Futile flouncing
Joan Smith on The Usual Backlash:
For too long, a motley collection of trans activists and green zealots have only needed to threaten to withdraw from literary events, and the organisers have taken fright. Now the Oxford Literary Festival has discovered a backbone, inviting the gender-critical author Helen Joyce and the feminist campaigner Julie Bindel to take part in this year’s programme. Cue the predictable outrage.
There have been calls for authors to withdraw, on the dubious (some would say bonkers) premise that the invitation puts other writers at risk. Harry R. McCarthy, a lecturer in early modern literature, grandly announced that he had withdrawn from his scheduled session on “Shakespeare for the modern age” because Joyce and Bindel are part of the programme.
Attaboy Harry! Deprive the literary festival of your thoughts on Shakespeare and see if anyone gives the faintest tiniest damn. Do your best to punish women who don’t think what you think, and fail completely.
Then there was the American author, Hesse Phillips, who apparently uses “she/they” pronouns. “This decision was not taken lightly,” she/they declared in a lengthy statement this week. “I’ve conferred with other queer and trans authors, cis and straight authors, friends and family, and in the end I feel that stepping down from my panel is the only way forward, both for my personal safety and my conscience.”
Who? Hesse who? Author of what?
Self-importance is not a desirable quality.
If you frown upon this proffered peace [and Joyce, and Bindel]
You will tempt the fury of my three attendants / Lean Famine, quartering steel, and climbing fire / Who, in a moment, even with the earth / Shall lay your stately and air-braving [academic] towers… Henry VI, Part 1, Act 4, Scene 2, with ornamental additions in square brackets: [ ]
“Personal safety”?
Since when does anyone have anything to fear from people who don’t believe in magic gender? The threats and violence are one way only, coming from the trans activist side. You’re blaming entirely the wrong party.
maddog, you seem to be forgetting the Tinkerbell effect: non-belief in the ideology causes trans people to cease to exist. One assumes that the erasure magic is stronger the closer a trans person gets to the non-believer. What greater threat to personal safety could there be than having one’s existence snuffed out?
There’s also the ever-present danger that exposure to opposing views is going to force a person of gender to commit suicide.
(Indeed the creatures that caused everyone who looked at them to kill themselves in Bird Box were actually TERFs)
“my three attendants . . . shall lay your . . . towers?” I cannot parse this, unless “lay” has a lost meaning I’m missing. (Is it like “lay to waste”?)
Soooo…
…we can get them to stay home if we invite feminists to events? And they think this is a win FOR them?
Bwahahahahaha.
Mike B, yes, it’s ‘lay to waste’ or more literally ‘lay flat’ or ‘flatten’.
Thanks, AoS. It adds a new, distasteful dimension to the expression “to lay X,” meaning to have sex with.
Hesse Phillips knows damn well there’s no risk to her/its personal safety or she/it wouldn’t have done all that conferring with other queer and trans authors, cis and straight authors, friends and family. It’s all pure drama, attention-seeking, preening, performing, ATTENTION SEEKING. Did I mention attention seeking?
FTFY
I’ve taken a look at the extract of Hesse Phillips’ novel Lightborne available on Amazon. It is a fictionalised account of the life of Christopher Marlowe and, perhaps unsurprisingly, is very over-written. This is the second sentence: “The face of Tamburlaine appears through the upstage curtains like a grotesque on a church door, oil-black rings of kohl smudged around his eyes, revealing something of the actor, Ned Alleyn, underneath.”
The problem here is that Elizabethan theatres did not have curtains, and neither did actors apply kohl, a word first recorded in English in 1799. A few pages later Marlowe is drinking whisky, a beverage unknown in Elizabethan England.
Phillips seems to have little feel for the Elizabethan era and I suspect the author’s withdrawal may raise the literary level of the festival.
Who in a moment shall lay your stately and air-braving towers even [level] with the earth. — in other words, ‘We’re going to level them flat’.
I wonder about the nature of Phillips’ consultation with friends, family, and colleagues. I would not be in the slightest surprised to learn – because it is so often the way – that she has de-friended and alienated anyone who does not have the same worldview as she, on the grounds that they are clearly fascists who want her not to exist. And if I am right, then the consultation would have been had with a small number of people whose position would be at most the homeopathic shadow of a ghost’s fart away from her own.
So why make the effort?
To solicit admiration!
Yeah: that’d explain it.
Bjarte, I prefer to think we’re more like the total perspective vortex, though the effect is much the same.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10147857-the-total-perspective-vortex-derives-its-picture-of-the-whole