Hello from Paris!
On Sunday, the perpetual drizzle gave way to snow for the second time this year, shaking down big fat fucking snowflakes as round as dinner plates. Plus one disoriented pigeon that at first I thought was a Kleenex caught in the gusts. I considered making hot cocoa or something. But I didn’t.
Instead, I kept on thinking dark and gloomy thoughts.
Mostly about how Trump was gone, but Biden could bring about a whole different kind of disaster. Enabling the Holy Woken Empire to get a deeper grip on the Western World. Creating catechisms about race and sex and gender, that if you object to, however minimally, turn you into heretics and bigots and pervs.
So much for the Latinas and Latinos who do not want the X of LatinX imposed on them. So much for the homo females that insist on sexed bodies and refuse any dick that cannot be put in a bedside table, and boiled when it needs to be cleaned. Failing the emergence of some kind of Martin Luther, the best I can hope for is that the Wokens, and their QAnon twins may burn themselves out. Though it’s just as likely they will give birth to another Trumpist government even more authoritarian than the last.
It depends partly on how serious the Democrats are about creating a functioning democracy. Their bedfellows from the Left aren’t exactly pro-free speech, and pro-dissent, unless of course we’re talking about theirs. Ditto for enfranchising voters that they mostly despise if they don’t vote the way they’re supposed to.
There’s also the little problem of misogyny which was a consistently reliable predictor of pro-Trump votes, but also permeates the Center and Left. Ordinary Dems are just as happy as Republicans to talk about women’s bodies without any in the room. It’s hard to see how we’re gonna make inroads against that without a viable feminist movement that is unafraid to lay out how male supremacy works, and the consequences it has, and the history of the fight against it. And goals we should aim for.
Nope, all we have is a pathetic excuse for a pro-choice movement so timid that it can barely admit that the female body exists, much less that there’s systematic discrimination against the garden variety form of it. We talk about gender now, instead. As if more than one thing can’t be true at a time.
It’s easy to blame gender theorists and radical trans activists, but the vacuum at the heart of the women’s movement was already sucking our issues into the black hole of oblivion by the time I landed in NYU’s Performance Studies Department in 1990. There, I discovered feminism had gone postal, and that all that talk of misogyny and discrimination against women had been declared positively passé, over, finished. Time to move on. No matter that it seemed a little premature.
Just a few months before, my clerk-typist mother in Kentucky lost her job because she’d gotten old and ugly instead of distinguished like a man. And about the same time, even unfeminine as I was, I’d been shoved in the corner by a guy insisting that what I wanted was his big dick. I remember, too, that before I climbed on the bus to NYC, my grandmother showed me a pair of knitting needles musing how glad she was to get her tubes tied when so many women she knew died on bloody beds. Even my evangelical mother talked approvingly about the recent pro-choice March in Washington, D.C.
Poverty. Bodily autonomy. Fear. I was still in the middle of it. Still idiotically and pathetically in need of the most basic promises of feminism. But then my parents weren’t professors. My mother wasn’t any kind of elite. When I got to New York, I was sleeping on the floor of an apartment full of Colombian immigrants in Queens where nobody was performing anything, much less gender.
The LGBT movement, too, had long turned its back on women’s lib. By the time Hillary Clinton was running against Barack Obama I was the only one at Gay City News in New York writing about the shocking misogyny of the Obama Bros who in chatrooms sounded largely like Incels, gossiping about rape and mutilation. I was the only one pointing out what Christine Quinn faced running against Bill “Asshat” de Blasio. The only one writing about woman-hating in the Bernie Bros. “If only Elisabeth Warren was running,” they lied. Yet the Left was somehow shocked, I tell you, shocked! when Hillary Clinton couldn’t beat Trump. Because no lessons were learned. And still haven’t been. And won’t be. Because as one trans writer, Andrea Long Chu, could jokingly (and truthfully) write in 2019 in the Transgender Studies Quarterly :
…there is no object worse than a woman… it remains the case that being dumb enough to write a book about womanness would get you bounced from all the cool academic clubs faster than you can say “intersectionality.” I am not arguing that anyone should be writing about womanness; I am simply pointing out that no one could, even if they wanted to, at least not if they wanted to get a job or a book contract in the current academic climate. Meanwhile, trans studies remains a field in which two men can sit around and debate the merits of woman as a political category (Green and Bey 2017). (Spoiler alert: They have their doubts.)
There’s something about women we just can’t get our heads around. Maybe because we are, as Chu writes, “politically dowdy.”
A woman getting beaten, again, by her husband or boyfriend, in the privacy of her shabby home, doesn’t inspire a raised fist in the street like a man getting shot down by cops, even though it’s far more common. Women earning less than men is not a sexy issue even if it’s you struggling to pay the bills or fill plates with non-Instagrammable meals. The forced hysterectomies of immigrant women in the U.S. were only in the news a couple of days before they disappeared. And lesbians, well, we won’t fuck you, or produce children for you, or keep your house, or consume your industrial-strength bullshit. So what good are we really?
Maybe I’ve been looking at it all wrong, and the sidelining of women is not just about sex and gender, but the economic class that discrimination forces us into. And while class is something privileged Lefties blab endlessly about, they only imagine a sturdy white guy on a picket line. Not us. Never us. Pushing around a mop and broom in an office building in the middle of the night. Cutting, deboning and packing chicken in a frigid, Covid-infected plant. Or smiling anxiously behind the reception desk. Getting fired when we’re not decorative any more.
If you need an anti-earnestness palate cleanser, give a read to the 1931 satiric novel Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940 in which a black scientist comes up with a machine that can turn people white. Interesting things ensue as Harlem empties out and the country starts to “whiten.” The writer was black journalist, George S. Schuyler, who usually analyzed race through the lens of class. Here, he uses it to skewer everything he beholds from the NAACP, organized religion, professional activists, not to mention the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists.
Schuyler is an interesting and complicated figure who began his career as a socialist but was disgusted by the racism of the left, and became conservative in some ways, though libertarian would probably be a better label. And because he also hated organized religion and preachers this put him at odds with the Civil Rights Movement, eventually making him a total pariah. Which probably pushed him further to the right. Because of course.
Well, that’s it for now.
Disgruntedly yours,
Kelly “Big Dummy” MacGogswell