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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Left Are Annoying Puritans |
| 2019-01-28 |
| Every time I blunder into a discussion of covers in my field, I realize that the left has turned into puritans so slowly we barely noticed. When I was young ‐ yes, and Mastodon roamed the Earth ‐ the left was all about "liberation." Of course, even then, if you paid close attention ‐ or any attention, really ‐ you’d see they idolized the Soviet Union and no one could really believe it was "free" when people were dying to get out. But as the seventies progressed on their very strange way, I told myself they were just odd people who believed the lies published about the Soviet Union, and they wanted complete freedom to do whatever they wanted. It might surprise the people who were born after the seventies to find out that the left really wanted no taboos at all. At least in Europe, if you attended a certain type of party, you might be importuned by adult males way before the age of consent. And when you refused you were told you had a problem and were repressing your sexuality or had "inhibitions." (I developed an answer that was something like this "No, I don’t have any hang-ups about nudity. I just have no interest in seeing old men naked, thank you." It usually made them go away.) In fact, just about anything you didn’t want to do or try, you were told that you had hang-ups, and how much better you’d feel if you just gave them up and did whatever the person talking to you wanted. If someone had told me back then that the left would in time become complete Puritans, I’d not have believed them. But just look at them now. ...I was reminded of this today when I blundered into a science fiction fan group online. Someone had posted a picture of an improbable space-babe with big boobs and a space suit that showed a little more cleavage than normal. ...Of course, things being the truth have never made any difference to leftist notions. They have got all up in their Marxism and become convinced that the purpose of doing their jobs is not to sell books or movies or for that matter razors, but to educate a populace they despise. In that sense, apparently, if they don’t put naked women on covers, or hetero romance in books (I had a book rejected once by a subsidiary of Harlequin that was interested in SF/F because the love interest in the book was "too masculine." That imprint has since stopped existing) they think somehow they’ll make humanity over and paradise will arrive. This is roughly equivalent to the imaginary Puritans (the real ones were a randy bunch) and how the left used to say such Puritans wouldn’t even tolerate mention of sex. For a while now, I’ve been expecting the left to start wearing poke bonnets and naming their kids "Eschew Material Gain Jones" or "Thou Shalt Not Objectify Women Smith" or perhaps "Excoriate the Cishet White Male Harris." ...This is because at the end of the day, what they actually want is power. In the seventies, it gave them power to shock the "squares" but as they’re now having trouble shocking anyone at all, they’ve taken the opposite tactic and are trying to bully us with how unenlightened we are because we like art with naked people. (Or fluffy books that are fun, or movies with an actual plot, or advertisements with[out] a "social justice" message.) Because they imagine this will give them power. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |