Honestly, I don’t mean to get sucked into the question of sex and gender almost every day. I’m not even quite sure how it happens. I wake up around four in the morning and catch up on all the political news I missed from the day before. I take a scroll through Twitter, and am, for real, fascinated by many subjects. But when it’s time for my fingers to hit the keyboard, the subjects that are causing me the most angst are increasingly having to do with sex and, as people like to call them, gender roles.
I mean, if I suddenly got stricken with a desire to write about Climate Change, or France, or whether or not we—in America—have a democracy or something else, or better yet, how to make sourdough bread, would any of you happen back by? The first rule, they tell me, is to find your subject and stick to it. Which, I imagine, is true to a point.
I think one reason I do keep circling back around to the question of men and women is that I don’t particularly enjoy being called a fascist. It just isn’t true that Christian women who have never been persuaded to sell the spiritual weight of their families and their labor to the market are the problem.
But also, I’m irritated by how brittle and trite the range of options for men and women are in this decadent and dying world. Every age has to sort it out, but I am horrified by the low and tawdry expectations of almost everyone.
Take, for example, a ridiculous piece in The Cut called “Summer Of Smut: A stimulating guide to the horny books all over best-seller lists and our TikTok feeds. Read responsibly.” It’s full of lines like, “We send each other podcast-level voice notes about the books and our lives and everything. We decided to hang out today and then she told me about this event, and here we are.” And, “There was a feeling of ease there, an oasis of quiet focus in the cotton-candy-fueled hubbub (cotton candy with the word SMUT spray painted into it, to be exact) of about 150 attendees.” And, “I walked back toward the front of the bookstore, where a Glace stand offered frozen hot chocolate topped with torched marshmallow fluff. I downed several dairy-digestion pills before joyfully slurping one up…”
I don’t know what I was expecting, clicking on such a piece. It’s not like I was going to read some fascinating literary excursus. But everything, whether high or low-brow, suddenly descends into the morass of middle-school morality. What surprises me is the apparent contentment. That grown women would spend an entire evening chattering over completely dumb, probably addictive, books while eating cotton candy. Not to be judgy or anything.
What I’ve been trying to tease out, in my own mind, is the conundrum of well-meaning, what a few minutes ago were called Classical Liberals who, (is it Auron McIntyre who said this?) have been mugged by reality—people like Nellie Bowles, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher.
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