Although I am a huge supporter of the initial intent and raison d'être of the Pride movement, I am a bit pissed if I’m honest. I’m not at all happy that one of nature’s great spectacles has been co-opted and so closely allied with this movement that it’s all but impossible to use a rainbow in any neutral way these days.
I’ve spent much of my scientific career trying to understand light and its quantum properties, and whilst I’ve mostly failed in that endeavour I still get a bit emotional and not at all “scientific” when I see a rainbow. These kinds of wishy-washy (but uplifting) feelings are, for me, best captured by IZ.
Pride seems to have largely degenerated into a public display of degenerates. I’m not really certain what ‘message’ is being sent by watching near naked (and in some cases actually naked) people in gimp masks march in public.
The message must be so very deep and profound that I have missed it entirely.
I’m pretty sure I’m getting this wrong, but here (to be read in a faux high-pitched excited ‘girly’ voice) is the message I get
Oooooo, look at meeeeeeeee!!!!!!! I’m just so fabulously queer.
But what the fuck is at the end of this rainbow? Does it even have an end? Is this it now? Will we have to endure this grotesquery of fetishes ad infinitum, and will the goalposts of decency and nourishing intimacy have moved so far that everyone can score with whatever frequency and with whomever and wherever they like?
Is there a point to Pride, or is it just an excuse to wear a gimp mask, shove things up your ass, and wobble your bits in public for a whole month?
I’m fairly broad-minded. My best mate is into some sexual stuff that I consider a bit weird (not my cup of tea), but I still love him to bits. I don’t think any less of him for his different tastes. If he decided to parade around in public exposing his privates and his (erstwhile) private fetishes, then I might be somewhat less accommodating. My general principle is: do whatever makes you happy, provided you’re not harming anyone else.
This is fine as a first approximation, but it does, obviously, require some refinement. What constitutes harm, for example? That’s a tricky question to answer. A more fundamentalist religious perspective might posit that homosexuality by its very nature is harmful, no matter how loving and lovely homosexual people are as individuals. I don’t agree (at all) with this perspective, but the issue of ‘harm’ is not easy to pin down in any fully objective way.
I also understand where such religious people are coming from here, even though I profoundly disagree with their view. I would never want to ‘cancel’ these views, but would rather try to argue against them, and by using their own scriptures if at all possible.
A supporter of Pride might argue that the ‘freeing up’ of our inner sexual desires, the elimination of the various cultural taboos that are preventing people from full self-realization and self-actualization, is a good thing and not at all harmful.
What we have on our hands is nothing less than a battle, and an important one, over what kind of people we want to be, what kind of society we want to live in?
Is there a compromise to be had between bibles and butt plugs? Which is just a provocative way of asking where the lines are to be drawn.
I think some degree of ‘freeing up’ of society was necessary. I don’t think a society built around so-called “Victorian values” is particularly healthy, but neither do I think the normalization of gimp masks and the like is particularly healthy.
Most people, I think, recognize that there is a line to be drawn. Somewhere. We can have vigorous debates about where that somewhere should be.
But when it comes to proponents of Queer Theory the philosophy is, by design, different. The whole purpose and ethos of Queer Theory is to eradicate those ‘lines’ - they represent the ‘norm’ and need to be dismantled. Queer Theory explicitly rejects the very concept that there are lines to be drawn.
This is why you get some people (mercifully very few) arguing that we’re oppressing kids by not allowing them to have sex with adults. Even this line should be dismantled in their view.
It’s all fine and dandy to have a bunch of aggressive Twitter spats with loons, bigots and the crazies - we all fling around our various insults and have a jolly good time bashing one another and causing no end of trauma. Some people even feel so abused by this process they leave the platform
What’s much more important, however, is how we bring up our kids.
What’s at the end of their rainbow? Is it a pot of gold or a crock of shit?
It’s something we need to get right. Or as close to right as we can manage.
How do we get this right? I suggest we’re always going to be short of the mark; we’re not going to get it right. But that’s OK, provided we help kids develop the tools and confidence to figure out for themselves what is right (in the fullness of time).
I have always liked the quote
We learn from our mistakes, so make as many as you can, as quickly as possible
When learning something like physics or maths I would even go so far as to suggest that it’s essential to make mistakes. Actually what’s essential is that we have the persistence and fortitude to work through our mistakes and to figure out where we went wrong. It’s this process of continual questioning that leads to a really secure and solid foundation and understanding.
But this process cannot happen at all if you do not have the freedom to (a) make a mistake in the first place and (b) go through this whole process of questioning.
Now have a listen to something we are emphatically told is NOT happening in schools.
https://twitter.com/TPointUK/status/1670145753669410816
The kids here are talking to their teacher (Rye College, UK) about gender, sex and identity. They disagree with their teacher and recorded their conversation. Listen to the teacher tell them “it’s not an opinion” (about the existence of the panoply of ‘genders’) and to then threaten and bully them in an attempt to force her opinion (or, more correctly, her ideology) on them.
Full marks to those kids. That miserable excuse for a ‘teacher’ has no business whatsoever being in a school.
Look how, instead of a discussion with questions and a genuine search for the ‘truth’ of a matter, the kids are not even being allowed to question, or to express their opinion.
I’m impressed with those kids - they’ve already found their inner pot of gold and are rejecting the crock of shit their teacher is trying to force on them.
If I might “problematize” your general principle a little (and I generally agree with it as a political rule— life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness being a good blueprint), the problem with the pursuit of happiness is that— as Gretchen Rubin probably wasn’t the first to point out— happiness doesn’t always make us happy. For instance, raising children creates many moments of exhaustion, frustration, anxiety, anger, and sacrifice of one’s own time and desires. Yet of everything I’ve ever done, it has been the most gratifying thing and the greatest contributor— other than staying married to my husband for over a decade and forevermore, through thick and thin— to my overall happiness.
Cultural norms— the opposite of “queerness”— aren’t for everyone, but they are an offering from our forebears: this is how you might create a life that is meaningful, enriching, and full, and that contributes not just to your personal happiness but to the well-being of others (and those two things are more related than you realize as an immature youth). You don’t have to live according to every whim you have, whether it is sexual attraction or any other physical craving. And I’m not even specifically poking gay people here; the real issue with obsessing about “attraction” and what one desires is that it is the enemy of any long-term relationship with an actual human being, whose body will change and droop and pucker. And there is also the issue of treating “love” as some random arrow that strikes you out of the blue, that a person has no control over, and that is intrinsically sexual in nature— rather than the marker of a relationship that is only sometimes eros but might also be philia (as with your best mate) or storge.
“My general principle is: do whatever makes you happy, provided you’re not harming anyone else.”
………..
Do these weirdos march in order to display that they are weirdly different? Do they have any general principles, other than to display that they are weirdly different? Or do they march in order to make normal people as unhappy as they appear to be? It seems to me that they want a reaction. It is best to ignore their provocations. Give them the Dodger Stadium treatment.
Teachers who advocate that it is permissible for adults to have sex with children should be fired. As should those who advocate that children should be allowed to make irreversible, attempted gender-changing operations.
BTW, there is nothing at the end of the rainbow. And even if there was, it will be gone before anyone gets there.