If No One Supports This Stuff Why Does it Keep Happening?

This boundary-pushing is inappropriate and does nothing to help gay people. Why can’t we forbid it?

Our world has changed at a dizzying rate, and that rate is probably accelerating. Where does that put us in 10 years? I couldn’t guess, but I think it’s a safe bet that we will collectively feel even more confused and uneasy than we do now.

When I was younger, society was different. 2001 was a calamitous year but after ISIS and AI and COVID-19 Al-Qaeda seems almost quaint. George W. Bush seems like a beloved and sincere and fairly admirable man. Despite two major ground wars and the worst recession in 50 years his tenure really does feel… simpler. Some of this is the nostalgia and rosy glasses of retrospective reflection I’m sure.

Most of the changes of the past two decades have been driven by technology. Geopolitics is in a second to consumer technologies. That technology is overwhelmingly concerned with the generation and collection and use of information. As our world becomes more computerized and more of our reality is constructed digitally the memory of our old way of life-homo sapiens sapiens at the beginning of the millennium, changing but still existing almost entirely in a material reality checkered with place memories and interpersonal connections-slips farther in our species’ rearview mirror.

A digital hybrid, information-rich space oriented toward 9 billion increasingly comfortable but lonely humans is not a picture of the future I’m excited to inhabit. I think there will be some good developments and plenty of bad ones but the sense of anomie and of being unmoored; I don’t think those will fade. Ultimately my feelings about the future are moot; it’s hurtling towards us and the path of acceleration is so deeply worn and the vehicle so massive that no one can slow or redirect its course, even a bit.

One aspect of our strange and nascent semi-digital lives is our engagement with news, celebrity gossip, current events, trends. Our lives became saturated with curated, unrepresentative bits of data about ‘the real world’ gradually enough that we barely noticed but I imagine if you brought a regular citizen from 2005 to the present he might find our relationship with phones and apps and algorithms jarring.

We should keep this in mind though: this customized data isn’t being fed to us to inform or improve us. Those goals are completely irrelevant to the systems which do the feeding. If we end up becoming wiser or kinder people, well that’s a gain of zero from the perspective of the algorithms. If we become wiser, kinder people who spend a gradually increasing share of our day communing with our phones THEN the algorithm is pleased. In actuality it’s often our character and mood which tend to wither, while our daily screen time continue to rise. I have zero data but I suspect that dramatic personal improvement usually correlates with LESS time before the screen, not more. All of the news and app tools and social networks you access and use every day don’t really exist to perform their functions. They perform their functions to keep you engaged but their real raison d’etre is the monetization of advertising and user data. They exist to keep you staring at your phone and helplessly inputting every iota of personal information that could be useful to the profit-making machine.

Too many people are still consuming news and current events content like they’re watching a CNN correspondent reporting from Kuwait in the early 1990’s. They’re assuming that the news stories are not only mostly accurate (which is usually, but not always, still the case) but are created to inform the viewer, to lay out a complete picture of the issue without any glaring or intentional omissions. This is now often incorrect. To be sure, there are still many journalists who consider some balance and reality part of their ethical obligation. The field has shifted, though, and the new coin of the realm isn’t the quality of reporting or writing. It’s simply the same blind imperative which drives YouTube and Facebook: to keep you looking at the images on the platform as much and as deeply as possible. Unfortunately well-written and incisive essays just don’t generate that much user interaction. Neither do carefully edited updates on major issues. Celebrities do, of course. Anything with that hint of parasocial attachment and sex is excellent for the algorithm, although less so for our cumulative mental health. Money, sports, beauty products, hobbies are all decent. More than anything, though, is indignation.

We’re social animals and we view our days and our lives and every human event through the lens of narrative. We are a species that reflexively creates stories for ourselves and our fellows. We can’t help it. The old dictates of the print journalist have been eroded and what’s left is a younger, wealthier, better-educated (but less stable or resilient), more connected and online worker. Their occupation has been changed by technology and structural economic shifts, certainly. They’re now producing clickbait, essentially. They still have some control over the quality, but it’s not just that the profit incentives have changed. The journalists themselves are different and see the world much differently. They have a strong and rigid moral sense which was inculcated in college and they consider a prime objective of their work to promote social change. To this end they have often (along with their editors) engaged in more and more brazen examples of omission, distortion, deception. Rather than giving everyone the facts and letting them make up their minds the journalists now consider themselves to be gatekeepers of information. Apparently many kinds of information shouldn’t be released to the public (for their own good). That’s why you’ll find (even now) dozens of encouraging articles about the ‘racial justice’ mission of 2020 but virtually none about the catastrophically risen rates of crime and violence in the black community. You won’t find many articles about the large and growing racial gap created by our public schools. You’ll NOW encounter some articles about the ‘lab leak theory’ (since the evidence is increasingly overwhelming) but that wouldn’t have been the case for the past 3 years. Years after a global pandemic and our media is totally incurious about where the virus originated and how it infected humans and the wisdom and efficacy of our anti-contagion public policies. They’ve collectively decided to absolve politicians, tech moguls, unions, and scientists of any scrutiny over the consequences of their decisions and the honesty and helpfulness of their public statements. They’ve collectively chosen to studiously ignore the strange fact that adolescent girls are now being treated with male hormones at rates dozens of times higher than was the case 15 years ago. The possibility that infectious Tik Tok content and social acclaim is fueling another social contagion among vulnerable girls seems quite plausible, but you won’t find that hypothesis (or even its barest outline) in almost any piece of contemporary mainstream journalism.

15 years ago different people and different parties had different values and assumptions and perspectives, but the facts on offer were widely agreed upon. Only Noam Chomsky or Alex Jones would dismiss public consensus. Such people used to be rare.

Now there is no public consensus. There are several main narrative streams for the larger public (depending on the issue) and there’s an elite consensus. That set of ideas is reflected in our journalism today but it is woefully out of touch with reality, and with a huge share of the reading public.

I say all of that as content and background for this curious fact: there are things happening in the US today that no one defends, yet they continue to occur and many people on the Left treat proposals to STOP such things as divisive or reactionary or cynical.

No one defends sexually explicit drag shows or adult performances in front of small children. No one defends explicit text and illustrations in elementary school public libraries. No one defends teaching children that ‘whiteness’ is a historic affliction that is still harming American society. These are things that virtually no one will publicly advocate.

There’s a similar category: sincere but SECRET values and goals. This is the tendency of some teachers and counselors and content creators and activists. They have very fervent beliefs, about gender or sexuality or identity. They believe these propositions not only as factual statements but also as moral imperatives. If you were a teacher who believed that the US was a patriarchal heteronormative power cabal whose norms and lessons had damaged children for generations and continued to damage them? You would dissent and resist and possibly season some of your office hours or lessons with these beliefs. If you recognize that your beliefs are very unpopular with local parents you will do this instruction in secret (as much as possible). You’ll exercise discretion but total compliance to society’s status quo is barely acceptable. It is, according to your worldview, wrong and your efforts to educate some students in confidence will seem to be the courageous and right choice. It doesn’t take many testimonials and confessions from self-described schoolteachers on Libs of Tik Tok before some parents begin to worry. That is how the term ‘Groomer’ arose: parents and Twitter users weren’t actually alleging any intended sexual abuse. They were using a slur to highlight concern that some teachers might be having personal and ideological conversations with their children, in private, about gender or sex (or race, or policing, etc.).

For every recent example I can say with a high level of certainty that such things have happened recently. I can’t tell you how common they are but I suspect they’re infrequent. Nevertheless, they are inappropriate and shouldn’t be controversial when a certain group pushes for policy against them. Is it an overreaction? Possibly, in some cases. Is this a big problem? No, I don’t think so. But IF a municipality bans childhood attendance at sexually explicit events why would anyone object?!

Modern progressives are stuck in their custom-made information silos (like all of us) and believe that pornographic books in elementary school libraries are a non-issue, that drag shows don’t expose children to adult material, and that teachers aren’t trying to subtly change the minds of students (or if they are it’s a good thing). Even when presented with video evidence (the collection of which was the animating cause of Libs of Tik Tok) they will studiously ignore the complaints. When laws or rules are written, even when they’re sexuality-neutral (as they all seem to be) the Left claims that the changes are just veiled homophobia (etc.).

I think this is another instance of two sides speaking past one another with no real communication possible, since they each ignore sincere claims by the other side. One side is protective of their children and is basically unconcerned with the lives or preferences of queer people. The other side sees homophobia as a serious social problem and considers it a precept of child-rearing to imbue kids with tolerant attitudes and expose them to queer people.

I have many questions about the youth drag show phenomenon. Drag began as a sexual subculture of gay performers for adults in special venues. It expanded into more consumer-friendly (and heterosexual) spaces (like Lips, a drag cabaret restaurant that I visited during a birthday party while living in Manhattan) but was always understood to be an adult scene centered around gay or trans people. I understand the urge to expose children to diverse people but drag queens aren’t real. Children will probably never, throughout their life, see a drag queen in the grocery store or waiting for a job interview. They’re actors. It would be a bit like wanting to familiarize children with black people, or Chinese Americans, and instead of inviting the black and Asian professionals or homemakers in the area you bring the Harlem Globe Trotters, or Shen Yun. There is an abundance of medical doctors or police officers who are queer. I guess that’s the point though. Queerness is generally accepted and welcomed. Drag queens strike me as outliers, even within the gay community, and I can’t think of any good reason to take pains to bring them in and read picture books to toddlers. Bring a nurse or a social worker or a police officer… then let kids ask questions. They might gain a little comfort towards such authority figures and it’s also an opportunity for advertising help. Kids were completely ignored by the Left during COVID. Public school children suffered more delays in learning, experienced higher rates of mental health symptoms and much diminished nutrition and social support. These were costs that progressives were willing to levy upon a huge group of students who were already disadvantaged and forgotten by the Left. Try improving the quality of public school teachers. Try proposing literally ANY idea to improve teaching: classroom metrics, merit pay, achievement bonuses, performance reviews, standardized testing… the unions oppose ALL of them. The unions Now oppose standardized testing as a basic concept, apparently. Their failure to educate the average black student to a satisfactory level for +50 years just became too unpleasant to confront I suppose. If the students aren’t tested does it matter if they’re undereducated?

My point is that there are lot of goals that schools need to begin making progress on before they earn the responsibility to develop kids’ worldviews and sensibilities or the prerogative to begin exploring the unscientific and bizarre ideas of gender ideology or anti-racism.

Since no one seems to actually support these kinds of childhood experiences let’s let them disappear, shall we? If children aren’t attending sexually explicit shows than a law against such events admitting children will just be dead letter and a waste of ink and floor time.

You can use the reactive ad hominem labels of ‘racist’ or ‘homophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ freely of course. When it comes to people’s children you will find much less ambivalence and acquiescence though. If organizing drag shows is leading to concerns about violence or to public resistance maybe the entire thing was a mistake?

Large national polling data has revealed that a backlash to some of the more unpopular demands of queer activists might be beginning. It’s telling that of the ‘anti-LGBTQ’ legislation around the United States nearly all of it is concerned with minors.

National pills have shown the first significant reversal in the rising acceptance towards LGBTQ issues in decades. These Pew data show a decline in BOTH political affiliations.

I hope that as the year passes I will encounter fewer and fewer videos of transvestites simulating sex acts in front of elementary schoolers. I hope that the question of exactly HOW many queer lib ideologues teach in public schools will barely occur to me. Our culture is a culture of unending culture war it seems, but children shouldn’t be enlisted or involved. A contemporary childhood in the United States already seems strange enough.

Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe, and SHARE.