In the nightmare, I’m held at gunpoint and for 24 hours am forced to read aloud works of “queer theory.” I begin with W. Benjamin Myers’ thoughts on “straight and white teeth as a metaphor for a straight and White identity” – and which allegedly reveal the “uninterrogated Whiteness” of routine dental hygiene and its role in maintaining “arrogant and ignorant straight and White identities.”

While you marvel at the naff, strained metaphor – teeth-brushing as an expression of “Whiteness,” an allegedly pathological state – and the irrelevant, space-filling anecdotal rambling, and the unearned,  predetermined conclusion, and the invocation of Judith Butler – this Judith Butler – do spare a thought for your gracious host. As I poke at the smouldering wreckage of academia. 

Because when you look at a sixteenth-century mirror salvaged from a warship belonging to Henry VIII, the first thing you want to know is how it might induce psychological crises in the sexually dysmorphic.

We’re told – indeed, assured – by Hannah McCann, of the museum’s collections and curatorial staff, “From the Tate Britain and the Wellcome Collection, to the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, museums are reinterpreting and Queering their objects.” A comfort, I know.

Exactly why such “queering” is underway – what its relevance might be – is not, however, made clear. An explanation for this bolting-on of irrelevant, flimsy tat – in the name of “queer theory” – was not, it seems, deemed necessary. Nor is it entirely obvious how such “queering” of museum contents benefits those who wish to know more about Henry VIII’s favourite warship.

Regarding the mysterious purpose of all this “queering” of sixteenth-century objects, Rafi adds, drily, “It justifies the employment of lecturers in ‘Queer Theory’…” Indeed. That does seem to be the primary objective. That, and the modish tactic of identifying a thing that people find interesting and then inserting one’s own rather narrow and tedious politics, and by extension oneself.

Looking through the catalogue notes, no other obvious benefit, for visitors, springs to mind. Unless we include the exercising of eyebrows by moving them up and down. And the effect, the incongruity – the sheer cack-handedness of it – is quite bizarre. It reminded me of the ‘adverts’ in The Truman Show, in which Truman’s wife and neighbours suddenly, rather desperately, and often mid-sentence, draw attention to some cleaning product or chicken dinner.

Welcome to the world of queered history. It’s like actual history, but less so.

Other questions generated by means of Queer Theorising include, “Do I think I’m having sex with my dogs when they kiss my face?” Apparently, for Dr Kathy Rudy, a Professor of Women’s Studies, being licked by a dog is difficult to distinguish from kissing grandma on the cheek or being lost in a full-on erotic fever. And thus, we’re told, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.”

The, um, research in question – by Mr Karl Andersson, a PhD student at the University of Manchester – was not without its challenges and frustrations: “I had hit a wall in my research. Semi-structured interviews can only take you so far,” we’re told. “I had a persistent feeling of only having traced the surface of my topic, and of wanting to go deeper.” And the hence the masturbation, of course.

Further, annotated and fairly graphic, details of Mr Andersson’s paedophilic self-pleasuring project – sorry, “ethnographic fieldwork” – can be perused via the link above. Should that be your thang.

As to the “embodied understanding” mentioned above, it remains unclear what exactly was achieved – beyond the obvious, I mean. Mr Andersson tells us that during three months of, er, research, and 30 notebook entries, his mind often wandered to thoughts of other gentlemen doing much the same thing with the same publications, including the copies he’d acquired second-hand.

This is described as a “feeling of intimacy.” Dozing off afterwards is described as “self-care,” which is apparently important. And we’re informed that the Cellophane wrappers of his pornography collection “signalled luxury and investment in myself.” It’s Earth-rumbling stuff.

If you’re an employer and trying to thin a pile of job applications, repeated errors of even simple grammar and spelling are, inevitably, going to be a big help, given their tendency to correspond with, and thereby signal, both carelessness and imprecision. If someone is apparently too distracted to proofread their own job application, that’s unlikely to inspire great confidence.

However, Dr Strouse has foreseen this practical problem and proposes a bold, if unorthodox, solution: “The workplace has way too much power and should not be allowed to determine something as fundamental as how we speak,” says he. “People need to tell their bosses, ‘Fuck you.’” And a long and satisfying employment history will no doubt follow.

You see, Dr Strouse is – in his mind, at least – “dismantling linguistic racism.” And he’s doing this using minority students as his little foot soldiers. How very brave of him. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. Because by the time any sufficiently credulous students have pinned their hopes upon it, it won’t be his problem. 

Apparently, San Francisco’s elementary-school children are expected to have, or at least regurgitate, strong opinions on the Israeli military.

Many young children are of course accustomed to being given a “word of the day,” though I would guess that such highlighted words don’t usually include “strike,” “ceasefire,” and “protest.” Nor, I suspect, would third-graders often be tasked with “disrupting whiteness,” which seems somewhat ambitious and just a tad question-begging, or with imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords.”

Yet here we are.

Readers may wish to ponder whether the sins against progressivism mentioned above – expressing doubts about rioting, or teaching Chinese pronunciation to students of Chinese – exist on the same level of inaptness as, say, a public-school teacher showing ten-year-olds shockingly graphic video of a man being shot in the neck – and killed, in front of his family – and showing that footage repeatedly, “numerous times,” while hectoring those same ten-year-olds on the merits of so-called “anti-fascism.”

Answers on a postcard, please.

The above does, I think, invite questions as to the vetting of public school educators and the kinds of personalities the job seems to attract in high concentrations. It also invites questions as to what kind of environment, what kind of workplace assumptions, might make a teacher of ten-year-olds think that such behaviour would be considered acceptable.

I mean, if nothing else, and even absent any conventional moral inhibition, you’d think that one of the obvious considerations for a teacher of ten-year-olds might at least be the assumption that parents will find out. In this case, when their children arrive home bewildered and distressed. And to therefore behave accordingly. And yet.

On the subject of parents being shocked to discover, belatedly, what their children are actually being taught, these three incidents came to mind. Among many others. Note, in the third link, the casual invention of a fake curriculum – yes, a fake curriculum – so as to deceive any curious parents. And all while insisting, “This is not being deceitful.”

In light of which, the “anti-fascist” snuff-video session mentioned above – the one for other people’s ten-year-olds – doesn’t exactly scream anomaly or aberration, or some unfortunate misreading of the room, so much as a ratcheting upwards.

Behind this mannered waffle is the weird implication that devotees of folk music are somehow, simply by existing, excluding racial minorities. Shooing them away. Though details on this point are neither obvious nor forthcoming.

Still, perhaps we can look forward to an academic interrogation of classic car shows in Nottinghamshire as some heinous bastion of “white-centricity.” Another item on the list of Things That Must Be Decolonised And Morally Corrected.

“Our aim,” says Fay Hield, professor of music at the University of Sheffield, “is to break down the barriers for people to get involved in folk music. Opening up the genre to different audiences will help to sustain the nation’s folk music for decades to come.”

Different audiences. Not the audience it actually has, mind, the one it attracts, and which is arrived at via choice and musical inclination. No actual barriers to participation are specified, of course. But the actually existing audience is nonetheless all wrong, apparently.

Having covered quite a few of these “decolonisation” efforts, which generally rely on a fig-leaf of widening access and removing barriers, it’s remarkable just how rarely any meaningful obstacle to access is actually mentioned. Typically, the humdrum is depicted as gruelling and somehow agonising, and motes are inflated to the size of boulders.

We were told, for instance, that racial minorities are being “deterred” from visiting the British countryside “due to deep-rooted, complex barriers.” Barriers such as the fact that rock-climbing instructors are usually white. And apparently this unremarkable state of affairs, in a white-majority country, is something that needs fixing.

Though it occurs to me that if a person with brown skin were being deterred from trying rock climbing by the fact that the instructor is likely to be white, then it seems somewhat unlikely that said person is interested in rock climbing to any significant extent. And a person deterred by such things may also want to reflect on their own racial assumptions. But we’re not supposed to mention those, at least not in an unflattering light.

You see, it’s “the radical act of collective song.” The “radical act of joy.” And the radical act of shunning white people as some kind of moral contaminant. How the time must fly.

As the only racial group being explicitly excluded is Old Whitey, the obvious inference is that the cause of all this alleged misery and “trauma” is the party being excluded. As if the mere proximity of People Of Pallor would inhibit and befoul any creative endeavour, any glimmer of “joy.” Given the minority status of white people in London, it seems a bit much. And ever so slightly ungrateful.

And it is, I think, worth noting that the nation’s capital, where these dramas of “resistance” unfold, has in my lifetime gone from a native white-majority city, over 90%, to a native white-minority one, around 35%. Yet it would seem that even this dramatically downsized white devil population is, for some, still too burdensome and oppressive. A cause of “collective trauma.”

I have questions, dear reader. Important, probing questions. Are you unenthused by hip-hop tracks about “police brutality and racialised oppression”? Does rapping about poverty and “the woes of Black Americans as artists” not render you giddy and enthralled? Do you not delight in endless repetition of the word nigga?

I ask because we’re told – by Dr Jeremy McCool and Dr Tyrone Smith, two devotees of “critical race theory” – that a failure to gush with enthusiasm is a result of “systemic bias and inherent prejudice,” and is suppressing such innovation. It is, they say, “the silencing of intellectuals in music.”

It’s perhaps worth noting how one of the most hazardous of words to use – one that may result in a kicking or sudden unemployment, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil – is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are supposed to be drawn, or at least happy to tolerate. Provided it’s being mouthed, endlessly, by idiots of a certain hue. And failing to have a taste for this experience, over and over again, is, we’re now told, evidence of racism.

As I’ve said regarding the pop-culture site io9, the more insufferably woke the site has become, the more generic and unwritten its content feels.

By which I mean, it was once possible to stumble across lengthy articles on niche pop-culture subjects, often written with an affectionate expertise. Now, however, it’s difficult to differentiate one contributor from another. The content doesn’t read as if anyone in particular wrote it. It’s flavourless, uniform in its politics and ideological assumptions – both pointedly announced – and uniform in its tone. It might as well be generated by an algorithm.

I suppose that’s what makes the Calvin and Hobbes article grimly funny, in a disappointing modernity kind of way. If you poke through Mr Shayo’s other, numerous contributions, the tone, such as it is, is much the same. There’s no obvious personality – no sense of any particular person having written it – no sense of mischief, and no discernible wit. Mr Shayo is, however, capable of making entirely contradictory claims, on the very same subject, mere days apart.

For instance, in the article quoted above, Mr Shayo worries that the absence of smartphones and GPS tracking devices may be “baffling for young readers,” and he bemoans how the strip “doesn’t have any modern technology.” And yet we’re told – days later – that, “the lack of technological influence makes the strip read as a timeless work.” “It always feels that it’s something that could still happen today… the absence of technology is hardly notable.”

Likewise, Mr Shayo insists that “ending Calvin and Hobbes is exactly what saved it,” and praises the strip’s creator, Bill Watterson, for refusing to license spin-offs, adaptations, and potentially lucrative merchandise, thereby “living up to the ideals that the strip… championed.” “Ending the strip,” we’re told, “was a good decision” and “there is no reason to tarnish that legacy by adding more to an already concluded work.”

While, one week earlier, “Calvin and Hobbes needs to be an animated show.” Because “an adaptation or continuation is essential.”

“For us,” says Eleanor Margolis, “the ideal parenting setup would consist of three or four of us sharing responsibility for a child (the others involved would also be responsible for providing the sperm).”

Providing the sperm. A joyous and maternal turn of phrase.

Also of note, the idea of wanting a baby, but with only a third or a quarter of the responsibility. A kind of low-commitment parenting.

Bodes well.

Readers are invited to ponder the appeal, for any gentleman with fatherhood in mind, of effectively becoming a sperm donor who is also expected to perform household chores, for many years, and to pay child maintenance. In a sexless relationship with random lesbians who may find him barely tolerable, a necessary complication.

But this, it seems, is how one “redefines the family unit completely.” It’s “the ideal parenting setup.”

I’m still processing the fact that a man who wants to violate women’s private spaces, who regards womanhood as some kind of costume, and who expects deference from women regarding what they may think and say, is now lecturing us on “patriarchy,” misogyny, and “toxic men.”

A person doesn’t just happen to be born into a context that their parents also just happened to be born into. I could not have been born to Mr and Mrs Jeong in South Korea, any more than I could have been born to a Yemeni peasant couple, or a Californian billionaire. Much as I – the person talking to you now – could not have been born in 1652.

The newborn me was a result of a particular lineage, of choices made by specific individuals and the genes of those individuals – who can of course say the same thing about themselves. To imply that anyone’s birth is a random thing, as if it could have happened anywhere, at any time, as if the particulars were immaterial, is, it seems to me, a little odd. Indeed, arse-backwards.

And I doubt that many parents see the birth of their child as some random occurrence, unmoored from any context or preceding events. I’d imagine it wouldn’t seem random at all.

Unless you imagine a queue of souls waiting to spawn in some small but arbitrary body on a continent chosen by the spin of a wheel. Or cosmic bingo balls.