Just three brief program notes in today’s Raspberry Patch: First, thanks to those who caught and informed me of some minor typos in this past Friday’s post (now repaired); second, be advised that between today’s post and the December 27 Age of Spectacle Friday post that will complete Chapter 8 I will insert, on December 25, a special feature to mark the start of Hanukah; and third, the year’s final post will go up on December 31--it is old but, perhaps like me, still of some use. You will decide for yourself.
But for now:
Chapter 8. Cognitive Gluttony Meets Race and Gender, part 3
. . . Same, very likely, with homosexual marriage—the June 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges decision that redoubled conservative determination to control the courts—for no settled, stable, and happy ways to muscle a political “fix” for such issues exist against the undying opposition of those who deem these fixes morally problematic. Indeed, one should be particularly suspect when salon opinion changes very fast. In 2008 Barack Obama opposed same-sex marriage, supporting instead “full” civil union, by which he meant a form of civil union that guaranteed equal rights with marriage at the Federal level, to include tax, inheritance, and other legal aspects. Only the name would be different, in essence, it being understood that when Shakespeare asked “What’s in a name?” he implied from context that the answer was not nothing. At the time that was the preponderant Democratic rank-and-file view, but in just half a dozen years the Overton Window caromed down the street. I agreed with Obama at the time, in 2015 as well, in part because I sensed a backlash rising in the culture.
That turned out to be right, and now looking back consider what else we got with the Republican determination and eventual success to dominate the nation’s courts: the Citizens United outrage of 2010, and then perhaps even worse if that is possible, the July 1, 2024 decision on presidential immunity. Neither of these decisions and others beside would likely have happened had it not been for forcing Roe v. Wade down the throat of a recalcitrant society.
We do not need and should not want a one-size-fits-all law on abortion (or same-sex marriage) because we do not have a homogeneity of view across different states and regions. Insofar as the latter impinges on aspects of Federal civil rights law, efforts should be made to reduce the impingement insofar as possible via expanding subsidiarity—moving the Federal government back toward the self-limiting enumerated rights stated in the Constitution. Obviously, we are no longer in the 18th century and the social interdependence propelled by technological and normative change must be acknowledged and accommodated, but better in a more thoughtful way than has been heretofore common. Otherwise, states and local communities are the right loci for these issue, and whosoever thinks their state or community wrong about these culture war battles can debate the issue in the agora; if they lose the debate they can pick up and move to a different jurisdiction if they feel strongly enough about it. If voice does not work, exit can, to employ Albert Hirschman’s famous formulation.
The abortion issue is, of course, not just a constitutional law debate. We must go back in time again to find the deeper real source of the emotion surrounding the issue.
The critical tipping point here was the 1964 advent and consequent widespread use of the birth control pill. Yes, technological innovation strikes again as an engine of cultural change and political perturbation. Women were by that advent freed to have recreational sex without inordinate fear of unwanted pregnancy, nearly just like men—nearly because pill or no pill accidents can and do happen. Few admitted this at the time, but sexual equality, feminism’s brass ring, amounted to precisely this: I, as a woman, so the reasoning went, can express my sexual nature on a par with a man because I no longer have to run significantly asymmetrical risks and burdens to do so. Equal pay for equal work, smash the glass ceilings, and all the rest—yes, that was real and important and it remains so. But that was never the emotional heart of the thing, as anyone who was relatively young half a century ago—and who probably remembers how the Boston Bread and Roses collective birthed the 1970 book Our Bodies, Ourselves—knows.
The strong emotional view of abortion rights, on vivid display since the 2022 overturning of Row v. Wade, must be seen in this wider context. I, the woman rightly reasons, am not only equal to the man in my capacity and right to have recreational sex, but I am also tired of being repressed, tired of being used and objectified, tired of being driven to neurosis by male bullshit about female frailty, and tired of being condescended to in the form of what is now popularly called mansplaining. All this fatigued and fatiguing language aimed at women, summing to slow-burning anger, is in my view wholly justified. So the suspicion that anti-abortion forces have as their real motive the re-control and re-subjugation of women is not entirely far-fetched. It does seem exaggerated, however, for most expressions of that accusation exclude other plausible motives, such as people sincerely believing on account of religious faith that life begins at conception.
It is also painfully but usually quietly obvious by now that sexual equality did not provide the anticipated happily-ever-after moment for most women, especially whose expectations matched their investments of hearts and souls in the struggle for gender justice. Why? Well, for one thing, old stereotypes in the culture have remained to some extent: Young men who behave promiscuously are still widely seen as men just being men, but young women who have sex with the same number or even fewer partners are still widely denigrated as sluts. This rankles, as well it should. But that annoyance falls miles short of the more serious unanticipated curve ball that came women’s way: It became harder than ever to do what was already very hard, namely figure out the deeper, mature connections between sex and love, and get one’s understanding on the same page with one’s partner or spouse.
If that were not enough, the post-pill era witnessed women joining the workforce in skyrocketing numbers, but the majority who wished to and succeeded in becoming mothers faced a newly shaped gauntlet of pressures and tradeoffs. Professional working women, in particular, experienced an array of stress points that most women in earlier generations could barely have imagined, and for too many the pressures ended up destroying marriages and putting children into almost inevitably dicey emotional situations. It was Gloria Steinem who nailed it dead to rights back in the day: “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.” That asymmetry is no longer as stark as it once was, but neither is it extinct.
In light of these disappointments and frustrations, access to abortion is nearly all that remains of the (over)promise of sexual equality, which in its own way was at least a subconscious urge to escape biology. “Love is just four-letter word,” Dylan tried to remind everyone, but with uneven success. In any event, abortion has become the symbol, the last-standing icon, of sexual equality. Most women and many men, too, believe that unfettered access to abortion is critical to maintaining gender equality if, despite all precautions, pregnancy happens anyway, whether by accident, laziness, or changed emotions twixt coitus and consequence. The point here is that abortion as symbol is about a lot more than post hoc birth control, and, whether most women realize it or not, it’s the symbolic side that gives the issue such a gargantuan emotional and hence political load.
I sympathize with all that, but some aspects of the more extreme, uber-feminist argument about abortion appall me. Let me try to carefully, if not also very sensitively, spell out what I mean.
No one makes anyone, male or female, engage in sex, whether recreational or accidental-drunken or any other kind. It is, and certainly needs to be for all involved, a free choice, and as with all choices certain responsibilities attend. The insistence on abortion as an absolute right in all circumstances to be decided by the woman alone is a sign of how our privileged, entitled young elite scions demand to be free from all responsibility for their own choices. It is part and parcel of the aforementioned insistence on the death of shame. Things have reached the point in some cases where moral reasoning itself has become a foreign concept, since many Millennials have never been taught the discipline or thought they needed to know about it. Most seem to think they have a right to what amounts to a perfect life—certainly including never having to face the trauma of shame—without exerting much of their own effort to achieve it.
Compared to older times such lives may indeed be close to perfect, in a way too perfect. As Yogi Berra actually did say, in his own way invoking the law of appreciative reciprocity: “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” Technology accentuates the problem: The streaming, on-demand model of mass-digital entertainment enables anyone now in the United States, and other so-called advanced countries in this regard, to hone in on what they want to immerse themselves in. It used to be that turning on a television began a process of finding something desirable to watch, and failing to find it occasionally resulted in switching the set off and doing something else. Now viewers can zero in on what they want to watch with scant chance of striking out. They can wait until a whole series is offered up so that it can be binge-watched. A viewer never has to suffer through a conventional advertisement if he or she doesn’t want to. Even more astounding in a way are the implications of the pause function. It wasn’t possible to pause a pre-digital TV show. If you had to pee, you had to choose between missing part of the show or pinching your knees for the duration. Now you can hit the pause button, go take a leak or make a sandwich, or both, and never miss a thing: Perfection!
It is indeed perfect, and perfection in entertainment media has cast a shadow on expectations generally. It has normed all forms of cognitive gluttony, otherwise known as unbridled indulgence. It has further compounded the retreat into orality, too, and it has further truncated whatever remains of patience—which used to be lauded as a virtue but is now considered by many to be a quaint nuisance. None of this would matter much if staring at screens for entertainment were only a tiny fraction of what typical Americans do with their precious time on this earth. Alas, as everyone who hasn’t been living in a monastery or under a rock knows, that isn’t remotely the case—and no pun intended because I haven’t even mentioned remotes. There is no need to mention them; everyone knows that it is beyond toleration to actually have to get off your fat ass to touch the machine to change its fare.
However the expectation of perfection in life came about, for many it has come to include a right to the ultimate primal form of entertainment in an age of mythic recursion: sexual gratification. And in the framework of the current mentality spectacle takes on a specific form we call orgasm in scientific language but a range of terms in common parlance.[1] Heaven forfend if anything or anyone interferes with the right to orgasms more or less on demand, and that self-dealt right has come to include freedom from one’s own misjudgments and mistakes in connection with it. So everyone, every woman certainly who gets pregnant without wanting or planning to, has a right to a re-play, a re-set, a do-over, as if life were part of some video game—as if the old board game Life had been refashioned as a Second Life avatar adventure.
That’s what the obsessive demand for abortion-on-demand is really about: freedom from one’s own choices and errors, a denial of responsibility for one’s own behavior, and a complete vanquishing of any and all forms of guilt or shame. “Sin” has such a quaint, musty ring to it these days, doesn’t it? As a means for insuring a perfect life, the “anytime, anywhere, everyone” version of abortion-on-demand is a form of oblivious selfishness so vast as to almost defy imagination. But it aligns well with the recent trajectory of the culture at large, so it seems self-evidently justified to many, perhaps even most, people.
Note that part of what is happening in the culture at large is the continuous transformation of affluence-enabled hedonism to morph, as it usually does with time, into nihilism. Too many Americans now behave with respect to sex like children who get tired of or disappointed with a particular toy, and set off in search of a new toy that does more or better things. Anyone who cannot see how love has been increasingly debased, especially in the so-called hook-up culture, into mere sex, and how in the process human beings have been depreciated and instrumentalized into objects for sexual pleasure, is either too young to appreciate the shift or just hasn’t been paying attention.
Of course for many centuries and in nearly every clime critical differences among modes of sexual intercourse have existed and been at least tacitly understood. To be only slightly light-hearted about it, four basic levels can be distinguished in vernacular English. The highest and most refined level is “making love,” the true union of physical and spiritual intimacy that is benign prolegomenon to bringing new life into the world. Next is “having sex,” which focuses more on the recreational than the procreational, but which can still involved deep shared intimacy and reciprocal caring and generosity in the arts of sex. Lower is “fucking,” which is more an expression of parallel selfish gratification efforts. And lowest of the four is “rutting like beasts of the field,” which typically involves abuse of some intoxicating substance and which is hard to describe because few participants ever remember much about it the next morning. Each of the four types has characteristic ways of dealing with choices of technique, the use of language, the number of participants, and the movement, if any, of money. What is different about sex in the Age of Spectacle is the whole range of possibilities seems to have shifted downward, away from the higher categories toward the lower ones.
In any event, obsession with entertainment in the age of primal mythic mentality redux obviously leads to an obsession with sexuality in all forms, high, mid-range, and low. With guilt and shame both more or less vanquished among younger age cohorts, that obsession must become far more open and public than it used to be, as indeed it has. We spoke in Part I about preliterate examples of self-worship, including phallic/genitalia worship as part of ancient fertility rites and the magic associated with it. Well, it’s back, only without the close connection to fertility, it seems, and the least indication of it is the woke tic of everyone, even in business life, having now to list their pronouns below their signatures. This is ecstasy spectacle bureaucratized, and few stranger accouterments of the new mythic dispensation exist than that.
Speaking of bureaucracy, it is worth pointing out here that the corporate buy-in to the new open sexual entertainment meme is not just what it may seem. The advertising juggernauts of Net Effect corporate business practices of course know that a show of affinity with post-shame and guilt sexuality will attract dollars. Corporate wokeism is thus partly just fawning to targeted consumers in gussied up form. But it is more than that: The relentless exploitation of the hedonic compulsion in the culture is truly the name of the game. After all, it takes money to do hedonism right, and the corporations want money for the purpose of financing their own lifestyles and those of their investors. But the purveyors of this hypocrisy know that the limitlessness of the spectacle mentality—remember that T-Mobile advertising campaign?—is also the perfect transmission belt into irresponsible individual deficit spending—also known as debt—so the banks and the insurance companies form a triangle of leeches with the major Big Box retailers to suck off money from the pathologies of the present-oriented in the alt-neu primal mythos run wild in a clueless affluent society.
Part of that pathology is obviously rooted in the natural near-universal fear of mortality. No one can be limitless because no one is immortal, so magic and sex—and especially ecstatic sex under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, as favored so much these days in the upper corporate echelons of Silicon Valley and beyond[2]—constitute the best available distraction from the inevitable in the general absence of belief in a corporeal or a consciousness-preserved afterlife. (It is no coincidence that those who abjure and often deplore the mythic sexual meme of contemporary America are mostly people who retain such beliefs.) The use of primal-sex entertainment distractions also suggests a two-step meaning to the infamous IBG-YBG acronym. The first step involves garbing your bundle while you can, however you can, so as to finance a hedonistic lifestyle this side of its nihilistic denouement, and the second definition of “be gone” points directly to John Barth’s “hurtling headlong toward the grave” locution in The Sot-Weed Factor.
The abortion crucible in American politics, then, is not as discretely isolated a debate as many suppose it to be. Rather a lot is actually involved, and so deserves a wider aperture of appraisal. That is why it is germane to the discussion to acknowledge that women have been subjugated in many domains of everyday life for countless centuries, and in practically every cultural corner of the planet. Women were subjected to what amounted to imposed selflessness for virtually all of recorded history, and perhaps prehistory, as well. So it’s not surprising that the yearning for a level playing field should be so fiercely felt. One might even fairly conclude, sure, let them exalt in a dollop of selfishness for a century or two; they’ve earned it the hard way. If men could, and too often did, walk away from parental responsibility, women should be able to do the same without shame, at least in an anticipatory mode. They will eventually return to their better-angeled senses when the string of self-deception has fully unwound and its moral price has been reckoned.
Maybe; but that urge does not of itself justify morally questionable behavior in the here and now. True freedom is not the right to do whatever you want, observed Lord Acton--pointing back to the original meaning of freedom in the Anglo-American mind as freedom of conscience--it’s the right to do what you ought. Abortion can be the right thing to do depending on context, or it can be the wrong thing to do. It is not always the right thing to do just because a woman feels as though it is—a moral tautology if ever there was one. It is rather a decision that needs to be thoroughly thought through not just as a practical matter but also as a moral choice. Any view of abortion that supplies a detour around the necessarily difficult is morally fraudulent.
Deciding whether or not to abort a fetus is a deeply complex and arguably the most human of conundra, not least because it is a decision that ripples forward into one’s whole life in ways that cannot be fully anticipated. This is why, again in my view, Constitutional law should bow out of having any say on the matter, because it is far too blunt an instrument to contain the multitude of particular cases. And it is why families and faith communities together should instead take case-by-case responsibility for all outcomes—and no one, certainly not a government at any level, should have the right to second-guess them, let alone to punish them for whatever choice they make.
Bottom line, then, which to me is the only stable compromise solution to the abortion crucible: Abortions should not be granted on demand on the basis of the expectant mother’s whim alone, but nor should they ever be made illegal.
Last comment on this: Even in retrograde states that currently ban abortion or limit it excessively, it does not follow in the time of the after-action pill that abortions will decline sharply or even much at all. The data so far shows that abortions have not become scarcer over all, even in states with draconian bans. That is good, and banning the day-after pill state by state is unenforceable. That is even better. Access to abortion, even for poorer people, may not be significantly affected, so the SCOTUS legal flip of 2022 may in due course have little practical impact.
Hardly anyone cares about that, however. Most culture warriors don’t really pay much attention to practical matters. They are fighting the God-versus-Devil passion play of Christianity’s categorical mindset on the intellectual cheap; they just disagree about who is Lucifer and who is fighting at the right arm of the Lord. I hope they both lose the fight for, as Orwell wrote, “Saints should always be judged guilty until proved innocent,” whatever their views. As with other culture war issues, we could use more people who see politics as a vocation rather than as apocalyptical spectacle.
Beyond Feminism
From feminism the genitalia focus passed about a decade and a half later to homosexuals and bisexuals. Shame was again the bulls-eye as new symbols and language emerged, and again entertainment was a major part of the cultural mix. Remember “La Cage aux Folles”? That was in 1978, some 46 years ago. Here, too, there is more than spectacle to consider: There still remains a deficit of respect, dignity, and fairness all around for homosexuals, in some strata of the culture more than in others. The point is that spectacle is now an integral part of Western social movements of every shape and size, and it has the effect of distorting even good causes, not to speak of others.
Of course we have now moved from a focus on homosexuals to one on transsexuals, complete with moronic debates about public school bathrooms and more. Along the way the parade of ever more exotic genitalia and their uses has spun letter collections: first LGB; then LGBT; then LGBTQ; then LGBTQI, and then a + sign at the end meant to stand in for “etc.” and meaning what “etc.” always means when you see it: I know there’s more but I can’t figure out what it is.
This is not demonstrative of growing deep literacy in this niche; quite the reverse. Little children first learn their letters before they learn how to make words from them, and only later move from words to sentences and then paragraphs. There are probably toy blocks already available with these letters and only these letters on them, likely made in California somewhere. Here, too, one can cite formative literature: Middlesex comes to mind, a 2002 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. But the real start from the arts here was probably The Kink’s super-hit “Lola,” released in 1970.
After that, Hollywood took over the gainful task of raising the shock-salacity-weirdness bar and that, above anything Jeffrey Eugenides and Ray Davies could do, accounts for the current cultural mainstreaming of transmania, which is partly another moral panic but in larger part another Ripley-accented two-headed carnival freak show entertainment. As we argued in Chapter 2, transsexuals are magic, the epitome of the postmodern constructionist fungibility ideal. The newest iteration of the genre consisting mostly of road trip storylines is “Will & Harper.” But it is preceded by “Transamerica,” “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” “To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” a much-watched docuseries about Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, and more besides.[3] In spectacalized, post-deep reading America no book can touch the cultural power of moving images on film.
Somewhere along the way this movement of LGBTQ-whatever letter expansion merged with a radical trickled-down expansion of postmodernist cant. The result has been a catechistic triumph of willful fantasy over could-care-less-what-you-think-about-it reality, to sort of paraphrase Jerome K. Dick. If subjective experience is more real than any material or physical reality, then it follows that the deconstruction of “binary” sexuality had to happen eventually. As several observers have pointed out, the “trans” movement is not really about dignity and fairness for sexually ambiguous persons, but rather about abolishing gender altogether, and with it biology, in what is by far the most insane, if still logical, extension yet of the obsession with radical undifferentiated egalitarianism.
That is what is behind the latest berserk “progressive” idea: the abolition of gender-segregated sports. But it does make a certain kind of sense: If you engage magical thinking to will away the existence of biologically distinct genders, well, why not? Even magic has a logic, after all, just one not long on rationality. How can woke progressives deny the existence of gender based on biological reality and yet simultaneously obsess over its social and political manifestations? A homosexual is the way he or she is because of “being born that way” and so should never be subjected to therapy designed to put that person in the fat part of the bell curve distribution for hormones--and that’s right. But it is irrational to insist on that and simultaneously claim that biology doesn’t exist. It is also, to repeat, a contradiction to claim that biology has nothing to do with gender but everything to do with identity politics identifications, as in “Black” and “White” meant not as colors but as cultures by dint of some biological essence.
This contradiction roams over a wider field than just that of gender and sexuality. A January 31, 2024 New York Times article highlighted the “pro-drug” policies of San Francisco city government (and also that of British Columbia), clearly showing an ideological horseshoe synapse between leftwing expressive individualism and rightwing libertarianism.[4] Taking technically illegal drugs isn’t morally wrong or morally judged in San Francisco, and city officials emphasize making drug taking safer instead of helping people reduce the frequency of doing it, or even helping those who wish it to stop doing it altogether. Whether you look at this attitude as expressive individualism or libertarianism hardly matters: It comes down to the same thing, which is that government has not the right to tell people what they can or cannot do with or put into their bodies.
The logic here seems to be a combined extension of both pro-choice logic—as in, I own my body so I can do whatever I choose with it as regards procreation—and radical sociology logic, the latter holding that criminality is an illusion in the first place. It is deemed praiseworthy in this mindset to break laws imposed by the oppressive white male patriarchy because it qualifies as a form of resistance to structural violence. In San Francisco that same reasoning seems now to apply to those selling and taking heroin, and the broader negative impact of this behavior on the community at large can barely get a word in edgewise.
But two questions persist. First, how do advocates of de facto legal drug taking of all kinds—and that seems to be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s no longer inconsequential view— reconcile it with their equally vigorous endorsement of group victimization and identity politics, which smothers individualism within a form of weaponized and propagandized communalism? And second, given that San Francisco’s new pro-drug policies have led to a huge increase in overdose deaths, is going blood-on-the-saddle over expressive individualism when it comes to drugs completely impervious to the human costs of the policy? What kind of leftwing advocacy is that? Aren’t leftists supposed to care more about ordinary people than conservative greed mongers?
But now back to the bedroom: It is delusional to insist that sexuality, or gender, is somehow inherently non-binary in the face of settled scientific proof of the existence of chromosomes. Human females have the XX combination of chromosomes, and males have the XY combination.[5] Females are born with all the eggs they will ever have; men are born with no eggs, only the ability to fertilize them. Hormone endowments vary along a bell-curve shaped distribution pattern, but chromosomes are fixed and, so far as current clinical capacities go, cannot be altered.
Why, one wonders, do anti-binary pro-“trans” warriors rarely mention the existence of chromosomes? Could it be because doing so would destroy the revenant magic spell they so love to chant? They illustrate uncannily the revenant magic that Carl Sagan warned about nearly thirty years ago: “. . .our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”[6] Full disclosure: Sagan’s melodramatic voice used to make me cringe, but if he was right then he was right. He was right to use the word superstition, even if he did not link it explicitly to its close kindred relationship to magic and the mythic consciousness.
We get a sense of how wildly distorted the issue has become when we hear extreme expressions of it, for they give away the inner illogical vision of the trans anointed. Thus Saorsa-Amatheia Tweedale (you cannot make this sort of thing up), a Whitehall diversity ambassador who claims to be a trans woman, told her UK civil servant colleagues attached to the Department for Work and Pensions on October 26, 2023 that binary sexuality is “not the modern scientific view,” that prepubescent children should be able to take puberty blockers even without their parents’ knowledge or permission, and—here is the money quote—that “there are as many genders as there are individuals because we’re all unique individuals.”[7] This silliness does not feel like superstition and darkness, just fun magic for everyone! So harmless, right? Not right.
The contradiction between claims concerning the supposedly total social construction of gender and those claiming biological definitiveness for homosexuality is of a different sort. The contradiction is again obvious but contradiction can be ignored readily by those who are determined to do so with the ready aid of magical metamorphosis. One is reminded of the famous line Charles Schultz once gave to his comic strip character Linus: “No problem is so large or complex that it can’t be run away from.” But it is no longer so easy for anti-binary zealots to ignore it because many homosexuals, male and female, decry the very notion that they are not who they say and feel they are. Andrew Sullivan put the disagreement sharply by titling an essay “The Queers Versus the Homosexuals.” In his view, anti-binary ideologues seek “the eradication of homosexuality from public life,” just the opposite of what “normie” homosexuals like Sullivan have been struggling for over many decades.[8]
Sullivan isn’t the only one to notice this: J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock have as well, and in their cases the concern is confused anatomical males invading safe spaces reserved for women in need of them. They and Sullivan and others are not anti-trans as regards persons, only anti-trans ideology, as Pamela Paul and others have pointed out.[9] But far more interesting is that the progression of radical undifferentiated egalitarian ideology is now devouring its own, as all forms of infantile leftism seem ultimately to do. The apostolic succession of liberation theology, so to speak, has moved over roughly the past seven decades from “people of color” to women to homosexuals and bisexuals and now, most recently and fervently and irrationally in the postmodern tense, to transsexuals. But as was not so much the case before, trans ideology does contradict the self-understanding and hence the identity of homosexuals as a group. One thinks here not of Charles Schultz and Linus but of the Ourobous—that alchemic symbol of eternal return, meaning in this case that if one plies irrationality persistently enough it will come around and bite at least someone in the arse.
[1] So banal and public has the word orgasm become in American culture that it has become a multipurpose meme; there is even a cocktail now called an orgasm. Cock-tail; but of course….
[2] See French’s passing description in “I Believe in Miracles. Just Not All of Them,” and the more granular treatment by Emma Goldberg, “C.E.O.s are tripping,” New York Times, December 12, 2024.
[3] A summary is Jennifer Finney Boylan,” Will Ferrell walks into a Texas steakhouse…,” Washington Post, September 28, 2024, p. A17. The feel of Boylan’s comment is well communicated by its opening line: “When I heard that Will Ferrell had made a new film about a road trip with his friend, a newly out trans woman named Harper Steele, my first instinct was to roll my eyes and make a quiet little sound like a sick raccoon.” Nevertheless, Boylan praised both the film’s celebration of friendship and its nuanced management of difficult fully adult humor, as opposed to the lately more common mean and easy adolescent types.
[4] German Gomez, “Culture shift,” New York Times, January 31, 2024.
[5] As is well known, a rare mutation gives some males an extra Y chromosome. But no females have any Y chromosomes, just as no males have mitochondrial DNA.
[6] Sagan and Drury, From The Demon-Haunted World.
[7] See Steven Edginton, “Children wanting to transition ‘can ignore parents’, says Civil Service diversity ambassador,” The Telegraph, January 13, 2024.
[8] Sullivan, “The Queers Versus the Homosexuals,” The Weekly Dish, May 19, 2023.
[9] Paul, “In Defense of J.K. Rowling,” New York Times, February 17, 2023.