How the new commentariat launders its privilege
Brendan O’Neill, in one of his getting something right moments, points out the flaw in Laurie Penny’s “feminism”:
Penny writes an awful lot about women for someone who doesn’t know what a woman is. Ostensibly this is a feminist tract, about how humanity faces a terrifying choice – it either carries on down the road to fascism or it embraces the corrective of Laurie Penny’s feminism. (Talk about a rock and a hard place!) And yet it’s a strange feminist tome that thinks men can be women, too. Penny gets it out of the way early. ‘In this book, when I talk about “men” and “women”… I am including everyone who locates themselves in those categories’, she says on page 8. So she’s not really talking about men and women at all. What a way to blow up your own thesis. Men have ruined everything, and only a progressive women’s politics can save us, but men can be women too if they want, so this progressive women’s politics will sometimes include men – that’s this book boiled down.
But Laurie Penny will just say they’re not men, because they say so.
And then there’s the part that crosses paths with the detransition article I quoted this morning:
I really wish that Penny – and all the other talking heads of our fashionably traumatised era – would just keep things to herself. Do we need to know that Penny starved herself as a teenager and ended up in hospital? Do we need to know that all her friends seem to have had terrible and frightening sexual experiences? (Where are they hanging out?) Penny says that she and others – the enlightened ones, presumably – have ‘realised and accepted that we are being abused and terrorised’. I call bullshit. Terrorised how? Again, why should we be made to suffer the neurotic cries of the leisured classes? Penny doesn’t need a political movement – she needs a therapist.
All these unconvincing claims to victimhood play an important role, however. They are the means through which the new commentariat launders its privilege and turns it into suffering.
Ah-ha. The same insight, you see. How does one get out of being a privileged white cishet Karen? By being trans or enby, or by telling us about a traumatic teenagerhood.
This is the fundamental function of identity politics – it allows those from wealthy, comfortable backgrounds to position themselves as the new oppressed. So Ms Penny – privately educated, time-rich, her labour unsold, her hands uncalloused, straight, married, etc etc – can magically reposition herself as a member of the downtrodden by announcing that she is genderqueer, a they/them, abused, terrorised, yada yada. And so do the privileged elites culturally appropriate the language of oppression and position us as the oppressors of them.
He’s not wrong.
Yes, the whole “queer/genderqueer” business strikes me as a kind of slacktivism.
Say what you will about the folks who get surgery, take hormones, or even just dress as a different gender — they do pay a price for what they believe, even if it’s just the occasional disapproving look. But someone like Penny can adopt one of these labels and not have to change a damn thing about herself. And as best I can tell, it’s utterly unfalsifiable. If I declared myself queer, nobody can contradict me because it doesn’t mean a damn thing.
I would take issue with O’Neill’s snide dismissal of Penny and other’s “terrible and frightening sexual experiences,” and his speculation about “[w]here are they hanging out,” as if women should shut up about sexual assault because it’s probably their fault for going to the wrong bars or whatever. It’s really not necessary to his main point.
How right Angela Nagle was, when writing about Laurie Penny and her fellow “Tumblr-liberals”, to state that “The cult of suffering, weakness, and vulnerability has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics, as it is enacted in spaces like Tumblr.”
I imagine there are Uyghurs and Mozambicans who read about how “oppressed” Laurie Penny is, and laugh bitterly.
Doesn’t quite explain the hoi polloi that propped these more privileged people up though. How good has a Kmart employee mainlining Lindsay Ellis really got it?
#1. O’Neill is indeed very off with his comments on “terrible and frightening sexual experiences,” (ONeill had to O’Neill I guess) but I would note that on the TRA side they can be quick to accuse women on the (to them) wrong side of “weaponising” sexual assault. The idea seems to be that such experiences send them a bit crazy and they proceed to inexplicably tar transwomen with the same brush as men.
Libfems be like, sexual assault isn’t such a big deal, right? Why do you radfems have to be so bitchy? An inclusive, woke feminism doesn’t report rapes, because that would be weaponizing sexual assualt, and unleashing the power of cis white women on powerless minorities — and that wouldn’t be true feminism.
All too accurate.