To embrace their narcissism as if it were a sexual orientation
Jarvis Dupont at the American Spectator (kind of a National Review with jokes?) is also impressed that Sam Smith is now drum roll a person of plural.
This is of course the most amazingly positive news, and a fantastic leap forward for genderqueer progressiveness. Someone as famous as Sam [OK. Have to admit I’m still struggling here, was he on American Idol?] coming out as non-binary will inspire anyone else out there who may have heard of them and is battling under the weight of their own inflated ego, to embrace their narcissism as if it were a sexual orientation. After all if we are unable to love ourselves, how can we be expected to be able to tell everyone else what is right and what is wrong with any sense of sanctimonious certainty?
I have added my pronouns (HE/HIM) to my Twitter bio in solidarity with those whose sense of self-importance must at times be so overwhelming they find it difficult to talk about the complexities of their gender for hours at a time…but by Cthulhu, they still manage it, because they are not going to let the callous ignorance of bigotry win.
It’s all so sad because Sam Smith told us to be kind when he made his earth-shaking announcement, yet here we are making jokes about it instead. And forgetting to call him “them” as I just did. SO TERRIBLY SAD.
To take pronouns so seriously is sign of someone who is not fully in touch with reality.
*snort*
It’s infuriating because these right-wing rags used to sneer at gay men while we were dying of AIDS. They mocked us, they insinuated (and all but openly declared) that we deserved to die. We had it coming. They gave exactly zero fucks about us. (ESPECIALLY the National Review — if I recall correctly, Buckley endorsed mandatory government-enforced tattoos for gay people, supposedly in the name of curbing the spread of AIDS, but really just as an overt expression of disgust towards us.) Fine, they have a point about Sam Smith and this narcissistic gender-identity claptrap that’s taken over the LGBTxyz scene of late. But it’s disturbing that they didn’t skip a beat between celebrating our deaths and sneering at the excesses of the current era. There was no in-between time when they showed any contrition or concern for what we went through — which they were partly responsible for.
And to be honest I don’t entirely blame them. Or at least, I understand them. Yes, the right wing is horrible and always has been, but the left has fucked up so badly with this narcissistic garbage, we’ve ceded the upper hand. And we’ve given the right an excuse to ignore their own history, to forget how monstrous they were. In a way, the right is kinda saying, “see, we were right all along; you were always a bunch of narcissistic freaks.” No need to make amends for perpetuating the death of an entire generation of homosexuals: the ones who survived ended up obnoxious, narcissistic and misguided in the end. The right was right all along.
That’s how it feels to me when I see the right-wing press go to town on this pronoun bullshit. And I am so pissed off at Sam Smith and the likes over it. What the fuck have you done?
Eternal vigilance, Artymorty. It is all too easy to forget to guard against threats from within, from the false prophets and parasites and mad zealots.
The American Spectator’s progenitor, the Spectator has had a line of sneering for its last couple of centuries, whether at votes for women, global warming, extending the franchise – it’s still at it with the unspeakable Rod Liddle’s constant sneer at concerns about racism. This is a sledge-hammer to crack a nut. All right, I think this pronoun stuff is insufferable, and the tenderness with which it is treated absurd, but Smith’s transgression seems minor compared to the likes of Yaniv, who are the ones who need a good verbal kicking.
I do agree with that, but…a lot of times the simplest of things are the ways that people are worn down to acceptance. The LGB movement used it to good effect, and succeeded in changing hearts and minds one son, brother, daughter, at a time. That was a good use of the small stuff.
Now the trans community piggybacks on the work done by the LGB without doing the work themselves, and these little things are seen as so little, we might let them slide. But they are also ridiculous enough to get people to sit up and say “Say what?” so then they are ready to hear about Yaniv, who could easily be couched as an aberration if we don’t practice, as Nullius says, Eternal Vigilance.
KBPlayer @ 5 – I know, and I very rarely share stuff from the Spectator here, because of that line of sneering.
And of course Yaniv is much worse, but I’m interested in the root problems with the ideology and the behavior it encourages. I’m interested in the extreme narcissism and how valorized it is in this supposedly left-wing movement when normally the left is supposed to care about the needs of others, not just the greedy self.
Also, of course…it’s funny. His dramatic tweets were funny. I can seldom resist the funny.