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?
High school took me out of the viagra without prescription http://seanamic.com/order-1097 protective, and increasingly stifling, boundaries of my neighborhood. Volume of milk increases in order levitra lactating mothers. You will be able to discover cialis generic purchase more about the underlying cause and successful treatment. cialis cheap online It is actually a phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitor happens to be the primary erectile dysfunction medication employed in ED.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.
