Bigging Up the Gibson Girl

Charles Dana Gibson: The Weaker Sex (1903)

I. 

Although - like many Englishmen - I have a great fondness for American women, I was never particularly excited by those turn-of-the-century beauties given us by the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. 

That is to say, Gibson's Edwardian ideal of femininity - combining slightly old-fashioned or straight-laced elements with more modern aspects - is not really my ideal. I like the slender, youthful features and the way her elegant neck is exposed thanks to the pinned-up (pompadour) hairstyle, but I'm not so keen on the fullness of figure and overly fussy fashions.

From the perspective of sexual politics, the Gibson Girl also leaves something to be desired; she was not quite new enough to be considered a New Woman and didn't fully share the latter's progressive vision of social and political change.

Thus, whilst she may have enjoyed some of the freedoms that the New Woman had campaigned for, she didn't seem to threaten the phallocratic order or wish to usurp traditionally masculine roles. Nor was she about to chain herself to any railings; the Gibson Girl was many things, but a militant suffragette she was not. Ultimately, she enjoyed her privileged life in a Gilded Age. 


II.

There is, however, one aspect of the Gibson Girl that does fascinate; she was sometimes depicted not as a traditionally passive paradigm of womanhood, but, rather, as a sexually dominant and teasing figure who enjoyed humiliating her lovers and making men feel small as she cheerfully crushed them underfoot, or, as we see in the image above, closely examined them in every detail as if they were some kind of inferior specimen or human insect. 

Whether this tells us something about the wilfulness of American women, or Gibson's own perviness, I don't know. But this little-commented upon theme of macrophilia identifiable in his work is surely worthy of further research by those interested either in the history of American illustration or the history of fetishism (or both). 

Although I wouldn't particularly wish to be abused or toyed with by a giantess - and I certainly don't have any desire to crawl inside a cavernous vagina or swallowed whole - I can understand the appeal of a fifty-foot woman and it doesn't surprise me to read that macrophilia is trending on an increasing number of porn sites and that the internet has played a crucial role in helping to develop and popularise this sexual fantasy.

The 18th-century statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke may have supposed it impossible to ever love a giant, but that merely shows the limits (and inherently conservative nature) of his erotic imagination. As does the all-too-predictable view of St. Louis-based clinical psychologist and radio show host Dr. Helen Friedman:

"[Macrophiles] are playing out some old, unresolved psychological issue. Maybe as a child they felt overwhelmed by a dominant mother, or a sadsitic mother. Maybe they were abused. [Macrophilia] is not so much a fetish as a disassociation from reality. It's part of an internal world. The macro's submersion in fantasy serves as a substitute for a more normalized approach to sex. Healthy sexuality is about personal intimacy. It's about feeling good about yourself in a way that expresses caring, and feeling a connection to another person."

This is so laughably ludicrous - almost beyond parody - that I don't even know where or how to begin to refute it. So I'll end the post here and leave this to others, such as Dr. Mark Griffiths, to do; someone who has an altogether more sympathetic and sane understanding of this and other paraphilias. 

See: Mark D. Griffiths, 'Big Love: a beginners guide to macrophilia', Psychology Today (9 April, 2015): click here to read online. The quote from Helen Friedman was taken from here. 

This post was inspired by - and is dedicated to - Miss Shirin Altsohn (aka Shirinatra), the vintage lifestyle model who knows how to nail the Gibson Girl look to a T: click here. 

What Big Teeth You Have: Notes on D. H. Lawrence and Dental Morphology

The kind of woman D. H. Lawence dreams of ...
Emmanuelle Vaugier as Madison in the hit 
American TV series Supernatural [S2/E17] 

I.

If you ask your dentist about teeth, they'll probably bore on about the different types (incisors, canines, and molars), what their function is (to cut, tear, and crush items of food), where they're located (upper and lower jaws), what they're made of (enamel, dentin, cementum, and pulp) and why it's important for our health and wellbeing to take care of our teeth and gums (prone as they are to decay and disease). 

Perhaps, if they really know their stuff, your dentist might even give you an insight into the evolutionary history of hominid teeth and their changing morphology. But mostly they'll just want you to upgrade your dental plan or agree to another series of X-rays.  

II.

Ask D. H. Lawrence about teeth, however, and you'll get a very different kind of answer. For although Lawrence wasn't a dentist - he's primarily remembered today (if at all) as a novelist and poet - he did have a fascination with teeth as the instruments of our sensual will.

What does that mean?

It means that their development is controlled from the two great sensual centres below the diaphragm; particularly the voluntary centre: "The growth and the life of the teeth depends almost entirely on the lumbar ganglion."

I don't know if that's true or not and don't really care. What interests me more - and what does have basis in scientific fact - is Lawrence's claim that the mouths of modern human beings have become smaller than those of their primal ancestors:

"For many ages we have been suppressing the [...] sensual will [... and] converting ourselves into ideal creatures, all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane, the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth have become soft and unquickened."

Worse, they give us trouble all the time and many people end up having to wear false teeth - a sure sign for Lawrence of an individual who is "spirit-rotten and idea-rotten". In other words, dentures indicate degeneracy.

Perhaps not surprisingly to those who are familiar with his work, Lawrence also relates his dental philosophy to his thinking on race and ethnicity; it is white people who have no room in their little pinched mouths for the healthy teeth possessed by negroes.

The dark-skinned races have wisely resisted the urge to forfeit their flashing sensual power and submit to the self-conscious love-ideal. Lawrence envies them their strong, resistant teeth - as he does their fullness of lips and thickness of nose; these things being indicative to him of the sensual-sympathetic mode of consciousness and the primary centre from which an individual or a people live.

Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he doesn't stop here. Ultimately, even black people don't quite have the gnashers he lycanthropically fantasises: "Where [...] are the sharp and vivid teeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour?"

Only if we possessed the large teeth of predators - including 2" fangs - would men and women find happiness, says Lawrence.

See: D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 99-100. 

Kiss This: Additional Thoughts on Lips and Lipstick

It's arguable that lips are one of the key defining features of the human being. For whilst most other mammals possess them, only we have lips that are permanently on display thanks to an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes.

Thus Deleuze and Guattari are right to suggest that just as the human mouth is a deterritorialization of the animal snout, the lips are a subsequent deterritorialization of the mouth, designed - amongst other things - to reterritorialize (and to suckle) on the maternal breast.

Later, of course, the lips will play an important part in the act of eating solid foods - and in speech; again, one of the defining characteristics of man is the fact that he stuffs his mouth with words as well as sausage rolls. 

Finally, due to an overabundance of nerve endings, the lips are extremely sensitive and therefore play a significant role in sexual acts, such as kissing; described by D. H. Lawrence as the primary sensual connection.  

Lips, then, are crucial to our survival and to our pleasure.

I have to admit, however, that the pale, thin lips of modern women that offer the delicate spiritual kisses of those who act exclusively from the upper plane of consciousness, don't really excite my interest unless they have been cosmetically enhanced with that fabulous mix of oils, waxes, pigments and emollients known as lipstick ...

Lipstick gives back to even the meanest and most refined of mouths a certain savage beauty. 

Notes

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987): see '10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)'. 

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004): see 'The Five Senses'. 

Click here for a related post to this one in which I expand upon my love of lipstick (with reference to the work of Baudelaire and to the case of Cleopatra). 

Young Flesh Required: Notes on Punk and Paedophilia

A banned promotional image for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

Designed by Jamie Reid (1979)

I. Cash from Chaos

Some of Jamie Reid's most provocative images produced during the Sex Pistols period came after the group itself fronted by singer Johnny Rotten had imploded and McLaren's management company, Glitterbest, had passed into the hands of the receivers.    

This includes, for example, the above artwork designed to promote the fabulously ambitious project known as The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle; a project which set out to paradoxically mythologise and demythologise the Sex Pistols whilst also exposing the greed, cynicism and corruption at the heart of a music industry that ruthlessly exploits young talent as well as the loyalty of fans.  

Based on the design of the American Express credit card,* the Sex Pistols are identified as being the Artist (or Prostitute). Of course, anyone's name could be inserted here, providing they have what it takes to generate income for the Record Company (or Pimp), which controls every aspect of the Artist's career and uses the monies earned to increase their power and diversify their business (perhaps even starting their own airline).

The Swindle, ultimately, is nothing other than the operation of the free market itself; for what's more anarchic (and amoral) than the unrestricted flows of capital? We all get cash from chaos - but particularly those who have resolved all values into commercial value and found a way to co-opt even the most radical and revolutionary of forces.

The relationship between punk and capitalism is an interesting one: I'd like to think that the former is a genuinely decoded flow of desire and not ultimately identical with capitalism's own game of deterritorialization. Unfortunately, I'm not entirely convinced of this; too many punks - like too many hippies before them - went on to make too much money and establish successful (and seemingly interminable) careers.


II. Servicing the Fetishes of the Pop World  

Jamie Reid's punk Amex card isn't simply making a point about the exploitative nature of the music business from a financial perspective, however. It also hints - in fact, it explicitly suggests with its language of pimping and prostitution - that there's also a sleazy, sexually abusive game being played by those in positions of power (including rock stars, DJs, and record company executives).

At the time, I don't remember anyone being particularly concerned about this; there was the same jokey, nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude to paedophilia as there was to rape. Either that, or people simply turned a blind eye to what was going on. It's precisely this aspect, however, that resonates most strongly with many people today in the era of the #MeToo movement and Time's Up campaign.

Thus, when watching The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle now, one of the more unpleasant and truly shocking scenes takes place at a brothel based at the Cambridge Rapist Hotel, where Steve Jones encounters a record boss awaiting trial on a child molesting charge. Whether this was intended to alert people to the perverse underbelly of the entertainment industry, or simply amuse viewers of the film, is debatable.

It's worth noting, however, that McLaren was not adverse to exploiting young flesh himself in order to create a stir; from his use of a picture of a naked boy posing with a cigarette on an early t-shirt design, to his attempts to embroil members of Bow Wow Wow - including their 14-year-old singer, Annabella Lwin - in a sex scandal, via a photographic recreation of Manet's Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. 

In the end, no one is innocent ...


Notes

Perhaps not surprisingly, American Express were not best pleased with Reid's artwork and claimed copyright infringement. An injunction was issued and the graphic immediately withdrawn by Virgin.

For those who are interested, the writer Paul Gorman provides more details of the smoking boy t-shirt designed by McLaren on his very wonderful blog devoted to all aspects of visual culture: click here. 

See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple (1980): click here to view the trailer.  

Mules 2: Beasts of Burden

Mule: Getty Images

Say the word mules to some people and they'll think of the favoured shoe of sex-kittens, much loved by artists, fetishists, and fashionistas.  

However, for those philosophers of animality, such as myself, with a keen interest in the natural world, the word refers, of course, to heterotic donkey-horse hybrids that hugely impressed Darwin for - amongst other things - their intelligence, memory, and powers of muscular endurance.   

To be precise in the matter, a mule is the result of interspecies shenanigans between a male donkey (or jack) and a female horse (or mare); something easier to obtain than a hinny which is the offspring of a male horse (or stallion) and a female donkey (or jenny).

What's interesting is that the mule provides us with an example of what's known as hybrid vigour - i.e. a form of genetic enhancement. For they are reputed to be not only more robust and longer-lived than horses, but relatively less stubborn and more intelligent than donkeys. This shows that artificial selection and unnatural couplings can, in fact, sometimes produce superior offspring.   

Not that the more snobbish members of the horse-breeding community concede this; they still tend to look down on the mule as an inferior creature (if not genetically, then socially). That said, although long excluded from traditional horse shows, mules have now been accepted for competition at some of the most prestigious shows in the world. 

Sadly, whilst in the industrialised world mules, like horses, have largely been replaced by machines, there are still some working in the United States, particularly in large inaccessible areas of wilderness, as found, for example, in the Sierra Nevada. Amish farmers and US marines also still recognise the great value of mules. 

Finally, I'm pleased to note that in 1985 President Reagan proclaimed October 26th as National Mule Day; something you'd have to be an ass not to celebrate.  

Note: for a sister post to this one on mules (as footwear), click here. 

Mules 1: Sex Kitten Shoes

Wandler handmade pink and orange leather mules

with 3" contrast heel and pointed toe

Available at Harvey Nichols: click here

Say the word mules to some people and they'll think of heterotic donkey-horse hybrids that hugely impressed Darwin for - amongst other things - their intelligence, memory, and powers of muscular endurance. 

However, for those philosophers on the catwalk, such as myself, with a mildly fetishistic interest in the history of female fashion, the word refers, of course, to one of the loveliest of shoe designs and surely a staple of every well-dressed woman's wardrobe; from celebrated French beauty Mme. La Comtesse d'Olonne, to Candace Bushnell's fictional alter ego Carrie Bradshaw.       

Backless and usually (but not always) closed-toe, the mule in its modern form was originally worn only within the bedroom; easy to slip on and easy to slip off. But when members of the French court, including Mme. de Pompadour (official mistress to Louis XV) and Marie Antoinette (the last and most stylish Queen of France), began to wear them en dehors de la boudoir, it kickstarted a new trend that has been with us ever since.   

As a man who knows more about women's shoes than most others, Spanish designer Manolo Blahnik once said:

'When a woman wears mules she walks a bit differently. It's very sexy; she has to find her balance. Madame de Pompadour in her mules, walking around Versailles, click! click! click! Can you think of anything more exquisite?'


II.

Perhaps because of their association with the bedroom - and the fact that that they always seem ready to slip off, leaving the foot exposed - mules have an inherent, playful eroticism. We see this, for example, in Fragonard's famous picture The Swing (1767), wherein a young beauty loses a shoe to the delight of her male spectators.   

But mules also figure prominently in the slightly darker corners of the porno-aesthetic imagination, as explored by artists such as Manet, for example in his scandalous painting of 1863 entitled Olympia, in which a confident young prostitute stares provocatively and without shame at the viewer, the nakedness of her flesh emphasised by a bootlace tied like a punk accessory around her neck and a pair of yellow silk mules, one of which she has casually kicked off.       

Finally, we must of course mention the so-called marabou mules of the 1950s, often made from plastic and decorated with feathers, as worn by sex-kittens everywhere (especially in America). In fact, as archivists at the Met Museum rightly say, no object better epitomises the trashy glamour of the time than the marabou mule.  

Amusingly, if you ever buy your groceries on Harold Hill, you'll notice young Essex girls wearing these fluffy symbols of feminine allure as they stroll round Iceland or buy coffee in Greggs.

See: Alice Newell-Hanson, 'In praise of mules, fashion's most perverse shoes', i-D (27 March 2017): click here to read online. 

See also a sister post to this one on mules as noble beasts of burden: click here. 

If You Only Palpitate to Murder / No One is Innocent

Jamie Reid: God Save Jack the Ripper (1979)

One of a series of posters designed by Reid for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980)

For more information visit the Victoria and Albert Museum website: click here. 

Some interesting emails have arrived in my inbox concerning a recent post by Símón Solomon on Charles Manson: click here.

Several people professed no interest in the case; others voiced their concern that, in publishing the post, I am helping to further mythologise Manson and his Family when such vile individuals should be starved of the oxygen of publicity and allowed to fade from the collective memory as soon as possible.

However, whilst I agree with D. H. Lawrence that "if you only palpitate to murder" it quickly becomes boring and results, ultimately, in "atrophy of the feelings" (i.e., like the sexual excitement generated by pornography, the sensational thrill of violent crime is subject to a law of diminishing returns and one must therefore seek out an ever more lurid level of explicit detail), I don't think we can simply ignore negative limit-experiences.

Like it or not, figures like Charles Manson are indelibly part of the cultural imagination and undoubtedly have something important - if disturbing - to tell us about ourselves. As Símón rightly argues, it's virtually impossible to exaggerate (or expunge) Manson's enduring impact and whilst some might need to think him beyond the pale, he was "very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic".

Similarly, in the UK, figures ranging from Dick Turpin and Jack the Ripper to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, are as British as fish 'n' chips and will continue to haunt our cultural imagination for as long as we continue to consume the latter (even though he's horrible and she ain't what you'd call a lady).

This was perfectly understood by Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, the latter of whom designed the provocative series of God Save ... posters that the former pasted up in Highgate Cemetery in the famous 'You Needs Hands' scene of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980) - a scene which I have discussed elsewhere on this blog: click here.      

Reid's artwork - much like the Sex Pistols' 1979 single featuring Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs on vocals - advances the challenging theological idea that, thanks to original sin, no one is innocent - i.e. we are each of us, as fallen beings, corrupt at some level and capable of committing acts of atrocity. Similarly, we are all of us - no matter how evil and depraved - capable of redemption; for we are all God's children (not just those who attend church and say their prayers).

Was punk rock, then, simply a disguised form of moral humanism founded, like Christianity, on a notion of forgiveness ...? Was its nihilism merely a pose?     

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI: March 1927-November 1928, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600.

Play: Sex Pistols, No One Is Innocent (Virgin Records, 1978): click here.

Again to Nowhere and Nothing Again: The Multiple Death-in-Life Masks of Charles Manson - A Guest Post by Símón Solomon

With the 50th anniversary overlap of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie - a black comedy-cum-thriller set in 1969 LA - and an orthodoxy-busting new book by Tom O'Neill, the helter-skelter spiral concerning the life, death and afterlife of celebrity mass murderer, Charles Manson, continues to unravel.

If Tarantino’s title attests to a sense of his picture's elliptical storyboarding, O'Neill’s obsessive study, two decades in the making, underwrites its anarchic archetypal matrix. Either way, should one or both works help to provoke laughter at the facile official version of the Family's choreographed career, a valuable public service will have been performed. In any event, the supposed madman who derailed free love's peace train and called himself no one is a media star all over again.

Some might need to think of him as beyond the pale, but, arguably, Manson was very much a product of American post-War popular culture and a toxic body politic. Thus, at a time when the psychedelic Summer of Love was turning - or being turned - hateful and psychotic, the Family's graphically mediated slaughter of the heavily pregnant actress Sharon Tate, plus three unfortunate friends and a visitor, would be obscenely exploited in order to euthanise the counter-culture by injecting a final shot of fatal terror into the haunted paradise of the beautiful people.

Although the Leno and Rosemary LaBianca slayings two nights later in a separate Los Angeles neighbourhood were suspected by investigators to be copycat homicides, the synergetic contiguity of the two events sealed the Manson clan's fate, implicated as its purported ringleader already was in the murder of Gary Hinman by Bobby Beausoleil.

What fascinates about Manson's legacy as Hollywood's Bluebeard-esque signature villain, is his shapeshifting multiplication through a panoply of visages that evoke resemblances with Jim Morrison, a desert Christ, Büchner's schizophrenic assassin Lenz, and a swastika-stamped beatnik Nazi.

Shot through with a consummate performer's narcissistic and solipsistic grandiosity (in my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities) and memorably inflected anti-humanism (I have X-ed myself from your world), Manson may or may not have been a malignant killer, but, like some fire and brimstone reincarnation of Oscar Wilde without the dress sense, he was always fiendishly quotable.

One can readily see how Tarantino was drawn to his cinematically suggestive story, even as one suspects a superior auteur like David Lynch - whose noirish attunement to Hollywood’s underside is indissociable from the Manson-magnetised termination of flower power  - might have concocted a far more unsettling film.

As we might expect of a mortal so manufactured, if not consumed, by his own demoniacal myth, it is difficult to exaggerate Manson's enduring cultural impact. Yet the more prosaic and humiliated humanity onto which his personae were pinned curdles the legend: a rootless and institutionalised roamer from a broken family; a beatnik thief; a sociopathic fantasist of race war who hung out with Hell's Angels; a failed musician with a monstrous superiority complex.

His archetypal reversion to zero, to a politics of utopian and/or dystopian annihilation, is presumably the clearest clue to the Family's engineered reality. To take Charlie at his word means to view him as essentially a cipher, a figment, of Hollywood’s phantasmic horror, a parodic Freddie Kruger precursor to the Terrible Beauty generation.

His final reported phone call from jail, a recursive quasi-Beckettian microscript, says it all in its unsaying:

'Nothing with everyone and everything over and gone to start backwards again and again to nowhere and nothing again.'

Notes

Quentin Tarantino's new film, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2019. It is released in the UK on 14 August 2019. Click here to watch the official trailer.

See: Tom O'Neill (with Dan Piepenbring), Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, (William Heinemann, 2019).

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, and critic. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

This is a revised and updated version of an earlier (unpublished) post of the same title. 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here. 

Guilt-Shame-Fear (Notes on the Spectrum of Cultures)

Henri Vidal: Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel (1896)

Someone writes in response to a recent post on the subject of pride:

'I don't quite understand what your problem is. Would you prefer it if, rather than feeling proud of who and what they are, individuals who have historically been not only marginalised but victimised due to their sexual orientation or racial identity, went back to experiencing themselves in terms of guilt, shame and fear?' 

This is a reasonable question and I'm not going to pretend that any of these emotions - typically associated with negative self-evaluation - are particularly pleasant for anyone to experience.

But, having said that, it's interesting to note that cultural anthropologists have categorised three distinct types of social order founded upon the individual's sense of guilt, shame, and fear and shown how these feelings - rooted in our evolutionary history - can very successfully be refined and exploited. 

In a shame society, for example, keeping up appearances and retaining one's honour is all-important; the prospect of publicly losing face, or the threat of being made an outcast, is what maintains the smooth running of the system. This can be contrasted with a fear society, in which control is secured with overt physical force; an individual who steps out of line will not merely be shamed or ostracised, but violently punished for their actions.

In a guilt society - which for those of us living within a Christian moral culture is the type of society with which we will be most familiar - the key is to construct a subject with a moral conscience; i.e., a subject capable of knowing the difference between good and evil and who accepts responsibility for their own actions, having been endowed with a free will. Judgement comes from within and the threat of punishment exists not only in this world and this life, but in the next world or afterlife.

It's possible - and may very well be desirable - to think of a future society that isn't located on this cultural spectrum of guilt-shame-fear. Indeed, having read Reich, Marcuse, and Deleuze, I'm well aware of such possibilities. However, these days I'm increasingly sympathetic to Freud's pessimistic view that there will always be a fundamental tension of some kind between the requirements of civilisation and the individual's wish for instinctive freedom.

In other words, it now seems to me doubtful that any society can function without some mechanism of repression and that neurosis, discontent and feelings we might prefer to do without are simply the price we pay for living alonside others; that culture is always synonymous with the internalisation of cruelty.


Notes 

Darwin regarded shame, for example, as a universal human trait that speaks of our common evolutionary history as a species, even if he carefully avoided upsetting his Victorian readership by discussing the radical implications of this (something that Nietzsche certainly didn't shy away from doing, declaring that not only were our precious feelings ultimately of animal origin, but so too were our moral values). See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): click here to read online.

The idea of distinct social orders founded upon guilt and shame was popularized by Ruth Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), who studied Japan (as an example of the latter) in contrast with the USA (as an example of the former). 

For Freud's views on the self and society, see his classic work Civilization and Its Discontents (Penguin Books, 2002). 

Why I'm Suspicious of Pride

I.

I'm not a great fan or follower of the journalist Brendan O'Neill, but as an atheistic libertarian he often writes things that cut across aspects of my own thinking (or, as critics would say, reinforce my own fears and prejudices).

Thus, for example, I was interested to read a recent column in The Spectator in which O'Neill expresses his irritation at London Pride; the UK's largest queer celebration which sees rainbow flags hanging from virtually every public building and branded on just about every conceivable product you may wish to purchase in order to show your support for the LGBT+ community and the sinister political project known as diversity.        

Like O'Neill, I'm perfectly happy to commemorate the Stonewall riots and welcome many of the social, political and cultural changes that have unfolded over the last fifty years vis-à-vis the rights of sexual minorities. I might not fetishise notions of freedom and equality, or posit them as ideals over and above all other considerations, but neither do I wish to live in a time or place where these things are denied.  

But, like O'Neill, I also find it depressing to see a genuinely radical event co-opted by governments, corporations and the media and pinkwashed into a bland (and virtually mandatory) spectacle informed by a needy and therapeutic politics of identity:

"It’s no longer enough to leave homosexuals alone to live however they choose and to inflict on them no persecution or discrimination or any ill-will whatsoever on the basis of their sexuality, which is absolutely the right thing for a civilised liberal society to do. No, now you have to validate their identity and cheer their life choices."

Now, we must all assemble - cisgender heterosexuals included - beneath the omnipresent bloody rainbow and condemn anyone who refuses to do so as a political heretic.


II.

Actually, the very word pride is problematic, philosophically speaking, due to the fact that it has both negative and positive connotations. It is, for example, often used as a synonym for the Greek term hubris and refers thus to a destructively excessive or self-indulgent quality. It certainly isn't an unambiguously virtuous concept as Aristotle and the organisers of Pride events seem to believe.

Thus, I'm always rather suspicious of people who speak insistently in terms of pride; particularly those who belong to sexual or racial minorities, as they have a tendency to overcompensate for feelings of low self-esteem and guilt born of a long history of oppression and marginalisation. 

Indeed, it could be argued that pride which has been determined by such a history is simply shame on the recoil, or what Nietzsche would characterise as a revolt in morals and is thus still contained within the same old dialectic rather than part of a genuine revaluation of values ...

Ultimately, the old slogan gay is good is as mistaken as the homophobic view that gay is evil (and for the same reason).

See: Brendan O'Neill, 'Why I'm Sick of Pride', The Spectator (6 July, 2019): click here.