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In a similar fashion the civil rights movement in America, which had started in order to right the most appalling of all historic wrongs, looked like it was moving towards some hoped-for resolution. But yet again, near the point of victory everything seemed to sour. Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric began to suggest that things had never been worse. Suddenly – after most of us had hoped it had become a non-issue – everything seemed to have become about race.
In On Liberty, first published in 1859, John Stuart Mill famously laid out four reasons for why free speech was a necessity in a free society: the first and second being that a contrary opinion may be true, or true in part, and therefore may require to be heard in order to correct your own erroneous views; the third and fourth being that even if the contrary opinion is in error, the airing of it may help to remind people of a truth and prevent its slippage into an ignorant dogma which may in time – if unchallenged – itself become lost.2
Almost immediately after gay marriage became legal in Germany, acceptance of it was made a condition of citizenship in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Yesterday there was one dogma. Now there is another.
the works that were the products of that research (Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, 1948, and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, 1953) Kinsey and his colleagues declared that they had found that 13 per cent of men were ‘predominantly homosexual’ for at least a three-year period between the age of 16 and 55 and that around 20 per cent of women had had some same-sex experience. Kinsey’s famous ‘scale’ of human sexual experience would produce the headline claim that around 10 per cent of the general population was homosexual.
Although Thiel had said that he didn’t agree with ‘every plank in our party’s platform’, he did state that ‘fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline’. As he went on, ‘When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?’
What is the demand that is being made here? The impossible demand that cannot be met but which has been written into contemporary mores? It is that a woman must be allowed to be as sexy and sexual as she pleases, but that does not mean she can be sexualized. Sexy, but not sexualized.
That women – not all women, but many women – have an ability that men do not. This is the ability to drive members of the opposite sex mad. To derange them. Not just to destroy them but to make them destroy themselves. It is a type of power which allows a young woman in her late teens or twenties to take a man with everything in the world, at the height of his achievements, torment him, make him behave like a fool and wreck his life utterly for just a few moments of almost nothing.
The attitudes of men at a senior level were striking. In interviews with more than 30 senior executives from the world of finance men admitted to no longer being willing to have dinner with female colleagues. They also refused to sit next to them on flights. They insisted on hotel rooms being booked on different floors from female colleagues and avoided any one-on-one meetings with women.15
The schemes themselves slightly differ, but all centre around versions of what at Harvard University has been developed as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Since it went on the internet in 1998 more than 30 million people have taken the test on the Harvard website to discover whether or not they harbour unconscious bias.17 What the IAT attempts to work out is who individuals think of as being in an ‘in group’ and who they might see as being in an ‘out group’. Cited thousands of times in academic papers, it has undoubtedly become the most influential measure of ‘unconscious bias’.
the one thing we can say with certainty about the advent of new technologies is that people overestimate their impact in the short term and underestimate their impact over the long term. There is little doubt now, after the initial excitement, that we all massively underestimated what the internet and social media would do to our societies.
It was Dr King’s great central moral insight that in the future about which he dreamed his children should ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character’.
Even anti-racism becomes racist. One of the primary principles of anti-racism in recent decades was the idea of ‘colour-blindness’ – the idea of which Martin Luther King was dreaming in 1963. The idea that skin colour should become such an unimportant aspect of a person’s identity that it is possible to ignore it completely – to get beyond race – is perhaps the only solution available, as well as a beautiful idea, for how to prevent race colouring every single aspect of human interaction for all of the future.
extreme claims are made in the places least likely to experience any such catastrophe. So whereas there are countries in the world which might be described as having something resembling a ‘rape culture’ (where rape goes unprosecuted and indeed is sanctioned by law), Western democracies could ordinarily not reasonably be accused of being among them. In the same way, whereas there are places in the world where racism is rife and there are societies which could at some point teeter back into some kind of racial nightmare, one of the places least likely to switch into ethnic cleansing in the
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in the world of academia intellectual drive-by shootings often happen at a more leisurely pace than in the rest of society.
Nobody seemed certain precisely how many seconds of standing ovation it was correct to give a trans woman receiving an award for courage. Some attention to the etiquette in the Soviet Politburo might have helped. The only lesson unarguably imparted was that if everyone is applauding a trans person you should make sure that you are the last person to resume your seat.
arises precisely from this concern about irreversibility. News of an increase in the number of children claiming to be gender-dysphoric, and the growing evidence of a ‘cluster effect’ when such claims begin to be made (that is, that once a number of children in a school claim to be in the wrong body similar claims expand exponentially),
a number of girls as young as 13 had been put on cross-sex hormones for fewer than six months before they were given surgery. This means that girls as young as 12 have been given these life-changing drugs. Furthermore, progress reports show that as of 2017 children as young as eight have become eligible for such treatments.
Perhaps it is just a version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum on human rights: that claims of human rights violations happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of human rights violations in a country. You do not hear of such violations in unfree countries. Only a very free society would permit – and even encourage – such endless claims about its own iniquities. Likewise, somebody can only present a liberal arts college in America or a dining experience in Portland as verging on the fascist if the people complaining are as far away from fascism as it is possible to be.
As MMA expert and podcaster Joe Rogan pointed out, ‘there is a giant difference between the amount of power that a man and a woman can generate . . . There’s a difference in the shape of the hips, the size of the shoulders, the density of the bones, the size of the fists.’ And this is a sport where, as Rogan put it, the objective is very clear: ‘Beat the fuck out of the other person in front of you.’
As Rogan later put it, ‘People came down on me harder than anything that I’ve ever stood up for in my life. Never in my life did I think there was going to be a situation where I said “Hey, I don’t think a guy should be able to get his penis removed and beat the shit out of women” and then people were like “You’re out of line”. But that’s literally what happened.’14
In fact, suffering in and of itself does not make someone a better person. A gay, female, black or trans person may be as dishonest, deceitful and rude as anybody else.
Early on in that crisis Sam Smith posted on social media some photos of himself crying in his mansion in lockdown. The response was less supportive of him than he obviously hoped. Although some online wit did point out that at least ‘they’ had ‘themselves’ for company.
