#like who’s left? germaine greer

[aronarchy]

Germaine Greer forced John Peel to sleep with her, Beryl Bainbridge paid a woman to have sex with her husband so she could get a divorce, and Joan Bakewell, now doyenne of religious affairs broadcasting at the BBC, smoked marijuana and had affairs.

The frank revelations by some of the most influential media figures of the past 40 years were made last night in a new BBC series, My Generation, in which Ms Bakewell discussed life, love and politics during the swinging 1960s with her contemporaries.

John Peel, 60, a Radio1 DJ, told Ms Bakewell about how Germaine Greer, the academic and feminist icon, forced him to sleep with her. “All I thought about was getting my end away. Germaine taught me a valuable lesson. She was a friend, somebody I liked and admired, and then she decided to presume on friendship and push it a step too far. I actually found myself saying: ‘Look, I like you too much. I don’t want to do this.’ And she just made me. I thought: ‘Oh shit, that's what it’s like.’”

Speaking from his home in Suffolk yesterday, the disc jockey said of the encounter, which took place before he married his wife of 25 years: “I’m sure it’s an incident she would rather forget, but it was all free love and that sort of thing. One of the tabloids phoned me up and asked for a blow by blow account, but I’m not doing that.

“I think we are still friends. We don’t exchange Christmas cards or anything, but I am always really pleased when I do see her.”

Ms Greer, who became a household name in the 1970s after the publication of her groundbreaking book, The Female Eunuch, which was considered the bible of feminism, was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Other revelations in the programme included those from Beryl Bainbridge telling Ms Bakewell about how she paid a woman to sleep with her husband, Austen Davies, at a party so that she could get a divorce, something the novelist claimed was common practice at the time.

“It was all arranged. I took the children up the road, with a cot. There was a girl who, for a certain sum of money, put herself forward as correspondent and that went down on my divorce petition.”

In an interview with the Observer, Ms Bakewell said the programme, made by the BBC’s religious department, aimed to show how the liberal left ideas of the 1960s gave way to the rise of the right.

Ms Bakewell, who admitted to having affairs and smoking marijuana, said that even she was surprised by some of the frank revelations, particularly Mr Peel’s.

“When it came up I thought: ‘We can’t transmit that.’ But the editor said it makes a very positive point. Women didn’t come on in those days. When Germaine did, it was a shock to John. It showed him how women might feel when men did it to them.”

Call it “rape,” ffs.

[philosophicalconservatism]

same anon here. well that's what i like about conservative people - you can have disagreements with them and still remain civil or friendly, whereas with progressives an argument like this would result in the cutting of all ties. we'd just see each other as the enemy. conservatives genuinely make the effort to understand liberals but the reverse doesn't apply (see Jonathan Haidt's research). But to a degree, I'm a product of my Nordic environment, whereas you're of your American environment.

Indeed. According to polls in the U.S., while a majority of (Conservative) Republicans report having friends of the opposite party or ideology, only a small number of (Leftist Progressives) Democrats report that they have any Conservative /Republican friends. Politics is all consuming for many, many people on that side of the aisle. They believe that If you do not agree with their politics you are indecent as a human being. But the situation is even worse than you described at this point. For the modern political Left does not merely ostracize Conservatives, they have begun to cannibalize their own kind for not completely conforming to their own ideology as they should. Consider the unforgiving vilification of the iconic 1970's Feminist Germaine Greer, and the modern British children's author J.K Rowling for having the wrong opinion on "transgenderism". And there are plenty of other examples. Anyone who does not both stay in line and recite the official line, is destroyed.

The American comedian Dave Chappelle is uniquely one of the few public figures that has survived such a storm, probably owing to his wealth and influence, his minority status ( the Left as we know is more timid about attacking in such situations) and his willingness to fight back.

If free expression is going to prevail in the long run, this militant present day version of Leftist ideology cannot be allowed to.

[intriguingpeoplebyangelafloyd]

GERMAINE GREER

GERMAINE GREER

1939

AUSTRALIAN WRITER AND FEMINIST

            ‘I opened the door, and there was this phenomenal creature!

            I couldn’t believe my eyes. She filled the door frame.

            Just a splendid creature…’ - Margaret Fink

She’s intelligent, mouthy and says what she thinks - the first person that comes to your mind when you hear the word feminist, is Germaine Greer.

            Greer was born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia into a Catholic family and attended University in Sydney and Cambridge where she was attracted to politics and the feminist movement of the 1960s.

            In 1970 her book The Female Eunuch, she wrote about women’s roles in society, believing women are expected to be submissive to fulfil male fantasies. Greer revealed how she was a rape victim whilst at University in 1958, aged 19 by a rugby player who beat her before he raped her. Throughout her life she has made controversial comments, which often ruffles the feathers around her. Many of her comments are agreed with and some are disagreed with, regardless she has kept it interesting. She appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2005 and left after six days, calling it a ‘fascist prison camp’. Today she supports the environment including land preservation.  

            She was only married once in 1973, to a builder who she met outside a pub in London, after knowing him for a short time they married. The couple broke up a few weeks later, Greer had been unfaithful and was disappointed in both her husband and marriage, he was a drunk and sneered to her one night, ‘I could have any woman in this room’, she replied, ‘except me’ and left him permanently.  

            She had lived in Essex, England as well as Queensland, Australia. In 2021, she returned to Australia, sold her home and put herself into aged care. She stated there are more women in age care than men, and she feels like an inmate. She states that aged care is one of the more pressing feminist issues today.

#germainegreer #feminist #feminism

[carolinemillerbooks]

New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/i-die-you-die-they-die/

I Die, You Die, They Die

“Suicide,” someone murmured after reading the announcement that a woman had died at the retirement center. “She was estranged from her family,” said another who stood beside the first speaker. Her remark rang true because the death notice asked that no condolences be left for the family. A shiver of melancholy ran through me as I read it. Being the last of my tribe, I realized that upon my death, no one would need consoling.  Headstones proliferate like autumn leaves in a graveyard but no matter how touching their inscription, the words are unreliable tributes to a life.  A generation passes and few remember. After eons come and go, archeologists may take an interest in a burial mound. And, if they find a necklace or smooth stone left beside someone they have disentombed, they are elated rather than grieved because the found object has been shorn of its memories.       Sometimes two bodies share the same grave, a discovery that raises a question.  Are these bones those of lovers? Or does a mother lie eternally with her stillborn child?  Their deathly embrace tells a story but who remembers? The desire to escape oblivion is potent. A hundred thousand years before homo sapiens walked the earth, the prehuman Homo Naledis buried their dead with mementos before carving the histories of these loved ones on cave walls.  Again, researchers rejoice because while the personal memory of these beings is erased, something about the hominin culture remains.  Patriarchy has a long presence in the affairs of humanoids, for example.  DNA studies of ancient sites suggest that females left their home community to join another– suggesting the probability that they followed their male companion to his home tribe.  Memory is a frail weapon with which to hold back the dark. Technology may come to serve us better.  In an earlier blog,  I wrote that one day we might download our stories into avatars but that would be a pale version of immortality. A combination of technology and biology is also possible, like current efforts to merge Artificial Intelligence (AI) with brain cells.  Will the result make machines smarter?  Or will humans become superhuman? Either way, will the merger help us conquer death?  We must wait to see. Some among us seek a less ambitious goal. With diet and medicinal cocktails, they hope to reverse the aging process.  Regimens like theirs are spartan, often eliminating meat and sugar.  To obtain a longer life, will humans forgo their hamburgers with cokes? Again, we must wait to see. Beyond tinkering with the human lifespan lies an existential question.  Having plundered our planet’s resources to the point of self-extinction, do we have enough time to save our species with discoveries and technological advances?  Or, is our destiny to grovel in the dust for a sip of water? To be or not to be IS  the overwhelming question.  The woman who committed suicide at my retirement center made her choice freely. Others have done the same because without love and respect what is life?  Germaine Greer, a woman near my years, ponders a related question: how to age with dignity?  Once a  professor,  feminist, and author of numerous books, The Female Eunuch most famous among them, and a person brilliant enough to disabuse William F. Buckley of his misconceptions about women’s liberation at 84 faces a growing infirmity. To maintain her independence, she moved into a retirement center.  The solution proved to be unworkable.  There, she suffered endless days of Bingo and bus outings to places that looked the same.  This she endured for ten months, being subjected all the while to abuse from  fellow residents who repeatedly told her to  “shut up.” The treatment must have come as a surprise to a person accustomed to being paid to speak. Fortunately, a brother took pity on Germaine and built a studio in his home where she could live in the bosom of her family but in solitude.  I say, “Happy is a woman with a compassionate brother.”  Happy is the individual who dies loved. Science and technology have the power to lengthen life spans but human attitudes toward aging are slow to change.  In the United States, prejudice against the elderly is the last reservoir of disdain that people feel free to express, as if growing old were a personal failure.  Teenagers may be forgiven for imagining themselves to be immortal, but tyrants who feel the same are fools.   Is it the light that falls from the swords of their armies that blind these dictators? Are they unable to see that like any pauper, they serve no higher purpose than to satisfy the appetites of worms? How greater their history might have been had they considered our common destiny and devoted themselves to acts of kindness.  In death do triumph and failure humbly meet.   (The Victory City by Salman Rushdie, Thorndike Press, 2023, pg. 531.)

[sapphia]

An unfortunate side effect of terf-ism is that feminism has, for quite some time, reached a stalling point where you must either be mainstream feminist or you must be a radical feminist - except in this day and age, being a radical feminist means that you believe 100% in sex or gender essentialism and therefore are inherently transphobic.

And that's true now. But it wasn't always. I know because I saw it happen. I watched radical feminism become terfism. I watched the discourse go from "violence against women is perpetuated by the patriarchy" (reasonable; some good points to be had) to "trans people are the greatest enemy we face" (which just... what the fuck).

Radical feminism was once a useful extension of mainstream feminism. it asked important questions and followed them to interesting conclusions. If women are oppressed in all walks of life, don't men benefit from that oppression? Example, if a woman is socialised to be demure in a workplace, is her male colleague not benefitting from that socialisation? And if a woman fears violence from a man because of the prevalence of violence in our society, then do men not benefit from the violence committed by other men? Whether or not a woman has been raped, it is something she has been taught to fear - might all men not benefit in some ways from that threat that hangs over every woman?

And those are all interesting questions that entire books could and have been written on. But the issue that we now face is that radical feminism took these arguments and streamlined them all into one particular direction: that men are violent/aggressive as biological imperative and benefit from the oppression that they perpetuate against women. That men are the enemy. That they must be overthrown.

One half of the problem is that the exclusionary nature of their new direction is directly hostile to trans people; that this flawed ideology has been used to focus all their resources against a fight against a group who, even if they were an enemy to feminism (which they're not), it just would not be worth fighting against. The idea that trans women are men trying to hustle in on women's spaces is incorrect, but combatting it is also a huge waste of resources given the much more serious problems that women and feminism actually faces.

Which leads us to the other half of the problem: the resources. Because for about 5 years (in the public eye - about 15 years in feminist circles) feminism has been at war with itself. Rad fems are wasting so much time and energy arguing that trans people aren't real, and of course feminists have to argue back. There's so much less room for discourse when half your discourse is just asserting the fact that transwomen are women and transmen are men. It pulls focus away from the radical right, and it waters down discussions of other feminist issues. And it's correct that we do argue this, and trans people deserve their time in the spotlight, of course, but it's so incredibly frustrating that the attack on trans people is coming from within feminism, from the very people who should be allies to the cause. In fact, I would argue that a large part of mainstream awareness of trans issues comes from radical feminism; I don't think radical feminism has helped trans people or their acceptance, but it's certainly brought the issue to the forefront and into the sphere of public debate.

And while we're busy arguing over the right of trans people to exist, extreme rightwingism and fascism are gaining in popularity, and actual radical discourse of feminist ideals are being left in the dust. WHERE is the mainstream discussion of the predatory beauty industry and how it's disguised itself as feminist when actually it's anything but? WHERE is the shift away from the non-tradition, non-nuclear families and relationships? WHERE is the push within radical leftism to marry radical gender ideals with those on race, sexuality, disability, etc? There are a lot of "formerly radical" racial discourses that have made their way into the mainstream in recent years, especially regarding colonialism and it's lingering effects, and feminism is lagging behind because without radical sects exploring new ideals, it is very hard for new concepts to trickle into the mainstream!

I've seen some stuff around tirfs and the tran inclusionary radfem movement, but so much of it is still gender essentialist and so much of it is still trans exclusionary in many ways - and the tirfs that aren't either of that are consumed with infighting just for their right to exist and be considered trans-inclusionary. so again, no extra resources to deal with non-trans issues. It's a hangup of the direction the discourse has gone recently, and I'm not surprised to see it. I think tirf ideals are flawed to begin with - they've been heading in a bad direction basically since germaine greer went mainstream - but there's some concepts there that could do with working their way into the general leftist consciousness because there's some nuggets of truth in there that I'd like to see debated by a wider audience. But I think radical feminism is now just always going to be too closely associated with transphobia, both in people's mind's and in the idealogical base on which their beliefs are founded. It's a poisoned chalice.

What I really want to see is a new near-mainstream movement of far-left extremist feminist discourse unassociated with radical feminism; not because I think I'll agree with them but because I think it's healthy and needed for feminism in general and for the progression of gender equality towards a better future.

[a-room-of-my-own]

Have you read "An Apology to JK Rowling" by Petra Bueskens on Areo? I'm pathetically grateful to read something so clever and well articulated on the subject after the amount of abuse JK has been subjected to

It's a great piece so here it is, thank you anon!

 Rowling recently published an eminently reasonable, heartfelt treatise, outlining why it is important to preserve the category of woman. There’s only one thing wrong with it: it assumes a rational interlocutor. Rowling outlines why the biological and legal category of sex is important: in sports, in rape crisis shelters, in prisons, in toilets and changing rooms, for lesbians who want to sleep with natal women only and at the level of reality in general. Rowling marshals her experiences as an androgynous girl, as a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor and as someone familiar with the emotional perils of social media, in ways that have resonated with many women (and men). Her writing is clear, unpretentious, thoughtful, moving, vulnerable and honest. At no point does she use exclusionary or hostile language or say that trans women do not exist, have no right to exist or that she wants to rob them of their rights. Her position is that natal women exist and have a right to limit access to their political and personal spaces. Period.

Of course, to assume that her missive would be engaged with in the spirit in which it was intended, is to make the mistake of imagining that the identitarian left is broadly committed to secular, rational discourse. It is not. Its activist component has transmogrified into a religious movement, which brooks no opposition and no discussion. You must agree with every tenet or else you’re a racist, sexist, transphobic bigot, etc. Because its followers are fanatics, Rowling is being subjected to an extraordinary level of abuse. There seems to be no cognitive dissonance among those who accuse her of insensitivity and then proceed to call her a cunt, bitch or hag and insist that they want to assault and even kill her (see this compilation of tweets on Medium). She has been accused of ruining childhoods. Some even claim that the actor Daniel Radcliffe wrote the Harry Potter books—reality has become optional for some of these identitarians. Rowling’s age, menstrual status and vagina come in for particularly nasty attention and many trans women (or those masquerading as such) write of wanting to sexually assault her with lady cock, as a punishment for speaking out. I haven’t seen misogyny like this since Julia Gillard became our prime minister.

The Balkanisation of culture into silos of unreason means that the responses have not followed what might be loosely called the pre-digital rules of discourse. These rules assume that the purpose of public debate is to discern truth and that interlocutors on opposing sides—a reductionist bifurcation, because, in fact, there are many sides—engage in argument because they are interested in something higher than themselves: an ideal of truth, no matter how complicated, multifaceted and evolving. While in-group preferences and biases are inevitable, these exist within an overarching deliberative framework. This style of dialogue assumes the validity of a persuasive argument grounded in reason and evidence, even if—as Rowling does—it also utilises experience and feeling. By default, it assumes that civil conflict and opposition are essential devices in the pursuit of truth.

Three decades of postmodernism and ten years of Twitter have destroyed these conventions and, together with them, the shared norms by which we create and sustain social consensus. There is no grounding metanarrative, there are no binding norms of civil discourse in the digital age. Indeed, as Jaron Lanier shows with his bummer paradigm (Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent) social media is destroying the fabric of our personal and political lives (although, with a different business model and more robust regulation, it need not do so). The algorithm searching for and recording your every click, like and share, your every purchase, search term, conversation, movement, facial expression, social connection and preference rewards engagement above all else—which means that your feed—an aptly infantile descriptor—will quickly become full of the things you and others like you are most likely to be motivated to click, like and share. Outrage is a more effective mechanism through which to foster engagement than almost anything else. In Lanier’s terms, this produces a “menagerie of wraiths”—a bunch of digitised dementors: fake and bad actors, paid troll armies and dyspeptic bots—designed to confect mob outrage.

The norms of civil discourse are being eroded, as we increasingly inhabit individualised media ecosystems, designed to addict, distract, absorb, outrage, manipulate and incite us. These internecine culture wars damage us all. As Lanier notes, social media is biased “not towards the left or right but downwards.” As a result, we are witnessing a catastrophic decline in the standards of our democratic institutions and discourse. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary culture wars around the trans question, where confected outrage is the norm.

This is why the furore over Rowling’s blog post misses the point: whether we agree with her or not, the problem is the collapse of our capacity to disagree constructively. If you deal primarily in subjective experience and impulse-driven reaction, under the assumption that you occupy the undisputed moral high ground, and you’ve been incited by fake news and want to signal your allegiances to your social media friends, then you can’t engage in rational discussion with your opponent. Your stock in trade will be unsubstantiated accusations and social shaming.

In this discombobulating universe, sex-based rights are turned into insults against trans people. Gender-critical feminists are recast as immoral bigots, engaged in deliberately hurtful, even life-threatening, speech. Rowling is not who we thought she was, her ex-fans wail, her characters and plots conceal hidden reservoirs of homophobia and bigotry. A few grandstanders attempt to distinguish themselves by saying that they have always been able to smell a rat—no, not Scabbers—and therefore hated the books from the outset. Nowhere amid this morass of moral grandstanding and outrage is there any serious engagement with her ideas.

Those of us on the left—and left-wing feminists in particular—who find trans ideology fraught, for all the reasons Rowling outlines, are a very small group. While Rowling is clearly privileged, she has also become the figurehead of a rapidly dwindling and increasingly vilified group of feminists, pejoratively labelled terfs, who want to preserve women’s sex-based rights and spaces. Although our arguments align with centrist, conservative and common sense positions, ours is not the prevailing view in academia, public service or the media, arts and culture industries, where we are most likely to be located (when we are not at home with our children). In most of these workplaces, a sex-based rights position is defined a priori as bigoted, indeed as hate speech. It can get us fired, attacked, socially ostracised and even assaulted.

As leftist thinkers who believe in freedom of speech and thought, who find creeping ideological and bureaucratic control alarming, we are horrified by these increasingly vicious denunciations by the left. The centre right and libertarians—the neo-cons, post-liberals and the IDW—are invariably smug about how funny it is to watch the left eat itself. But it’s true: some progressive circles are now defined by a call out/cancel culture to rival that of the most repressive of totalitarian states. Historically, it was progressives who fought against limits on freedom of speech and action. But the digital–identitarian left split off from the old print-based left some time ago, and has become its own beast. A contingent of us are deeply critical of these new directions.

Only a few on the left have had the gumption to speak up for us. Few have even defended our right to express our opinions. Those who have spoken out include former media darlings Germaine Greer and Michael Leunig. Many reader comments on left-leaning news sites claim that Rowling is to blame for the ill treatment she is suffering. Rowling can bask in the consequences of her free speech, they claim, as if having a different opinion from the woke majority means that she is no longer entitled to respect, and that any and all abuse is warranted—or, at least, to be expected. Where is the outrage on her behalf? Where are the writers, film makers, actors and artists defending her right to speak her mind?

Of course, the actors from the Harry Potter films are under no obligation to agree with JK Rowling just because she made them famous. They don’t owe her their ideological fealty: but they owe her better forms of disagreement. When Daniel Radcliffe repeats the nonsensical chant trans women are women, he’s not developing an argument, he’s reciting a mantra. When he invokes experts, who supposedly know more about the subject than Rowling, he betrays his ignorance of how contested the topic of transgender medicine actually is: for example, within endocrinology, paediatrics, psychiatry, sociology, and psychology (the controversies within the latter discipline have been demonstrated by the numerous recent resignations from the prestigious Tavistock and Portman gender identity clinic). The experts are a long way from consensus in what remains a politically fraught field.

Trans women are women is not an engaged reply. It is a mere arrangement of words, which presupposes a faith that cannot be questioned. To question it, we are told, causes harm—an assertion that transforms discussion into a thought crime. If questioning this orthodoxy is tantamount to abuse, then feminists and other dissenters have been gaslit out of the discussion before they can even enter it. This is especially pernicious because feminists in the west have been fighting patriarchy for several hundred years and we do not intend our cause to be derailed at the eleventh hour by an infinitesimal number of natal males, who have decided that they are women. Now, we are told, trans women are women, but natal females are menstruators. I can’t imagine what the suffragists would have made of this patently absurd turn of events.

There has been a cacophony of apologies to the trans community for Rowling’s apparently tendentious and hate-filled words. But no one has paused to apologise to Rowling for the torrent of abuse she has suffered and for being mischaracterised so profoundly.

So, I’m sorry, JK Rowling. I’m sorry that you will not receive the respectful disagreement you deserve: disagreement with your ideas not your person, disagreement with your politics, rather than accusations of wrongspeak. I’m sorry that schools, publishing staff and fan clubs are now cancelling you. And I’m sorry that you will be punished—because cancel culture is all about punishment. I’m sorry that you are being burned at the digital stake for expressing an opinion that goes against the grain.

But remember this, JK—however counterintuitive this may seem to progressives, whose natural home is on the fringe—most people are looking on incredulously at the disconnect between culture and reality. Despite raucous protestations to the contrary, you are on the right side of history—not just because of the points you make, but because of how you make them.

[comrade-meow]

“Kill all Terfs”. “Shoot a Terf today”. “All terfs deserve to be shot in the head”. “Would you kindly suck on my womanly dick – preferably choke on it”. “Terfs can choke on my Girl Dick”. (These misogynists love the idea of women, especially lesbians, being forced to suck their dicks and preferably choke). “All terfs need to cease existing. All of them. Gone. Wipe them from the Earth. They are a plague to be purged”. “I’m not into mass murder but I’ll commit terf genocide if I have to, tbh”. “What if someone traced the ip of that emily person and went and killed her because i’d do that but I’m a bit far”. “That’s the only thing terfs deserve. being doxxed and killed”. “I wanna direct a snuff film where multiple TERFS get shot in the head but don’t die, they just suffer in agony”. “Murder Germaine Greer”. “Hope someone slits Germaine Greer’s saggy fucking throat”. “Rad fems and terfs make me extra stabby”. And on and on and on it goes relentlessly.

These are documented by the hundreds and hundreds at sites such as ‘Terf is a Slur’ and ‘Peak Trans’.

Not exactly the language of a liberation movement.

This violent misogyny, however, is all fine and dandy with a large section of the left. Especially males.

Who would have guessed that the left involves quite so many men who have a massive chip on their shoulder against women and women’s rights and advances in society and have finally found a way of letting out their previously suppressed inner violent misogynist, albeit vicariously through going along with this vile material? Where they can look woke – pro-trans – instead of obviously looking like the vicious misogynists they clearly are?

Not hard to see where people like “Comrade Delta” and co. come from then. (Comrade Delta was a central leader of the British SWP, their national secretary no less, who sexually assaulted and raped female members and who was protected by other leaders.) The British SWP, not surprisingly, has massively drunk of the trans ideology kool-aid.

And look at the International Socialist Organisation in the United States. ISO was the largest organisation on the US left for several decades, before imploding earlier this year. ISO drank massively from the trans ideology kool-aid and was viciously hostile to gender-critical leftists. And, yes, of course, it also turned out to have been harbouring violent misogynists.

Indeed, it was the discovery that members of its central leadership had been acting rather like the Catholic hierarchy – in this case harbouring and protecting men assaulting women, while the Church hierarchy protected priests who raped kids and nuns who bashed kids – that brought ISO down like a pack of cards in a puff of wind. (American ISO is the group that NZ ISO linked to in the States and whose postmodernist identity politics they have recycled in relation to women’s rights.)

But it’s not just a man thing. There are also lots of “third-wave feminists” – you know, the ones who have benefited massively from the struggles waged by second-wave feminists and leftists but who have nothing but contempt for the very people who fought and partly won those huge battles.

It’s third-wave feminists who dismiss the women’s liberation activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s who actually got struggles for the right to abortion, equal pay and opportunities in the professions and workplaces in general, off the ground, along with progressive trade unionists and left-wing groups. Third-wave feminists haven’t really done much fighting for women – their ‘feminism’ often seems to be more about molly-coddling super-entitled males who can’t grow up and cope as adults, especially men who claim to be women and want to gate-crash women’s sport, women’s changing rooms, women’s toilets, women’s prisons, women’s health resources, and even the definition of what a woman is.

When I was young you had to have empathy with oppressed people to be leftwing. You didn’t pretend to be them, just empathised and solidarised with them. But, apparently not now, according to the new left. Indeed, it positively helps to be violently misogynist and also dismissive of the people who went before and won you so much. And if they complain, pretend to be them and claim they are oppressing you.

In acting like ungrateful spoilt brats, a chunk of younger leftists mimic the capitalists who have contempt for the workers whose labour-power provides their profits. British gender-critical transexual Miranda Yardley has, not surprisingly, called this layer of youthful faux radicals “the pampered offspring of neoliberalism”.

The people who write the vile stuff in these tweets actually believe they are on “the right side of history”, another of their bizarre ideas repeated by a bunch of people, mainly men, on the left. Sorry lads, but violent misogyny will never put you on the right side of history – rather, it puts you well and truly in the cesspit of history.”

[howelljenkins]

it really was “the left has gone to far with all this sjw nonsense” by comparing trans people to ‘people that identify as disabled despite not being so and trying to hurt themselves so they be disabled’ and defending known TERF germaine greer through straight up misinformation (she hardly cites anything for a book that speaks with such definitiveness) and then by saying that women cannot be triggered by certain words/things online because “they are not war veterans” like !!!!?????

i read up more on it and she sounds like someone who would fail basic sociology

[buzzdixonwriter]

TROTS AND BONNIE Review

Trigger Warning: This will review a work that often addresses human sexuality, emotional / physical / sexual abuse, and adolescents’ views on same.  Be advised.

. . . 

When I was growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, two old comic strips that remained popular were J. R. Williams’ Out Our Way and Gene Ahern’s Our Boarding House, both started in the 1920s and, from their daily panels and Sunday pages, never moving out of that decade.  My favorite cartoons on local kid shows were Fleischer Brothers Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, many of which took place in urban / suburban settings heavily reflective of 1920s and 1930s America.

So when I first encountered Shary Flenniken’s Trots And Bonnie I instantly recognized the flavor and style of the strips.

The content, on the other hand, came straight out of her underground comix pedigree, with the refreshing point of view of the female gaze instead of the admittedly too often misogynistic male cartoonists of the milieu.

Flenniken is one of the best artists and writers to come from the underground era, displaying a confident early mastery of the form (don’t listen to her protestations she really wasn’t good at the start of her career; she clearly ranked among the finest of the underground comix artists).

But the sweet and innocent look of Trots And Bonnie belies the frank and frequently shocking honesty of Flenniken’s work.  

As cartoonist Emily Flake notes in her introduction, “that’s the terrible power of children, the monstrous innocence that makes them capable of anything, a state of being we fatuously describe as ‘pure.’”

Innocence is not synonymous with purity in the world of Trots And Bonnie because the cast lack the moral and cultural filters we acquire as adults.  They are reporting on reality as they see it, and as with all children (and the elderly, and drunks) there’s nothing to stop them from commenting on the foibles of hypocrisy of humanity, nor is there a single iota of shame to hold back their expression.

And when you add the impact of puberty to that mix, holy &#@%, you have no room left for pretense or propriety.

Hold on to your hats, folks, ‘cuz it’s gonna be one helluva ride.

One helluva ride…and a hilarious one, too.

If modern audiences can get past the admittedly often shocking visuals and situations, they’ll find some of the most brilliant coming-of-age comedy ever penned.

The truth is always an absolute defense, and Trots And Bonnie dishes it out lavishly.  Brava to Shary Flenniken for having the courage (or honesty, of lack of filter; take your pick) to pen it, to the original underground comix and National Lampoon to publish it, and to new York Review Comics to bring almost all of it back (Flenniken herself opted to withhold a few strips that she feels might be construed now as hurtful or insulting).

Flenniken is the daughter of a military family, growing up in a variety of climes and places before her father retired in the Seattle area.

She reached adolescence and young adulthood during the hippie era, and the earliest strips cast a fond eye back on that time.

An original member of the infamous Air Pirates crew, she and fellow underground comix artists gained immediate recognition skewering Disney icons.  Air Pirates Funnies and Paul Kassner’s The Realist generated no small amount of tsuris for the House of Mouse in the late 1960s / early 1970s but The Realist, true to its name, possessed to good sense to adhere to the unofficial so-called “one-time fair use parody” rule while the Air Pirates pressed their luck with Air Pirates Funnies #2, resulting in the Disney legal department descending on them like an anvil dropped from orbit.

Crawling away from the wreckage, Flenniken kept contributing to a number of underground venues, creating the first Trots and Bonnie strip for the 1971 underground comix Merton Of The Movement. 

Trots and Bonnie (soon joined by Pepsi, a beguilingly sweet looking elfin-like child with the heart of Germaine Greer, the reproductive organs of Karen Finley, and the mouth of an interstate trucker) popped up in several single page strips and short stories until NatLamp recruited Flenniken in 1972 to be a regular contributor and (briefly) an editor.

NatLamp proved to be the perfect venue for Flenniken and her characters because the magazine possessed the economic mojo and suicidal “Who gives a &#@%?” attitude to publish Trots And Bonnie while at the same time providing a perfect audience of proto-incels who desperately needed some consciousness raising, especially if said consciousness raising arrived in the form of a kick in the groin.

Trots And Bonnie’s tenure at NatLamp lasted slightly more than two decades, but a big hunk of that era saw the Reagan culture wars raging, not to mention much of the country becoming obsessed with a literal modern day witch hunt in the infamous Satanic panic (an apt subject for Flenniken’s characters, but one she wisely avoided, thus following the old military adage, “Never draw fire on your own position.”).

The already edgy material in both NatLamp in general and Trots And Bonnie in particular threatened to be perceived as too edgy by law enforcement, legislators, and judicial authorities who seemed either unwilling or incapable of distinguishing between photographs and video of actual sexual assaults and rapes committed against real children as opposed to crudely drawn Xerox copied mini-comics made by outsider artists with audiences that might possibly number in the dozens.

Flenniken’s willingness to honestly recall the turbulent emotions of early adolescence resulted in stories and strips where prepubescent kids engage in activities and discussions that would be acutely problematic if done today.  Again, the utter lack of self-consciousness in Flenniken’s characters swerves her work away from the low grade smut ground out by many of her male contemporaries and flung open a window on how adolescent females perceived the world around them.

The stories are wildly transgressive, and like all transgressive art can only be understood in the context of their time and mores.  Flenniken’s art carries a sweetness that leavens out the most horrendous situations (she gets astonishing comedic mileage off a story about a woman raped by a police officer, never once blaming or exploiting the victim but lambasting the culture and mindset that makes such a crime possible).

The fact these stories are told from a vibrant feminist / sex positive point of view makes them relevant to this day, and Flenniken’s ability to draw both truth and humor from dysfunctional families, emotional abuse, and drug use keeps them from being one-note exercises.

Most importantly, Flenniken comes across as strongly pro-child, even while honestly depicting her own characters’ failings and misconceptions.

She always brings a genuine emotional connection with her characters as adolescents, neither glorifying nor patronizing them.

One of the most notorious Trots And Bonnie strips finds Bonnie looking at herself in a mirror, fantasizing she’s famous actresses of the past.*  

At the hands and brush of Norman Rockwell, this theme tries for poignant but lands in schmaltz, looking down on an anxious child studying her reflection in a mirror; in far too many bad novels by sub-par male writers, it’s borderline (and often not-so-borderline) pornography.

At the touch of Flenniken’s deft pen, it’s honest and sweet and shockingly frank but it never depicts Bonnie as a figment of the male imagination but as a character and personality all her own.

Flenniken has not done any new Trots And Bonnie strips since the last ones published in NatLamp in 1993.

To be honest, I think that’s a good thing.

The characters are of their particular time and cultural gestalt, it may not be possible to recapture that lightning in a new bottle, and rather than diminish the old, perhaps it best remains a perfect artefact of its era.

Mark Twain tried repeatedly but could never transport Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn out of antebellum Hannibal, and to use an example more contemporary to Flenniken’s work, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers resolutely thwart all efforts to move them out of San Francisco during the Summer of Love.

You can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe famously observed, but that only applies if you’ve successfully left home.  At a certain point, if you haven’t moved beyond your old confines, you never will.

Flenniken’s honest frankness could have turned into a big crosshair on her back during the cultural wars, but to paraphrase John Lennon, life happened while she was making comix.

She married twice, divorced once, widowed the second time.  While she never completely withdrew from professional illustration, she no longer sought out the high profile gigs.

Trots And Bonnie from New York Review Comics is the first extensive English language compilation of her strips and stories, a very handsomely produced volume designed by Norman Hathaway.

The strips are meticulously presented, making it possible to enjoy Flenniken’s fine line work and exquisite character depictions in greater detail than every before.  It’s a genuine delight, sure to thrill old time fans of the original strip and quite likely to win a new generation of admirers.

But brace yourselves, noobs, this ain’t your grandma’s Betty Boop…

© Buzz Dixon

 *  It should be noted that for all its apparent revolutionary newness, the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, the crucible that forged Flenniken’s point of view, also enthusiastically embraced the past.  W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers became cultural icons to a new generation, Betty Boop regained her old popularity, old movies were rediscovered and reimagined, African-American spirituals and blues sprang from new voices, obscure books and novels from earlier decades and centuries became the new cultural touchstones.

I’ve posted elsewhere on how the boomer generation enjoyed a unique conflation of new technology and old media to produce a brand new synthesis; there has been nothing like it since even with astonishing advances in technology.  When old media is rediscovered and reinterpreted in this era, it too often tends to be in the form of irony, which mocks that which it cannot understand.

Give those old hippies their due -- they got the &#@%ing point!

[willpowerbutch]

Willpower Butch and the Son of God

By the Reverend Willpower Butch

We found ourselves in a dour, tangled wood, having strode excellently to the north of the ruins of London. We were safeguarding ourselves from the Homosexual by burning his nail polish and thrusting our pelvises as we walked – I, by virtue of my untrammeled virility, and Timpani Gayparade because I was repeatedly kicking his ass – for this display of breedful lumber-hauling intimidates even the most unhyperbolic Gay into hours of aesthetic crying. My un-non-sodomized companion, Paragon Shag, halted us before a gully, grimacing as he did at its detestable and wet resemblance.

“Quite Anti-Rimbauded Stoics,” spake he into the gap in the David’s pants, “were you capable of womanly regard for your environment, I should caution you now to take protective hold of your erections. For I scent among the pungent mosses a grievous concoction of defensive sarcasm, elderflower, and fear of guns.”

“No!” shouted Top-a-mée Christopherhitchens tremulously at Shag’s injunction. “That odor could only announce one thing: an Anglophilia of Transgendereds!”

No sooner had the flaccid, strawberry-incensed brat danced this were we come upon by these self-same Transgendereds. They were crudely crayoning beards and boobs onto the yearbook photos of children while singing the “Internationale” in Esperanto. And they were, without exception, slathered in a gloopy, glittery sludge.

“Alas, they have fornicated with Boy George,” Shag supposed.

“Nay,” I overruled him, speaking the truth because I am a Man, “they are the undead. See how they rise from the ground like a Gay asshole thrashing up toward Papalism. See how they have returned from Tim Curry’s House to torment their enemies.”

For, in the center of that discoing mass, there stood the trifecta of swallowing come at somebody else’s orgy and then complaining about the taste: Graham “transplanted his ass onto his face” Linehan, Germaine “spectacularly missed the point of her own life’s work” Greer, and JK “spent the nineties roleplaying a little boy and is desperately trying to deflect” Rowling.

The trifecta hailed our entourage, noting that we were not party to the Transgenders’ Dostoevskian lower bureaucrat fetish. “Help us!” they cried.

Marzipan Dostoevsky, friend of Vladimir Purina and King Gay of Sierra del Fuego. His infamous bent nose is the result of giving too much head.

Forthwith, we left them and continued on our way, crossing the border into Scotland.

As we plowed further into the wilds, we encountered a strange portal carved into the rockface of a proud spire. Drawing closer, Michael Sheen exclaimed, “This is it! The secret cavern where Franc’n’o has kidnapped God. But how may we come inside?”

There was, indeed, no discernible way through, for the doorway was a mere carving on stone. Near the top, there was a message scrawled in Scotlandenisishlatin.

The David stepped forward, the arches of his hips and back as sturdy and graceful as a yew, and his mouth as red-pink, as inviting, as absolutely forbidden as yew berries, gyrating as he read the words to himself.

“Read homo in the face of Man, and enter,” he translated for us. Turning toward me, his expression was puzzled. “Homo in the face of Man?”

“Shag,” I said frowningly, “what do you make of this?”

“Perhaps it’s a riddle. Omo represents the eyes, the ridges of the brow, and the nose in the face of Man, for facial hair is too powerful to render in this Nancy language,” Shag considered. “What we do not know is the symbolism of the ‘h.’ What could that be?”

“A cowlick?” suggested Gayparade.

“One ear?” ventured Michael Sheen.

“The tongue, sticking out?” lilted the David.

“The tongue, sticking out,” I murmured, repeating him. “Why else would Franc’n’o construct such an opening? He means for us to enact something that no Man would ever do, for the genital of the Gay is magnetized to the tongue of the Straight Man.”

My companions were much astonished at this, but also greatly impressed that I had retained so many facts about the Gay from only one drunken viewing of their episode on the Discovery Channel.

Looking between them, I could perceive the fear in their rapid flacciding. “Nay!” I shouted, mustering all my strength, “MEN!” And thus, I kicked through the doorway, sending out a shockwave that turned every blushing, pristine flower for miles into beer-soaked charcoal, scented with entitlement. And we were through.

Treading into the dark, it was several minutes before we came upon a peculiar thing. At the end of the hall was a garish, stadium-lit roller-skating rink, but unlike any we may see in the world above, for this rink was tiled with a material smoother than any quality of marble or varnished wood: twinks. Our metal-toed boots clanged as we approached, and upon this clamor, the twinks rolled around, alarmed, and like cats puffing their tails, they sprang their stiffnesses at us.

“Gentlewomen!” exclaimed the vile Franc’n’o from his throne of unsexiness. “You think that I’m greeting you to your faces, but in fact, I’m admiring your thighs!”

It was in this moment I knew that Franc’n’o had succeeded in becoming a Gay at last. And I mourned, my lords. I mourned the children unborn because Ben Whishaw and his cohort have made western Europe into a writhing accumulation of sexually ambiguous style magazine cover-shoots. I mourned that the poppy fields of yesteryear are become the pansy fields of today. And most of all, I sprayed three-in-one shampoo/conditioner/bodywash into Franc’n’o’s eyes, for this confuses the radar of the Homosexual.

Notwithstanding this, Franc’n’o pounced. And, like a quietly imposing youth who always sits alone at the bar and vanquishes toxic masculinity by making engaged straight men curious about bottoming, his fierce countenance froze me to the spot. But just when all hope seemed lost, there emerged a shot a pearly white from behind him, disintegrating the villain into innumerable molecules of coming-of-age movie nosebleeds.

At first, I could not make out the source of this blast through the shimmering dust of a thousand twinks vanishing back into the realm of the fae. But as they dissipated in the air, I saw him directly. He was a titan of a Man, impossibly contoured, possessing flawless bronze skin and a statuesque comportment. He had hair that no beauty appliance had homosexed, and yet it was both as firm and as silken as victory garlands. He beckoned Shag and me to him, and when he spoke in his engorging baritone, it was a language otherworldly and supreme, far too masculine to pass the lips of any mortal man.

Gesturing to me, he boomed, “У него толко серп, но у меня большой молот.” And then, he turned toward a large set of doors, and we could only infer that he meant for us to follow. We passed into another long, dark hallway, which culminated in a yet larger portal which emitted an indescribable glow. “Зови меня капитаном подлодки, потому что я углубляюсь,” he spoke again and urged us inside.

We were blinded altogether, so bright was that interior. Droplets rose to Shag’s eyes and to my hardness. A voice still deeper, still richer, still more impossible accosted us. “Do not fear, my good Men,” it said. “This is my Son, whom mortals have met before. He returns to you rebranded as his true form, and his name is Panzer Dzheesaskrist.”

Dimly, I made out the irresistible figure who had addressed us. At once, all was clear. Such a vision met me, my indomitable brothers with extreme personal space, that I shall remember and love forever: it was God, the Manliest Man of all.

About the Author

The Reverend Admiral Willpower Butch, who recently topped the human race by releasing God from a pervert’s Scottish underground fetish athletic studio, is hard at work on his petition to remove fruit from public markets on the basis that it is gay propaganda. Paragon Shag, his brave correspondent and roommate, is coming out with a line of deconstructed cars to raise money for Brothers In The Comintern Have Enlarged Scrota, an anti-communist mission. Their secretary and Russian fairytale character who gets no dialogue, Dead Summer Days, is treading on thin f*cking ice with his decision to start wearing sweatpants.

[fanonical]

Does JK Rowling count as a TERF if she's barely a feminist though?

the reason people think this is because they see the title of Feminist as an unchallengable monument -- when really, feminism is a self-identified group; anybody who is a feminist is a feminist because they identify with feminism & the movement of feminism, and there are so many branches and flavours of feminism that one describing themselves as a feminist doesn’t really say much about their personal beliefs. you have first wave, second wave, third wave feminists; liberal, radical, white, black; trans-inclusive, trans-exclusionary; sex-worker exclusionary; sex-worker inclusionary; even Catholic, race-realist, etc etc. all it means is to identify with “feminism” which is obviously a nebulous concept

JK Rowling sees herself as part of the “group” of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. she follows them on Twitter, retweets from them, subtweets them, likes their tweets, uses their hashtags, speaks their language and rhetoric, and most recently, stood in support of one, whilst using a TERF dogwhistle, WHILST promoting a TERF hashtag, in the name of protecting cis women.

i agree -- JK Rowling is not what you or i would consider an “effective” feminist; her economic policies are centre-left at best, her female characters badly written, and her protagonists mostly male, but we would say the same for other notable TERFs like Germaine Greer, would we not?

in conclusion, yes, she’s a TERF.

[clairebeauchampfan]

The biter bit. How ‘liberals’  are consuming their own

I’ll begin this post, as one has to nowadays, by reiterating my sincere commitment to whatever righteous cause takes your fancy this week. No one can accuse me of not following the party line, or having ‘wrongthought’. I freely confess to my past, deviationist, splittist opinions, and respectfully ask to be sent to a reeducation camp, preferably among the Uighurs. 

Meanwhile, back in what remains of the Free World, I have to laugh when I see so many prominent ‘Liberals’ getting themselves in hot water because of what they have said or done in contravention of the Groupthink that they themselves once so earnestly supported.  

For example Steve Bell, the wannabe socialist cartoonist, is being ‘let go’ from his contract with The Guardian, the UK’s Liberal-left paper of record. No doubt partly because of his age (ageism being rife amongst right-on folk) but perhaps also because they are looking for a young BIPOC/woman/LGBTQ+ to replace him, and , let’s face it, Steve Bell is...ahem...an older non-BIPOC non-female person (that’s an old white male, to those who aren’t woke). The Guardian recently published a Bell cartoon showing Priti Patel, the Home Office (Interior) Minister as an ugly cow - or a bull- forgetting that for Hindus, half the UK’s people of South Asian ancestry, the bovine is sacred. Cue an outraged and insulted minority, offended even more when the paper refused to apologise or withdraw the cartoon. Oops! Someone had to go.......Judge for yourself and see if it is sexist and racist at the same time.

Priti Patel

Steve Bell’s Cartoon in The Guardian

In Hollywood, long a bastion of right-on wokeness and insincere platitudinising,   non-BIPOC /LGBTQ+ actors have - or so I read in the Daily Strumpet and the Feudal and Reactionary Times- apparently become unemployable, especially if they are of a ‘problematic’ age or sex (that’s old, white and male, again). If you aren’t sufficiently diverse,  forget it; there are no up-coming parts for you. At least Historical fiction drama, Outlander has lots of butch men running around in skirts, which goes to show how advanced Scotland was in the 18th Century. No wonder it’s my favourite TV drama, though it does show a problematic  lack of diversity among the lead characters. Time for a colour-blind recast? I mean, look what they can do with Henry V. Chiwetel Ejiofor to play Scottish clansman Jamie Fraser! Bring it on! 

Manwhile JK Rowling, favourite children’s author, (and, once,  famously right-on as a Labour supporter, fierce critic of the wicked Tories and feminist) together with Ur-feminist Germaine Greer,  have both  been pilloried for apparent Transphobia, for daring to suggest that if a male cuts all his bits off and  fills his body up with female hormones to develop breasts (and other more messy surgical treatment) he does not become a woman, per se.It’s a point of view. Personally, if a lad believes he is a lassie and not merely a eunuch, who am I to put a spoke in his wheel? If she is still armed with a male weapon and goes into the Ladies loo only to pee on the seat, on the other hand..... and I really think that teenagers  whose raging hormones and developing brains may encourage them to identify as a member of the opposite sex, ought to have to wait until they are a tab more mature before taking an irreversible decision on their sexuality, and shouldn’t be encouraged by adults  into taking such action. And Doctors shouldn’t perform such operations  on minors. It’s a point of view. Don’t judge me!

 I leave you with these extracts from an interesting article from the Sydney Morning Herald, about Twitter mobbing.

“........You can say that ridiculing Twitter’s exotic grievances is an easy sport. Sure, except that years ago it seemed to me that Twitter wasn’t merely reflecting, but engendering and magnifying, a kind of wickedly censorious piety. And one that was increasingly influencing journalists and artists. I’ve had editors more interested in avoiding controversy than in judging the accuracy and value of my work.

Online, piety has no trouble finding affirmation. But the thing with piety is that it stubbornly resists private examination. This might work for the seminary, but it seems ruinous for a writer. Unless you’re an awful one. In which case, this is an optimal environment to work in – so, congratulations on being born to an age that enthusiastically supports your mediocrity.

I suspect the most politically pious in this country won’t be satisfied until certain professions have yielded their specific values and functions in deference to a vision of society that is perfectly liberated from aggravation. It’s a vision of a giant creche.

All contest would be outlawed. Literature would become dogma. Universities would moonlight as daycare centres. The law would abandon its duty to evidentiary thresholds and the presumption of innocence, and become a place of infinite credulity. Comedy would cede the joys of irreverence, and prefer applause to laughter. Journalism would reject curiosity, exploration and corroboration, in favour of politically sanctioned advocacy and “authentic” personal essays. Increasingly, newsrooms will serve their readers a narrow, ideologically curated diet.

I’ve disagreed with plenty of Bari Weiss’s work, but I agreed with her this week when she wrote, in her open letter resigning as an opinion editor at The New York Times, that “a new consensus has emerged in the press ... that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else”.

These days, it’s quite common to hear: “It is imperative that a writer of non-fiction write only about experiences they’ve had.” ( I thought it was supposed to apply to writers of fiction) When confronted with this stupidity, I experience my own violent irrationality and consider applying the credo in extremis by torching all newsrooms and the history sections of libraries.

A common defence of the left’s censoriousness – however venomous and trivial – is that it is merely free speech deployed against another’s. That’s fundamentally true, and it’s also disingenuous: the threat of mobilised zealotry is chilling speech.

I can’t prove the negative here – I can’t measure the things not written or said. But I can tell you that I’ve spoken to a few eminent writers about this – authors of works we’d consider classics – who have told me they would not dare to publish the work today. One writer told me she had not slept the night she spoke to me about such things, so fearful was she that I’d publish it. That’s a problem.

It’s also a problem when scholars are sacked for tweeting links to academic papers, when good faith cannot be distinguished from bad, when writers self-censor or have to explain that their insistence on complexity is owed to intellectual integrity and not, say, their belief in white supremacy or Satan.

Increasingly, those who have contributed to a culture of outrageous sensitivity are being impaled on the swords they helped sharpen. Past months have resembled a kind of woke purge. Which makes schadenfreude very easy to indulge, but we’ll need to resist that dubious pleasure lest we perpetuate this cycle of mob-ruled destruction of careers and reputations.

This isn’t either/or. It shouldn’t be truth versus freedom. It shouldn’t be inferred that criticism of this censoriousness means that the critic doesn’t believe there aren’t righteous battles being fought. But you can’t tell me that elements of this online piety aren’t absurd, indulgent or destructive.

You can’t tell me that middle-class folk aren’t publicising interpersonal spats as proof of “systemic violence”, or that we’re not partially cannibalising culture in a moment of historic uncertainty and vast, easily industrialised disinformation. Or that I can’t resist or make fun of Jacobin zealotry. You can’t.

Martin McKenzie-Murray, Sydney Morning Herald

It looks like I’m guilty of schadenfreude myself. Oops!

#twitter mobbing #wrongthought

[philosophicalconservatism]

The Intolerance Of The Left.

Left wing thought today is increasingly a severe and intolerant dogma that does not allow or forgive non-compliance in anyone; including in its most respected advocates. It mercilessly punishes any deviation from its official ideological stances. The iconic Feminist Germaine Greer, who I have mentioned in the past, is just one example. Leftists do not have the option of veering off a bit on one issue or the other; it is not tolerated. And any deviation from its own orthodoxy is by definition a manifestation of "hate" or insidious intent.

By contrast, a pretty stunning degree of ideological variety can be found on the political right. I cannot think of a single major modern political issue that does not have high profile Right wingers on either side of it; issues from abortion, to same sex marriage, to social programs ( the importance of social programs is a tenant of Neoconservatism; a philosophy pioneered by the American author Irving Kristol, and embraced by numerous members of the last Bush administration), international war and peace issues,  immigration (which is of course why certain Right wingers accuse other Right wingers of being in bed with business interests that covet inexpensive immigrant labor) etc.

In the magazine National Review (the most influential Conservative magazine in the country) there is from time to time a symposium of Conservative thinkers representing a variety of views on a single major issue, each defending their own unique perspective. Nothing like that is a possibility on the modern political Left. There is one uniform ideological line on all  major issues and dissent is not an option.

[filmsisnice]

Ullmann & Bergman: Redefining The Muse

Published by The Quietus

With the release of Jane Magnusson’s Bergman: A Year in a Life, we take a look at one of cinema’s most prolific partnerships and consider where the myth of the muse fits into 2019.

‘Behind every good man is a great woman’ is a phrase that hasn't aged well. Overlooked and undervalued, these wives, lovers and discounted companions all stand, shadowed by that figure in front. The politics of art have always favoured men: From the ubiquitous nudes of the renaissance to Lucien Freud’s blotched beauties, women were – and still very much are – positioned to be looked at. Like the armless pillar of flesh that is Venus De Milo, women have been handicapped and stripped for millennia. If they ever do discover her marbled limbs it would seem fitting to find them sporting le bras d'honneur.

To have a muse has mostly been a male privilege. A symptom of artistic genius, its role, according to the feminist academic, Germaine Greer, is ‘to penetrate the male artist and bring forth a work from the womb of his mind’. It’s a rather captivating interpretation where gender roles are flipped and power is forever shifted. But when we start to unpack its baggage we find a lack of autonomy beneath the glamour. An icon without the ‘I’.

“You are my Stradivarius” the great Ingmar Bergman once told his ‘muse’, Liv Ullmann, who, up until his death in 2007, shared over forty years, twelve films and a child with the auteur. Their kinship was one of cinema’s most fruitful and fascinating alliances. Part time lovers and life-long friends, their turbulent relationship often bled onto the screen, smudging the borders of reality and fiction into a scalding blend of Scandi sensuality. Now, Ullmann, tired of the crooked politics of being a female director, can be found trekking through festival retrospectives, documentaries, memoirs and interviews, all the while accounting for a man’s genius.

But by no means does Ullmann begrudge the muse moniker, she embraces it as a gift. “Being seen by Ingmar Bergman changed me”, she told CBC Radio. “I found out that there is more to me, there's more in who Liv is, and what she understands.” Though it wasn't just Ullmann’s life which was altered, Bergman’s work with the Norwegian actress represented a shift in perspective. At first he looked from above, with moral fables like The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960), but soon glanced up to the heavens with the spiritual quandaries of Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963). It was only after the introduction of Ullmann that Bergman began to look inward, a self-reflexive meditation spanning decades.

With Persona (1966), as noted in his 1990 book, Images, Bergman ‘touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover’. One of those secrets is undoubtedly Ullmann, with her mute performance quietly simmering beneath vampiric desire, we can’t help but fall under her spell. Sucked into a vortex of gazes, we swim between two shores, two women who embody the tangled conscience of Bergman’s cinema. If Bibi Andersson represented a forgotten innocence then it’s through Ullmann we endure the trails of adulthood, the complexities of human connection.

“So many of Ingmar’s movies are about a little boy looking for safety”, Ullmann told TIFF director, Piers Handling at last year’s festival. This echoes the lasting image of Persona, that of the bespectacled youth caressing Andersson’s projected face as it morphs into that of Ullmann. As if a glimpse into the future, these few seconds encapsulate a forty-two year relationship. Trapped behind a blurry backdrop and caged inside a frame, Ullmann would go on to become an on-screen vessel of infinite neurosis. “He didn't know who I was”, the actress told an audience at BFI Southbank, “But I understood one thing, I was Ingmar.”

Forever defined through a lens, the muse must abandon all sense of self. It’s only then will they become the blank canvas on which to project the male fantasy. When first introduced to Anna Karina – another great ‘muse’ of the 20th century – in Le Petit Soldat (1963), we don't see her, instead Godard describes her. She’s “chic” and “has a mouth like Leslie Caron”. Who is this woman? This Frankenstein of fantasies. Even when she appears on screen she’s kept from view as Godard teases us into a game of peek-a-boo. Then, the eagerly awaited close-up in which she shakes her hair lose and with it unfurls a frenzy of sensuality. With one orgasmic motion, Karina flexes the freedom and style of La Nouvelle Vague, sealing herself into the everlasting memory of cinema.

Karina’s career stretched beyond Godard’s grasp yet will be forever tethered to his genius. A pop-star, novelist and director, it could even be said that as an actress her role in Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966) towered over anything she encountered with Godard. Similar to Karina, Ullmann left Bergman’s herd in 1970, swapping the misty mounds of Fårö Island for the Hollywood hills. Her efforts however went largely unnoticed as films like Lost Horizon (1973) and 40 Carats (1973) proved critical and box-office hiccups.

After returning to Europe, landing a string of successful roles, Ullmann stood behind the camera for Sofie (1993). It’s a directorial debut searing with a unique sensitivity throughout, a quality largely overlooked at the time. ‘Inevitably’, wrote Stephen Holden of the New York Times, ‘Sofie, has a strong Bergmanesque ambiance…Like Mr. Bergman, Ms. Ullmann has a particular fascination with people's eyes’. Constantly comparing and contrasting her work with the Swedish maestro, it seemed the world wasn't ready to recognise Ullmann as an artist in her own right.

Faithless (2000), arguably Ullmann’s finest outing as a director, shuffles memories of life and art into what Ebert calls, “the kind of truth seeking that movies and life rarely allow”. Penned by Bergman himself, the production offers an intriguing power reversal. It might be his words, but it’s Ullmann’s story to tell. The film in many ways is Bergman’s confession, making strong allusions to the pair’s rocky past, it weighs the price of heedless passion, a price that only time can measure.

Now in 2019, time has rendered the ‘muse’ defunct. With the #MeToo movement highlighting the uneven power structures across the media industry, such antiquated terms of objectification seem like rusted relics of a bygone era. The once associated glamour has turned to grime, the metaphor for creativity now a broken tool of male control. And although dozens of articles lazily attempt to corral such pairings – like Keaton/Allen or Thurman/Tarantino –  under the muse/artist banner, the term holds little meaning for these actresses. “It's great if he finds me inspiring”, Thurman told a Rolling Stone reporter in 2004  “But it [the muse label] doesn't really relate to what I did."

Carefully unpicking such tired terminology, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017) weaves a playful deconstruction of male power. We align ourselves with Alma (Vicky Krieps), her wants and desires, her need not to be looked at but listened to. It’s through her we become an accessory to obsession, suffering the polite violences of fixated stares and domestic ritual. The film threads mainstream myths through a feminist perspective, asking us to consider the psychological cost of being placed on a pedestal.

And like most mythology, the muse dates back to Ancient Greece. Beloved deities of song, dance and memory, these Goddesses were summoned by men in order to spur imagination. Now, seeping through to pop culture, these crusted fables of divinity, according to the writer, Manthia Diawara, ‘mask history and addict us to voyeurism, fetishism and mystified social relations’. Attach these myths to Ullmann, Karina, or any other person anchored by the 'muse' tag, and not only will you dismiss the artistry and grit, you ultimately ignore their humanity. Having severed the monosyllabic shackle holding them captive to celluloid, they've undeniably earned the right to be called artists. But with their directorial work grossly under-seen or unavailable, they patiently wait for the world to catch up.

[korrasera]

Why I Care

One of the few things I care deeply about is the importance of educating people about authoritarianism. My belief is that authoritarianism is a harmful cognitive flaw in the human species that causes us to build harmful, exclusionary, and violent social structures when we fail to achieve emotional maturity in our adult lives. In an effort to feel a sense of security that they cannot feel on their own, authoritarians seek to create a world that gives them that sense of security by controlling the lives of everyone who lives in it, up to and including attacking people with less power in order to feel safe by way of conquering an imagined enemy.

It occurs in all walks of life. The most obvious example that anyone can think of are the nazis, a political party of virulent fascism that has enshrined mass murder and genocide as cornerstones of their ideology. You see it reflected in the regressive attitudes of the current US GOP and right-wing conservatives, and again in evangelical Christians that march hand in hand with them. But you also see it in otherwise left-leaning communities as well.

When authoritarianism appeared in the LGBTQ+ community, it looked like Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs. It's an ideology that grew out of 2nd wave feminism and the emotional immaturity and transmisogyny of such radical feminist authors as Germaine Greer, Sheila Jeffreys, and Janice Raymond. TERFs like Raymond are directly responsible for the deaths of countless trans women and transgender people because they've fought for decades to exert political power to establish and increase gatekeeping and strip transgender people of rights and protections under the law.

Raymond's work alone, in the form of a report she submitted to congress in 1979, completely reversed the US government's attitude towards transgender healthcare, an act that set back trans rights for decades. All because she was an authoritarian who was emotionally immature and fearful, and acted to attack trans women and trans people out of that fear, imagining us as some monolithic evil.

This topic is important to me because I don't like bullies, I don't care where they're from. But some of them (like TERFs) are in my backyard, socially speaking, and if I'm going to stop them then this is the only way I know how. By helping to share what little I know so that other people can learn the same things I've learned.

The more people know how to recognize authoritarianism, to see where it dwells, and how to inoculate ourselves against it, the better off we will be. Because authoritarians want nothing more than to burn down the rest of the world to feel warm, not realizing that the cold they fear is of their own making.