Two Random Acts of Civilizational Implosion
George Clooney, a thoroughly inconsequential member of an ultimately inconsequential profession who because he is famous for being famous believes, like so many of his ilk, that the world ought to care what he thinks about important political issues, has praised Australia’s Covid-19 response, and declared, on the basis of his no doubt expert-analyzed calculations, that 900,000 lives would have been saved had his own country followed the same protocols — such as, I suppose, turning his country into a sparsely populated island at the furthest geographical remove from the rest of civilization. Oh, and of course chasing down stray teenagers who decide to get some fresh air on an isolated beachfront, beating them bloody, and roughly dragging them to the police station as a lesson to all others who might dare to defy the state’s lockdown commands. And by the way, an absolute lockdown of the sort instituted in Australia probably seems a lot less constricting when one is locked down in any one of one’s various fifty-acre, twenty-five-room estates, each replete with all the luxuries of a world-class resort and with a full-time staff to cater to one’s every whim or need. No worries about mask mandates or getting billy-clubbed by the cops when one has four or five of one’s own private beaches to choose from, right Georgie-Porgie? Because this clown played a doctor on a TV show thirty years ago, he has granted himself the right to recommend arbitrary enslavement for the little people, whenever he thinks it might be appropriate “for their own good.” Fake physician, enslave thyself.
A sixteen-year-old American high school student has purchased her fifteen minutes of fame by uploading to social media a video of herself complaining about her school’s dress code. Specifically, she berates the school for refusing her (and of course all sixteen-year-old women everywhere!) the right to wear midriff- and bust-revealing clothing in class, since after all these body parts are quite “natural,” whereas she claims that what is really needed is for the males who are so ill-mannered as to notice such outfits to “keep it in their pants.” “Our bodies aren’t distracting, you’re just disgusting,” her social media post declares.
But wait one moment, missy! If you should be free to expose any body parts you wish on the grounds that these are “natural,” then why shouldn’t this apply to men’s body parts too, whether those of your teachers or those of your male classmates? Why should they have to keep “it” in their pants if you shouldn’t have to keep “them” in your shirt? The implicit answer, of course, is that women’s exposure embodies freedom, whereas men’s exposure embodies patriarchal oppression. This girl is demanding the right to behave in overtly sexual ways while simultaneously declaring anyone who dares to be “distracted” by (or object to) her overtly sexual behavior as oppressive, even to the point of publicly judging her own teachers as “disgusting” if they notice it enough to ask her to expose less of herself in class. (Nothing enhances the all-important teacher-student connection in the classroom better than branding one’s teacher a pervert on the internet.)
Observe that the teachers are condemned as “disgusting” not because they are acting inappropriately toward the overtly sexualized students, but precisely because they are seeking to remove the conditions that might encourage such inappropriate feelings, or even behavior. In other words, it is the very fact that their dress code enforcements draw attention to the natural attraction of men toward women that is deemed objectionable, along with the antiquated (i.e., sexist) male protectiveness entailed by their wish to reduce the immodest sexuality of the girls’ in-class behavior.
Here is your feminist agenda in its full life-denying ugliness, filtered all the way down to the self-righteous attitudinizing of schoolchildren. Girls, it is now insisted, should be allowed to show their belly buttons and their cleavage anywhere they like — on the condition that men (at least the ones whose attention the girls are not seeking) should train themselves, in the names of equality and anti-sexism, not to notice or care about this exposed female flesh, in the way men used to notice such things and care about them. That is, the old concept of modesty, which was explicitly a mechanism of subduing and moderating men’s natural inclinations, channeling and elevating innate bodily urges into nobler ideals and attachments, is to be jettisoned in favor of the psychological self-censorship of men forcibly dulling themselves to the omnipresence of openly sexual exhibitionism until it no longer means a thing.
If these militant feminists-by-indoctrination get what they want, which is nothing less than the death of human nature, they might eventually begin to come to terms with the full meaning of the traditional warning about being careful what you wish for. After all, if you truly don’t want anyone to notice your belly button — if you really don’t want anyone to give a damn about it one way or another — why make such a fuss about exposing it?
For what it’s worth — which may be nothing more than a passing lament about the loss of all notion of the true, the good, and the beautiful — I daresay young women such as this, who rant at men as disgusting for noticing women’s natural attractions, or for having natural responses to same (whether desirous or protective), are unlikely to be victimized by the patriarchal feelings they so programmatically despise. No one, I would guess, will ever sleep on this girl’s doorstep, struggle with his words in her presence, write a poem about her eyes, or declare himself her eternal captive. No one will turn to reflection about the meaning of life, die willingly in battle, or dream of God, freedom, and immortality under her influence. For she has reduced herself to nothing more than an unwanted distraction that finds male attention disgusting. The men such feminists warn to “keep it in their pants” will, under the deflating influence of this anti-feminine and reductionist command, also keep their souls in a box. No wings will sprout here, there will be no flight, no greatness, no eternity, just the occasional bout of bodily amusement to take the edge off, and otherwise plenty of soulless, undistracted equality.
