Reheated (129)

It seems we’re expected to follow Mr Decker’s lead, into that glorious tomorrow, where cuckoldry is ascendant, an ideal, and where fathers and their children are biologically disconnected and physically estranged. Because that always goes smoothly. No issues there.

With such levels of unrealism and contrivance, such practised not-noticing – say, the claim that people in general are somehow unconcerned by “whether their children are genetically theirs” – it’s not altogether clear where one might begin.

We have arrived at the assumption that a primal, root-level motivation found across species is somehow absent in human beings – for no clearly stated reason – despite all appearance to the contrary, across continents and centuries, and despite the fact that human offspring are unusually dependent and require an uncommonly prolonged and costly investment by the parents.

Presumably, we should ignore studies confirming the correlation of parental investment and physical resemblance, i.e., relatedness, and the statistical preference among adoptive parents for children who could pass for their own biological offspring. Likewise, the lower aggregate levels of investment by stepfathers, noted many times.

And I’m guessing we’ll have to ignore the entire history of human courtship, a great deal of which has been geared towards ensuring genetic relatedness – and to avoiding cuckoldry. The cuckoldry that Mr Decker claims will somehow improve the world.

One might think that gangs of masked misfits following elderly and disabled people to their cars, then obstructing their attempts to leave, while generally menacing them and muttering vivid threats, might constitute a breach of the peace, to say the least. Causing fear and alarm is the obvious intention.

And remember, the targets in the videos above – the unimposing, the elderly, the disabled – are chosen deliberately and with glee. Because that’s who they are, these mighty warriors of the Cluster B Tendency. Malevolence is their aphrodisiac, their euphoria. It’s how they feel important. It’s how they process the buzzing noise inside their own heads.

The threat of catastrophic injury would, I suspect, be the only language such creatures are likely to heed. It’s certainly hard to imagine them being swayed by appeals to logic, reciprocation, or basic decency. I see no evidence of a better nature to which one might appeal.

I mean, once you’ve chosen to spend your afternoon menacing the elderly and disabled precisely because they’re unlikely to give you the vigorous kicking you deserve, you’re pretty much beyond any negotiation or genteel outreach project.

And so, we arrive at the idea, common among racial activists, that a country to which you’ve migrated, or to which your parents migrated, should reorganise its history, its cultural memory, in fanciful and jarring ways in order to accommodate you or your racial proxies. Thereby providing the most contrived and overreaching affirmation. As if that were some totally proper and incontestable thing.

It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid.” As “emotional labour.” As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.

The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether.” Though possibly not in ways the author intended.

Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.

The kind of woman who would moan about the chore of choosing a holiday that her husband is paying for. And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour.” The final indignity.

The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting,” while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.