since the 1980s and the return of occupying forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway framed the British state as being “at war” with Islam and Muslims generally and sought to bring about an end to that war. In the predominantly Muslim constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway re-entered parliament now representing Respect.

Ultimately, Respect fractured into two parties with most non-Muslim members moving to the Socialist Workers Party in 2007; this appears to have been related to their dispute with a key non-profit organization that functioned as Galloway’s main campaign surrogate in 2005, the Islamic Forum of Europe, an organization seeking not just the substantial self-government rights for Muslims in public education but a more general personality of law principle for diasporic communities. IFE believes in a legal system like that of present-day India in which Muslims are governed under a separate legal code from the majority religious population. This Muslim code would include a radical reformulation of family law allotting substantial powers to husbands and fathers over their female family members. Without the substantial left and anti-war movement support, Galloway was defeated in the 2010 election.

Galloway re-entered parliament in 2012 with the assistance of another conservative Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (UK). In the byelection Galloway contested, the MPACUK focused its third party campaign on accusations of apostasy against the Labour candidate whom they argued was not, as he claimed, a practicing Muslim.

In 2012, Galloway joined many “anti-imperialists” in defending Wikileaks’ Julian Assange but did so in a highly distinctive way: he suggested that even if the testimony accusing Assange of rape were to be believed, Assange’s behaviour did not constitute anything worse than “bad manners.”

In 2015, Galloway attempted to return to parliament, this time opposing a Muslim Afghan candidate, Naz Shah, who had gained substantial prominence for her feminist activism following her harrowing and violently abusive experience as a child bride, married without her consent. Strangely, Galloway made this his central campaign issue, arguing that Shah was both dishonest and morally corrupt because she had claimed she was contracted into marriage against her will at the age of fifteen when, in fact, Galloway argued, she had been forced to marry at sixteen and a half, something to which he deemed it wrong for her to object. He attempted to demonstrate this with what he claimed was her marriage contract, which his representatives had obtained in Pakistan.

It may seem at this point in my post that I am simply telling you the story of a reprehensibly sexist man who is also a socialist. But while I think Galloway’s misogyny is indisputable, I want to suggest that something else is also going on, something pertinent to our understanding of the contested and unstable nature of the modern self.

The Respect Party, like many of the neo-traditionalist authoritarian parties that are rising around the world today, was actually saying something large and revolutionary, albeit extremely disturbing. What Gallowayism contested was the liberal theory of the base unit. The liberal junk anthropology that I took down in my last post has served an important, albeit ahistorical purpose: to argue that the fundamental base unit of society is the individual person.

This used to be the thing over which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatives saw as the essential heresy of liberalism: the idea that the organic base unit of society was the solitary, atomized person. As anthropology suggests, this is a notion that is arbitrary at best and absurd at worst. And that is why most societies have understood some sort of larger unit as their base unit. Whereas a liberal sees a family as a collection of individuals, people outside this ideology see an individual as a fraction of a family.
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For the Inca, the base unit was the allyu, the macro-lineage that could be traced to one great ancestor; for much of Indian history, the jati, a guild-like macro-lineage structure was the base unit, the extended family a sub-unit thereof and the individual, a fraction of that; raza, in medieval, as opposed to early modern, Spain, (the cognate of “race”) used to refer to macro-lineages that could be traced to a single ancestral conversion (or moment of saintly patronage), to an Abrahamic religion. The raza, the allyu, the jati are just a few historical examples.

When Saul of Tarsus writes to his followers in Corinth, he is arguing that his intentional communities of like-minded believers, and not the individual, constituted the base unit, that the ways in which some had conceived of salvation as personal was wrong.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

Just as we often fail to realize that what we think is a public policy debate is actually an epistemological debate, we often fail to realize that what we see as a debate about the relative rights of different kinds of individuals are actually debates about our social base unit.

At equal proximity to the ideological core of the modern Republican Party to the episteme of Authenticity is the theory of the nuclear family as base unit. Expressed religiously in the “headship principle” where prayers must be undertaken and led by the family’s head (the father), the fundamental argument of the GOP is that women’s bodies are fractions of a coherent familial body that have no essential independent ontology. The only way they can be severed from the body of the family is through marriage into another male-headed collective body.

Such a family has sweeping reproductive rights; it is just that the rights are articulated by the executive as opposed to reproductive part of the familial body. If one looks at the structure of abortion laws enacted to prohibit abortions and criminalize miscarriages, the ability to punish women for ending pregnancies is contingent upon the participation of the biological father. While getting a mid-term abortion may be technically illegal in many states, the only way the offense becomes prosecutable or actionable is if the male participant make a police report or files suit.

And we see similar approaches to women’s bodies in similar conservative social movements. Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party legalized marital assault and rape in 2017. Narendra Modi’s BJP and Recep Erdogan’s movements, similarly, do not so much view women as inferior members of society as inferior parts of a cohesive social body, that of the extended, male-headed family.

Gallowayism merits our study because it is the first of these neo-traditionalist ideologies to rear its head on the political left. One can effectively reduce Galloway’s political argument to a single unifying point: white, Christian men get to manage “their” women as they see fit; brown, Muslim men do not. There will be no fundamental equality all men enjoy an equal right to manage the bodies and minds of “their” familial or extended familial body. This is, fundamentally, the foundation of Iranian law, since the 1979 Khomeinist revolution and it came to be a sincere part of Galloway’s anti-capitalist worldview.

Gallowayism forces the left to once again confront the way in which its long-term alliance with liberalism has caused us to atrophy intellectually, to quit the field in one of the most central debates of our times. The choice between patriarchal neotraditionalism and the late capitalist theory of the independent, individual choice-maker is no choice at all. We need to rediscover elements of Second Wave feminist thinking and pre-Stalinist Marxist thinking about our own theory of the base unit.

Instead, I fear that the left is choosing to amplify the liberal characteristics of self-making in order to distinguish itself, to find ways to offer more atomized and solipsistic ideas of constructing a modern self. More on that in my next post on this subject.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Race | fusangite |

Did the Survivor Vote Swing the Election for Trump?

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump vote at PS 59 in New York, New York, U.S. November 8, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY - RTX2SKKG

There has been a lot of talk about how Donald Trump won over so many white women in his campaign. The general narrative is, and I am not saying it is untrue, that, for American women, white supremacy trumped female solidarity. I am sure that is the case. But it is useful to think about the other things that might also be true, truths that function synergistically with this one.

A terrifyingly large proportion of people in America have had sex to which they did not consent by the time they turn eighteen. It is just shy of a majority of women and as many as one in six men. And the Trump campaign telegraphed their candidate’s propensity—perhaps even preference for—non-consensual sex, especially given that his main rebuttal of the “grab them by the pussy” tape was to suggest his accusers were too ugly to have been the women he actually assaulted. Similarly, the campaign did the opposite of disabusing the public of the notion that at least one of his daughters grew up having sex with him, something to which he has alluded in multiple interviews over the decades.

What is, as I suggested in my piece on Trump’s preference for incestuous relations, this was an intelligent and rational piece of campaigning.

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What survivors have also learned from the failed rape prosecutions in our media is that a survivor needs to fashion a public image of themselves that either denies their past experience or portrays them as a Lifetime Network TV movie hero-victim, for whom sexual violence and abuse has been a crucible, forging them into an implacable warrior against their abuser and the system supporting him. The majority of survivors who have become more vulnerable, more involuntarily compliant, more calculating, dissembling and fearful are viewed as reprehensible beings to be derided or attacked for currying favour with past abusers or consenting to further abuse.

What if the Trump campaign activated this? What if this is what undergirds his decisive victory among white women is this? What if the more his violent, predatory monstrosity was displayed, the more it began being refracted through the emboldened misogyny of men in their own space, America’s survivors intensified their performance of divided selfhood. Trump, in a way, became the biggest, most inescapable sexual assailant imaginable. In all the ways that a child sees a sexually predatory adult as omnipresent and omnipotent, Trump actually was, his face on every TV screen, his words coming out of the mouths of so many proximate men, like the eponymous priests of ancient Egypt, embodying America’s fascist, rapist god-man.

For most survivors, the way forward would be clear: dissemble and comply. Somehow your abuser will know if you tried to thwart him. In all likelihood, your abuser wants you to generate a narrative that you have consented, that he has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, the greatest performances of domination are the ones that inspire feigned consent. What if the moment, America’s survivors placed their hands on that lever, they felt their omnipresent, omnipotent abuser leaning over the flimsy cardboard privacy partition, their eyes full of malice, and knew what they must do to survive another day?

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |