Cultural fascism
I can’t remember whether I was puzzled or shocked the first time I was asked on an official form whether I was Male, Female or “Other”. A recent edition of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour was dedicated to the concept of “gender stereotyping”. It seems we can no longer can we say that little girls are made of “sugar and spice and all things nice” and boys are made of “snips and snails and puppy dogs tails.”
So it all seemed a little rich that a programme called Woman’s Hour (“The programme that offers a female perspective on the world”) was applauding those Brave New World experts and the parents who think it’s cool to bring “gender-free” offspring into the world! I mean, what’s to happen if the social engineers succeed in abolishing gender? Can we expect, ten years from now, to be listening to “Non-Gender Hour”, “Person’s Hour” or just plain “Hour”?
A concerned mother (or should that be “parent”?) phoned the programme to confess she was trying really hard to bring up her children (a “boy” and a “girl”, by the way) to be “gender neutral”, while a teacher called in to say that she had to have a serious little tête-à-tête with her primary school class after one of the boys said something derogatory about “girls” (huh!). Left to himself—and I stress “left to himself” and not to politically-correct social revisionists—ten years from now the boy’s attitude to girls will have significantly modified.
The singer Adele was all but lynched by feminists when she confessed to finding motherhood “fulfilling”. How dare the young diva find fulfilment in raising a child instead of in hoovering up gold discs and whatever other awards that come to her for her songs! The superstar managed to claw back some cred from her critics, however, by being spotted at Disneyland with her three year-old son who was dressed as… a princess from the Disney animated movie Frozen. Poor kid!
How is it all going to end? In one of two ways. First, the politically-correct thought police will continue to try to silence all voices of sanity in order to achieve their politically correct, cold, grey, bland, God-free utopia in which everyone looks, behaves and thinks the same.
But every now and then, a voice of common sense cries out in the wilderness: “This is political correctness gone mad! The emperor is starkers!”
Although I sympathise with the sentiment that political correctness has gone mad, the protest presupposes there is such a thing as sane political correctness. There isn’t. Political correctness is the invention of nut jobs who think marriage is legalised rape, that milking cows is an act of theft and that criminals are just people who are guided by a different moral compass.
I once sat next to one of these people on a flight to the Far East. Eldur tried to convince me that evil is an illusion. Then our meals were served. Noticing that I bowed my head before tucking into the meal the hostess set before me, Eldur correctly surmised that I was saying grace and unctuously informed me that he didn’t give thanks for his food; instead, he apologised to it, promising to one day lodge a complaint with the “higher powers” for the barbaric way they had obliged we humans to sustain our life force in this world. This from a man who believed evil is an illusion.
Alternately, political correctness and its equally vacuous philosophical construct postmodernism are doomed to collapse under the burden of their own weightlessness. In spite of the overwhelming number of students who have been brainwashed to believe there is no such thing as absolute truth, particularly—nay, especially—in the area of sexual conduct, they find it impossible to live life without absolutes.
Take Ed, a very nice young chap I met in Budapest some years ago. Ed was a typical politically-correct postmodernist. Ed had his own moral compass which, he clearly believed, was infinitely superior to that of the Bible. I asked Ed how he knew his personal moral compass was pointing in the right direction. After all, if every member of a ship’s crew carries their own compass and each compass points in a different direction, how can anyone on board know where true north lies?
Ed denied he needed the Bible to guide him through life because his code of ethics was simple: “Do to others as you want them to do to you.”
I smiled. And so did Ed: “Oh, sorry,” be blushed, “That’s in the Bible isn’t it?”
Political Correctness gurus remind me of Penny, the pretty but not-very-bright blonde eye candy (Whoops! Am I being politically incorrect?) in the phenomenally popular TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory: “I’m a vegetarian. Oh, except for the occasional fish… And steak. Oooh, I loooove steak!”
Postmodernists and political correctness enthusiasts don’t believe in absolutes but they do believe in their own values. So absolutely in fact that they demand everyone else fall into line with their values. Denying absolute truth is a convenient untruth but what does that matter so long as you can live the way you want and still feel good about yourself?
The term “Orwellian” is overused but the purveyors of political correctness and gender-free parenting remind me of O’Brien, the inquisitor in George Orwell’s 1984.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the party says that it is not four but five – then how many?”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston’s body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four.”
The needle went up to sixty.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!”
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!”
“How many fingers, Winston?”
“Five! Five! Five!”
Postmodernism, political correctness and gender neutrality don’t liberate. Instead, they confuse and oppress. Postmodernism is cultural and intellectual fascism. In the nineties, I wrote a leaflet titled, Are you Politically Correct? As I was handing them out in the central London, a smart, flawlessly made-up businesswoman eagerly took the tract, reading out loud, “Are you Politically Correct? Ooh, I hope so!”
It’s bad enough that a group of self-appointed experts on a pseudo-discipline of “gender stereotyping” they have created, want to surgically remove the critical faculties of perfectly sensible adults but it’s even worse that they want to confuse the next generation. If the Brave New Worlders have their way, a six year old girl who has no desire to be the next James Bond will be looked on as abnormal, while boys who don’t want to play with Barbie dolls will be condemned for being criminally insane. Children need to be confident in their own skins. They need parents who treat them equally while assuring their sons that they are boys and their daughters that they are girls because that’s the way they have been fearfully and wonderfully made.
As the French say: Vive la difference!
And as the Bible says: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them… And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.”
