Tuesday, August 29, 2023
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
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