The Katie Hill Saga, Last Chapter

Is Maureen Dowd becoming conservative? Has she broken with social constructivist morality to pivot back toward traditional rules?

For some it will be a horrifying turn. For others it will restore their faith in humanity. The notion that you cannot make up your own rules, even if you get all of your friends to sign on to them… seems not to have penetrated the skulls of our millennial generation.

You see, millennials believe that right and wrong are social constructions. If you do something that other people might have seen as wrong, then you can make it right by persuading everyone to think that it was really right. I admit, persuading is a bit bland here. If you want everyone to think that there is nothing wrong or even risky with sending out naked pictures of yourself, then you can solve the problem by blinding everyone—figuratively speaking.

Those unhappy few who resist the brainwashing or who refuse to comply with the new social constructivist morality must be denounced and voted off the island.

As for our moral world, it resembles nothing but the world of Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  As you know well, the Emperor has been persuaded by a couple of swindlers that anyone who does not agree that he, wearing nothing, is decked out in imperial finery is morally degenerate, and disloyal. Being a good subject means accepting that reality is what the emperor thinks it is.

Evidently, the sham is exposed when a boy shouts out the truth. He is not speaking truth to power as much as he is defying an commonly accepted illusion. He is expressing an opinion that is unacceptable in proper social circles. In the story, the emperor continues on his way. In reality, Rep. Katie Hill was forced to resign from Congress.

In her column today Dowd offers a dialogue between her boomer self and a millennial Times staff member. When faced with the notion that all moral truth is relative, merely a function of what you can get people to believe, Dowd demurs. Despite what the millennial generation has been brainwashed into believing, we have not yet repealed human nature.

Exposing your nakedness to the public, risking having your nakedness exposed to the public, is still shameful. Because shame is a universal emotional sanction against exhibiting your private parts in public. That is why they are called private.

Allow Dowd her say:

I get that young people are digital natives, even cyborgs. But I had to offer a riposte to Shawn that, while society can be reshaped, human nature is immutable. What I learned from studying Shakespeare is that the primary colors of emotions carry through the centuries.

There will always be vengeful exes and envious allies and ruthless opponents and double-crossing friends. Whether the messages are being carried by pigeons or pixels, you have to protect yourself — and your data. Don’t let our shiny new tools blind you to the fact that some horrible truths about humanity never change.

And don’t leave yourself vulnerable by giving people the ammunition — or the nudes — to strip you of your dreams.

OK, millennials?

The highly estimable Whoopi Goldberg made the same point and received gales of derision. But, truth is truth. Anyone who sends such pictures over the internet, or who memorializes his or her romps in photos, is running a risk. The same applies to any woman who takes what has been called the walk of shame. If she walking down the street or across the quad on Sunday morning dressed for a party, her shame does not merely arise from the fact that a lot of people will judge her ill, but from the fact that she knows that she is showing the world that she does not respect herself.

One notes, and one underscores, that we do not care what she was doing the night before. And we do not really care about what Katie Hill was doing with her girlfriend, her boyfriend and her husband. We care when it is flashed in our faces. We care about the indiscretion more than we care about the parties.

As for the Katie Hill saga, here is Dowd’s take. The Shawn in question is Shawn McCreesh:

Shawn OK-Boomered me Friday on the topic of Katie Hill, the 32-year-old freshman California congresswoman who is openly bisexual and ran what Vice dubbed “the most millennial campaign ever.” Her promising career flamed out in a scandal that was both age-old and very millennial, in that it featured revenge porn, a throuple, sexual fluidity and dirty bong water.

Hill was a blast of fresh air on the Hill. And it is amazing that, after two centuries of men treating the political landscape here as a droit du seigneur playground, that the one ensnared in an ethics investigation about the new rules enacted last year on sexual harassment — barring lawmakers from having sexual relationships with staffers — is a woman.

Hill pointed the finger at her “abusive” loser husband, Kenny Heslep, who has been unemployed for the past five years, implying that he leaked the pictures and texts to Hill’s foes. Not since Linda Tripp has there been such a creepy betrayal in politics.

Being as the moral default for the millennial generation is to blame the double standard, it is worth noting the number of men whose Congressional careers have been aborted by sexual improprieties. You can read the list in The Daily Caller.

In the world of eternal socio-sexual verities, we also note that Hill was betrayed by her husband. Apparently, he had no problem engaging in threesomes with Hill and her comely female assistant, but he drew the line against sharing her with a man. We can tamp down our outrage by seeing this in more Darwinian terms. If a throuple contains two women and one man, there is never any doubt about who the father is. If the throuple contains two men and one woman, there is always doubt. As Dowd suggests, the millennial generation has not yet managed to repeal human nature.

As for the other eternal verities, the one that no one seems inclined to notice, Hill’s vengeful husband had been thoroughly emasculated—in the social sense, not in the sexual sense—and had been reduced to a house husband, a man who had no place in the world of work, that is, the world of men, but was told by his wife to stay at home and do the laundry.

One understands that the woke millennial generation has decided that gender roles are merely a social construction. Apparently, Hill’s husband did not think so. Having other men see him as a wuss must have worn him down. He decided that revenge was sweet, and that he would destroy the career that had been used to destroy his own career aspirations.

Of course, millennials do not approve. So what. And they point out that they have all taken and distributed pornographic pictures of themselves. Dowd quotes Shawn:

He pointed to a viral text going around this past month as evidence that most young people have at least one picture on their phones that they don’t want to get out. The first line of the text refers to Instagram and pops up on the recipient’s phone with the most horrifying words known to the millennial mind: “Why is there a nude on your story??” Once the text is opened, it turns out to be a prank. Nonetheless, Shawn said, it caused a lot of spilled coffees and near car crashes among his friends.

He said that iPhones and social media have so reshaped culture that older people would have to accept the new and sometimes naked reality.

The notion that older people must accept these youthful aberrations must have a long history. It is like bluffing when your cards are exposed.

One also notes that Dowd first-names her interlocutor… perhaps because we usually first name women more often than we do men.

Anyway, McCreesh has offered an absurd thought, one that has defined the moral character of the millennial generation. They are like the ostrich who has stuck his head in the sand and who thinks that it makes him invisible. They know that they are making moral errors. They know that their moral errors might very well haunt them forever. And yet, they believe that they can obviate the pain by taking over everyone’s minds, by making it more reprehensible to say that the emperor is naked. 

Why give up an illusion, especially an illusion that will expose you as a shameless dupe when you can just shoot the boy who declares that the emperor is naked. Not literally, of course. But, you must shut him up and shut him down. Dissenting opinions are no longer welcome because they might force millennials to face their moral derelictions. 

Perhaps this tells us why the younger generations are so happy to shut up dissenting opinions and why they believe that mind control will save their honor. They are going to have a very rude awakening.