Category: culture wars

J.K. Rowling, Gen X, and the trans debate

Does the internet need yet another post about the transgender debate? Probably not, but humor me. This one has an angle that you might not have heard.

Last week the Scottish Supreme Court ruled that biological men presenting as women (aka trans women) are not biological women. Womanhood, the court declared, is based in biological reality and is not a mere social construct.

British author J.K. Rowling celebrated on X. The Harry Potter author took a photo of herself sipping a glass of wine and smoking a stogie. The post’s caption was: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

J.K Rowling was born in 1965. She’s a few years older than me, but we’re both Gen Xers. (Had Rowling been an American, we could have both been in high school at the same time.)

Before she became involved in the transgender debate, Rowling was generally regarded as a progressive. She was critical of British and American conservatives, and held a scathing assessment of Donald Trump during his first term.

Then came the western, English-speaking world’s obsession with transgenderism and gender fluidity. Rowling picked a side, and became a pariah in the left-leaning publishing and filmmaking worlds.

The problem was: J.K. Rowling proved too big, and too powerful, to “cancel”. That pantywaist of an actor, Daniel Radcliffe, personally tried to separate Rowling from her own book franchise. People ignored him. Radcliffe, not Rowling, is the expendable one, insofar as Harry Potter is concerned.

Like Rowling, I’m a Gen Xer, and like Rowling, I don’t get what all the fuss is about. For approximately a decade now, we have all spent far too much time debating the question of what a woman is. No one gave this debate any oxygen at all until the spring of 2015, when a former Olympic athlete named Bruce (aka Caitlyn) Jenner underwent a very public gender transformation. That opened the floodgates, and we have not stopped talking about this since.

But as an MSNBC columnist pointed out, the world has always had people who are trans, gender-fluid, etc. This is true. Study ancient history: gender-bending religious cults existed in Roman times. The Galli, followers of the deity Cybele, were female-identifying men who subjected themselves to the gender-affirming care of castration.

So…no…the twenty-first century did not “invent” transgenderism. But the twenty-first century did invent an unhealthy obsession with it. The twenty-first century did invent unnecessary pronoun rules, and silly neologisms like “pregnant persons”. The twenty-first century did invent the idea of pushing gender transitions on children who barely understand the concepts of sex and gender at all.

We Gen Xers, though, have long been aware of gender fluidity, even if we weren’t aware of the Galli. In 1982, we all saw the female-presenting Boy George on MTV. For a long time, I assumed that Boy George actually was a woman. (Hey, I was fourteen years old.)

Then in 1987, Aerosmith came out with that song and video: “Dude Looks Like a Lady”. It was the height of the Reagan era, and one of the most testosterone-soaked rock bands was performing a song about the male narrator’s brief and inadvertent attraction to a gender-fluid man.

None of this was a big deal at the time, nor even very controversial. I don’t remember anyone getting in a high dudgeon about Boy George. “Dude Looks Like a Lady”, meanwhile, was chosen for the soundtrack of Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie my Boomer parents and my World War II-generation grandparents all loved.

No self-respecting Gen Xer has ever had a problem with a man who wants to present as a woman. Most of us, moreover, are willing to humor people on pronoun rules. I remember Bruce Jenner as the very male athlete on my box of Wheaties in the 1970s. But if [she] now wants me to call [her] Caitlyn…sure, why not? Live and let live.

For most Gen Xers, all of this went a bridge too far when we were told that simple live-and-let-live tolerance was not enough. One day, we were told that we must now believe that biological males like Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Levine, and Lia Thomas are truly women, no different from actual, biological females. We were also told that we must affirm these new beliefs in public.

That has wide implications, including—but not limited to—women’s sports and Title IX. Gen X women were the first generation of American women to fully benefit from Title IX, and many of them have understandably strong feelings about it.

Most Gen Xers also have bullshit meters with very sensitive settings. We don’t like to be told what to think, especially when we know that you’re spouting nonsense. We rolled our eyes at the smarmy, finger-wagging televangelists of the 1980s, and most of us roll our eyes at the smarmy, finger-wagging social engineers of today.

Back to Rowling’s tweet. The phrase, “I love it when a plan comes together,” was popularized by the A-Team, a TV series of the 1980s. The aloof, cynical, wine-sipping pose, meanwhile, seems borrowed from some Gen X memes that have proliferated throughout the Internet in recent years.

We Gen Xers are a tolerant lot. But we aren’t going to deny reality just to make you happy.

We didn’t blindly listen to the older generations when we were kids. And now that we’re older ourselves, we aren’t going to obediently nod our heads at moppets who tell us that gender is just a social construct.

-ET

Trump vs. Harvard, and notes for the ‘Resistance’

The Trump administration has announced that it will suspend $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard University. This is the result of the university’s failure to comply with a number of the administration’s policy initiatives, regarding—among other things—DEI, merit-based hiring and admissions reforms, and the way campus protests are handled. At present, Harvard is digging in its heels, and the Trump administration is withholding money.

At the 85-day mark, the Trump administration’s policies have met with mixed reviews. Trump’s actions aimed at curbing illegal immigration and securing the border have been popular, albeit draconian at times. The administration’s declaration of “two genders” was largely seen as a curb on gender-bending ideology that had simply gone a few bridges too far.

By contrast, Trump’s actions on tariffs provoked widespread alarm last week—including among some Republicans in Congress, and Trump supporters in the heartland. Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and making Canada the 51st state have been head-scratching. And while his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico was harmless, it’s difficult to see what that accomplished. (It reminded me of the left’s weird obsessions with politically correct nomenclatures.)

Trump has also gone after universities. Most of his ire is directed at the Ivy League schools. I’ve been reading over some of these debates, and at times I’ve been thinking, “Well, I don’t know about that one.”

The problem, for supporters of Harvard, is this: from the perspective of the rest of the country, Harvard has been a political monoculture since the late 1960s. The same could be said of Yale, Princeton, and other Ivy League institutions.

For that matter, academia had already tilted decidedly to the left in the 1980s, when I was a student at the University of Cincinnati. This was especially true in the liberal arts and the humanities. During the 1960s, the more left-leaning college students disproportionately gravitated toward academic careers. By the time I arrived on campus in the fall of 1986, they were in early middle age, and made up the core of the professorial ranks.

There is a sense among many Americans that our universities have become places of ideological and intellectual rot, and are among the many “swamps” that need to be “drained”. Yes, I realize that I’m painting a wide brushstroke here. But I experienced the closing of the academic mind for myself—forty years ago, and at a state university in Ohio.

The Ivy League, in particular, is not popular in the heartland. And it isn’t just the guys with gun racks in the rear windows of their pickup trucks who are scoffing at Harvard, Yale, etc. In recent years, corporate employers have soured on the Ivy League, too. Corporate employers have gradually discovered that ideologically stagnant universities, no matter how prestigious, don’t produce superior graduates. In practical terms, a graduate of the local community college might be a better hire.

Which brings us around to this whole notion of the anti-Trump “resistance”. I want a civil, intelligent anti-Trump resistance, just like I wanted a civil, intelligent, anti-Biden resistance. I have an equal distrust for social engineers on the left, and Bible-thumpers on the right. I don’t want either side to become too powerful. If different viewpoints compete in the marketplace of ideas, then hopefully we choose the best ones, and we land somewhere in the middle.

But for those of you who would seek to mobilize opinion against the Trump administration: pick another rallying cry besides, “Remember Harvard’s $2.2 billion!” Don’t expect anyone who doesn’t live in one of the liberal coastal enclaves to rally around Harvard. That just isn’t going to happen.

-ET

Russia’s ‘Shared Values Visa’: Soviet redux

If you’ve decided that the West is too woke, violent, corrupt, whatever, you can now apply for citizenship in Russia, under a so-called ‘Shared Values Visa’. (Watch the video below for more details.)

The Shared Values Visa is new…but not really. The Kremlin has a long history of rolling out the red carpet for westerners who are disillusioned with life in their home countries.

During the Great Depression, several thousand Americans, Canadians, and Europeans moved to the USSR to escape “capitalist corruption” and live in a “workers’ paradise”. Many of these emigres were among the first folks to go into the gulags during Stalin’s subsequent purges.

Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, defected to the USSR from 1959 to 1962. Overall, Oswald’s Soviet adventure did not work out. But he returned to the USA with a Russian wife. The rest of Oswald’s story is a tragic one, both for him and the rest of the world.

No, this isn’t where I segue into a conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination. (I have no novel insights on that matter.) My point is: westerners defecting to Russia for one reason or another is nothing new. This has been happening since the earliest days of the USSR, a hundred years now. And it has never really ceased.

(I might also suggest that you watch the movie Reds (1981) if you haven’t seen it.)

Once again, a knowledge of history comes in handy for decoding the present. History often repeats itself, with only a few superficial changes.

And so it is here, with Russia’s ‘Shared Values Visa’. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

-ET

**View books about the history of the Soviet Union on Amazon!

Russia/Ukraine, and political censorship on YouTube

It seems that the YouTube channel of Alexandra Jost, aka Sasha Meets Russia, has once again been removed from that platform. This is the second time this has occurred.

While the removal may have been the act of YouTube’s management, it is far more likely that Ukrainian and pro-Ukraine bots are behind the removal, via a mass flagging campaign.

We hear a lot about “Russian bots” on the Internet. These do exist. But we don’t hear so much about Ukrainian bots; and these exist, too. (We should all remember that both Russia and Ukraine have a legacy in the former USSR and its methods.)

Jost is an American expat who has been residing in Moscow for several years. Her mother is Russian, and she speaks that language fluently. Her YouTube videos were always a mix of human interest stories and commentary.

And yes, that commentary had a distinctive spin. I fully recognize that Ms. Jost is/was engaged in advocacy journalism. Her pro-Russian views are rather transparent; and there are even reports (unsubstantiated though plausible) that she is on the payroll of one of the Russian state media agencies.

But so what? I come from the twentieth century. In those days—which include the Cold War with the USSR—we trusted people to take in information from all sources, and to then make judgements for themselves.

My high school history teacher exposed us to translated versions of Pravda. I read The Communist Manifesto in college. Funny thing—despite all that exposure to “Russian propaganda”, I never became a Soviet agent. I was never converted to Marxism-Leninism. In fact, reading/hearing the Kremlin’s viewpoints usually made me more certain in the beliefs of my own culture.

But those were more open-minded and sophisticated times. In this intellectually simplistic era, it is often Internet mobs and tech bosses who decide which viewpoints will be heard, and which ones will be censored.

This is especially true on social media. On YouTube, for example, it is now virtually impossible to find a YouTube channel on the Russo-Ukrainian War that isn’t pure Ukrainian agitprop.

-ET

A stabbing in Frisco, and 17-year-old boys who carry knives to high school track meets

Frisco, Texas is located in suburban Dallas. I have been there. It isn’t a dangerous environment.

But it turned out to be a deadly environment for 17-year-old Austin Metcalf, when he encountered another 17-year-old, Karmelo Anthony, at a high school track meet.

After a brief altercation over a seat in the bleachers, Karmelo Anthony pulled a knife and stabbed Metcalf to death.

The racial dynamics of this case are attracting attention. Anthony, the killer, is black. The late Austin Metcalf was white. The mainstream media has thus far shown little interest in Metcalf’s murder. Nor is it likely that Austin Metcalf will be transformed into a national martyr, in the way Trayvon Martin was a decade ago.

Some say that this is because the crime “does not fit the narrative”. There is no indication, so far, that race was a factor in the slaying. (Anthony and Metcalf were athletes from rival schools.) A cynic, however, could not help wondering if CNN and MSNBC would have given this crime more attention had the races of the killer and the victim been reversed. (At any rate, the mainstream media’s consistent refusal to cover crimes involving black perpetrators and white victims only fuels such cynicism.)

But questions of racial politics aside, there are some conclusions that can be drawn. Karmelo Anthony’s father, Andrew Anthony, told reporters that his son is a “good kid”. Because “good kids” stab other kids to death all the time, perhaps?

I have not been a 17-year-old boy since 1985, about 40 years now. But some rules of thumb transcend the generations. A “good kid” who takes bladed weapons to high school track meets is a conceptual oxymoron. In my experience, good kids usually don’t see the need to carry deadly weapons to school athletic events.

Similarly, a kid who immediately pulls a knife and stabs another over a dispute about a seat in the bleachers was probably never on his way to becoming Citizen of the Year. If Karmelo Anthony is a contemporary example of a “good kid”, may the Almighty save us all from the truly bad ones.

-ET

James Bond, Helen Mirren, and the decline of male fiction reading

British actress Helen Mirren recently  told a reporter that the long-running James Bond franchise is “born out of profound sexism”.

Oh, I think we know where this is going! Wag those fingers, clutch those pearls!

Let us first acknowledge that Helen Mirren has a point. But the more precise descriptor here would be laddish. If you read any of the James Bond novels (penned by Ian Fleming), you’ll find lots of action, clear lines of good and evil, and lusty femme fatales. It doesn’t get any more laddish than that.

James Bond was created in 1953, at the height of the Cold War. That was also more than 70 years ago. The James Bond novels were never meant to be highbrow, or even middlebrow. This was male escapist fiction, from a time when men still read fiction (more on that shortly). US President John F. Kennedy was a famous fan of the series; but he wasn’t alone. Many Cold War-era men, many of them World War II veterans, read the James Bond novels as a form of fantasy fulfillment.

And what was the stuff of those fantasies? Taking down the bad guys (usually the Soviets, in the context of the Cold War), and being admired by beautiful women half one’s age.

Oh, perish forbid. How is this any different from so-called “curvy girl fiction”, which casts overweight women as the sought-after sex objects of quarterbacks, billionaires, and even princes? Is one form of fantasy fulfillment more unlikely or pernicious than the other? (Isn’t that why it’s called “fantasy fulfillment” and “escapism” to begin with?)

I don’t begrudge the readers of curvy girl fiction their fantasy fulfillment. And I don’t begrudge our Cold War grandfathers their daydreams of saving the world and bedding scores of hot babes along the way. There are far greater injustices in the world, if one wishes to object to something.

I would rather object to the now decades-long trend of men avoiding fiction altogether. No one disputes the basic facts here; it’s been verified by study after study. Men will read nonfiction (though sparingly). Few twenty-first century men read novels. 

I also know this anecdotally. I can’t convince my male friends to read anything more literary than a Tim Ferriss self-help book. (And even then, they’d really prefer the audiobook version!)

This wasn’t always the case. My grandfather, who barely had a high school education, compulsively read western, crime, and adventure paperbacks. I mean…the man read fiction all the time. He kept stacks of paperbacks lying around.

I’m sure that many of my grandfather’s novels were of the male escapist variety, too. Helen Mirren might have described them as “born out of profound sexism”. How feminist do you think the average Zane Grey novel was, after all?

But what she really means by that is: attuned to common male fantasies, relating not just to the opposite sex, but also to the sorts of derring-do that have long excited the male imagination. The kind of adventures that men used to find in novels, but now search for in professional sports and video games.

Why do so few men read fiction nowadays? Maybe it’s because most fiction published nowadays bores most male readers to tears. It isn’t written or published with them in mind, and they know it.

I repeat: my grandfather was an avid fiction reader. So was John F. Kennedy. Have men changed? Or has the publishing industry changed?

-ET