Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings

When I was growing up and my musical tastes first started to develop I liked some stuff that is, in retrospect, a little embarrassing. The first album I ever bought was by The New Seekers and it contained this, erm, gem

The vocal work here is actually pretty good, but the song makes me cringe a bit these days. Mind you, I’d take this sickly anodyne sweetness over something like WAP any day.

Another song I liked, for what are now utterly inexplicable reasons, is Feelings by Morris Albert.

This song does have one redeeming feature at least; it contains the immortal line

I wish I’d never met you, girl
You’ll never come again

Well, if that’s true, I’m sure she feels the same way

I did eventually progress to liking ‘progressive rock’, although I’m not sure if that’s less, or more, embarrassing.

I was always impressed with vocal harmony, and still am. Despite several miserable attempts to master this skill, it’s not something I’ve ever been able to do. There’s something quite magical about male vocal harmony¹ and the resonant deep voices. Homeless by Ladysmith Black Mambazo always give me goosebumps.

I’m not sure whether overdosing on testosterone would allow a group of transmen to ever sound quite like this. I wouldn’t be surprised to be proven wrong, but I think it would not be the ‘norm’, so to speak.

In the Sacred and Holy Month of Pride (SHMOP) many of us find our thoughts more focused on certain kinds of questions. What is a man? What is a woman? What’s the best lube to buy? Those kinds of things.

In 2023 the western world, it seems, is awash with feelings. We’re drowning in the fucking things. People feel “unsafe” at work, they feel the need for validation, they feel anxious and depressed, they feel they are the wrong sex, they feel offended, and the list goes on.

I’m not going to deny that feelings are important, but perhaps we’ve given them just a tad too much primacy when deciding on how to structure society and the various controls and boundaries that are necessary to teach us how to ‘sing in perfect harmony’, so to speak.

The correct response when someone says “I’m offended by that” is, so what?

Instead, we have the ‘miscreants’ indulging in some hideous grovelling and overblown apology in a vain attempt not to derail their careers. These ‘apologies’ are even more sickly than any New Seeker’s song (hard to imagine, I know).

There seems to me to be far too much encouragement, these days, to feel traumatized. Trigger warnings, for example, are not a warning - they’re an inducement to feel traumatized. Once you’ve convinced yourself that you ought to feel traumatized by even the slightest thing, what do you think might happen?

I mention (again) the counselling offered by one university for students who attended a lecture on free speech; to help them overcome their trauma at attending such a terrible event. The expectation was that some students would be traumatized by it.

At least the ‘hateful’ event was allowed to happen. In many cases such events get cancelled for fears about ‘harm’ or that certain students will be made to feel unsafe.

When kids are very young, they’re basically just a blob of smells, noises, and feelings. As they grow and mature they learn to master their feelings, to have some degree of control over them. As adults we’re not expected to have tantrums. We are not, except in perhaps the most dire circumstances (like a death in the family, for example), expected to be temporarily disabled or deranged by them.

This is part and parcel of what being an adult is all about. We take responsibility - not just for our material needs, but also for our emotions and feelings.

But it’s SHMOP and so we also need to consider another area where feelings become ultra-important. This is the issue of whether if someone feels they are of the opposite sex, they actually ARE the opposite sex. Strictly speaking, the claim is about gender and not sex. Only the craziest of the woke crazies will actually think you can change your biological sex.

We all know about the serious problems with the concept of gender. It’s one of those words that seems ‘sensible’ on the surface; it’s the bundle of roles and behaviours that are internal and external and associated with one’s biological sex.

Except that no longer works, because there are no associated roles or expectations or behaviours when it comes to some of the genders that were made up just ten minutes ago. It makes some kind of sense (but only some) in the context of male and female bodies - that is, in the context of biology - because there is something meaningful with which to make the association.

What are the gender ‘roles’ and ‘behaviours’ expected or ‘internalized’ by someone who is of the gender demigirl, for example?

But even in the context of biology and restricting things to just the obvious two genders associated with male and female biology, there’s a problem. And it’s to do with feelings, again.

Biologically you’re a man, but you feel like a woman?

OK. What am I supposed to do with that? What does that even mean? What ARE those feelings? Describe them to me. How do you know that this is what it feels like to be a woman? What are the feelings associated with being a woman? If a biological woman doesn’t share those feelings, is she still a woman? Is there some minimal set of feelings required out of a range of possible feelings?

You could go on and on trying to figure out what feelings have to do with any of this and coming up with question after question after question. The important point to note is that none of those questions have any answers outside of stereotypes.

You don’t feel like a woman - what you feel like is some imagined and constructed idea of what you think a woman is, based on stereotypes, and how she is imagined to feel.

It’s the same problem we have with religious leaders who tell you that God thinks this, or says that, or is like such and such. How the hell would you know? You don’t know what God is like, you only have an idea of what you think God is like.

One analogy that’s made when it comes to gender is that biological sex is like the hardware and gender is like the software. Which brings to mind the old adage from early IT days; the way to understand hardware and software is to remember that it’s the opposite of men and women. In a computer the software goes into the hardware.

OK - but we’re back to the question of what ‘software’ does a woman run? Is there a way to examine the ‘code’ and say, yup, this is definitely female code - look at all the never-ending recursive loops².

The only reason we’ve gotten into this surreal gender mess is because we’ve allowed our feelings to run away with us and have afforded them primacy over everything. It’s the only way you can convince a significant fraction of the population of the absurdity that all one needs to do to BE a woman is to “feel” like you’re one. It’s your truth, your lived experience, and we’re all supposed to play along with this fantasy.

I am a woman because I say that I am is no basis upon which to create legislation that potentially affects the lives and well-being of those people who actually ARE (objectively) women. But this statement is all that they have. It’s the entirety of their “argument”.

For the majority of day to day interactions none of this is important. If you choose to ‘live as’ a woman (although that’s a bit vague) even though you were born (not assigned to be) male, then it’s really not a big deal for me to treat you as a woman, is it? I don’t think so anyway³. I can live with that and hope you’re happy in your choice. It’s only ‘at the edges’ does this stuff matter - things like the safety and security and dignity of women when it comes to things like intimate medical procedures, or rape crisis centres, or changing rooms.

It’s all a horrible mess and people are going to end up hurt. Proper hurt - not some fantasy ‘trauma’ because someone said free speech is a jolly good thing.

How we are going to get ourselves out of this unholy mess is unclear to me. The woke think it’s just a matter of time as they indoctrinate their way through the schools. But they will be very sadly mistaken. You can only deny the realities of biology for so long.

You can’t sustain things based on feelings, nothing more than feelings, forever. We desperately need to get back to being adults and having a bit more mastery over our feelings.

1. There’s also something magical about female vocal harmony - just in a different way.

2. Sexist ‘joke’ which rests on a stereotype

3. Except if you’re built like a brick shithouse and have a beard. I’ll be honest - I’m going to really struggle with thinking of you as a woman. Sorry about that. Can’t help it. I’ll do my best, but don’t expect me to ‘do a Walsh’ and open any jars for you.