By contrast, anybody who got in the way of this direction of travel found themselves mown down with astonishing vigour. The weapons to hand (accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia and finally transphobia) were all too easy to wield and there was no price to pay for wielding them unfairly, unjustifiably or indeed frivolously. Critics of the emerging orthodoxy, including scientists, were accused of being propelled by the most base motives. As Steven Pinker wrote in 2002, ‘Many writers are so desperate to discredit any suggestion of an innate human constitution that they have thrown logic and civility out the window . . . The analysis of ideas is commonly replaced by political smears and personal attacks . . . The denial of human nature has spread beyond the academy and has led to a disconnect between intellectual life and common sense.’11
Of course it had. For the purpose of large sections of academia had ceased to be the exploration, discovery or dissemination of truth. The purpose had instead become the creation, nurture and propagandization of a particular, and peculiar, brand of politics. The purpose was not academia, but activism.
This fact is betrayed in a number of ways. The first is through the pretence that these academic political claims were in fact no less than science. Throughout the decades in which the social sciences were producing the bases of intersectionality they consistently presented their claims as though the ‘social’ wasn’t in their title and the ‘science’ was real. Again in this they were following a strain which went right back to Marx through Nikolai Bukharin, Georgi Plekhanov and the Second International. In all of these cases claims were presented as though they were scientific when they were, in fact, not even politics, but more like magic. This was make-believe, masquerading as science.
Another curiosity about the intersectional movement is the camouflage that it employs. For aside from McIntosh’s most popular document, the one thing that all the purveyors of the ideologies of social justice and intersectionality have in common is that their work is unreadable. Their writing has the deliberately obstructive style ordinarily employed when someone either has nothing to say or needs to conceal the fact that what they are saying is not true. Here is one sentence from Judith Butler in full flow:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.12
Prose this bad can only occur when the author is trying to hide something.
A theoretical physicist like Sheldon Lee Glashow cannot afford to write in the unreadable prose of the social sciences. He needs to communicate exceptionally complex truths in as simple and clear a language as possible. When he weighs up the latest claim in string theory he concludes that it ‘addresses none of our questions, makes no predictions, and cannot be falsified’. ‘If one’s theory can’t predict anything,’ Peter Woit observed with some asperity, ‘it is just wrong and one should try something else.’13 This clarity, and this honesty, may still exist in the sciences. But it is dead – if it ever existed – in the social sciences. Besides which, if practitioners of women’s studies, queer studies and race studies tried something else when their theories couldn’t predict anything, or were proved wrong, then their departmental buildings would empty.
Still, the purveyors of social justice theories have done a job, in providing a library of works which (however unreadable) present an intellectual framework on top of which political positions can be adopted and politicized claims can be made. Anyone who finds it useful to argue that gender or race are social constructs can cite a whole library of material to bolster their claim and cite endless numbers of tenured academics who can ‘prove’ it. A god is made of X, who is then the subject of study by Y, and before long Z comes along to write on the rearticulation of temporality demonstrated by any Althusserian comparison of their work. Any student wondering whether the world really works like this can be instantly presented with the library of intimidating evidence that the gobbledygook he is failing to comprehend is his fault and not the fault of the writer of the gobbledygook.
Of course sometimes when it is nearly impossible to tell what is being said, almost anything can be said and exceptionally dishonest arguments can be smuggled in under the guise of complexity. This is one of the reasons why Butler and others write so badly. If they wrote clearly they would attract more outrage and ridicule. It is also one reason why this field finds it so hard to detect what is sincere and what is satire. The claims made from the social sciences in recent years have become so unmoored from reality that when their walls have been assailed by genuine intruders it turns out that they have no defences to either detect or repel them.
One of the most beautiful things to happen in recent years was ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’. This was an academic paper published in 2017 which proposed that:
The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.14
The claim was peer-reviewed and published in an academic journal called Cogent Social Sciences. The only problem was that it was a hoax carried out by two academics – Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay – who had immersed themselves in the academic literature of our time. Once the authors admitted to their hoax the journal in question unpublished the piece. But the culprits have successfully repeated the exercise with other academic journals in the years since.
In 2018, with the addition of Helen Pluckrose, the same academics managed to get a paper published in a journal of ‘feminist geography’ titled ‘Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon’. This paper claimed that dog-humping in Portland parks was further evidence of the ‘rape-culture’ which many academics and students had by then begun to claim was the most perceptive lens through which to see our societies. Another paper published in a journal of ‘feminist social work’ was titled ‘Our Struggle is My Struggle’. There the spoofers successfully managed to meld together passages from Mein Kampf and pastiches of feminist social-justice theory jargon and pass it off as an academic study. In a third paper published in ‘Sex Roles’ the authors claimed to have used ‘thematic analysis of table dialogue’ to conduct a two-year study on why heterosexual males would want to eat at a Hooters restaurant.15 Aside from some swift unpublishings, the main response from the authors’ peers once their successful infiltration had been exposed was to turn on them and attempt to expel Boghossian from his university position.
The spoofs carried out by Boghossian and his colleagues made a number of deadly serious points. Not just that these areas of academic study had become playgrounds for frauds, but that there was absolutely nothing that could not be said, studied or claimed so long as it fitted into the pre-existing theories and presumptions of the relevant fields and utilized its disastrous language. So long as people were willing to claim that we live in a patriarchal society, a ‘rape-culture’, a homophobic, transphobic and racist culture; so long as they indict their own society and scatter in a smattering of admiration for any other society (from an approved list), then almost anything can be said. So long as the pyramid of oppression is believed in and propagated to others, almost anything can find its way into the canon of unreadable and largely uncited academic work.
However, the biggest mistake was not in allowing this to go on at publicly funded institutions for decades. The true error was in not realizing that some day its fruits would spill out into the rest of the society. In its 2018 guidance on how its members should treat ‘traditional m
asculinity’ in boys and men, the American Psychological Association wrote:
Awareness of privilege and the harmful impacts of beliefs and behaviours that maintain patriarchal power have been shown to reduce sexist attitudes in men and have been linked to participation in social justice activities.16
Indeed. If boys could just realize that their gender was ‘performative’ rather than natural, they could grow up to play a greater role in social justice activities, to the ends that Laclau, Mouffe and a generation of other radicals had always dreamed of.
2
Women
In his 2002 book The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker noted that gender had already become one of the ‘hot button’ issues of the day. Nevertheless he seemed confident that the scientific view would win out. Over several pages he listed just some of the biological differences that exist between men and women, such as the fact that while men have ‘larger brains with more neurons (even correcting for body size)’, women ‘have a higher percentage of gray matter’ and that many of the psychological differences between the sexes are exactly what an evolutionary biologist would predict (males being larger than females on average because of an evolutionary history rife with violent competition for mates).1 And treading close to what was soon to be a whole other issue, he also noted the divergence in development between the brains of boys and girls and the effects on the brain of testosterone and androgens. It is a stimulating scientific riposte to the people claiming that biological differences between the sexes do not exist. As Pinker said, ‘Things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born identical except for their genitalia, with all other differences coming from the way society treats them.’2
Except that less than two decades later they are. The facts are certainly on Pinker’s side, but the noisier voices are not. As a result, since Pinker wrote The Blank Slate our societies have doubled-down on the delusion that biological difference – including aptitude differences – can be pushed away, denied or ignored. A similar process has occurred in social differences. Any parent may notice the differences between their sons and daughters, but the culture tells them that there are none or that those that are there are purely ‘performative’ issues.
The fall-out of this and much else is toxic. Most people are not gay. Men and women have to find some ways of getting along. And yet the societal self-delusion over biological reality is just one in a whole series of such self-delusions that our societies have decided to engage in. Worse is that we have begun trying to reorder our societies not in line with facts we know from science but based on political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences. Of all the things that are deranging our societies, everything to do with the sexes – and particularly relations between the sexes – are perhaps the most deranging of all. Because the facts are there all the time, in front of our eyes. It is just that we are not meant to notice them, or if we notice them we are expected to stay silent.
It is 2011 and time for the Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica. A long way into an evening of lengthy self-congratulation Paul Rudd and Eva Mendes come onstage to present the prize for best screenplay. Mendes (who is 36 at the time) explains that she and Rudd (who is 41) had arranged to do some funny stuff up onstage but that the show was running behind schedule. As Mendes explained it to the audience: ‘Paul was going to grab my tits. You guys were going to be shocked, horrified, and you guys were going to laugh hysterically. But apparently we can’t do that any more because we’re out of time. So . . .’
Rudd then ogles Mendes’s chest meaningfully, pushes his hand onto her right breast and grips it hard before saying deadpan, ‘The nominees for best screenplay are . . .’ The audience laughs, gasps, whoops and cheers. Mendes looks faux-shocked. While Rudd is holding her right breast, Mendes uses her spare hand to flick back her hair. It is important, after all, to look good.
After this has been going on for a while another woman joins them onstage. The actress Rosario Dawson (31) has leapt up to the podium and is grabbing Rudd’s crotch, hard. The audience whoops, cheers and laughs some more. ‘Oh my god, what’s happening,’ says Mendes a couple of times in unconvincing bemusement at the tableau of which she is a part. She opens the award envelope. All the while Dawson keeps her hand vigorously attached to Rudd’s crotch while waving her other hand in the air in a gesture of power or triumph. Although Rudd is no longer holding either of Mendes’s breasts, Dawson continues to hold Rudd’s crotch. The audience continues to laugh and scream with delight. Because this is 2011 and sexual molestation is still hilarious.
In a backstage interview afterwards Dawson explained the impetus for her equal-opportunity groping:
I love Paul. I’ve been a huge fan of Paul since like way back in the Clueless moment and stuff. But he had this like vice grip on her breast and I was like ‘OK that’s funny, like ha ha ok’ for like a second. But then it was like that kept going and going and then the lights went down and the clip started rolling and he was still vice gripping her . . . So I was like ‘Alright I’m going to just grab his package.’ Why not? It was kind of nice. It wasn’t bad. It was actually a pretty good package. I’ve kind of been curious since I was a teenager watching Clueless. But yeah so then he stopped . . . I’m just a women’s rights activist and I was getting a little tired that he was grabbing her boob onstage for half an hour. Nothing bad it was funny.
Her male interviewer reassures her: ‘It was one of the . . . it got great reaction.’ ‘OK good,’ she replies:
I grabbed his package onstage. It was kind of great. Why do men always get to cop a feel? Women get to cop a feel too. You know what I’m saying. I’m just saying. Just keeping equal opportunity.3
This was the way back then. The grope-fest at the Independent Spirit Awards was not unusual or especially remarked upon. The idea of groping, grabbing or exposing yourself to people of the opposite sex may have been looked upon with a certain disdain in wider society for years. But in Hollywood it was still all part of the entertainment. In a profession in which nudity is normal and for which ‘the casting couch’ was coined, the boundaries were never easy to discern. This is one reason why Hollywood might be a bad place to base either a set of ethics to aspire to or a set of ethics which should be regarded as particularly emblematic of anything beyond the entertainment industry.
Different standards always operated in Hollywood. It was the only industry in the twenty-first century in which someone still on the run for child-rape could be applauded, revered and even viewed as something of a victim by their peers. Had an accountant, social worker or even a priest in their forties anally raped a 13-year-girl, then they might have got away with it as has Roman Polanski. They may have found friends to cover for them. But it would be inconceivable – even in the Catholic Church – for someone to be applauded on prime-time television as being at the top of their profession while still on the run from the law. Hollywood, and the audience of Polanski’s peers at the Academy Awards in 2003 in particular, felt no such restraining impulse.
It was always a world slightly apart – as centres of the arts and entertainment always have been – and so as bad a place as it is possible to find from which to determine societal norms. Especially social norms as complex as relations between the sexes. Only in Hollywood would a famous director like Woody Allen separate from his wife because he has been caught having a relationship with her adopted daughter. But then this is a town, and a business, which threw up Gloria Grahame in the 1940s. Of her four husbands the fourth (Tony Ray) was the son of her second husband (Nicholas Ray) and his first wife. The relationship between Grahame and Tony Ray was first exposed when she was found in bed with him (Grahame being in her late twenties at the time, and Ray just 13).
So to make Hollywood, or movie people, into moral examples might have been a mistake in any era. But when the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in 2017 that is exactly what was attempted. Yet, in its own way the oddity of the entertainment industry always does hold up a mirror. And i
f it is not any exemplar for how to behave then it is certainly a mirror which highlights the confusion of the age. Most especially the confusion over what roles women might play – and which roles everyone knows they can play – in an era that seems to swing between libertinism and prudery without finding any mean-like balance.
Consider the fondness with which people look back on the actress Drew Barrymore’s appearance on the David Letterman Show in April 1995: 12 April was Letterman’s birthday and Barrymore was on the show, describing – among other things – her recent fondness for nude dancing. Although 20 years old at the time Barrymore spent the interview playing by turns the role of a confident sexual woman and a naughty little schoolgirl.
Eventually, presenting it as a birthday treat, in front of the live audience (who whooped, laughed and hollered throughout) Barrymore asked if Letterman would like a dance. Without waiting for an answer she called for the studio band to strike up, clambered onto the presenter’s desk and performed a table-dance for Letterman, a married man twice her age. Slinking up and down, with her hands above her head and her midriff exposed, Barrymore’s performance eventually culminated in her whipping up her short top and exposing her bare breasts to a visibly shocked Letterman. The audience could not see the breasts, though a camera caught what the Mail Online’s side-bar of shame would call a side-boob. But still the audience could not get enough of it. They loved the whole thing, laughing and cheering throughout and giving a great roar of appreciation when Barrymore exposed herself to the host.
The Madness of Crowds Page 8
