Wednesday, August 3, 2016

"An Authoritarian Cultural Moment"

A few thoughts on the Nazi language police and our "authoritarian cultural moment," from novelist Bret Easton Ellis:

Because, in our society, social justice warriors always prefer women to be victims. … The reality of the world is that men look at women, and men look at other men, and women look at other men, and women especially look at other women and objectify them. Has anybody been on Tinder lately, and seen how our Darwinian impulses are gratified in a swipe or two? This is the way of the world in order for our species to survive, and I doubt that is ever going to be erased.

He continues:

But because the little Nazis policing language have a new rulebook about how men and women should and should not express themselves about their desires…. 

Why is it once again that I feel the well-intentioned young liberal self-proclaimed feminist left has become so oversensitive about everything that we have entered into what is really an authoritarian cultural moment? It just seems that it's so regressive and so grim and so unreal, like in some dystopian sci-fi movie: there's only one way to express yourself as some kind of neutered thing, this mound, this clump, turning away from your gender-based responses - towards women, towards men, towards sex. This neutering, this castration, is something no-one really wants or believes in, I hope. But hey, maybe if I go with it and pretend to believe it, it'll fill my column - and I do need to put out some clickbait this week."


9 comments:

Ares Olympus said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Sam L. said...

The left hates, Hates, HATES, dissent and disagreement with them.

Ares Olympus said...

I see new "Sponsored Content" ads have appeared on the left side, being rather distracting for reading with puss-colored yellow teeth on the side, while trying to read about liberal thought police as authoritarians.

Fortunately I had the liberty to zoom the font size and scroll the view to the right, so I could avoid my Darwinian impulse of disgust.

Looking at the HTML source, it seems to connect to a Javascript file with this URL:
http://www.newsmaxfeednetwork.com

I hope Stuart gets a cut when I finally look in the mirror in horror and click to order some teeth whitener.

sestamibi said...

I believe George Orwell referred to the kind of folks Ellis describes as "The Junior Anti-Sex League".

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Ares, you should go back to writing your blog and make yourself great again. Then perhaps you could score some advertising.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

After all, Ares, how much do the Democrats pay you to comment here? Given your craven and vacuous prose, they must be paying by the word.

Dennis said...

IAC,

Thank you for my daily laugh at Ares' expense.
After reading several of your well written commentaries I now recognize why the term
ditto" came into use.
Does it not seem interesting that the people who scream about an Authoritarian Cultural Moment are the ones who helped create it. Like much on the Left the minute that their attacks on others start to be turned on them it becomes time to be civil.

David Foster said...

Sestamibi.."I believe George Orwell referred to the kind of folks Ellis describes as "The Junior Anti-Sex League"."

Indeed. Actually, I believe many of the extreme feminists of the SJW persuasion are exactly the sort of people who, if they had lived in the late 1950s, would have been foremost in denouncing any woman who wanted to have a career as 'unfeminine', and helping to humiliate an unmarried pregnant girl and driving her to suicide.

The enforcement of conformity, for these types, is far more important than the content of what is being enforced.

David Foster said...

(continuing)

A good model of this type is Goethe's character Lieschen, who loves humiliating sinners. Gretchen, after herself becoming pregnant by Faust, realizes how terrible Lieschen's humiliation-feats were and how wrong she was to have participated in them:

How readily I used to blame
Some poor young soul that came to shame!
Never found sharp enough words like pins
To stick into other people’s sins
Black as it seemed, I tarred it to boot
And never black enough to suit
Would cross myself, exclaim and preen–
Now I myself am bared to sin!
Yet all of it that drove me here
God! ws so innocent, was so dear!