For Mahsa:
While we are shaking our heads at the image we see below, let’s also shake our heads clear of the fog of pathological political correctness and think about the safety of children—and ponder how this happened and where we’ll end up if we keep normalizing this behavior and presentation of self. (And if this dude is trying to make a point, I still worry about the kids. Let’s just hope it is effective.)
Oakville High School and Halton District School Board in Canada are using that nation’s human rights model (making a mockery of a system that necessary includes the protection of children) to defend an adult male performing kink in front of a captive audience of minors for personal sexual gratification. Yes, this teacher appears this way in front of minors in a public school classroom.
I study psychopathology. The Oakville High School teacher appears to be a textbook case of autogynephilia. To quote from the abstract of a medical science journal: “Autogynephilia is defined as a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism. Autogynephilia encompasses sexual arousal with cross-dressing and cross-gender expression that does not involve women’s clothing per se.” The abstract continues: “Autogynephilia resembles a sexual orientation in that it involves elements of idealization and attachment as well as erotic desire.”
Perhaps we should feel sorry for this person. However, I think it’s fair to ask whether this public act of sexual fetishism around children is one step away from pedophilic acts with intent likely already present. That’s the criminologist in me talking. As a parent, I’m concerned, as well. Even if this individual is not a MAP, I’m still concerned.
I’m not saying it’s wrong for an adult male to strap on fake tits to cop wood. I’m no prude. As we used to say in the 1970s, “Different strokes for different folks.” (Remember, I’m a fan of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and took part in its rituals in the art district of Coconut Grove, South Florida—or have I not told you about this yet?) I’m saying that it’s wrong to do it in front of a captive audience of children and the school board’s defense of the man indicates the power of gender ideology in disorganizing the consciousness and conscience of otherwise intelligent people.
* * *
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Foucault’s Nietzschean analysis of power as substance woven into the very fabric of modernity results from an acutely felt need (having been socialized in something approximating a decent society) to escape the conscience pangs associated with child rape. Read: boy love in Tunisia. The more I read and see and learn, the more I’m convinced that Derrick Jensen is over the target in his carpet bombing of queer theory and its connection to pedophilia and gender ideology.
As it so often does, living history gives us an opportunity to make more connections. I am now speaking of the uprising in Iran against compulsory hijab wearing. Foucault’s despicable defense of the Iranian Revolution, a regime that, as noted in a recent blog on Freedom and Reason, force-transitions gay boys to hijab-wearing brides (and fates lesbians to find love in the secret community of women), only strengthens the connection. Patriarchal heteronormativity manifests in a myriad of (perverse) ways.
Know that Foucault would see the present-day revolt against the murderous hijab in Iran as an atavistic expression of oppressive modernism, getting the truth precisely backwards (as all neo-Hegelian reflex inevitably does). And so it is that a male wearing clownishly massive prosthetic tits in front of students in the high school shop class he teachers becomes a substitute for actual progress for women in the inverted totalitarianism of corporate state society.
In retrospect, we might have guessed this would be the next step in a culture where progressive feminist academics in the West were, in the wake of 9/11, taking their female students to mosques for hijab day to learn how to tie oppression around their heads. (I watched the cult snag not a few young women thanks to the inclusive desire of woke progressivism.)
Remember when Ward Churchill caught flak for suggesting the Islamic attack on the World Trade Center was justified in light of New York’s role in world imperialism? Ultimately, it led to his dismissal from the University of Colorado (albeit, technically for alleged academic misconduct). Unknown to most, at that same time, another French postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard, Janet Afary and Kevin B Anderson document in Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, wrote something similar, that the 9/11 attack “represents both the high point of the spectacle and the purest type of defiance,” which means, in Baudrillard’s view that “it could be forgiven.” Baudrillard was merely following in Foucault’s footsteps—as was Churchill.
* * *
CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour was scheduled to interview Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in New York. The interview would have come just days after a 22-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of the Iranian Morality Police after being detained for allegedly wearing a hijab too loosely. As noted earlier, wearing the hijab is required of women in Iran. The control of women through compulsory dress codes is an expression of Islam’s deep-seated patriarchal heteronormativity. The Iran president sought to require the hijab of Amanpour (more on that in a moment.)
As noted, patriarchal heteronormativity in Islam also manifests as a homophobic impulse. I really want the reader to grasp this connection. The idea that a boy could be attracted to other boys or like the things that girls like horrifies not only the elites in Iran but the Iranian population at large. Besides being shunned, homosexuality is punishable with death in Iran.
So profound are Iran’s gender norms, in fact, that the regime has adopted the position that gay people are the opposite gender trapped in the wrong physical body (an error of ensoulment, I suppose). To remedy this problem, the regime compels the parents of gay boys into drastically altering their sons’ bodies to appear as a girls’ bodies. The regime even pays for the hormones and surgeries. The surgeries involve castrating the boy and reconstructing his penis and scrotum into a faux-vagina.
I reported this in Elite Hankerings for Obedience. It bears repeating here: many young Iranians and their parents opt for medical intervention not only to avoid being hanged from cranes in public or other serious punishments, but to meet the demands of social pressure—to find some semblance of normal life in Iranian society. To put this another way, Iran has a project to eliminate gay and lesbian people by making them appear as the other sex. It’s a medical alternative to “pray the gay away” (since prayer never works). It’s a radical form of conversion therapy.
The western media doesn’t seem to interested in the plight of gay boys in Iran (or gay boys in the West, for that matter). However, they appear to have become interested in the circumstances of Iranian women. Something new must be afoot, since this problem has been around since the 1970s only to be accompanied by crickets (with the exception of the Hitch, which I share below).
Back to Amanpour. The CNN journalist reported on Twitter that she was prepared to question Raisi about it. After all, the incident has triggered protests across Iran. But Raisi demanded Amanpour herself don a hijab, which, to her credit, she refused to do (as the interview was to occur outside of Iran, suggesting that she shamefully would have in Iran—and I have seen her in a hijab). So Raisi refused to participate in the interview.
Not only is the mainstream media covering the story. Antony Blinken of the State Department said on Thursday in response to Amini’s death that the United States has imposed sanctions on the Morality Police and on senior security officials the United States has accused of engaging in serious human rights abuses. Blinken condemned the country’s Law Enforcement Forces of arresting women for “wearing ‘inappropriate’ hijab” and enforcing “other restrictions on freedom of expression.” (The inappropriate hijab is akin to the way dispirited citizens haphazardly wore their cloth and surgical masks during the COVID-19 pandemic. See the image of Busty Lemieux above.)
Again, there must be an ulterior motive in all of this attention, but we will take the attention where we can get it, I suppose. So, how about some attention for gay boys?
* * *
In 1978-79, as the Islamist protests against the Shah of Iran were reaching their peak, two French newspapers, Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur, tapped philosopher Michel Foucault as “special correspondent.” In this capacity, Foucault traveled to Iran and met with leaders of the revolution, including Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on his experience with revolution, which he supported (for this, he was heavily criticized by Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson and the French intellectual community more broadly, which has not let the memory of this affair escape down the memory hole).
Foucault’s love affair with the brutal Islamist regime in Iran is significant because Foucault’s postmodernism, organized around his loathing of the Enlightenment and modernity, affected his political attitudes (spiritual politics, as he would have it) towards his homosexuality, which in turn influenced the construction of queer theory.
Outside of France, the political and cultural left of the greater West, including the United States, has long adored Foucault and postmodernism, which dovetails with the Marcuse-perversion of critical theory, and so we already have part of the story of how we got here. (For an analysis of the Islamic Revolution in Iran see my 2019 essay Who’s Responsible for Iran’s Theocratic State?)
I am going to lean heavily on Michael J. Thompson’s 2005 review of Janet Afary and Kevin B Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism for much of this section. The book is important, but Thompson’s review in particular recognizes the Foucauldian reaction to Marxism, which is useful to my own project of pushing back against the rightwing misrepresentation of the origin of the perversions they rightly decry—the misrepresentation that postmodern critical theory has its roots in the materialist conception of history. On the contrary, as I have documented on Freedom and Reason, the present expression of critical theory that plagues our culture and politics has its roots in Hegelian idealism and resurrects these in spite of Marx’s efforts to correct the dialectic. It is neo-Hegelian, not neo-Marxist.
As I incorporate into my thoughts the intervention of Derrick Jensen concerning the pedophilia of Foucault and the perversions of other progenitors of queer theory (Jensen names Gayle Ruben, Pat Califia, and Judith Butler), I want to take care to specify where these ideas intrude so as not to expose Thompson to the wrath of TRAs. Thompson does not address the problem of queer theory in his essay. Nonetheless, queer theory is an instantiation of the profoundly unscientific, indeed antiscientific stance of the postmodernists. If you have been following these matters, whether you are on the left or right, I hope some lights will turn on.
Thompsons notes in his essay “a growing number of contemporary critics” who have themselves noted “a kind of marriage between postmodernism and religious fundamentalism.” You will recognize this argument in my writings on Freedom and Reason going back several years now (see also John McWhorter)—but not back to 2005. My ignorance of some earlier critiques of postmodernism allowed me (and McWhorter) to independently arrive at similar conclusions.
I would have benefitted from being a bit hipper a bit earlier. At the same time, in my own defense, I have been a vocal critic of postmodernism since the mid-1990s when it became clear that these ideas represented not a legitimate challenge to scientific rationalism but rather carried the potential to confuse people about the character of science with claptrap about “other ways of knowing.” I can now see that it amounts to a new religion.
Thompson cites Meera Nanda’s 2003 Prophets Facing Backward who argues that the postmodernist critique of scientific rationality as a left-wing attack on social domination and power “goes hand in hand with right-wing political and cultural projects.” I understand the spirit of Nanda’s observations, but the comparison is unfair to right-wing political and cultural projects. (For a critique of these ideas from a right-wing perspective, I highly recommend Roger Scruton’s 2017 Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, a reworking of his 1985 Thinkers of the New Left.)
Thompson also cites Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s well-known destruction of “the nonsensical approach of postmodern thinkers to science and mathematics” in Fashionable Nonsense (1999), “revealing postmodern thought as lacking any understanding of science or scientific rationality and therefore possessing no real ability to make a substantive critique of it.” Sokal has also associated the postmodernists’ difficulty with the truth with the assertion among those who call themselves liberals that conservative have, among other things, wrongly questioned COVID-19 policies and the 2020 presidential election. (See Alan Sokal descries the place of postmodernism in the alt-Right’s denial of facts, but neglects the Left. Unfortunately, Coyne also dismisses the concerns of conservatives. To his credit, Coyne criticizes Sokal for only focusing on the alleged perversions of the right.)
“These writers,” Thompson writes, “share a common concern to defend reason and science from the dismissive approach of postmodern thought.” The strength of Thompson’s essay is that he grasps the relevance of the critique to reclaiming the left, casting the defense of rationality and science as “a means to revive a left political discourse that can reclaim the political project dedicated to political equality, human rights and social justice.” This is why I have maintained on Freedom and Reason that an authentic left politics is not found in woke progressive ideology—critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, and all the other ideologies cynically cribbing the language of science to create a false air of legitimacy while attempting to discredit science to create space for technocratic rule. An authentic left politics can only be found in a rights-based politics of individualism focused on class struggle and economic justice.
I want to make sure the readers are following the line of argument here. History is relevant. Remember the Sokal Affair? This is what first got my attention on this matter. In 1996, Sokal submitted a hoax paper to Social Text, a journal of postmodern cultural studies: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal proposed that quantum gravity was a linguistic and social construction—and Social Text published it! It was Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s suggestion that, if the paper fit within the parameters of leftwing ideological thought, journals in the humanities were likely to publish it that inspired Sokal to give it a try. His stunt inspired James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose to organized a hoax publishing campaign they tagged the “The Grievance Studies affair,” manufacturing pretentious papers on cultural, fat, gender, queer, race, and sexuality studies. They demonstrated that Sokal’s intervention had not slowed down the postmodern perversion of the Western academy.
The “seductions of Islamism” is Afary’s and Anderson’s construction. “Their central argument is that Foucault’s theoretical views allowed him to embrace a politics—radical Islam as it manifested itself in the Iranian revolution of 1979—which was wholly against the goals and imperatives of the tradition of progressive politics,” writes Thompson.
[I apologize for what may feel like too many asides, but I’m really bugged by the reckless use of language here. By “progressive politics,” I believe the authors really, or should, at least, mean liberal politics. Progressive politics is not an adequate euphemism for what the contents of left liberal thinking since progressivism is the politics of the technocratic core of the corporate state. Moreover, the construction “racial Islam” misrepresents the spirit of Islam, which is as a form of extremism. There is nothing radical about extremist ideologies. If we are going to reclaim a viable politics for the left, we need clarify in our language.]
So what are the “seductions of Islamism”? They are the seductions of Foucault. Afary and Anderson explain that Foucault and the Islamists “were searching for a new form of political spirituality as a counter discourse to a thoroughly materialistic world; both clung to idealized notions of pre-modern social orders; both were disdainful of modern liberal judicial systems; and both admired individuals who risked death in attempts to reach a more authentic existence.” (Note the concepts here, for example, “authentic existence.” Sound familiar?)
Thompson writes that Afary and Anderson show that “Foucault’s oeuvre is marked by a discourse that is hostile to grand narratives, totality, and modernity as a whole.” As a consequence, Foucault embraces the “totalizing ideology that radical Islam was presenting to the world, one that still has consequences today both in Iran and in the West.”
Thompson tells us that Foucault and the Islamists “shared three core, overlapping ‘passions’: an opposition to imperialism and colonialism, a rejection of modernity, and ‘a fascination with the discourse of death as a path toward authenticity and salvation’.” Thompson continues: “These three points of commonality would shape Foucault’s interpretation of the Iranian revolution and lead him to interpret the anti-modernism of Khomeini and his coterie as a liberating political impulse against domination, power, and against the Enlightenment rationality and the institutions of modernity that had, in his view, plagued western consciousness, culture and political life.”
One may be excused for finding great irony in all of this. Those familiar with Foucault’s work were likely seduced by his intellectual project to abolish what he called the “fascism of the mind,” a project declared in his 1968 preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in 1968. It is likely that many young people were seduced not by a comprehensive engagement with Foucault’s ideas but through the influence of a professor in a literature, philosophy, or sociology class. It is likely that I played a role in instilling in a young person’s mind the notion that Foucault was on an honorable mission by employing the principle of charity (a pedagogical tactic). They were not told of Foucault’s hostility towards Marxism, and had reinforced their already cultivated aversion to liberalism, as these “narratives of liberation and emancipation” had only, in Foucault’s eyes, “succeeded only in reproducing domination.”
Really, this should have been obvious in Foucault’s best known work, Discipline and Punish, work I use in my class because, while there is certainly something to it, I see clearly now that there’s even more to it—or something else, if that makes my point clearer. By flipping matters upside-down Foucault convinced himself that the negation of Enlightenment in Iran, in cancelling the western project of modernization there, was actually what it wasn’t: an emancipatory moment in the lives of the Iranian people—a moment that represented, to borrow Thompson’s words, “the opening up of a new path that could serve as a guide for merging the spiritual and the political.” And there we have it: the paradigm of woke progressivism—a new religion of extremist politics that sees authentic selves released by the bright knives of surgeons. Or shop teachers with massive fake mammalian protruberances.
What a cluster-fucking several decades postmodernist bollocks has wrought on humanity. Can we at once rise up and bury this shit forever and be sure to bullhorn to the world what a complete catastrophe it’s all been (and always will be)? Fuck critical theory since and including Marcuse. And fuck the post-1950s French intellectual. If it were just babble, whatever. Babies babble. But this is destructive.
And it’s pushed out by real power. Not fantastical power embedded in the warp and woof of modernity (what crap), but real power from above: corporate state power. Next-level crazy doesn’t dominate the academy by accident. And now they are gaslighting you. You’re supposed to see an adult male with giant fake tits and visible nipples standing in front of a classroom full of students as neither mad nor dangerous, but brave and beautiful, as a subject worthy of protection by the Canadian human rights model. And so pedophilia is normalized. And the impressionable want fake tits, too.
I close by returning to the video embedded in the tweet at the top of this page. What’s happening in Iran makes quite obvious the unique matter of women’s rights. Women are oppressed because of who they are and the fact that they are not men. The sexual dimorphism of the species is the basis of the patriarchy, the rights of women overthrown with the emergence of the sate and law.
The women’s right movement has made great progress in dismantling the patriarchy. However, just as the faux-left politics of intersectionality, informed by postmodernist critical theory, has undermined the class struggle, so it is undermining women’s rights. Sex, family, and class antagonisms are the most important factors in driving world history and determining the life chances of concrete individuals.
freedom and reason 