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September 8, 2021 - 2:15pm
In 1999, The Guardian ran a piece on an annual prize for bad writing, which celebrates “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles”. The only condition for entry was that no parody was allowed. The winner was Judith Butler, for this:
This week, The Guardian ran an interview with Butler who boldly stated that: “…we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women.” Here, Butler’s argument is much more clear: the category of women must be expanded to include men.
While I don’t contest that Butler is a bad writer, it appears to me that her linguistic obfuscation serves a purpose. Butler follows the post-modernist school of feminist thought, hoping to “disrupt” the categories of gender, thereby rendering it meaningless. Of course, such a proposition is ridiculous.
If we can put on and take off our gender, then that means we can also decide to identify our way out of oppression. Girls in menstrual huts in Nepal; teenagers being forced into marriage; girls and women being bought and sold in the global sex trade; women everywhere being raped and then disbelieved and blamed – all of this can be dealt with if we simply perform a different gender expression. Somehow I am not convinced that performing as a Drag King will solve the problem of misogyny.
In the same recent interview, the reporter asks: ‘This year’s furore around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobia followed by bloody protests organised by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?”
To which Butler suggests that TERFs (as she so lovingly refers to feminists who defend our sex-based rights) act as fascist enablers:
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SubscribeIn academia; the social sciences and humanities, the all pervasive nihilist revolution is fully entrenched. Its corrosive, philistine, stench has seeped out into the wider culture, compromising, destroying family, nation, personal responsibility before moving on to other bourgeois concepts such as biology, genetics and reason itself.
And this has been fully embraced by the feminist movement who are now coming to reap what they have sowed.
Yet I side with the TERFS, not out of any goodwill – they have happily squandered that, but only because they are now the ones holding the line before 2 + 2 = 5.
The Trans thing going on is merely a first salvo over the ship of society, testing the range, as it were, gauging the response. I don’t think anyone cares about this issue, it is just something to use to draw up the battle lines.
The actual battle is all about Equity. The fight of the Neo-Marxists is that all who have; be made to pay those who have not. For this to happen they need to completely establish that the West is totally composed of ‘Oppressors and Oppressed’.
Equity being equality of outcomes, not opportunity, and thus redistribution, as meritocracy, work, effort, talent, do not justify uneven holding of assets. The basis being the society is oppressors and oppressed, and thus anyone who has more is an oppressor, and those with less are oppressed – and redistribution is the just cure.
Biden’s $3.5 Trillion on ‘social infrastructure’ is 80% Equity, and 20% pure corruption, and 0% good. The recently agreed $1.3 Trillion infrastructure bill is 80% Equity, 20% roads and bridges.
Naturally this amount of deficit spending will being about a vast Global Depression – but Neo-Marxists WANT that, because as all become dependent on gov handouts, all become clients of the state, and that is Marxism, and so all who are wrong thinkers can be punished, and those of the approved groups can be rewarded.
This is the ultimate battle of whither Freedom prevails, or if totalitarian systems take control under these Post Modernist Far Left/Liberal Neo-Marxists. You are in a war for your very existence, and think it just about the blurring of genders…. CRT and BLM are their ‘Critical Thinking’ which is based on this premise.
Thank you, Sanford, for your explanation. I’m not sure I agree with it entirely, as it seems to be somewhat overstated.
Even so, I get your point, and it does explain a lot about the dynamics of econ-eco-politico activism these days, especially the element of neo-marxists wanting a depression.
However, I do not appreciate your appending the “Biden’s” tag to the entirety of the so-called social infrastructure legislation. Our President is a seasoned politician who watched the wheels of .gov, in all aspects, turn, for 50 years before he attained his present job. Had Bernie or Elizabeth been managing this administration, there might be more accuracy in your assigning socialist descriptors to this present .gov, which is (let us not forget) tempered and mediated by republican input and limitations.
Joe Biden delivered us from the fascist fiasco of t(Rump). Joe is no marxist; he is a true American statesman whose policy inclinations are founded deeply in the Democratic infrastructure of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In this identity, he has actually delivered us from the excessive onslaught marxist abuses.
The Daily Mail USA is full of stories of University Professors being driven out by the Post Modernist Wokes – try Today’s on line one. Bret Weinstein and Jordon Peterson on Youtube will cover this well – here is the DM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9972935/Now-woke-factory-idiots-Outpouring-support-Portland-State-professor.html
We differ on Trump and Biden, but glad you get the new Philosophy which Woke is derived from.
I hear you. I have spent hours listening to Jordan and Bret. Theirs is the most relevant dialogue I have found anywhere.
I understand them. I was a useless Engish major who spent 35 years as a carpenter feeding three kids and wife (who now saves lives in ICU). Later, when my wife took over the bread and butter aspects, I reverted to my literary roots and wrote four historical fiction novels, Glass half-Full, Glass Chimera, Smoke (which begins in London on George VI’s coronation day), and the fourth novel, King of Soul, which deals with what happened to America during Vietnam.
“Woke” is just Civil Rights (which I have supported and somewhat documented in my historical fiction), now steroidized beyond reasonable utility.
Seeing now what is happening at the Universities, I consider that my early decision to not go that route is Providential.
Not yet he hasn’t. Let us hope so, but I doubt it. Read what is being done to women in Afghanistan. Among other things.
I have bitter firsthand experience of what you’re stating.
How did feminism do all that?
Don’t worry Julie, we’re all fascists now. The word has lost its sting
Not me. Speak for yourself. If you think your casually ridiculous pronouncement is cute or funny, maybe you really are a fascist.
But not me. No thank you.
Political confrontations are serious stuff, Andrew, not to be fodder for jokers and jesters. When Mussolini took over Italy, and Hitler took over Germany, almost 100 or 90 years ago, that was no joking matter to be casually commented upon.
The onslaught of real Fascism has murdered millions of human beings in the last 100 years.
We are not all fascists now. Some of us are still Democrats; some of us are Republicans, but we are citizens of a Constitutionally-protected democratic republic.
I don’t think you understood my point.
Of course he didn’t. He was absolutely right (after the first paragraph) and yet absolutely off point. There was an element of irony in your post and, as we know, most Americans don’t really seem to do that.
Trump was never a threat to impose Fascism on the US. He never had that power, and he used his power of executive orders far more sparingly than Biden has so far. And yet, I don’t think that Biden is going to achieve dictator status either, just that he would be a somewhat more likely candidate than Trump. To compare either to Hitler or even Mussolini suggests a fanatical left-wing perspective that has lost all ability to distinguish between moderate and extreme tendencies. And yes, I would say the same to anyone on the Right who suggests that Obama, Biden, the Clintons, et al, are essentially clones of Lenin, Stalin, or Mao.
BTW, I’m getting very annoyed at people like you who still think it’s funny or witty to spell the previous POTUS’s name as tRump. You are making, ahem, far bigger asses of yourselves than you of The Donald. And it also makes you fairly hypocritical for scolding Andrew D for his alleged joke or jest, which I doubt was even his intention.
The first thing I learned from watching Triggernometry, without being told specifically, was “embrace the labels.” They’re being tossed around so casually now that we might as well use them for our own amusement, otherwise the current environment is bad for the blood pressure.
Perhaps if Andrew D had said we are all “called” fascists now, he would not have roused resistance to the thought. Many feel obligated to object to irony involving such a cruel disgrace as fascism. At first, for it to grow, fascism depends on subtle irony and little incursions.
Also, it is a social evolution to realize and understand that gender is dynamic and kinetic, that it prevails over and is more primary than sex and deserves difficult ethical and practical accomodation. This is an abstract concept whose verity ensures its inevitable ascent to its full potential.
Judith Butler is grossly overrrated. She talks as she writes deliberately obscure nonsense and is unable to answer straighforward questions (as I discovered when I tried to put one to her). There is a superb critique by Pierre-André Taguieff in L’Imposture Décoloniale (alas not yet translated) which denounces the ‘extreme banality’, ‘lack of intellectual rigour’ and ‘ridiculous narcissism’ which the pseudo sophisticated discourse obscures. I am nevertheless surprised that she has descended into the mindless (mis)use of the word ‘fascist’, which is wheeled out on social media by social justice warriors many of whom do not even know what the word means. Does she? For those of us whose parents knew real fascism this (mis)use is laughable, though offensive too (like the wearing of yellow stars by anti vaxxers in France). It is not, however, the first time the term has been (mis)used. The Stasi ideolgues described the wall they built to divide East from West Germany the ‘anti-fascist’ barrier. For most on the West side of the wall Europe had been freed from the fascists. If Butler really does think those who object to the new gender ideology are fascists then she is condemning a large majority in the Western world.
Agreement on all points. “L’Imposture Decoloniale” is indeed a fine text that should be required reading. Judith Butler is a sad self-parody, a mentally ill has-been struggling to find anyone who is still foolish enough to read her. But she’s unintentionally comical and therein lies her real value to society.
I’m afraid that the language of the left very often favours obfuscation over communication. It is designed to create in the reader the sense that they are less intelligent than the writer. The Emperor’s New Clothes, only visible to truly enlightened and intelligent persons, is a good analogy.
What Julie Bindel wilfully refuses to understand is that any move from a structuralist account in which fascism is understood to structure Owen Jones’s relations to the world in relatively unbenign genocidal ways *to* a view of feminism in which patriarchy relations are decolonised via dressing it up as-it-were in a dress thus subjecting to pennyianesque re-articulation proving once and for all that a todger is your auntie’s prerogative
Today we award the Guardian Prize for:
““the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles”
well played Paul
Love your run on sentence, Paul.
Whew! Judith Butler has some stiff competition in the overcooked prose department.
If you want to refresh your palate after the profound dullness and incoherence of all of this read Roger Scruton’s Fools Frauds and Firebrands where he limpidly destroys this circular deeply stupid Island of Laputa craziness.
Or better yet, Camille Paglia’s “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf”, her viciously on-point attack on careerist pomo obscurantism, reprinted in her collection Sex, Art, and American Culture
Also Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
The Guardian? Doing censorship? I’m shocked.
Amazing… there was huge coverage of the Wi Spa incident and all the protests held thereafter. I didn’t see that a registered sex offender was charged in this case!
Even before this little nugget, why would The Guardian think it is automatically ok for entire men to be naked in a change room with women and girls? Oh yes, The Guardian is becoming a rag, so large is its bias.
Problem with the Guardian, as it is with Guardianistas and other associated groups, is that they base their whole creed on being the opposite of those they consider “enemies”, even when the things they support are ludicrous, extreme, illegal, morally bankrupt etc etc. It’s perverse, like many of the things they support
‘Spiked’ did quite a lot on that at the time, Lesley
From my heroic couplet satire, The Wokeiad by Richard Craven:-
Now neither washing claws nor wiping arce,
Wokeness takes wing and flies South business class.
Where Berkeley’s Judith Butler plies her trade,
Her torch of idiocy casts its shade:
Gender performativity’s her thing,
A stinkpot full of greasy ink which stings.
Let Logos wither now, deprived of light,
And all of Oakland bathe in blackest night.
Watch Butler tie up Sense in tangled rope
Of subclause pendant from embedded scope,
See Preposition yawn over chiasma’s void,
Neologism coined, curdling, and cloyed,
See Sentence butterflied upon the wheel,
And Meaning, drained, in agony congeal,
Poor Commonsense, imprisoned and ignored,
Naive Intelligence, traduced and bored.
The smiler with the knife under the woke,
Who patronises ordinary folk,
The sugared pill, the blandness and bromide,
The utter b0ll0cks never once defied.
With awful majesty writ on her brow,
The cold sarcastic stare of moody cow,
Wokeness presides over the crazed tumult,
The warped psychotic nonsense of her cult,
The Jonestown Kool Aid of which she’s the cause,
And chews the lib’ral writhing in her jaws.
Problem is this pointed skilful piece depends on readers getting The Dunciad references. As you know the vast majority of English grads in the last 30 yrs or so wouldn’t have a clue. The 18th century canon is a bit hard for most of them and dead white maleish poor things. The reading public can be forgiven perhaps.
Thanks very much for your kind words, nevertheless I think there’s still something in this offering for reasonably intelligent and rational people, even those not well-acquainted with 18th century formal verse.
Well I’m under 30 and I liked it. But then I’m also not an English grad so who knows?
Glad you liked it! As Terence Fitch says, it’s modelled on Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, of which I thoroughly recommend the googling. There’s also a little bit of the Temple of Mars scene from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.
On further reflection, I think you’ve made a useful point. Some footnotes & background info will make the thing more accessible to the newcomer to formal verse, for whom the rest of the present comment is intended.
As said in the Introduction, The Wokeiad is in heroic couplets. A heroic couplet is defined as a rhyming pair of iambic pentameter, whereby an iamb is in its turn defined as a foot of verse consisting in two syllables with the second syllable stressed ,i.e. {ta, DUH!}, and ‘pentameter’ means there are five iambs. Unpack all of this, and you end up with two rhyming lines with a rhythm like
{ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!}
{ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!} {ta, DUH!}
I’m no expert in the history of sustained heroic couplet verse, but the earliest exponent I have come across is Chaucer – much of the Canterbury Tales is in heroic couplet. A very nicely polished piece of heroic couplet verse from the late Elizabethan era is Christopher Marlowe’s Hero & Leander. Then moving swiftly along, the next prominent figure of my relatively paltry scholarship is John Dryden who lived and wrote and feuded with George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham during the late 17th century twilight of the Stuarts.
Sustained heroic couplet verse had its heyday in the 18th century, when its foremost exponent Alexander Pope lived and wrote and feuded with Curll and Lintot. But the age also boasted Pope’s friend Jonathan Swift, author of the scatological gem The Lady’s Dressing Room, and Samuel Johnston, who graced the culture with the altogether more dignified Vanity of Human Wishes. The Wokeiad is modelled as you point out on Pope’s Dunciad, which in its turn borrows from Dryden’s MacFlecknoe.
I haven’t come across much in the way of sustained heroic couplet verse dating from the modern era. The only two examples I can think of are:-
(i) Roy Campbell’s Georgiad, a satire attacking the Bloomsbury Group, inspired by Campbell’s disgust at the revelation of his wife’s lesbian affair with, if memory serves me, Ottoline Morrell.
(ii) The first half of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire consists in a 999 line heroic couplet poem. It’s interesting, but I’m not quite sure how well it works.
Thanks, Terence. I really enjoyed Drahcir’s piece (which I am coming to quite late), but I haven’t read the Dunciad; I must now go and have an excursion into Pope’s writings
The problem being that once you accept that femaleness is only contingently attached to female bodies (ie that it is not a manifestation of some inner or genetic reality) then you kind of leave the door open to the whole trans thing.
And if you go further like JButler and see gender as performative then the door is wide open.
She’s really only taking to its conclusion a logic that was set running by feminists before her.
‘I am not convinced that performing as a Drag King will solve the problem of misogyny.’ In a non-gendered world there can be no ‘misogyny’, so problem solved.
So here’s my question?
Does Judith Butler believe her own philosophy?
Damn near killed appreciation of jazz, too.
To pout or not to pout.
That is the question.
They may not be fascists but their resort to biological determinism is reactionary. Feminists may have some good arguments against the monstrous regiment of Trans but so far it’s so silent.
It is becoming more obvious that much of the momentum comes from an international Marxist coalition.
The Prod Boys weren’t the ones who physically attacked unarmed women and grabbed signs. They didn’t initiate any violence. Antifa did.