As noted earlier, while this is the last Age of Spectacle post for 2024 in The Raspberry Patch, it is not the last post of 2024: On New Year’s Eve you will receive one more, making 59 for the year (we began on January 4). Of the 59 posts all but one or two have been long-form and more or less substantive essays.
According to the Substack folks, The Raspberry Patch now has 217 subscribers, of which a tiny number—21—are volunteer paying subscribers. Thank you. But since we started with about a dozen back in January, and since I have never asked readers for money, those numbers strike me as not too shabby. The intellectual level and the subject matter here in The Raspberry Patch is not mean to appeal to mass-public tastes in an age of spectacle, so all in all I’m pleased with how things have gone in The Raspberry Patch’s first year.
As far as The Age of Spectacle project goes, yes, the rollout process has helped me both in ways anticipated and in other ways, as well. So since in my estimation it ain’t broke I’ll not fix it in 2025: so no paywall is in the offing, at least for the duration of the rollout which should wind up around the Spring equinox. After that, we’ll see what will be with content and format.
A related housekeeping note before getting down to business: Welcome to new subscribers, of which there have been quite a few in the past month or so thanks to referals from friends like Claire Berlinski and Larry Kotlikoff, in particular. These two really are friends in the old-fashioned sense that I have actually met them in the flesh, in Paris and in Boston, respectively. I do rue the cheapening of friendship in the digital era, where “to friend” someone doesn’t require ever having looked a person in the eye, matched body language to words, or hand-touched. Such counterfeiting of what is precious in life that has been going on….which leads to a final point.
When new subscribers to The Raspberry Patch get in touch to sign up, those with their own substacks usually invite me to follow them back. I rarely do it, so none of you should take it personally. My reason is simple: If I open a firehose of unbundled electronic incoming and point it at my brain, I will probably never again manage to sit and read a book. I do not need another obstacle in that regard; please understand.
Chapter 8. Cognitive Gluttony Meets Race and Gender
. . . The radical leveling obsession on the Left reflects a childlike logic, expressible in the simplest of syllogisms: No one can ever be better than anyone else; all differences imply or create inequality; therefore all differences must be abolished. (In education, this has meant hiding information from students that they are National Merit Finalists so that some groups without finalists, or with many fewer of them, will not be made to feel unequal as a group in an identity-politics infested mindset.[1]) If differences cannot really be abolished, which is to say anatomically abolished when it comes to bathroom use and sports competitions, then they need be metaphysically abolished. So, say the woke, how a teenager feels on a given morning should determine which bathroom that person ought to use in school that day, not what actual genitalia the person has based on their chromosomal inheritance at birth or what the student’s legally responsible parents have to say about it. That is not so much an act of mind over matter, since mind has little to do with it, as feeling over objective reality—the law of consanguinity or magic, in other words, again hard at play. (Might a choice of bathroom upset others in that bathroom with different genitalia? The woke seem not yet to have come up with a coherent answer.)
Instead of celebrating the dignity of difference, the unexamined “idea”—so not really an idea at all, more of an irritable gesture masquerading as an idea, as Lionel Trilling put it in The Liberal Imagination—is to extirpate difference by abolishing the press of physical reality. In theory anyway, everyone should get to fantasize what gender they want to be in the moment, and everyone else is expected—indeed is urged—to respect that magical choice.
Were it possible to force recalcitrant people to follow orders in this regard, many anti-biology warriors would wield that force. Happily, magic is feckless, and with any luck at all the anti-binary tic will fade as a fad, as fads tend to do. Since use of force is not presently available for this purpose, linguistic coercion has to make do—and the prolific invention of obfuscating language for all this is a giveaway that something strange is afoot.[2] Just as anyone who prefers the term “homosexual” to “gay” or dissents from blessing same-sex marriage is immediately labeled “homophobic,” anyone who dissents from the trans ideological agenda is now labeled “transphobic.” The speed with which “homophobic” transmuted into “transphobic” is best explained by the fawning of the mainstream media, terrified by the witch-hunting woke in their midst. When spokespersons for the “trans” magical anti-biology agenda used the term, the media immediately hit the ground and rolled over like a friendly dog begging a belly rub.
If MAGAts can’t spell “martial” law, wokesters seem unable to discern the simplest etymology. A phobia is a fear, from Greek. Very few heterosexual males who find male homosexuality off-putting to contemplate, let alone to practice, are afraid of homosexuality or of homosexuals. Repulsion is not the same as fear. If we experience the misfortune of witnessing some poor soul vomit on the sidewalk right in front of us, we are repulsed by the vomit and we sympathize with the ill person. But we are not afraid of the vomit or the person, as that word is commonly meant. No one expects a pile of vomit to jump up from a sidewalk and try to bite us in the ankle.
“Queer” ideology—and again we must distinguish between homosexuals as human beings and queer or gay ideology—nevertheless insists that yes, all heterosexual men are afraid of the homosexual urges it contends reside within every male. But this is nonsense. It’s just a way to make homosexuals feel less aberrant, which is, in turn, just part of the fantasy some express that homosexuality is actually superior to heterosexuality. Even a semi-bright teen can see this for what it is: overcompensation for the natural insecurity of being in a small minority that is, for most male homosexuals at least, inescapable. But nothing, apparently, can arrest the urge some feel to radical undifferentiated egalitarianism, and if that means pulling down what is statistically normal to make what is statistically abnormal seem less so, then that is what happens. Alas, warping the English language via the tactical invention of supposed new phobias—and surely we’ve not seen the last of this—is not high on their agenda of concerns.
The dominant sexual version of leveling we see before us today is, as already noted, unmistakably a childlike mental tic, and it is not hard to figure out where it comes from. Just ask yourself: What kind of person, generically speaking, obsesses about genitalia, their own and others? A tiny percentage of psychologically exotic adults aside, the answer is so simple that we are likely to miss what is in front of our noses (apologies to Mr Blair): adolescents.
When human sexuality emerges in the early teenage years it is typically a wondrous but puzzling and sometimes troubling event. It is natural that puzzlement leads to questions, many so awkward that they are not asked of others, but only pondered privately at least for a time. With the porn explosion on the internet no young, puzzled teen is completely bereft of reference points about sexuality and gender, though not necessarily healthy ones.
The temporary obsession with genitalia is a natural and probably a necessary thing for most of us. What is not natural, or did not used to be, is the temporal expansion of this obsession into full metabolic adulthood. Most of us used to grow up into cognitive as well as physical adults. Now, as we behold “the vanishing American adult”—to again press Ben Sasse’s phrase into use—mismatches between fully adult bodies and adolescent minds have proliferated. The woke insistence on radical undifferentiated equalitarianism as applied to gender thus resembles a new children’s crusade, one as wackily into reality denial as the original.
It is more than that, however: It is the species hurling itself backwards in time. Human societies in preliterate, mythic-consciousness times were not only acutely aware of genitalia but in many forms worshipped them as the creative instruments without which the propagation of humanity through new life was impossible. Fertility rites and the statuettes that went with them adorn most, possibly even all, primitive cultures. Worshipping the instruments of human fertility was often accompanied in the ancient Near East by animal sacrifices, in too many cases not to exclude human sacrifices. That was arguably spectacle 1.0, chin-dropping demonstrations of desperate human imaginations gone off the deep end.
People offering up their infant females to Baal is of course mentioned many times in the Hebrew Bible, and not with approbation. Ample archeological evidence corroborates the text. The Israelites were not hesitant to call this idolatry, but contemporary readers may miss the key point: The statuettes were not random idols; rather, worshipping genitalia via the statuettes was typically a form of self-idolatry, of worshipping parts of one’s own and others’ bodies that seemed magical, enchanted, because of the remarkable, indeed spectacular, things they did. The woke obsession with genitalia thus presents us with a biting irony: What is thought by its adepts to be “progressive” is in truth a throwback to the collective primal childhood of the species.
That is not all that is ancient. The insistence, of which more below, that a “gender fluid” person can decide a chromosomal his or her’s own gender, according to a mental fixation that biology has nothing to do with gender roles (the opposing view, please note, is not that it has everything, only something, to do with it) represents a triumph of will in the moment over an otherwise perduringly insistent reality. This is the mythic law of metamorphosis in full bloom that, in our methodically bureaucratized age, ironically gives rise to sedate forms of inanity—like the aforementioned mandate that pronouns be placed under people’s workplace signatures. This represents a form of not just gendered but also sexualized political correctness run amok. The supposed rationale for this ideological fetish is that one would not want to insult or make uncomfortable someone who to all appearances is a male by calling that person “he” when the person insists on being a she, at least for the time being. The real reason is again the insistence on magical efficacy: Biology imposes limits stipulated as impossible by adolescent fantasist ideology? Well then, poof, so much for biology.
Even wackier is the use of “they” for one person who thinks he or she is transgendered, “cis-gendered” or “gender fluid,” which is perfectly normal in some quarters these days since, again, all gender roles are supposedly socially constructed and have no basis in biology. Moreover, if that were not anti-biological enough, our sense of a unitary self, we are assured (recall the discussion in Part I), is a delusion concocted by our own devious superego. If we are not really one unitary person, it is perfectly logical that we can be male and female—“fluid,” that is—at the same time.
How a condition that affects about 0.4 of a percent of the population has gotten generalized into a cultural obligation pertaining ideally, if not yet really, to everyone is easy to understand: We must adapt to the needs of the 0.4 of a percent, lest they be made to feel unequal and hence uncomfortable—as if perfect comfort amid a fairly perfect life were a constitutional right, or at the very least a universal American entitlement. Presumably, there have been transsexuals and gender-confused or conflicted people for as long as modern anatomical humans have existed.[3] No doubt many have been treated badly, even very badly. But we can and should remedy that historical shame without turning logic upside-down, and without obsessing about what is by any rational measure a very minor problem compared to the many huge ones we now face.
That said, thanks to the performative ballyhoo now surrounding transsexuality in an Age of Spectacle the problem is getting worse. Through some combination of the power of suggestion and the near obsession to stand out from the crowd as a kind of victim deserving of attention, we now have more self-defined transsexuals than ever. While about 0.4 percent of U.S adults—about 1.3 million people out of an adult population of 258,327,000—claim trans status, 1.4 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 do.[4] That is a near 300 percent increase over the norm. Anyone think this is a coincidence, or owes to a sudden change in human hormonal distributions?
That cloying fact is not allowed in our agora, however; in an age of sexualized spectacle it is just too useful for publicists, advertisers, and megalomaniacs of all descriptions for anyone to disabuse the magic.[5] The result has been a rapidly formed cargo cult of transsexual performative fluff. A good random example of dozens easily found each week is the front page above-the-fold, photo-bedecked March 24, 2023 Washington Post supposed news story, “In survey, most say life is better after transition.”[6] The WaPo, having loosened a lot of money from the Kaiser Family Foundation for the survey, needed to give the story high exposure. Of course the writers conformed to the new norm of mimicking “they/their” pronouns for individual transsexuals. They also followed house style in identifying every person they discuss with the leading adjectives “White” and “Black” despite the obvious fact that not one of them is literally white or black. (Maybe it’s good, in way, that ever fewer people read newspapers?)
Or consider what has lately been going on in the celebrity-accented campaign to abolish biology. Demi Lovato made news not long ago by—gasp!—changing her main pronoun to “they.” Wow; journalists were persuaded to refer to Demi, one person, as “they” whenever a full sentence needed writing about her. We don’t have enough problems with the use of proper grammar—read a social media thread lately?—that we need this?
The aforementioned pronoun-pluralization of individuals is either more absurd than sad or sadder than absurd; it’s hard to choose. Only the absurdity that a human being’s inner self is solely gender-based can be squared with the pronoun nonsense. How else could it have been conceived? Obviously, many heterosexual men are gentle, intuitive, and creative in the way women are seen commonly to be, and many heterosexual women are decisive, aggressive, and controlling in the way men are seen commonly to be. Personality stretches out over gender distinctions in a broad spectrum; no gender-defined on/off personality switch exists so why on earth pretend to invent one?
But that doesn’t make such men not men or such women not women; again, chromosomes are resistant to abolition by the whim of infantilized imaginations. Who we are as people far overshadows the reach of gender on personality, and is influenced by myriad other factors than hormonal distributions. To exclude all factors save for gender in what we cherish about other people is sad; but to schizoid individuals into plurals for any reason is sadder still. The fact that some transsexuals abet the destruction of their own unitary selves by eagerly adopting plural pronouns may be the perfect synthesis between sadness and absurdity, with admixtures of exhibitionism and victim-mongering tossed in for spice.
No matter: As far as American culture is concerned the battle is already over. Even the holy Chicago Manual of Style, a.k.a. Turabian, has surrendered in its newest eighteenth edition—“fully (if perhaps wearily)” says reviewer Scott Huler—blessing the use of “they” and “themself” as singular pronouns.[7] It is striking how quickly this magic-inflected absurdity has become normalized. It seems to date at the earliest in standard print English only from March 2017 when the Associated Press changed its style guide.[8] From there it took only an eye blink to produce uncountable examples. Typical is Ellie Silverman and Jenny Gathright, “Noncitizen residents reflect on their votes” in the June 4, 2024 Washington Post, page B2. In the section under Shaghayegh “Chris” Rostampour the pronoun “their” is used as a schizoidal “queer” singular three times and is used once properly as the plural pronoun it has been for many centuries. This sort of thing exactly is what persuades some observers that leftwing surrealism is actually more dangerous than the MAGAt type because it roots insidiously into the culture in non-political guise. With the fall of Turabian, alas, the opposition has been rendered individualized and hence iconoclastically feckless.
Naturally enough, the sexually abnormal in its many forms makes for terrific spectacle and, of course, for the fulsome publicity that goes with it. It worked on me; I had never heard of Demi Lovato before her “their” stunt, probably because I had long since aged out of “Barney & Friends” and “Camp Rock.” Fans and prurient-minded others, not a small group these days—or possibly any days—must have begun wondering: What do “their” vagina look like? Do “they” also have a penis? Does she both “cum” and “squirt”? How does she choose personnel for group sex? What says “their” gynecologist? (Oh, that’s private) Even former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, who came out as cis-gendered in 2022, could not top that; but some free advertising for the then-newly founded University of Austin she probably achieved.
As with many forms of spectacle, the potential for humor cannot be far away. Funny to start with is the riotous earnestness of the people who insist on the pure morality of all this nonsense. Dave Chappelle saw the potential, went for it, succeeded, and was of course excoriated in the harshest terms by the guard bees of the wokester hive. Publicity comes in many forms, apparently.
But Chapelle did not exhaust the potential for comedy. Any person who insists on the pronoun “they” really ought to be made to buy two tickets to enter a theater or a concert venue, and two tickets to pay for a bus, train, or airline seat. Seems only fair if a person possesses the unusual ability to see life “from both sides now” (apologies, Joni). Seriously, however, very few of the very few actually walk around with a bifurcated narrator. Unless someone has been diagnosed clinically with schizophrenia, and so needs medical care, no transsexual walks around with two distinct randomly oscillating personalities. That individual is in fact an individual, a single human being deserving of respect and compassion, not a freak show act hypnotizing observers into bouts of double vision.
Alas, this is not really funny after all. Sexualized spectacle is a strange way indeed to front anyone’s personality, as if sexuality is the essence of anyone’s character. And it is not harmless. As already noted, homosexuality is to a considerable extent a chemical inheritance from birth, but social norms affect those stranded somewhere between mean and extreme in the hormone distribution sweepstakes. Permissive or even laudatory cultural norms concerning non-heterosexual behavior invariably produce more of it. That has been the case from ancient Greece to contemporary Afghanistan, with its bacha bazi (“dancing boys”). There is no reason to think that will ever change.
Insecure or confused people are easily influenced in many ways, and not just about gender identification. In any case, too, humans are mimetically inclined even at their confident best, particularly younger ones; knowingly and (usually) not, we copy whatever memes make a large enough impression on us. Put a bit differently, our personalities are composites of affects we adopt as we age, consciously sometimes but usually not. Before the advent of literacy the reservoir of traits and attitudes we could draw upon was limited to those we encountered directly, particularly parents, other family members, and community models. With literacy it became possible to adopt aspects of personality from people we never met or ever would meet, even from fictional, and in due course animated, characters. Particularly for other-directed personality types, Kurt Vonnegut’s aforementioned Mother Night remark has long been apt: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
In an Age of Spectacle the mimetic nature of human beings has taken on a new angle pointed to the outsized significance of primal power sources, of which sexuality is pre-eminent and power/violence is a not-that-distant second.[9] Many in a mass society of mostly other-directed personality types struggle to find ways to stand out, to be noticed, to be whatever everyone seems to care most about: being an individual. (Yes, it is curious, as the sagacious will recognize, that the postmodern Western zeitgeist simultaneously emphasizes individuality and radical undifferentiated egalitarianism, so that no individual should stand out as being in some way better than anyone else, but what is the point of being an individual if being unique sums to being the same as everyone else?....oh, never mind.) In a postmodern ideational world where subjective feeling takes pride of place over facticity, a young person unable to locate his or her individuality and make others notice it may conclude that they might as well not exist.
Quite aside, then, from ostentatious tattooing, piercings, and chartreuse hair, this is a formula for “black pill” extremism, voluntary celibacy (“incels”), and garden-variety nihilism.[10] It accounts, too, in part at least, for still-rising incidents of self-harm and even suicide among teens and twenty-somethings. What easier way to get over the shock bar, if visible tattoos and piercings and technicolor dyed hair doesn’t turn the trick, than to declare oneself gender fluid?
Given the burgeoning outward spectacalization of gender, it is a wonder how anyone into this particular vibe can get so agitated about a presumed lack of privacy. How low has Western society fallen when instead of concerning ourselves primarily with what it is our heads and hearts we drop down twenty of so inches to the zone between our legs? How can anyone avidly forfeit any pretense of sexual modesty by telling the world via their pronoun declaration what their proclivities are, and then wonder at the rarity of genuine intimacy? First you tell everyone about your genitalia and the implied uses thereof, and then you expect to engage in precious innocent sincerity over shared hopes, dreams, and challenges? Really?
Finally on this point, to bring the matter back to the political level: Almost needless to say, the negative follower effect of anti-binary ideology has been massive. To most Americans, certainly to the vast majority without a college degree, this ideology sits somewhere between risible and hated—merely “rejected” is too mild a term. Since this ideology is associated with the Democratic Party—a party that today is estimated to be around 55 percent female in terms of active members and voters—it was inevitable that, even without the exaggerated propaganda of the MAGAt political machine, the sudden rise of trans ideology and its anti-binary magical thinking would hurt the Democrats at the polls. Since the trans/anti-binary ideology emerged into the limelight after the 2020 election but before the 2024 election, it may not be a stretch too far to reason that Kamala Harris’s trouncing had more to do with the negative follower effect of the trans/anti-binary optic than with any other single aspect of an over-determined defeat.
I’m a Man, I Spell M-A-N[11]
Many pages ago in this book’s Introduction, a brief synopsis of post-November 5, 2024 election autopsies appears, the gist of which is that both anti-identity politics and pro-authoritarian/nihilist currents best explain the outcomes, not just in the presidential election but across the board and also down-ballot. The outcome was not about faces but about paths; not about party policy positions, but about party cultural identities. That is what mattered most. What we did not dwell on there, but have alluded to just now, is the specifically genderized dimension of identity politics. To be properly understood, however, the backlash against genderized identity politics needs to be seen in tandem with growing nihilism on the MAGAt Right to define a 21st-century version of the war between the sexes, one that, according to this argument, incisively shapes our current politics.
According to this view, at the least worth pondering if not accepting whole cloth, the November 2024 election was really about what a man is and whom he should love, and what a woman is and whom she should love. A woman, because she is physically smaller and weaker on average than a man, will always need a protector for herself and her children, and that protector will either be her husband or it will be the state—essentially a socialization of the husband’s role in the form of institutional constraints against abusing and harming women. Changes in the nature of post-industrial revolution work, the end of the age of brawn so to speak, have changed traditional conceptions of gender characteristics, indeed have scrambled them to the point of incoherence for many people. This is why early-stage feminism drove women into the arms of the state, even to the point of demanding an equal rights for women amendment to the Constitution. As already suggested, that path has not led to the desired destination.
Whether because of the afterwash of the “Me, Too” moral panic or for deeper reasons, most women are arguably more ambiently fearful today than they were before feminism existed. Whether that tallies with their actual vulnerability to abuse, or just tallies with the spread of the Mean World Syndrome, is not the point. The point is that having devalued masculinity from dimple to duodenum, it turns out that the state is not a reliable substitute protector after all. Many critics charge the MAGAt world with creating fear and division so that it can be harvested politically, and that is correct. But the Democrats, now tilted toward female membership and influence, have become, albeit in a different way, a party of fear, as well. Women have projected that image of fearfulness, inuring it into the party itself. The Democrats stand, or are seen as standing, for generic risk-aversion, extreme interpretations of the precautionary principle, and snowflakery in all forms. This is unpopular; in the normal course of the American political flow it does not win elections. And this is basically because most men sense and do not like what has happened to their social status these past several decades. The anti-binary tic, which places a transsexual’s cultural status higher than their own, amounted for many to the last straw of their collective humiliation.
Consider, first, that nearly all their teachers, authority figures in young male lives par excellance, were either women or, maybe one in a dozen, “sensitive” men. If the data on single-mother families and divorce are accurate, many grew up with no male authority figure in the home. As the economy moved toward symbol manipulation and service provision and away from manufacturing and all grunt, physical labor forms of work, the more natural emotional intelligence of females advantaged them in the schoolroom and then in the increasingly post-industrial workplace at the expense of men. As technology diminished the advantages of brawniness, and as higher education become the key to upward mobility, again feminine qualities gained marketplace purchase and masculine qualities lost it.
Errol Flynn and John Wayne are passé, yes, and even Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone are rapidly becoming memory-bound curiosities. Long ago already American popular culture substituted “Top Guns” like Tom Cruise, all 5’7” of him, for the male heroes of old. But mega-masculine fantasy superheroes are not passé. They range from obviously outré Marvel-comic-like characters, beginning perhaps with “The Hulk” but now including new and improved versions of Thor, Captain America, Ironman, Wolverine, Daredevil, Punisher, Black Panther (does it ever stop?), to the more realistic and just as ubiquitous “good guy with a gun” scriptings and depictions on TV and in the movies. The mesmerized male viewers of such fare long to act, to be heroes and saviors just like the “real men” (who of course are not real at all) on the screen, not to contemplate, meditate, do yoga, or read—and as already noted the recent collapse of deep reading is disproportionately a male phenomenon.[12] It follows too that a regression to mythic consciousness summons from the distant depths of cultural history the now occluded image of what a man used to be and again should be. Donald Trump’s pretense of being an Alpha male spoke to these magical yearnings, loudly enough, it seems, to make a difference.
Alas, the ambit of opportunity for mythic-inured men to fulfill their ideal of manliness has long been shrinking, now to the point that some women, at least, express despair about the waning of masculinity. They got what they thought they wanted—metrosexual delicacy, now derided on the Right as the stuff of soy ninjas—only to find that they did not want it after all. Sick of the eternal fawning deference of the sub-alpha male, they wait, mostly in vain, for a man to take some initiative—a hope made much more likely to be disappointed in the continuing aftermath of the “Me, Too” affair, which has made many young men terrified of being called a rapist for as little as an affectionate light shoulder tap.
Already now long ago, in 1943, C.S. Lewis was on and perhaps a bit beyond point: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”[13] Lewis could not have foreseen it, but now male wishful thinking about retrieving a kind masculinity since turned into a museum display takes the shape of comic book and screen-fantasy fiction heroes. Spectacular as they may be, no real woman can date such a character. Wait: Are we sure about that with artificial intelligence moving from the rear-view mirror to the far horizon? Could “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” come one day to be seen as prophetic? Yikes.
[1] This really happened. For a slightly whitewashed account, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/12/29/thomas-jefferson-high-national-merit/.
[2] See Andrew Sullivan, “Culture War Politics and the English Language,” The Weekly Dish, March 24, 2023.
[3] Again, this is very old. I am unfamiliar with the likely Greek sources here, but the Talmud discusses what have usually been translated as hermaphrodites in the section called “Bikurim,” which is part of Tractate Zeraim. A hermaphrodite also appears as a character in the aforementioned play “Volpone” by Ben Jonson.
[4] Jonathan Allen, “New study estimates 1.6 million in U.S. identify as transgender,” Reuters, June 10, 2022.
[5] Note: Publicists and advertisers are once-removed megalomaniacs on behalf of other people and products. That, exactly, is what they are paid to be.
[6] Casey Parks, Emily Guskin, and Scott Clement, “In survey, most say life is better after transition,” Washington Post, March 24, 2023, pp. A1, 14. The headline may be misleading without explanation: Only 16 percent of those identifying as transsexual have had genital surgery or other cosmetic procedures done on their bodies, so “transition” simply means coming out about one’s felt sexual identity.
[7] It also demands the capitalization of “Indigenous” as well as “Black” and “White.” See Scott Huler, “9 changes to the Chicago Manual of Style—and why they matter,” Washington Post, September 19, 2024. That said, Huler affirms what Turabian stands for and is: The assertion that “there is a right way. Its changing rules and traditions can be known; you can keep them near you. At a time when right ways rules and traditions are everywhere uncertain, a new Chicago provides, at least for the moment, solid ground.” Faint praise, that—but what else can he do?
[8] See Brooke Sopolsa, “AP Stylebook Embraces ‘They’ as Singular, Gender-Neutral Pronoun,” NBC News, March 27, 2017. The authors admitted the awkwardness of the innovation and advised jounalists to write around it, but few bother even to try anymore. The AP guide also now embraces “homophobia” and “homophobic” and advises writers never to use male and female with the words “both,” “either,” or “or.” The AP guide can go screw itself, any which way it prefers.
[9] Long before I wrestled with the manifestations and precursors of wokeness, and before the term itself even existed, Philip Rieff captured much of the picture in My Life Among the Deathworks. Rieff noted that the mythic consciousness’s fixation on sexual desire as the principle source of primordial power flows into a once-removed fixation on power itself--but it doesn’t flow very far. Hence, Rieff argued that 20th-century authoritarian movements’ populist appeal had much to do with sexual eroticism, and that sexual eroticism, however it may be expressed--he cites military and police uniform designs as an example--often doubles back into eroticized violence. In this regard note the methodological similarities of rapine and mass murder between the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen and the Soviet Cheka. To repeat a point just mooted, self-worship is the oldest form of idolatry, sexual and otherwise, and Rieff saw Freud’s “psychological man” as a throwback to the form of self-idolatry he called “therapeutic man.” This amounted to a new secular religion in which the deity was the self. This formed a relativistic cultural dead-end that worked rhetorically for Rieff the same way “the last man” did for Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Note Gerald Howard’s “Reasons to Believe,” Bookforum (February/March 2007).
[10] Reeves, Black Pill, op. cit.
[11] With apologies to Bo Diddley.
[12] Van Dam, “We’re breaking down reading habits. How did yours stack up in 2023?”
[13] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford University Press, 1943).