It’s So You
In The Baffler, Jessa Crispin writes:
His desire for stockings and earrings and a flattering skirt did not change his critical stance against capitalism, but it did complicate his view of what socialism or communism could be. “Will there be lipstick under communism?” Yes, [sociology lecturer, Colin] Cremin writes in a new book, Man-Made Woman — but only if men are wearing it, too… A truly progressive man, then, would be one who rejects the social and economic advantages that come from hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal conformity. A “feminine flourish,” as Cremin puts it, of perfume or lipstick or a silk blouse, would undercut a man’s power immediately in both the workplace and on the sexual market.
Via Ben Sixsmith, in a thread where it’s noted that when many men favoured stockings and beauty spots, this didn’t immediately result in communism or a toppling of “hegemonic masculinity.”
Dr Cremin, of course, has been noted here before.
A “feminine flourish,” as Cremin puts it, of perfume or lipstick or a silk blouse, would undercut a man’s power immediately in both the workplace and on the sexual market.
Yes, you’d look stupid and no one would take you seriously. Not really selling it, are they?
Not really selling it, are they?
I don’t find myself being swayed, no.
But then, why gild the lily?
What?
When we remove forms of control, we are left to act freely on our desires. A liberated economy, then, would not delete fashion, cosmetics and perfumes, and high-heeled shoes from our world. It would give men and women equal access to such pleasures.
Ah- it would be a lot like the liberated economy that already persists throughout the Western world, then.
Ah- it would be a lot like the liberated economy that already persists throughout the Western world, then.
There does seem to be quite a bit of magical thinking going on. How, for example, does an economic system which, by definition, removes private ability to cater to the private choices of individuals, in favor of a top-down determination of “what’s good for you and what you need” make room for Manolo Blahniks and Estée Lauders? Do we get a “Peoples Commissariat of Lipstick Hue?”‘
“I’m sorry, Comrade, but the People’s Gulf Tuna Fleet needed all the fishnet this year leaving none for hosiery.”
A truly progressive man, then, would be one who rejects the social and economic advantages that come from hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal conformity. A “feminine flourish,” as Cremin puts it, of perfume or lipstick or a silk blouse, would undercut a man’s power immediately in both the workplace and on the sexual market.
Says the guy in drag who’s already attained a cushy, tenured sinecure in academe with captive “customers,” thereby insulating himself from normal market forces.
“Will there be lipstick under communism?”
Yes, but as our own Tovarich Bernard Sanders (C-Vermont) pointed out (while sniveling from one of his three homes that there oughtn’t be 23 brands of deodorant), only one color, one brand.
From the article…
Someone indeed seems to have an idea, at least about the patriarchy and masculinity part, and I offer this stunningly idiotic tidbit from an female alleged Rabbi who apparently thinks we should worship Eve, “…our blessed mother, [who] is saying, “#Metoo.”
I m not sure who the “Rabbi” means by “we”, so we’ll skip over the whole Sunday School not exactly what one would call a feature of th Hebrew faith, but I am sure you are curious how God “sexually assaulted Eve. OK, here you go.
Once again, we’ll skip over the fact that the “Rabbi” appears never to have read the Torah, as the Garden of Eden was awash with food, and Eve did the one thing, the only thing, she and Adam were told not to do, so she is punished with shame. However, that supposedly equals sexual assault, but also among the things the “Rabbi” ignores is that Adam was equally punished, so at least God is an equal-opportunity creator, and/or sexual predator.
We’ve seen lots of smug and sanctimonious people in these pages, but I, even as an Apathetic Agnostic, think telling God to straighten up and fly right is both a first, and a bit much, especially for a supposed Rabbi.
RTWT.
A “feminine flourish,” as Cremin puts it, of perfume or lipstick or a silk blouse,
As noted previously, Dr Cremin overlooks – or deliberately avoids – an obvious problem. The “sensuality” that he mentions repeatedly, as if it were a universal benefit, is rather dependent on his own personal kink. Specifically, his cartoonish idea of womanhood and his need to parade in front of students in unconvincing drag.
Unless you’re young and attractive – and attractively androgynous – a combination that’s quite rare – gender-bending tends to have an inherent absurdity, which rather undermines any “sensuality,” or for that matter, delusions of subversion. For most of us, the results of cross-dressing would be farcical, even grotesque. As indeed they are for Mr Cremin – a balding, middle-aged man in a frock and court shoes – who looks like he’s walked out of an episode of The League of Gentleman.
…[A]lso among the things the “Rabbi” ignores is that Adam was equally punished, so at least God is an equal-opportunity creator, and/or sexual predator.
Actually, in evangelical theology, it is not Eve’s transgression which damns Mankind. It is Adams’s. When you look at references to Original Sin in the Bible, it is referred to as belonging to Adam and the taint of Sin is passed through males. Thus, the necessity for the Virgin Birth of Christ, who was conceived by God himself, and thus untainted by Original Sin.*
*The “Rabbi” can’t even do a proper Critical Analysis of Christian Theology.
Matter of fact, Farnsworth, if this “rabbi” would have bothered to open the actual text, she’d find the following:
“The snake… said to the woman, ‘Is it indeed true that G-d has said you may not eat the fruit of any of the trees in the garden?’ The woman said to the snake, ‘We may eat of any of the trees in the garden. But the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden – that, G-d said, we may not eat or touch…'” (Genesis 3:1-2)
So this “rabbi”‘s contention that Eve was driven by hunger is precisely the snake’s position: if you can’t eat from one tree, you can’t eat from any of them.
BTW, our host waits until after the fundraiser to post photos of old bald guys in drag. Coincidence? I think not.
No refunds. Credit note only.
Credit note only.
Which would be fine, if your gift shop didn’t look like one of those 1970’s Soviet-era markets with six jars of lard-like substance in some unidentifiable liquid and a scowling babushka-clad woman of indeterminate age behind the counter–You know. The one with the mole on her chin sporting several prehensile hairs who miscalculates the amount of our change.
“The Baffler is America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism,”
Okay then.
America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism
When not trying to graft political significance onto sad sexual kinks, they also publish the mind-shattering works of one Laurie Penny.
I suspect the words interesting and unexpected are doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
“hegemonic masculinity”
Great name for a band…
A future world created by and for these masculine, straight men, however, is not a world I am interested in living in.
This is, evidently, a perfectly acceptable thing to say.
A future world created by and for these confused, genderless beings, however, is not a world I am interested in living in.
This would get you sent to the reeducation camps.
“The Baffler is America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism,”
We should start a competition where contestants are given the photo and bio of a Baffler author, and must guess the headline and thesis of their article.
Next week: Why foot fetishism and eproctophilia are essential to the downfall of capitalism.
Jessa Crispin is the author of The Dead Ladies Project.
If you read the last word as a verb, rather than a noun, you may find it much easier to understand Ms. Crispin’s perspective.
It’s a common problem of leftist cultural theorising. When you start from so many begged questions and false assumptions, so many wild misunderstandings of how the world is, and why, then what follows is very likely to be a teetering pile of shite.
“Will there be lipstick under communism?” Yes, [sociology lecturer, Colin] Cremin writes in a new book
Yes. Yes do tell how it’s gonna be…
https://youtu.be/lTr-Z1ZOmQE?t=5m26s
a scowling babushka-clad woman of indeterminate age behind the counter–You know. The one with the mole on her chin sporting several prehensile hairs who miscalculates the amount of our change.
Ma? That you, ma? Why didn’t you use that bus money we done already sent you?
When we remove forms of control, we are left to act freely on our desires.
This is stated as if it is self-evidently a Good Thing.
This is stated as if it is self-evidently a Good Thing.
And note that Dr Cremin’s desires entail, not just cross-dressing for “sensual” reasons, but specifically, cross-dressing with the goal of disconcerting an involuntary audience, during office hours, and obliging others to pretend that there’s nothing unusual about a transvestite sociology lecturer indulging his kink in class, at their expense. They, the staff and students, are to be accessories to his psychodrama. And the fact that some may find his behaviour incongruous and gratuitous, a needless imposition, is very much part of the kink, as he makes clear.
And while I’m unlikely to be unnerved by the sight of a needy transvestite, I might object to being a prop in their narcissistic fantasies.
…specifically, cross-dressing with the goal of disconcerting an involuntary audience, during office hours…
He should just whop his member out and treat his classes to a display of onanism. It would be more honest – and arguably a great deal less offensive.
When we remove forms of control, we are left to act freely on our desires.
Remove forms of self-control (indeed, sneer, denigrate, and dismiss any attempts of promotion of same as “pop psychology/discredited bootstrap pablum”), act freely on whatever emotion one is seized by … we get stuff like the Florida shooting.
I’m actually familiar with Ms. Crispin from her long-running Bookslut blog, which was often interesting. Unfortunately, as she’s moved away from being just another idiosyncratic young woman on the web with a passion for reading and writing, toward a career as a published author and member of the cultural intelligentsia, she’s become unreadable. Like an intellectual Benjamin Button, she seems to somehow get anti-wise the older she gets. If she’s now in the teenage anarchist phase, I dread seeing her regress to full toddlerhood in another decade or so.
For all of the talk of dismantling the patriarchy and destroying capitalism and undoing traditional modes of masculinity, very few people seem to have new ideas as to what might be built in their place.
To oppose the status quo without having any clear idea of what you are going to replace it with is the classic radical leftist pose. Why, it’s almost as if these radicals are more interested in rebellion, rejection, revolution and negation than in formulating their radical goals. They are prepared to destroy the status quo in the quasi-religious faith that a liberationist utopia will emerge phoenix-like from the ashes. Such naivety is as risible as it is terrifying.
we are left to act freely on our desires
I don’t think this individual would like the actions some of us would freely take.
It’s baffling how those opposed to capitalism imagine that their particular and peculiar personal style will blossom under socialism/communism. They must have their brains turn off automatically whenever any evidence of the stultifying and oppressive forced social conformity of communism is presented. The fact that gays were gleefully shot by Che Guevara must not have been allowed entry to his/xer’s/her’s perception.
Are they really opposed to “capitalism” or are they just jockeying for position to get special treatment/status/grants?
“Eproctophilia”.
That’s why I keep coming back.
“Will there be lipstick under communism?”
The evidence would suggest no. Or at least not much, unless you are in the State Cheerleader Squad. Communist regimes of the past have general been much stronger on oppression and mass slaughter than fabulousness.
Of course your modern leftist social inadequate would immediately trot out the old “But those evil regimes of which you speak, they weren’t reeeeeally communism, although women did have great sex in the GDR you know.” However, while reading Stalin: the court of the red tsar, I couldn’t help noting – amongst the infighting and casual genocide – that the people who drove the Bolshevik state were all broken and twisted individuals.
I have no doubt that the aggressively demonstrated character flaws, kinks and outright mentalism of the 21st Century Lefty will result in the next communist state being much like the last. Although to be fair, I can’t see Dr Cremin and Laurie Penny engaging in the sort of bold gangsterism that got Stalin to the top, so we might not need to worry…
I wonder if we really have to blame Monty Python for all this craze for cross dressing, Middle aged men in crimpaline dresses discussing the merits of “French ticklers”, it’s all too tempting.
https://youtu.be/PDBjsFAyiwA
Which would be fine, if your gift shop didn’t look like one of those 1970’s Soviet-era markets with six jars of lard-like substance in some unidentifiable liquid and a scowling babushka-clad woman of indeterminate age behind the counter–You know. The one with the mole on her chin sporting several prehensile hairs who miscalculates the amount of our change.
Uh oh. Your customers are getting restless, Mr. Thompson. And about those pickled eggs on the bar…
those evil regimes of which you speak, they weren’t reeeeeally communism
Dude. You gotta get with the program. It’s not just that they weren’t reeeeeally communism. It’s that they were capitalism. Enough with your right-wing-nut nonsense. Venezuela fell apart not because it’s a socialist nation.. It fell apart because free-wheeling crony capitalism handed all the wealth to the 1% and let the people suffer… And because the US and the world Bank imposed onerous penalties on them… Cuba is similar… You lack understanding of what really is happening, see.
For your “education”, here’s a list of the top socialist nations today.. You won’t find any failure there.. In fact, most are much better off than we are here. http://blog.peerform.com/to…
Sniff-sniff.
“Yes, you’d look stupid and no one would take you seriously”
But in ten years most HR departments will be staffed by people who firmly believe that anything less that enthusiastic public applause is a firing offense.
But in ten years most HR departments will be staffed by people
In ten years most HR departments won’t be staffed at all. Many large companies, having realized that the HR ditzes are effecting a empire-building soft coup, have been aggressively outsourcing HR’s functions to web apps offering HR and benefits administration self-service. Policy compliance is being returned to middle management and corporate legal. The worm is turning.
corporate legal
Ay, there’s the rub.
WTP: is that link satire? (it is badly formed btw http://blog.peerform.com/top-ten-most-socialist-countries-in-the-world).
New Zealand isn’t remotely Socialist.
We have nationalised health, which is not free and allows competition. We have nationalised accident insurance. That’s about it. Oh, we have a reasonably high minimum wage.
We do have a mostly nationalised school system, except there are many partially state-subsidised private schools, church integrated schools and — although these are controversial — we have some charter schools. More importantly, the state schools are in direct competition with each other, as parents do not have to send their child to the local one. That means in my city the traditional boys school is over-subscribed but a progressive school a kilometre away is dying as parents refuse to send their children there. Schools are run by locally elected boards and can, and do, choose to run things their own way. Yes NZ has a national curriculum etc, but then we’re smaller than many EU or US cities, so hardly surprising. The US education system is far more Socialised than the NZ one.
About 30 years ago NZ was heading down a Socialist path. Since then it has been a world leader in reducing the size of the state. Our state sector employees 13.4% of the population. (The United States, by comparison, is 17.8%.) Take out the actual Kiwi workers — nurses, soldiers, teachers, rubbish collectors etc — and the state sector is tiny. We’ve almost got it down to the size of that notorious bastion of Socialism, Hong Kong (and take out defence from both, and we’d be the same size).
We’ve sold off almost every state owned business. We’ve put the few we’ve kept, such as the state broadcaster, into the form of a business and they are expected to make money.
In general NZ is used by the right as an example of how a country with few natural resources can thrive by rejecting the nostrums of Socialism.
That’s not to say we are right wing. Having a Labour led government (albeit the National Party actually have more seats) pretty much suggests we aren’t. But our Labour government has more or less lost every bit of Socialism (indeed splinter parties developed from it in response to this, including “New Labour” which was really ‘Old Labour’). The previous Labour government was very dry economically. This one probably not so much, but still drier than the UK Conservatives.
We are quite high tax, but it is expected that governments make a serious attempt to balance the budget, and we often run government surpluses. That tax is then spent to a large extent on the poor. But that’s not Socialism, that’s merely because we are a vaguely left-wing country.
The most bizarre section is this
“Officially” free market my arse! We’re full on, red-blooded, free market. The state runs no businesses and has largely given up trying to direct any at all.
One sure sign a country is not Socialist, incidentally, is that the capital isn’t sucking in people who need to use political connections to make money. Not only is Wellington not as big as Auckland, it’s losing ground to it.
My understanding is that the Nordic countries have gone down exactly the same path. They are welfare states, they are not Socialist, in as much as that word has any meaning other than “left-wing”.
Sorry for the rant, but when NZ is shown as an exemplar of “Socialism” the person is just talking total shit.
Sorry for the rant, but when NZ is shown as an exemplar of “Socialism” the person is just talking total shit.
Another sign of “total shit”:
Recently, the Chinese economy has become more geared towards capitalism, but is still officially socialist. Life in China remains relatively less stressful and more relaxed than life in capitalist countries like America.
Obviously written by someone under the influence of intoxicating substances.
(Chinese government-controlled “capitalism” = old school Fascism.)
WTP: is that link satire?
Hell, I don’t know. I’m getting old, tired, and yes, lazy. There’s so much sarcasm that needs to be done and so little time to do it in. So one day it hit me, outsource the shit. So now when I feel the need, I simply search (or troll, old men are beyond shame) the web for the latest deep thoughts of leftists, socialists, #NEVERTRUMPers, communists, etc. and use their brilliance as substance for my sarc. Irony I still leave up to God.
However, while reading, I couldn’t help noting – amongst the infighting and casual genocide – that the people who drove the Bolshevik state were all broken and twisted individuals.
Indeed. That brilliant book was the only one I’ve read where I often found myself checking the index to see whether some individual had ended up getting his 9 grams – and (I’m slightly ashamed to say), in most cases being pleased to see that he had.
The text snipped from my previous comment was, of course, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar
Sorry for the rant, but when NZ is shown as an exemplar of “Socialism” the person is just talking total shit.
Because only the camel’s nose is in the tent?