The Lie of the Beholder (by Steven Tucker)

 

A female British IT worker recently sued her boss for sexual harassment in the workplace. According to her, the fact that her employer had placed the letters “xx” in his emails to indicate an unknown quantity (as in something like “do we need xx more print cartridges???”) was really a hidden sexual code for him sending her unwanted electronic kisses. Likewise, his use of multiple “???”s was a subliminal attempt to ask when exactly she was going to allow him to have “sexual contact” with her, she said.

When he wrote “I need date, date, date!” in regard to which specific day she was going to complete a project, her one-track mind thought it meant he required a specific date she was going to finally allow him into her knickers. Meanwhile, when he named a computer file with his initials “AJG,” she somehow perceived this really stood for “A Jumbo Genital,” the extra-large item he was boasting of possessing, and demanding she allow him to insert it inside her, posthaste.

Lying Eyes
Ruling against this lunatic, the tribunal judges suggested she possessed “a skewed perception of everyday events,” demonstrating “a tendency to make extraordinary allegations without evidence,” and ordered her to pay £5,000 in costs.

“We now live within a world haunted throughout by invisible new secrets that only designated victim groups perceive.”

You may say this individual was just paranoid, but, in an age in which we are solemnly told by neo-Marxist academics that everything is now simply a text to be read, and that the meanings of such texts are endlessly fluid, had she not in some sense actually been groomed to hold such fancies by ivory-tower idiots?

We now live within a world haunted throughout by invisible new secrets that only designated victim groups, primarily blacks, gays, transsexualism and radical feminists, possess the infallible ability to perceive. If you’re straight, white, and male and fail to see them too, this is just further proof that you have been blinded to the truth by your innate position of white, cisheteropatriarchal privilege—so get new glasses, granddad, and learn to see everything through a fashionably black/queer/anticolonialist lens. It seems the U.K. tribunal judges cited above were the last legal officials west of Budapest still not to have gotten the memo.

Able Semen
A prime example of this brand of perceptual witchcraft at work occurred in early August, when a Portsmouth museum devoted to preserving the sunken wreck of Henry VIII’s Tudor warship the Mary Rose published a blog by a young intern named Hannah asking, “How can we understand the Mary Rose’s collection of personal objects through a Queer lens?”—the answer to which was “Not very well at all.”

Sadly, no dildos, butt plugs, or treasure chests filled with vials of Tudor-era amyl nitrate were found within the wreckage of the Mary Rose. Thus, Hannah had to settle for queering various mundane, everyday, entirely non-gay objects instead, like 82 nit combs that, Hannah astutely observed, “would have been mainly used by the men [aboard] to remove nits from their hair.”

Nothing gay to see here, please move along? Not at all. As Homophilic Hannah continued, “for many Queer people today, how we wear our hair is a central pillar of our identity,” something that should obviously be kept in mind when examining Early Renaissance insect-killing implements.

A gold wedding ring is not a poignant reminder that the sailors left behind (female) wives and families ashore when their ship sank in 1545, meanwhile, but instead a far more upsettling prompt that “Today, same-sex couples cannot be married by…the Church of England, the Church that Henry VIII established.” Paternoster rosary beads were not really evidence of the crew’s religious faith, but a cautionary warning that Christianity traditionally taught gay sex was a sin. I’m surprised Hannah didn’t just try to claim they were strings of antique bum beads instead.

Ship of Fools
Opinion columnist Rod Liddle mocked this by proposing the Mary Rose was originally a male warship named Bob that had its prow chopped off on the NHS; homosexual novelist Philip Hensher tweeted skeptically that “I am as keen as anyone on gay sex, but I have to say to these curators—you’re fucking mental.” In an essay, Hensher then elaborated that Narcissuses like Hannah clearly “aren’t half as interested in the past as they are in telling you all about themselves, at length.”

Indeed so. The most telling object “queered” by Hannah was an octagonal mirror that, to my own biased eye, looks a bit like a tasty jam biscuit. Yet I am self-aware enough to realize that the object is not in fact a jam biscuit, it is an antique looking glass, and my misperception just results from a personal excessive fondness for Jammie Dodgers. Hannah, though, gazes into the mirror and sees only herself: “For Queer people, we may experience a strong feeling of gender dysphoria when we look into a mirror, a feeling of distress caused by our reflection conflicting with our own gender identities.” Dracula himself had fewer issues with mirrors than poor Hannah, it seems.

Hannah ends by emphasizing the importance of viewing objects in museums “through a Queer lens”—but that is really just a euphemism for transforming all such exhibits into perpetual mirrors, even when they are actually nit combs or rosary beads. And this masturbatory solipsism now has official institutional approval and imprimatur. You can see where the woman in the employment tribunal got her own delusional mindset from.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the queerest of them all? You are, Hannah, now carry on wanking at your own rainbow reflection endlessly on the public dime, it’s all museums are for now.

Curse of the Mummy’s Womb
Elsewhere, I once detailed the efforts of queer “Egyptologists” (i.e., ignorant benders who knew what pyramids and sand looked like) to disingenuously claim ancient Egypt was full of trannies. A mummy was found in the British Museum whose hips and chest had been stuffed with extra padding, like a flat-chested schoolgirl shoving tissue paper down her bra to pass herself off as Jayne Mansfield. This was taken by the perceptually enlightened as irrefutable evidence he was a drag queen of some sort. Yet it later transpired the man was just very fat during life, and his embalmers had tried to replicate this obese appearance; those swabs were not primitive breast implants, but an innocent attempt to replicate his wobbly moobs.

But what does actual evidence matter? Just so long as your eyes are woke enough to perceive it, such non-queer artifacts can easily possess a far deeper truth; if you can only feel this mummy is trans, then he is!

The online History Is Gay podcast, for example, which attempts to queer literally everything that has ever happened ever, ever, ever in the history of ever, provides photos of bearded female pharaohs like Hatshepsut (who only wore a stylized metallic beard to symbolize she had the authority of a male king, not because she thought she had a magic invisible penis…), and even possible gay jackals bumming one another on sarcophagus portraits, statuary, and tomb decorations. One is only grateful the hosts don’t give their further opinion on the fact there was once a famous male American Egyptologist called James Henry Breasted.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
It is a curious fact that, in ancient Egyptian myth, the creator-god Atum masturbated the universe into existence from his magical penis, an item that women by definition do not possess, not even Michelle Obama.

However, during Egypt’s Dynastic Period an analogous act of spiritual masturbation was needed from the recently deceased to enable their successful transition into the Egyptian afterlife. So, in the words of the unacceptably named Egyptologist Kathlyn M. Cooney, “[dead] Egyptian women had to shift their gender and ‘masculinize’ themselves to enter the Fields of Peace,” with their sarcophagus becoming “an excellent vehicle to transform the woman” into a male god temporarily, by facilitating “a kind of impermanent gender-shift.”

Therefore, to fool the Guardians of the Land of the Dead into thinking they were male like Atum, Osiris, or Ra, the three gods of creation, death, and regeneration, whose equally male human avatars and their penises were the only things actually allowed into Paradise, women of the time often had images of themselves looking inaccurately male painted onto the front of their sarcophagi, or were buried with items only men would ever usually possess, like weapons, condoms, Rohypnol, underpants, or copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.

In De Nile
Initially, academic culture warriors were inclined to present such curious funerary phenomena in a (then) fashionably feminist light. Consider the Brooklyn Museum’s 2017 show A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt. According to the show’s website:

Egyptian medicine taught that a woman, once in her tomb, faced a biological barrier to rebirth…. To overcome this perceived problem, a priest magically transformed a woman’s mummy into a man [temporarily]…. This required representing a woman with red skin on her coffin—the color normally assigned to a man—and reciting spells that addressed the woman with masculine pronouns…. A woman later returned to her original female state and incubated herself for rebirth into the afterlife as a woman.

This was all then framed in a feminist light: Oh, how sexist were ancient Thebes and Memphis! But what seemed woke in 2017 now seems oh so very bigoted, passé, and TERF-ish. It does not take too much imagination to guess how the presence of enchanted gender-altering pronoun spells on an ancient Egyptian coffin might be deliberately misconstrued by the newly risen woke gender-benders of today like the Mary Rose museum’s Hannah, especially when you consider these magic words allowed the dead to successfully “transition” from one state of being into another.

One day, the very name of the 2017 show A Woman’s Afterlife may itself be reclassified as some kind of curatorial hate crime. Obviously, the women of ancient Egypt were not even women at all, but men. And if you disagree? You just need some new woke glasses, don’t you, Mr./Mrs. Magoo? Try pushing that transphobic line with a “tolerant” leftist young intern today, and you’ll soon find yourself on the wrong end of an employment tribunal. Someone as old-fashioned as you is viewed through woke eyes today as nothing but a total museum piece.

The Lie of the Beholder - Taki's Magazine (takimag.com)