Brendan O'Neill Gets Genderfucked by Conchita Wurst

Back in May the outcome of the Eurovision song contest provoked predictably unreconstructed reactions from the usual quarters. It was to be expected, so sadly predictable are bigots. Still, for a long time it looked as though the Europeans had traded their tradition of slaughtering one another for a song contest. One such dismally unreconstructed and dim-witted response came from Brendan O'Neill in his blog at The Telegraph. In case you're not acquainted with the O'Neill schtick, Brendan edits sp!ked and claims to hold a Marxist libertarian perspective. About Ms Wurst's claim to womanhood, this soi-disant contrarian had this to say:

News reports tell us that Wurst prefers that people apply the female pronoun to him when he slips his dress on. Okay. But does that mean we all have to comply with this rather strange demand, no questions asked? Does objective reality – the fact that there are biological differences between men and women, and that the vast majority of humankind decides whether someone is a man or woman by those biological attributes – count for nothing in the face of one person's wish to be known as something he is not? By the same token, can I now request that people refer to me as black even though I'm white? Who are you to say I am not black? I might feel black.

Brendan O'Neill fell far short of his libertarian commitment to individual liberty this time. There was no thought for Mill's experiments of living or for the harm principle. The shibboleths of classical liberal thinking were completely absent in O'Neill's tiresome screed. Given that O'Neill claims to filter his libertarianism through Marx it would be easy to expect him to reach for the radical feminist critiques of transgenderism in this case. The paucity of O'Neill's imagination is on full show. He even commits the rookie mistake in conflating a biological distinction (sex) with that which is cultural and performative (gender). He wants to disregard the claims of the transgender movement at the cultural-performative level and assert his own claim to a 'objective reality' which they deny.

Note the use of 'objective' here should be reassessed. In bringing up racial identity O'Neill opens up another can of worms, but not an entirely irrelevant can. Race is objective, but not in the nineteenth century meaning of 'scientific' racial distinctions. Race exists as a social formation, and not just a historical construct, which we've yet to do away with, and insofar as it does it is objective. The same may well be said for gender roles which are not to be confused with differences of sex. O'Neill seems to want to insist on difference at a fundamental level, stand up for individual freedom, all the while reinforcing categories, and challenging those who do not conform. He falls short of his claim to be a coherent libertarian on these grounds.

The irony is that females and males are far more similar, biologically, than in terms of gender roles, which have long been defined by minorities. If O'Neill wants to defend the binary distinction between woman and man he undermines his own reactionary project. He should have little qualm with gender reassignment if he wants to defend a strict dichotomy. The rejection of the automatic sorting of males and females into clear-cut categories of men and women does not necessitate a rejection of gender roles in itself. This is at the level of liberal emancipation, the kind Karl Marx wrote about in his essay on Jewish emancipation. O'Neill would know this if he was as well-versed in early Marx as he pretends to be. He is explicit in focusing in on Conchita's beard and that it is the bending of gender conventions which really irks him.

It's ambiguity which threatens him. He is much too concerned by a possible break in social reproduction posed by men and women jumping from one gender role to another. Yet as an individualist O'Neill should be rejoicing. What could be more appealing to those guardians of untrammeled liberty than a social order determined by free individuals? It's not like a libertarian to see individuals as situated and shaped by existing social conditions. A more radical demand would be why we should accept such conditions in the first place. Of course, abolition is not on the agenda, but rather conservation. In this regard we can see Brendan O'Neill, not as a libertarian provocateur, but as a cultural conservative, in spite of his contrarian appeals.

After the spurious appeal to 'objectivity' we have the casual deployment of right-wing swearwords, 'relativism' being a long-standing favourite. He writes "The bending of gender speaks to today's speedily spreading cult of relativism. We live in such relativistic times, in an era so hostile to the idea that there are measurable truths or concrete realities, that it seems we can no longer even speak of 'men' and 'women'." This is the best he could come up with - half-witted blather at best! He doesn't take the time to justify his own censorious standpoint in the first place. He has no such sense of courtesy, but he does have a salaried platform.

First of all, one could not articulate a coherent position on identity without normative presuppositions (at the very least) as relativism can only function in descriptive terms. One relativism rises above the level of description it ceases to be relativism. If you condemn racism in favour of a society in which migrants can settle and maintain a cultural identity in conjunction with our own you are not a relativist. The same applies to Conchita and her request to be recognised as a woman and not "a beardy bloke in a dress" as O'Neill puts it. It presupposes a set of normative standards. It couldn't be the case that this abandons all sense of 'objective reality'. These are the terms set by O'Neill and should be thoroughly undone if we are to see his opponents as more than straw targets.

As for 'narcissism', you wouldn't expect a self-proclaimed libertarian to criticise someone for their sense of identity as if free-market individualists have ever sought to disregard selfhood. If a right-wing libertarian is to be consistent on the questions of self-ownership and sovereignty there is no reason an individual cannot choose another gender role. The best of the liberal tradition comes in the praise for experiments in living and takes heed not to trample the lives of others. Leaving people alone has its advantages. It is this basic impulse which is absent in O'Neill's writing. Except, of course, when it comes to the freedom of poor people to starve to death then O'Neill is a lover of liberty. The radical free-marketeers of this world don't stand for freedom, but misery and repression.

Victims of Porn.

 

In The Whole Woman (1999) Germaine Greer situates pornography as the "sexuality of the information revolution". If this is the case then we face serious questions. In a more recent debate Greer said "Sex is a blood-sport", she went on to suggest that pornography actually promises to regulate the potential mess of sexual relations. It has no capacity to reject you, nor to disappoint, or to fail in its purpose as an aid to masturbation. After all masturbation is easy compared with building healthy and fulfilling relationships. Pornography enters not as a substitute, but as a means of shifting the problem around. Perhaps too crudely, Greer puts this down to the fear of commitment among men. She notes "Women are not the point of pornography". Instead it is the "flight from women, men's denial of sex as a medium of communication, their denial of sex as the basis for a relationship". On these grounds Greer claims "The victims of pornography are men not women."

 

Somehow I doubt that the masculinists of this world in their campaigns for men's rights will bear this in mind and add 'Defeat the Porn Industry' to the agenda list. Though it wouldn't surprise me if someone out there already has jumped onto this, I suspect they have other priorities. After all A Voice for Men posted an article on 'male vilification culture' (a counter-term for rape culture) featuring this line "Possibly, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the concept of the penis as a machine emerged." Perhaps rape denial could take a back seat for once. Your guess is as good as mine.

Cultural Criticism of Rap

 

Rap has persevered in the decades since the decline of its predecessors, the end of what used to be called Black music, in the 1980s, in conjunction with the predominance of pop music, which had been manufactured and sanitised to maximise sales. Only once the music scene became totally dominated by music which had no relation to anything outside of its bubble do we find rappers could lay claim to authenticity. The success of so-called 'Gangsta Rap' comes down to its drawing upon a certain view of the lives led by the Black American under-class. The fact that these rappers then go on to celebrate their success in a rags-to-riches narrative meshes well with the false promise of meritocracy. We now live with the worst of both worlds, where it seems no one is pushing boundaries far enough.



"Better to burn-out than fade away..."

I could have written a piece for the twentieth year since Kurt Cobain killed himself. I have no time for the debate over whether or not Cobain did kill himself. I think it's much more important that we remember Cobain's work and not his death. Especially, as the man's suicide note stated "It's better to burn-out than fade away" and there may be something in that. In regards to mortality we shouldn't despair so much, finite lives make their mark and in the case of great artists they have their own piece of eternity. For the twentieth anniversary of Nevermind's release I posted an article (see extract below) drawing upon Fred Pfeil's observations of Kurt Cobain's swipes against repressive masculinity.

The example of choice is the music video of In Bloom in which the band are introduced on an Ed Sullivan-esque TV show as "three fine young men from Seattle" complete with combed hair and matching sports coats. The video is shot in grainy black-and-white to give it the feel of the early 60s, the days before there was such a thing as MTV, Heavy Metal or Punk Rock never mind Grunge.  The effect is a Brechtian distance, the verfremdungseffekt, the point of which was to encourage the audience to take a critical view of the events on stage. So the trio bob about cheerfully as the crowd of pubescent girls get all hysterical as the quiet opening line stands incongruous to the scene "Sell kids for food, weather changes moods". The immediate subject of mockery is the "one" who "knows all our pretty songs", who likes to sing along and shoot his gun but "knows not what it means"; later adding "We can have some more, nature is a whore". The position to be ridiculed is that to comprehend these lyrics is to "shoot a gun", e.g. to possess a phallus.

My anarchist buddy Ted says I should've brought up the fact that the songs Polly and Rape Me were really about highlighting atrocious violence towards women. Originally, the two tracks were to be paired together, played back-to-back, in memory of a teenage girl, who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured. Fortunately, the girl escaped and the rapist Gerald Friend was arrested and is currently rotting in prison. Far from being works celebrating violence against women, as they have been confused for in the past, the songs are very much anti-rape and ultimately life-affirmative.

Brand Obama - Four More Years.

As far as I can see there are a hand full of important reasons for Obama's victory that we should keep in mind. We should never kid ourselves that the US is a shining beacon of democracy atop a hill. In this election the American ruling-class had largely no reason to initiate a seat change. This was reflected by the pressure on the Republican Party to churn out a saleable extremist candidate, only to dress up 'moderate' Mitt as 'reactionnaire' Romney - it was a cop-out from the start. I think we'll probably find from analysis of the campaign funding that Obama had a lot more institutional capital behind, while irrational types like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers poured cash into Romney's doomed campaign. This may indicate that the composition of capital may be even more important than the actual concentration of wealth. Romney was chosen given his record for stable continuity and adaptability, if he lost it wasn't a big deal - the real opportunity for the GOP is 2016 and I suspect that is well understood in the belly of the Republican beast.

There is some evidence to suggest that voter-turnout was actually lower than in 2008, with a difference of maybe 10 million votes give or take. I suspect that the majority of voters were mobilised on the basis of cultural fears of either candidate, while the liberal vote went automatically for the Democrats and the rest stayed home. This is the standard culture war theory of American politics. It's possible that the Tea Party voters were even put-off by Romney, difficult to say at this point. It was a matter of continuity, of maintaining the status quo. Here we find the slim majority of votes converged with an enormous exercise of financial power on the part of the bourgeoisie to bloat Obama's campaign chest, thereby enabling him to reach as many voters as possible. The lesser evilism of Michael Moore and Bill Maher triumphed as there was no perceived left-wing alternative to Obama. But it was more about the defeat of the Right, it was a negative victory and not positive in other words. Putting aside cultural issues, there is the materialist issue of immigration.

Much has been made of the changing ethnic makeup of America, specifically the burgeoning Latino-American population. It's even been predicted that the US will not be a majority white country in a matter of decades. It's worth noting that the impact this could have on the Republican Party, given that it's share of the Hispanic vote collapsed from 44% for Bush in 2004 to 27% in 2012. It was partly due to Romney's own inconsistency, his warming to the most reactionary positions on abortion and homosexuality could not reconcile the Catholic vote given his endorsement of racist policies on Mexican immigration. These votes eventually went to the Obama campaign. Bush had managed to appeal to a broad Catholic base with socially conservative positions on gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research. Notably Bush maintained a moderate position on immigration and even produced an absurd campaign ad in which he claimed to be proud of his 'Latino heritage'. So we've seen that this contradiction might only be resolved by burning a policy plank or two.

 

It remains to be seen whether or not the GOP will moderate it's positions in order to appeal to a much wider base. It's plausible that the Republicans will get crazier and crazier as their voters get whiter. But it is also possible that they will have to concede ground in order to gain greater influence. After all that is the major priority of the Party's primary constituent, namely the American bourgeoisie. This is an instance of the capitalist system undermining it's own interests ultimately. It was the US that has enforced an appalling economic programme on Mexico and Latin America, that has led to Hispanics migrating north just to earn a mediocre living. The militarisation of the border offers only a way to temporarily mobilise a shrinking white voter-base, but the question of Latin-American voter-base still looms large. It's out of the realm of the possible for the Republicans to seek to improve the economic conditions in Mexico in order to limit immigration. The same goes for the prospect of a unionisation of Mexican immigrants.

 

In either case these measures would improve the living standards of Latin-Americans, yet it's also the case that the rising number of Latinos may be inevitable. To put it briefly, America will be skin deep for many years to come. I digress, I've already noted that it was the logic of the lesser evil that was behind a great deal of left-wing support for Obama, but there's another angle here. The late Alexander Cockburn argued in 2010 that Obama may actually be more susceptible to left-wing pressure than Clinton, so the problem is that there's not much of a Left left in America to push the Democrats around. There may be some hope in the charged discourse we now live with thanks to Occupy Wall Street. For a long time it looked as though the era of a lively culture of organised and disciplined politics is dead in the US. We should not kid ourselves that with Occupy Wall Street this era will be reborn. We might hope that the discourse has been impregnated with a certain potential. Though there needs to be something more than a lively grass-roots base to win this thing.