That is clear. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of paranoia that — remarkably — rivals the terror over AIDS. The fear of touching, and the naive notion that ‘good’ people (the virtue signallers who continue to avoid contact with strangers) will live longer than the ‘bad’ people (who touch everyone, willy-nilly) will not disappear fast. It’s been labeled the ‘new puritanism.’ Now if you wonder how we can possibly be puritans when ‘the children’ are probably watching porn on YouTube as we speak, welp -- that’s the way hatred of sex and hatred of the body works. When we deny ourselves, our urges and pleasures crop up in the oddest of ways; hence the panopoly of twerking prebuscent female singers along with an alarming number of misogynist TikTok videos. Consider also — the Oakville transgender shop teacher who appears in class sporting gigantic fake breasts, protruding nipples and all. Well you just try criticizing her! Under the new puritanism rules — where sex no longer exists — she is a paragon, her performance consistent with the gender illogic of ‘drag queen story hour. ‘ You see, long ago The Wokies separated gender from sex. It seemed like a good idea at the time (ie. when Judith Butler suggested it in the 90s). But the fact is that gender is sexy, and this is one of the main reasons we cling to it. Men dress as women for three reasons only (sure there are exceptions) — a) because they are transexual and wish to have a sex change, or b) they are drag queens i.e. gay men who dress as a woman to flirt and perform, or c) because female clothing is their sexual fetish. Obsessive male crossdressing nearly always has a sexual component. And that’s good. Because sex is a good thing, right? (Do I need to remind you?) Now when women wish to dress as men— it’s a different matter altogether, because women are different than men -- due to both hormones, and social programming. Women are often raped and abused by men; and they are generally treated with less respect than men (need I remind you, of this, also?) and so they hold a ‘lower’ place in our culture. So if women dress as men they are likely to be taken more seriously, whereas men who dress as women are likely to be viewed in a more sexualized way. The Oakville stop teacher is obviously a fetishist, and proud of it (more power to her!). But she should not bring her fetish into the classroom, just as drag queens should not bring their big kissy lips and sheer nylons into kindergarten. I thought of all this while viewing the absorbing new Canadian film Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age. Yes its a great documentary, but — it's not so much that there is a ‘rise’ in misogyny, (it’s always been there in western culture) but that the blithe acceptance of the digital world and its toxic algorithms is destroying us. Honestly -- why are we we taking seriously anything some anonymous idiot says online, anyway? The ‘digital world’ is all about money, period. Yes I know. You are now reading my internet bog. But in my defence, I will remind you that this blog is wildly unpopular, only faithfully read by a handful of nutty people -- and my friends -- as I am no longer taken seriously as artist or thinker by anyone. Thank God I am merely a sad old faggot - whose plays will lie dead, forever unproduced; a pathetic drag queen who insists on nattering on about how great sex is, when, as everyone knows, sex is over. I do not frequent social media for the very reason that I would be demonized there -- for all this. Social media is — as some are beginning to realize — a kind of blood sport. Your cellphone is the modern coliseum; we gather daily to gleefully celebrate the suffering of others, as nothing can compare to the joy of a good dressing down or cancelling (‘You're fat and ugly and stupid and nobody likes you! So there!’) Now it is true that the women in the documentary Backlash — including the president of the Italian parliament Laura Boldini — have experienced not only the imagined slings and arrows of outrageous social media demonization, but the terror of real life home invasions and threats of physical violence. But this imagined ‘increase’ in misogyny is a digital magnification of what has always been there, admittedly exacerbated very much by the well meaning but ill-fated attempts to de-sexualize relationships between men and women that characterized #Me too. Duh! — you can’t remove sex from heterosexuality, try as you might. Attempts to de-eroticize male/female relations just serve to make straight men more misogynistic. Rape is a crime, but sex, like unwanted touching, is a lot like hate speech; it’s very human, and sometimes very attractive, we all need it now and again just to keep the ball rolling. And if we attempt to erase it, this thing we have so demonized will just appear somewhere else in an even more disruptive way The whole concept of ‘verbal violence’ is a romantic invention of the digital world — we never thought of words as actual physical violence before social media. What ever happened to -- 'sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me?’ Now that was good advice. If ‘hate speech’ is banned, then I will be, too because mostly I just want to write about politically incorrect sex (and all sex is politically incorrect anyway). Ergo, therefore, in conclusion, let’s stop pretending that sex does not exist. Instead, let's start having more sex, and starting admitting that we are doing so, and admitting that sex is all about power, and power is sexy (see: Foucault). Sorry, but if we decry rape and misogyny without speaking of the intimate and complex relationship between sex and power, we do women — and well, everyone — a great disservice — to say the very, very, very least.
