A decade ago, I apparently left a comment on Assistant Village Idiot’s site, which he liked and suggested I post as an original article elsewhere. I don’t remember writing this, but I find I still agree, so here it is:
Sydney Sweeney as Heretic
Max Cossack relates a story from 2017 about Norm MacDonald being told he couldn’t appear on that day’s taping of “The Tonight Show” because his prior comments made Jimmy Fallon’s staffers cry.
Max writes:
The Fallon Show weepathon demonstrated that at some point since its origins, modern feminism had turned into its opposite. Or more likely, revealed that it never was what it claimed to be in the first place.
After all, power take [sic] many forms. Modern feminism may clothe itself in a burka of lies but it cares most for naked power. And tears work.
The question is what kind of power this is.
I saw an article in another part of the New York industrial-media complex, the NY Times’s The Athletic, regarding Sydney Sweeney’s ad for a sports betting site. The “writer,” a certain Megan Feringa, states:
The response has been swift and damning, predominantly from women in sport whom Sweeney is — intentionally or not — representing. Athletes of all abilities and levels have shared images of what it actually looks like to be a woman in sport, denouncing Sweeney’s hyper-sexualised iteration.
If you are not familiar with the ad, Sweeney is basically using her hot bod to sell sports betting to men. Not that ad executives read the philosophy of Locke and his work on empiricism, but “ample” experience has shown that men like sports, many like to bet, and almost all men on this side of soy milk lattes like hot women. Simple analysis in the manner of another great English philosopher, Francis Bacon, would conclude that using hot naked women to sell sports betting to (most) men is a proven winner.
Feringa, who, unlike Ms. Sweeney, I have not seen mostly naked, wants us to think that over-the-top ads using sex to sell sin to normal males demean “women in sport.” What she doesn’t say is that there is very little overlap between those men who like the Sweeney ad and those who watch women’s sports. Those men don’t think less of women’s sports as a consequence of the Sweeney ad, because they don’t think of women’s sports in the first place.
We can each have our own corner of the world and wish each other well (as I do for the WNBA which I do not watch), but also place a “Do Not Trespass” sign on our particular property.
There’s another, even more troubling, element to Feringa’s argument. She is stating that Sweeney, whether she knew it or not, represented “women in sport” and that term is defined solely by women athletes.
Leaving aside that Sweeney’s ad has less of a connection to “women in sport” than a stripper has to a ballerina, what does that say about Feringa’s role as a writer? Is she (as a non-athlete) allowed to comment and critique “women in sport” as long as she does not stray from the orthodoxy defined by those women who participate in sports? As long as she doesn’t (thankfully) issue her commentary while being mostly naked?
What do we call a self-selected clerisy that proclaims its right to not only define its own narrow view of the world but also to punish dissenters? Maybe not totalitarians, but certainly something ominous.
Something involving power.
Perhaps in her next ad, Sweeney should embrace her role as a heretic and nail her own 95 Theses onto Feringa’s office door.
Have You Ever Kippled?
The title of this post is a reference to an ancient music-hall joke, in which a young man asks his new girlfriend if she likes Kipling, to which she replies, “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled!”
This topic was brought to my mind when I commented on David Fosters’ Amelia Does Kipling post – that admitting to a liking for and knowledge of the prose and poetry of Rudyard Kipling is a kind of secret conservative/libertarian handshake, by which we recognize another of our kind. Recognizing and readily quoting something like The Gods of the Copybook Headings, or When the English Began to Hate, The Sons of Martha, or The Dane-Geld, and being familiar with his vast and varied body of work is something which goes bone-deep among us but also leaves those of a woke inclination utterly cold. Kipling himself was a curious but very logical sort of writer and observer of the human condition. He was insanely popular, a best-selling writer, international celebrity and recipient of the highest honors for literature in his time.
The City Wall
In April 1996, more than five years before he steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, Mohamed Atta sat in a small Hamburg apartment and wrote his last will and testament. He was 27, an architecture student at the Technical University, the son of a Cairo lawyer, fluent in German, and living comfortably in one of the most affluent societies on earth.
The category error of our response to 9/11 wasn’t that it treated the Islamic threat as something merely external, but that it failed to properly define the term “external.” After 9/11 we defined the external as something from a foreign land, when in reality the external threat was from a hostile ideology that resided among us.
The key defining element of a civilization is the border, the line that both physically and socially divides it from the rest of the world. In older times that border took on the form of the city wall that defined both who did and who didn’t belong. Those who resided outside of the border may be our friends but they are by definition not us.
One of the (many) great lies of the past 50+ years is the Left’s use of the term “inclusion,” popularized not only through terms such as “DEI,” but also through culture in songs such as “Imagine” and “We Are the World.” The trope is that there are no borders, that the human race is one big happy family.
The old rites
A friend of a friend asked to use our garden for a wedding yesterday, on a couple of days’ notice, and I found to my surprise that it sounded like a terrific idea. Since my husband hurt his back somewhat a few years ago, we haven’t been doing our annual Oysterfest extravaganza and have allowed the area to get a little squalid, but I’ve been working hard on it recently, especially watering to help everything recover from last year’s severe drought. I brought in a crew that worked like dogs all day yesterday bringing order and cleanliness to the premises, after which at 7:30pm we pulled off an impromptu service.
The couple had worked on their vows, and a mutual friend was recently ordained and was ready to do the service, but that’s about it for the prep. All day yesterday there was a mad scramble getting a wedding cake baked and fantastically decorated, which so occupied the attention of the person mostly likely to rally the troops that, with the time of the ceremony rapidly approaching, I was alarmed to find that no one had yet arrived to help set up. I didn’t even know how many people were coming. Then everyone poured in, some bearing refreshments, others flowers. Someone had brought a veil, which we rapidly pinned on the bride’s head. There were candles. Everyone had a few shared assumptions about the essentials of the rite, which came off with surprising beauty and dignity. The firepit occupied several small children for the next hour or two making s’mores, while the rest of us drank sangria and ate Indian food, tamales, and wedding cake while toasting the couple’s health.
If the society and/or government tries to tell us that the whole country is now in our charmed circle, experience tells us it doesn’t work out the same. We won’t work extra hard for strangers, or at least the economic performance data tell us clearly that most people won’t on average. The economy booms when incentives are tied to our productivity, but our incentives are what they are, not what someone tells us they ought to be. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an Uncle Sam poster telling us, or Michelle Obama, or Edmund Burke, or the church: unless we not only hear the message but actually take it to heart, then a system that makes us share the product of our work with those people is not a system in which we’ll push the envelope on how much valuable work we put out.
An economic system that pools resources because we have a conviction that as Christians we should share more puts the cart before the horse. If people are persuaded in their hearts that they should share more, then they will. If they’re not, then neither an economic nor a legal system can solve the problem that forced sharing leads to lower production and therefore a poorer economy. We may be able to solve a different problem: we may be able to substitute an economy with greater equality of wealth, if we think that’s more important, but we’ll do it at the cost of total wealth per capita.
It seems to me we have to figure out what’s the important societal goal here. Is it to maximize the material wealth a culture can produce? Is it to alleviate the material poverty of our least fortunate members, ones who not only can’t produce for themselves but don’t have anyone who cares enough for them to share with them? Is it to reduce invidious distinctions among neighbors and citizens? It is to convert as many souls as possible to the virtuous habit of generosity? The economy is a useful tool for many things, but I’d argue it’s the wrong tool for the last three of the projects just listed. The right tools for the last three projects are political, ethical, or religious.
Imagine if all our productive workers genuinely were as motivated to improve the standard of living for the non-kin groups living on the other side of the tracks as they were to benefit their own kids. Suddenly we’d find that the free-market system was every bit as capable of harnessing that desire as it currently is of inducing people to take second jobs so their grandkids can go to Harvard.