OO'S THAT GUT-LORD MARCHIN'...?
YOU SHOULD CUT-DOWN ON YER PORK-LIFE, MATE, GET SOME EXERCISE..!!
IT'S NOT ABOUT YER VORSPRUNGZ-DIRK TECHNIQUE, Y'KNOW...
THE IMPOSSIBILITY PROBLEM
As a culture we have entered an area which is now mined with impossibility problems. From some of the most famous women on the planet we have heard the demand that women have the right to be sexy without being sexualized. Some of the most prominent cultural figures in the world have shown us that to oppose racism we must become a bit racist. Now a whole set of similar impossibilities are being demanded in an equally non-conciliatory manner.
There was a fine example on the BBC’s This Week in October 2017 when an artist and writer going by the mononym ‘Scottee’ appeared on the programme to discuss a short political film he had made. As a self-described ‘big fat queer fem’ he complained that he was a ‘victim of masculinity in a way because of the aggressions I put up with on a day-to-day basis’. Although he had no answers to this problem, he insisted that ‘queer, trans, non-binary people’ shouldn’t have to be the ones who have to disable “toxic masculinity”’. It has to come from within, he argued. Men ‘have got to acknowledge their privilege, and I want them to hand over power, and also I want them to hand over some platform. I’m really up for like trying a matriarchy. We’ve done patriarchy for a long time. Hasn’t really worked.’
Avoiding the Nuclear Presumption of ‘hasn’t really worked’ for a moment, there was one even larger fact staring any viewer in the face.
This was that one of the main complaints that this flamboyantly dressed self-declared ‘big fat queer fem’ had made about the society he lived in was that he found himself so often ridiculed.
So here is another paradoxical, impossible demand.
A person who chooses to be ridiculous without being ridiculed.
Other impossible demands can be found everywhere – such as the one that was on display at Evergreen State College and Yale University and was highlighted by Mark Lilla on the panel at Rutgers (where the audience member insisted to Kmele Foster that he ‘didn’t need no facts’).
On that occasion Lilla provided an insight into one of the other central conundrums of our time. He said, ‘You cannot tell people simultaneously “You must understand me” and “You cannot understand me”.’
Evidently a whole lot of people can make those demands simultaneously. But they shouldn’t, and if they do then they should realize that their contradictory demands cannot be granted.
Then of course there is the question of how the hierarchy of oppression is meant to be ordered, prioritized and then sorted out.
Laith Ashley is one of the most prominent transgender models in the world today. The female-to-male transsexual has received prominent coverage and done prestigious fashion shoots for leading brands and magazines. In a 2016 television interview he was asked by Channel 4’s Cathy Newman if in the two years he had been transitioning from a woman to a man he had encountered any discrimination. Ashley said that in fact he had not, but then alleviated his interviewer’s disappointment by adding that transgender activists and others he knew from transgender rights movements had ‘told’ him that he had in fact gained some male privilege.
As he said, breaking it down for the viewers, ‘I have gained some male privilege. And although I am a person of colour I am fair skinned and I adhere to society’s standard of aesthetic beauty in a sense. And for that reason I have not necessarily faced much discrimination.’
Laith Ashley is one of the most prominent transgender models in the world today. The female-to-male transsexual has received prominent coverage and done prestigious fashion shoots for leading brands and magazines. In a 2016 television interview he was asked by Channel 4’s Cathy Newman if in the two years he had been transitioning from a woman to a man he had encountered any discrimination. Ashley said that in fact he had not, but then alleviated his interviewer’s disappointment by adding that transgender activists and others he knew from transgender rights movements had ‘told’ him that he had in fact gained some male privilege.
As he said, breaking it down for the viewers, ‘I have gained some male privilege. And although I am a person of colour I am fair skinned and I adhere to society’s standard of aesthetic beauty in a sense. And for that reason I have not necessarily faced much discrimination.’
So he had taken a couple of steps further into the hierarchy by becoming a man, had taken a couple of steps back by being a person of colour, but a step forward by being a light-skinned person of colour. And then he had hit the negative of being attractive.
How can anyone work out where they are meant to be in the oppressor/oppressed stakes when they have so many competing privileges in their biography?
No wonder Ashley looked concerned and self-effacing when going through this list. This is enough constant self-analysis to knock anybody’s confidence. But a version of that impossible self-analysis is being suggested for many people today, when in fact there is no way of knowing how to perform this task fairly on another person let alone on yourself. What is the point of an exercise that CANNOT be Done?
And where to next? One of the pleasures in recent years has been watching people who think they are being a good liberal boundary keeper discover that one of their feet has nicked one of the tripwires. One Saturday evening in 2018 Vox’s David Roberts was spending his time happily auditioning for the committee for public virtue on Twitter. In one tweet he wrote, ‘Sometimes I think about America’s sedentary, heart-diseased, fast-food gobbling, car-addicted suburbanites, sitting watching TV in their suburban castles, casually passing judgement on refugees who have walked 1000s of miles to escape oppression, and . . . well, it makes me mad.’ As he sent it off he must have thought ‘Sounds good. Attack Americans, defend migrants, what could go wrong?’ A more cautious member of the new media might have wondered whether it was wise to sound quite so disdainful of people who live in the suburbs. But in fact it was not Roberts’s suburbo-phobia that caused him to spend the rest of his Saturday evening frantically trying to save his career in dozens of remedy tweets. The thing that caused an instant backlash from the very crowd he was hoping to impress was that he had been ‘fat-shaming’ and this was ‘problematic’.
By his 17th tweet attempting to mop up his crime Roberts was reduced to begging: ‘Fat-shaming is real, it’s everywhere, it’s unjust & unkind, and I want no part of it.’ Soon he was apologizing sincerely for only being ‘half woke’, and blaming his upbringing.
The potential for claims of offence, allegations of shaming and new positions in the grievance hierarchy based on ever-evolving criteria could go on indefinitely. But how would they be arranged? Is a fat white person equal to a skinny person of colour? Or are there different scales of oppression which everyone should know even if no one has explained the rules because the rules are made not by rational people but by mob stampedes.
Perhaps rather than derange ourselves by working out a puzzle that cannot be solved, we should instead try to find ways out of This Impossible Maze.
Where's your head at
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Drozze it
Okay are you ready, I'm ready
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
You get what you give that much is true
Don't let the walls cave in on you
You turn the world away from you
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Where's your head at (Where your head at)
Wasn't that?Okay are you ready, I'm ready
You have now found yourself trapped in the incomprehensible maze
Where's your head at, you'll know how to be
Where's your head at, you don't make it easy on yourself
Where's your head at, what you give is what you get, is what you get
Where's your head at (Where's your head at)
Where's your head at (Where's your head at (Okay are you ready, I'm ready)
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Don't let the walls cave in on you
We can live on, live on without you
Where's your head at, Where's your head at
We can live on, live on without you
We can live on, live on without you
We can live on, live on without you
We can live on, live on without you
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