Empowering and infallible
Rod Dreher, “Sex and the modern mother” at The American Conservative = http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/sex-the-modern-mother/#post-comments. Yeah yeah another link to another post by Dreher. I am open to variety also but it is not just what Dreher himself writes but the issues he addresses and the articles which he discusses. Anyways a short piece that highlights an article in Cosmopolitan magazine by Kitty Stryker and her feminist mother. Apparently Stryker works in the pornography industry. For a while she kept this secret from her mom who eventually found it. Did mom criticize her or try to talk her out of it? No. She listened. I left a comment focusing on how much “listening” seems to be part of how modern secular progressivism accomplishes its goals whatever they are. I have nothing against listening or having conversations about controversial issues. I have however noticed how often “listen… talk” plays a role in how increasingly modern society questions then rejects tradition (= traditional beliefs and practices about you name it). We are not pushing Position X we just want people to be able to talk about it openly. And nearly every time the result is that Position X takes over. I see it all the time. I hear people (whose views are modern secular or progressive or all three) say things like “gosh those people do not want to talk about this” when what they mean is almost certainly “they do not want to talk about this with me… such that they listen to my view of everything and convert”. I think sometimes people seem unwilling to talk about issues because they know jolly well that the purpose of the “conversation” is to guide them in a particular ideological-theological-political direction. We just need people to read this book and they will see the light. Because when people hold different views it is because they are stupid or (and I hear this more often) ignorant. They do not know what we know. They have not read what we read. That is the purpose of education. If people hold views we disapprove it is because they have not been educated properly. I see this all the time. In one sense I do not care overly much about daughters in pornography industry and feminist moms who support them because it is the “most empowering thing she can do for herself”. Actually there was one comment (I think most comments to articles by Dreher are pretty stupid even when they are by people who seem very intelligent) that caught my attention.
I love this comment. “Once you remove the “thou shalt not!” pressure tamping a lot of this behavior down, once you lose the normative frame that let’s someone shout “I’m liberated!” by pushing back, a lot of what’s left is just kind of gross and pathetic.”
Forget conservatism, forget religion, forget God, forget everything–sexual liberation is nonsense as an ideal because it’s internally inconsistent and self-defeating. It ends by eviscerating the only good thing that it promises, which is sexual satisfaction.
Transgression comes with a powerful frisson of excitement, but that all drains away once there is no longer anything to transgress against. Modern culture has learned this lesson in every sphere, starting with high art–where the avant-garde went from being an actual movement, to just another entry on capitalists’ portfolios of wildly speculative, inherently valueless investments. To try to enshrine this stuff as normal is simply evidence of an exhausted culture with no forward movement and no new ideas.
Pretty much the heart of all the tension and excitement between the sexes comes down to sexual differentiation–the things that make us different from one another. Bizarrely, current ideas about gender are that we should eliminate all of those differences — thereby eliminating everything that we find exciting and interesting about the opposite sex. When exploring radical feminism with my students, I just wanted to shout out–do you guys really want to live in the sterile world of sexless androgynes that these people are trying to create?! How can this be anyone’s idea of utopia?
When I was young, I grew up in a strictly gender-segregated society. Girls were mysterious, elusive, intriguing — beautiful creatures usually seen from a distance. We exchanged shy glances, our brief conversations thrumming with sexual tension.
College destroys all of that, engendering excess familiarity between the sexes and the contempt that goes with it. And it encourages this sort of frathouse lowest common denominator in women–vulgarity, sweatpants, and all the rest.
Anyway, we don’t have any of this because it’s aesthetically pleasing. We have it because sex is being instrumentalized, mobilized to legitimize our current social and political order. It is “repressive desublimation,” following the logic Adorno and Horkheimer identified as being at the root of cultural capitalism. They say “the culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises.”
The same can now be said for progressive aspirations to sexual liberation. It merely reflects the deeper, more profound penetration of that capitalist logic into every facet of intimate life. “The personal is the political” should be a terrifying slogan. (Jones in reply to Candles) [emphases added]
Skapow. I like to think I am pretty smart (and according to a neuropsychologist who evaluated me after my accident I still am) but there are times I feel like a dullard. One thing I appreciate is how Jones says “forget God and conservatism, just look at sexual liberation and compare its results to its ‘progressive aspirations'”. This is where traditional religious people and secular progressives both err. We think “God says this” is all it takes. They think “your convictions are invalid simply because you say God says this”. And yes they say things like that. Can you say “impose your religion on others”? It is long past time we push back hard against the idea that “secular” arguments are inherently more privileged over “religious” arguments. Really? Why? In any case (watch me neatly contradict myself) I believe that “God says this” for reasons that usually (not always but sometimes? usually?) God says this for reasons that can be understood and appreciated by people who do not believe in or care about God. Terence Freitheim discusses this well in his Interpretation commentary on the book of Exodus. Wisdom is not solely the possession of Jewish and Christian religion. Although (and this is where it can become murky) sometimes “God says this” is all we have and it is difficult to explain why in non-religious terms. Sexual morality happens to be one of the chief examples of that. I can understand why modern secular (and religious) progressives think it is utterly ridiculous to question the morality of same-sex relationships and marriage. Maybe I am giving in to the constant daily barrage of propaganda and social-cultural pressure. Okay probably. But it is difficult to take that stance. “Well the Bible says so” and sure enough here come modern religious progressives who argue “actually no it doesn’t”. We cannot all be correct. Someone has to be wrong. But who? And how can we tell? I need to wrap this up. Jones says “forget religion and just look at sexual liberation and its results”. I have noticed a handful of voices who say this has to do with capitalism. Now that would be ironic. Part of me wants to give up and surrender and throw up my hands and say “fine… fine… do whatever the **** you want modern secular society… I am tired of fighting you every day for every centimeter of our culture… tired of you calling me a monster and bigot who must be compelled to celebrate sexual liberation or else ginormous fines or lose job or destroy career or blah blah blah and so on”. And yet Jones and a few others say “actually these social and cultural trends seem to result in misery and defeat”.
Aaron Closson, “Progressivism’s fragile gender realism” at First Things = http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/05/progressivisms-fragile-gender-realism. Surprisingly short piece that examines how progressivism seems to defend or talk about transgender. Basically Closson seems to argue that progressives are gender realists. Say what? Yes they are gender realists. Except they locate gender reality in the will not in biology. In fact progressives have to be gender realists in some way or else their arguments collapse without a foundation or framework. Okay yeah but so what? That is where Closson argues the progressive approach is no better and probably is worse than “your gender is your biological sex”.
Progressives are every bit the gender realists that conservatives are, only they locate the seat of gender in the capricious impulses of the will. This opens the progressive position to any number of reductio ad absurdum criticisms. In promoting the will to arbiter of gender reality, progressives empower transgendered persons to change genders spontaneously and endlessly, oscillating as the mood seizes them. After decades of feminist toil and sacrifice, the joys and entitlements of womanhood now stand open to all free of charge. That anyone should have bothered to defend so tenaciously the merits of a universally accessible gender orientation over another testifies to the incompatibility of the many strains of gender revisionism jockeying for position within the progressive agenda.
As insoluble as these quandaries may seem, progressive gender realism faces an even greater obstacle. Once the progressive admits of the possibility of an error concerning gender identity—which she must do in order to lend legitimacy to the transgendered person’s grievance in the face of obvious physiological incongruities—she exposes to the possibility of error her professed organ of gender reality, the will. Having insisted that biology erred in rendering authentic personhood, the progressive must now show the will to be immune from exactly the same vulnerability. Whether she can succeed in insulating the will from error depends upon the explanatory resources at her disposal, and if she is a materialist—and she is almost certainly a materialist—scant resources offer the promise of assistance. On materialism the will, along with the sense of self that actualizes it, is merely a feature of the human organism and is no less prone to error than the biological mechanisms responsible for inaccurately manifesting the transgendered person’s identity. Without recourse to an immutable reality impervious to biological aberration, the progressive cannot defend the will as any more reliable an indicator of gender identity than the rest of the fallible human body to which it belongs. [emphasis added]
Handful of dear readers note I am not expressing an opinion on transgender or gender fluidity. My concern is how people think. How people speak and debate. Closson seems to argue that progressivism must believe in some form of gender realism… this might(?) represent a contradiction in their views… but more importantly the result is chaos. Perhaps the most important point Closson makes is why do we assume the will is somehow infallible but not biology? Now if said progressive is not a materialist (and I work largely among and with religious progressives) then that might complicate the critique. “A female soul in a biologically male body”. And of course our soul – or at least how we perceive ourselves and our true identity – is somehow infallible. Maybe we are getting closer to discerning the Agenda behind all these agendas.
Addendum 12.21h – Ed Whalen, “Obama Administration’s Outrageous War on North Carolina—Part 3 (On ‘Discrimination’)” = http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/435027/doj-transgender-war-north-carolina-discrimination. Not really about how the Obama administration is using every tool at its disposal to compel states to get on board with the sexual liberation-autonomy agenda. More about how it uses rhetoric.
[R]eserving women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities for biological females (and men’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities for biological males) does not in fact involve any discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Rather, under the guise of nondiscrimination rhetoric, the Obama administration is pressing the substantive claim that gender identity trumps biological sex under Title VII—in other words, that employers must discriminate in favor of gender identity. That is a policy position that transgender advocates are welcome to push for in the legislative arena.
I have said this before and am becoming a bit repetitive in making the point that so many discussions and debates in modern society are largely games of rhetorical maneuvering. What is the magic term in this debate? Discriminate/discrimination. Discrimination is bad. In fact against the law. So if you discriminate (read = if we can label what you are doing as discrimination) then game over that is bad and against the law. It is difficult to uncover. Increasingly I see examples of this. People invoke buzzwords or magic rhetoric. Because this is about equality… liberty does not mean you can discriminate and everyone thinks “oh wow great point game over”. Except we are letting the words do the thinking for us. No! Surely not! Again that is difficult to recognize and uncover. We generally think and speak with words right? And what if the words themselves are loaded from the beginning. “What you call liberty is what I call discrimination therefore your argument is invalid”. Well maybe. Or the other person is trying to win the debate through superior rhetoric. It takes effort to pause and analyze carefully how terms are being defined and employed.