Full Frontal Nihilism

I just read that Antifa has clashed “violently” (how else would Antifa clash with anything?) with Los Angeles police outside a Korean spa where, according to a video complaint by a woman (actual), a transgender woman (non-actual) exposed “herself” (man, this stuff gets complicated, typographically speaking!) to young girls. Needless to say, Antifa, tireless fighters on behalf of flashers everywhere, refused to take this outrage against the basic human right to expose one’s full frontal nudity to underage girls lying down. (That is to say, Antifa refused to take the outrage lying down, not that it is a basic human right to expose oneself to young girls lying down, although I suppose Antifa would fight for that right too, if push came to shove — as, for Antifa, it always does.)

Anyway, I just wanted to apply one useful correction [in square brackets] to the Fox News article describing the backstory to the violent clash.

A customer at Wi Spa posted a viral video to Instagram on June 24 in which she complained that a transgender woman exposed her [MALE] genitals “right in front of young girls, teens and grown women.”

I think my bracketed insertion may help to clear up the gist of the story. A man who has pathetic fantasies of being a woman decided that the fulfillment of his fantasies required the cooperation, which is to say the involuntary moral submission, of the female patrons of the spa “she” chose to visit. 

One of the more grotesque elements of this story, and all others like it, is the extent to which the political agenda of the sexual nihilism brigade reveals the essential megalomaniacal infantilism of today’s radical progressives. 

Back in the old days, regardless of one’s sexual proclivities or possible deviancies, most adults understood, and usually abided by, one basic premise of social responsibility regarding such matters: Not in front of the children. Today, by contrast, it is deemed precisely necessary to engage the children directly with one’s deviancy, to expose one’s genitals (and one’s preferred uses of same) to children in particular.

The emotional imperative of this new moral outlook is clear: “This is all about me. What I want is all that matters. Children must be forced to accept me.”

Thus, there will be none of that old-fashioned deference to the innocence of children, who, as people used to say, are not ready for such things.

“No! They have to be ready, because my personal feelings and wishes demand complete social compliance and acquiescence to my will. You have to affirm my feelings and officially accept that I am just another one of the girls, in spite of my male genitalia — maybe even because of my male genitalia. You have to look right at my biological maleness and say, ‘She’s a woman,’ because if you can’t do that, if you won’t say that, then you are denying my humanity!”

Well, no. They are just denying your female humanity. And they have every right to do that, too, since you just showed them why you should not be regarded as female. As you may recall, in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” it is a child who calls nonsense on all the adults’ willingness to deny reality on the command of authority. A child — even one raised in public schools — is not quite ready yet to look at a man exposing his genitals in the change room and say, “Mom, who is that nice lady?”

But for that man’s right to demand that the child say exactly that, and really feel it, Antifa is prepared to storm the streets and demand international communism.

These days, the word “nihilism” gets used a whole lot, but without much definitional content. Nihilism defined for beginners, then: The rejection of all truth, meaning, purpose, or nature; hence, the assertion that reality does not exist, or to state this more positively (though paradoxically), the assertion that reality is nothing — that the meaninglessness of things, if you will, is the only reality.

“Um, could you give me a practical example of nihilism as it would be applied in real life?” asks the initiate.

Sure, I reply. Here is one:

A customer at Wi Spa posted a viral video to Instagram on June 24 in which she complained that a transgender woman exposed her genitals “right in front of young girls, teens and grown women.”

Clarification: This example comes from the United States, where, as Allan Bloom incisively pointed out in writing a generation ago, this very dark and sullen European perspective has been adapted to American tastes as “nihilism with a happy ending,” which is to say existential emptiness reinterpreted as a new opportunity for self-expression — or, as Bloom expressed it even more pointedly in a recorded lecture, “Nihilism for the greater fulfillment of your life.”

In recent years, however, the nihilistic vanguard in America (and elsewhere) has adopted a somewhat more, shall we say, aggressive approach to the greater fulfillment of their lives. This new approach and the emotional state underlying it are captured nicely in a tweet issued by Antifa to signal their latest outbreak of self-expression at the Los Angeles spa: “ROUND TWO MOTHER-F******.”