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)

 

EP39 - The Only Autogynephile - Debbie Hayton

"Trans Women Are Men … Including Me" - Debbie Hayton

Old Age (by Maxwell Bodenheim)

 

In me is a little painted square
Bordered by old shops, with gaudy awnings.
And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men,
Drinking sunlight.
The old men are my thoughts:
And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart,
And quietly unload supplies.
We fill slim pipes and chat,
And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the square . . .
Strong men, tinkling women, and dripping, squealing children
Stroll past us, or into the shops.
They greet the shopkeepers, and touch their hats or foreheads to me . . .
Some evening I shall not return to my people.

Efforts to expand the lifespan ignore what it’s like to get old (by Robert S Gable)

As modern medicine extends the human lifespan, quality of life is not keeping up, raising thorny ethical dilemmas

Everyone dies sometime. But when and how? Those questions become more salient as birthdays roll by. It has been said that wherever old people gather there is an ‘organ recital’ of malfunctioning body organs and parts. I, too, have a recital.

Last year, at age 88, I woke up in a San Francisco hospital room after having my aortic heart valve replaced by one made of a metal spring and some cow tissue (an ‘Edwards Sapien 3 Ultra’). I was glad to be alive, and I was clearly better off than my roommate, an elderly gentleman with a wrinkle-ridden oblong face and no visible hair. Heavily sedated and apparently dying from double pneumonia, he was a convenient roommate: no idle conversation, no moaning in pain, no shouting for nurses, no snoring, no watching late-night TV game-show reruns.

I don’t know what happened to my roommate – I escaped after two days. Back home, my healing went well, ‘for a person my age’, as the doctors routinely reminded me. But it was not entirely good news. My artificial heart valve – by decreasing my chances of dying from heart disease – has increased the likelihood of my dying from something worse (such as pancreatitis or a brain tumour).

Biophysicists have calculated that, with maximal improvement in health care, the biological clock for humans must stop between 120-150 years. Biotechnology firms such as Calico, Biosplice and Celgene are putting this to the test by scrambling to extend our normal lifespan as far as they can. However, a basic problem, at least thus far, is that a sustained quality of life has not been extended to keep up with our expanded longevity.

As people get older, they are not gaining economic security, maintaining their usual level of independence, extending their social relationships, or avoiding chronic illnesses. For instance, about 85 per cent of older adults in the United States have at least one common chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease, arthritis or Alzheimer’s. Thus, many routine tasks such as bathing, making the bed, doing errands, shopping, picking up items off the floor, or walking without falling cannot be performed without help. In short, as we live longer we are also unwell for longer.

Psychological depression, caused by physical illness plus associated medical expenses, often contributes to even more decline. Almost every day a new ache or pain, of uncertain duration, pops up and adds to ongoing maladies. Undesirable, but necessary, medical compromises gradually squeeze the vitality out of a chronically ill person. In most cases, death is not a sudden event at the end of life (except as a legally defined physical state). Rather, it is a long process of progressive functional decline.

Top of Form

From my perspective, preventing death is not always more important than promoting the quality of life. What value is there in existing if the ability to do and experience what you most value becomes unavailable? It is, indeed, possible to live too long.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s character Zarathustra commented that:

Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: ‘Die at the right time.’ … Many too many live, and they hang on their branches much too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!

Nietzsche would have probably approved of the cult comedy-drama film Harold and Maude (1971), showing a timely and poignant death. Twenty-year-old Harold, bored and obsessed with suicidal thoughts, meets 79-year-old Maude at a stranger’s funeral service. Maude, who breaks many social taboos, teaches Harold to make life fun. A year later, she calmly arranges her own death. Harold is shocked into realising the value of present-moment awareness.

Unfortunately the popular press is apparently not ready to discuss the ‘rottenness’ and ‘worm-eatenness’ of the elderly. Take the July 2022 issue of AARP magazine, which offered older women ‘10 Things That Always Make You Look Stylish’ such as bold red lipstick, which they claimed will ‘help dingy teeth appear whiter’. Or the May 2023 swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, which featured the 81-year-old business woman Martha Stewart demonstrating, they said, ‘ageless living’ and showing a bit of cleavage without ‘much airbrushing’. Perhaps she won a genetic lottery – most of the old people I know have saggy skin and poor posture. They are sexually unattractive. They are a hazard as drivers on the road, or even as pedestrians. They forget things. They are expensive to maintain. Rational and open discussion of death is rare, especially in a culture where a charge of microaggression or ageism has become an all-too-common threat.

A notable exception to the death-discussion taboo was an item in KFF Health News in June 2019 that reported on an 86-year-old woman arranging a secret off-campus meeting with nine other seniors (who slipped away from their fancy retirement community near Philadelphia) to discuss ‘rational suicide’. Seniors currently account for about 18 per cent of suicides in the US. An unsuccessful suicide attempt can leave the person even worse off. As one of the participants in the Philadelphia meeting put it: ‘We only get one crack at it. Everyone wants to know what to do.’

At present, medical personnel are left to deal with the toxic underbelly of a death-phobic culture. Only pain medication that may, as a side-effect of treatment, hasten death is a generally acceptable life-terminating procedure. As defined by the World Health Organization, palliative care improves the ongoing quality of life of patients with life-threatening illnesses. In contrast, where it is available, legally authorised medical aid in dying allows a physician to prescribe a lethal dose of a drug at the request of a patient who intends to end their life. In my opinion, such a prescription would at least give suffering patients a comforting option, even if they ultimately chose never to use the drug.

In the US, 10 states plus the District of Columbia presently allow medical aid in dying. Relevant laws typically specify that the patient must be a mentally capable adult within an estimated six months of dying, and be able to self-ingest the medication. The legislation also usually includes more than a dozen safeguards, such as affirmation from two physicians and two independent witnesses that the patient was not coerced.

Countries other than the US that allow medical aid in dying (as of 2023 that’s Austria, Australia, Belgium, Columbia, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and New Zealand) have varying medico-legal requirements. For example, to prevent ‘suicide tourism’, Canada requires that a patient be a Canadian resident. Switzerland does not have that requirement. In her book In Love (2022), Amy Bloom details the voluntary death of her husband in Switzerland, where the patient does not need to be critically ill or within six months of death. Bloom’s husband had severe Alzheimer’s and she reportedly acted on his insistence that he would ‘rather die on my feet than live on my knees’.

Specific criteria and customary medical practice apparently have significant effects on patient utilisation of medical aid in dying. For example, in Canada, 10,064 patients received medical assistance in dying during 2021. By contrast, in California, with a similar population of about 39 million residents, only 486 patients received medical assistance in dying during the same year. California law requires that the patient self-administer the drug, and that the patient be within six months of death. Canada does not require self-administration, and medical assistance is available if the patient’s medical condition is ‘grievous and irremediable’. Nonetheless, in both Canada and California statistics show that, consistently over several years, more than 80 per cent of the patients who used medical aid in dying had previously been in palliative care. The average age was 76 years, and more than 60 per cent had cancer. It seems younger, healthy people are not routinely exploiting the system.

Medical aid in dying and other practices pertinent to end-of-life care are surrounded by enigmatic and controversial issues involving religious beliefs and civil rights. Many people believe that life is sacred, and therefore the beginning and end should be left to divine intervention. The doctrine of the ‘sanctity of life’, commonly based on a theistic metaphysics, holds that killing oneself or others destroys the God-given intrinsic value of life. By contrast, a secular utilitarian view holds that there is a duty to ‘maximise happiness’ and therefore a moral obligation exists to end a life when it is characterised by indignity and suffering. Some moral philosophers argue that, just as it is wrong to compel people to die, so it is wrong to compel people to live under conditions they find intolerable.

I do not have the wisdom or inclination to solve such ethical complexities. I do, however, hope that the ‘right to die’ becomes a civil liberty issue in the way that daily living options have been expanded for marginalised ethnic groups, women and gender minorities.

A few months ago, in order to dissolve some blood clots, my cardiologist prescribed the blood thinner warfarin – the principal ingredient in rat poison. I assume that I will die, not by choice, but by the lethal default of accumulated peripheral decisions. So far, I have been fortunate. My body’s awkward way to the exit has not diminished the gratitude I feel for the many undeserved blessings I have received.

Efforts to expand the lifespan ignore what it’s like to get old | Psyche Ideas

 

Color in the Wheat (by Hamlin Garland)

 

Like liquid gold the wheat field lies,
A marvel of yellow and russet and green,
That ripples and runs, that floats and flies,
With the subtle shadows, the change, the sheen,
That play in the golden hair of a girl,—
A ripple of amber—a flare
Of light sweeping after—a curl
In the hollows like swirling feet
Of fairy waltzers, the colors run
To the western sun
Through the deeps of the ripening wheat.

Broad as the fleckless, soaring sky,
Mysterious, fair as the moon-led sea,
The vast plain flames on the dazzled eye
Under the fierce sun's alchemy.
The slow hawk stoops
To his prey in the deeps;
The sunflower droops
To the lazy wave; the wind sleeps—
Then swirling in dazzling links and loops,
A riot of shadow and shine,
A glory of olive and amber and wine,
To the westering sun the colors run
Through the deeps of the ripening wheat.

O glorious land! My western land,
Outspread beneath the setting sun!
Once more amid your swells, I stand,
And cross your sod-lands dry and dun.
I hear the jocund calls of men
Who sweep amid the ripened grain
With swift, stern reapers; once again
The evening splendor floods the plain,
The crickets' chime
Makes pauseless rhyme,
And toward the sun,
The colors run
Before the wind's feet
In the wheat!

 

 

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗢𝗳 𝗣𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 (by Marge Piercy)

 

Under a sky the color of pea soup

she is looking at her work growing away there

actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans

as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,

if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,

if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,

if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,

then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

 

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

 

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

 

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

for every gardener knows that after the digging, after

the planting,

after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.