Not even the appearance of goodness
Suzanne Moore on the RA shop v Jess DeWahls:
Her work is desirable and sold in the shop of a prestigious museum. Yet her thoughts which she sometimes blogs about, these terrible thoughts mean that now this work must be banned from the museum’s gift shop because it “conflicts” with the values of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” that the institution stands for.
You know, I would have thought that the values the institution stands for are values that relate to art. It’s not a social work institution or a political institution, it’s an artistic institution. There are basic, background values that we generally assume public institutions adhere to, like not barring The Wrong Kind of People, but they’re basic and background, not up front and in your face.
And then, of course, whether they’re in your face or in a small closet two floors below ground level, it’s a funny kind of equality and diversity and inclusion that banishes a woman artist because she thinks men are men.
I am , of course talking about the completely ludicrous decision by the shop of the Royal Academy to no longer stock the work of Jess De Wahls because she “cannot accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born.” She thinks that being female is not simply a feeling.
…
Maya Forstater won her case last week but clearly the Royal Academy does not understand the Equality Act. Nor do they mind hanging paintings on the wall by a man who bought girls from their mothers and gave them syphilis – Paul Gauguin – or selling his prints in their gift shop. Diverse? Inclusive? Equal? Eric Gill who sexually abused his daughters was an associate of the Royal Academy. Indeed the place is full of art made by those with views that certainly do not embody the mantra of values that every institution now intones .
It would be nice if we could get someone from the Royal Academy shop to explain the thinking here. Why Gaugin & Gill fine but DeWahls banished?
What the Royal Academy has achieved here is not even the appearance of goodness but the appearance of stupidity. Does any of this – the banning of textiles – help a single trans person?
Stupidity but also unabashed bullying of a woman, all too similar to the bullying of Rowling and Forstater and Murphy and Millar and Suzanne herself.
The answer is, apparently, yes. I guess when what you know to be true about yourself is DOUBTED by other people who are NOT you and therefore have no way to know WHO and WHAT you really, truly are, that’s demoralizing. But look — someone has your back! They hurt the textile weaver who hurt you.
It’s always an unexpected rush of validation.
I dunno. Is schadenfreude better than validation?
Feminists’ efforts to protect the health, safety and dignity of women and girls, and women’s sex based rights, are always framed as just being a pretext for hurting “trans folk,” that somehow these women don’t really care about their own sex class, so long as they can dump on the trans. Yet so much of trans activism is actually more about punishing women, and hurting TERFs, than it is about trying to help those for whom they purport to speak and act.
Oh, it does help many trans people… it helps them enjoy the suffering of another human being (which I think is the other main driving force behind all this shit).
“The biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good, because it provides you with enemies. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you.” – John Cleese
Just like Christianity “helps” Christians feel better. They get to feel superior, and imagine all their enemies burning in hell for all eternity. They get to make little cluck cluck noises and pretend sympathy and harass their friends under the guise of “I just don’t want to see you go to hell”. While secretly enjoying their own special knowledge that they will, in fact, go to hell because they just are not as good as you.