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.

A Dirty Old Man.

The poet and self-described dirty old man Charles Bukowski died twenty years ago. He passed after a battle with leukaemia in which he finished his novel Pulp (1993). He gave up the ghost with a sigh of relief. He was the American equivalent of Céline. He lived his work. It was the end of the Beatniks and the Hippies when Bukowski burst onto the scene, having been crowned King of the Little Magazines, and churned an incredible bulk of poems and short stories from the 1940s onwards. It was a hard struggle, writing from the gutter, mainly for others who found themselves there too.

Other poets such as WH Auden had seen structure, order and stability (not to mention hard work!) as the vital components to the life of a writer, Charles Bukowski was the manifest opposite and revelled in it. The writing was meant to be as alive as you are, so it was meant to sweat and bleed and reek to high heaven. It's all on show. As Nietzsche put it "Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them." He had little time for formal questions, and regarded the matter with scorn, as a retreat for the writer, carving out a minimalist body of work instead. He hated rules and regulations and quickly found enemies and friends. The novels were a fictionalised autobiography centred around Henry Chinaski. It is a portrayal of life in the darkest corners of American society, at times absurdly comic, inexplicable, and it all comes with an authenticity in its gritty texture as each word has to carry its own weight.

A friend of mine told me she feels like having shower after reading Bukowski's prose. As readers we follow the travails of Chinaski through dirt cheap apartments, menial work, drunken brawls, gambling, sexual escapades, and eventually to Hollywood. He opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook "It began as a mistake." And with that he reels you in to read a tale of a dozen years as a postie. He had written the book in about a month, after John Martin came to him and made an unconditional pledge. Martin promised to give Bukowski 25% of his earnings for life - it amounted to $100 at the time - every month if he quits and writes full time. Whether or not they succeeded the money would be there. It was this guarantee of a minimal income that gave him the motivation to leave the post office and start work on a novel. It was also what John Martin needed to build up Black Sparrow Books.

It was in the late 60s that Bukowski became a part of the countervailing forces of American culture and society. He had a column in the LA Free Press and Open City - with a column called 'Notes of a Dirty Old Man'. The Beat Generation was on the wane and Lawrence Ferlinghetti was on the lookout for the next big thing when he came across Bukowski. It should not surprise anyone that he was not too impressed with the Hippies. After all, this is the same poet who loathed Walt Disney for creating Mickey Mouse. He shared this disdain for the Hippie with Jack Kerouac, Much like Kerouac the dirty old man would be hoovered up by the prevailing spirit of Western life. It's almost as if there was no escaping it. The Hudson driven by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957) now sits in a museum with the same dust on it. There is Jack Kerouac Alley, just as there is Bukowski Court.

In Factotum (1975) Bukowski rails further against the Protestant work ethic and instead preached the refusal to work: "How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" He was an individualist who hated rules, but he offered a counter-individualism to the pretences of the 'American dream' and its false promise of paradise by hard labour. He spat on its sunny optimism and expressed antipathy towards society at large. Solitude was the alternative. It was a conservative solution in that it had no care for the problems of society, or of people more generally. The solitary alternative was a kind of isolationism, an active policy of non-intervention with the world and its social ills.

It wasn't just a literary trope as we find if we examine his life. In the days when his father called him Heinrich, the young Bukowski studied at LA City College in the late 1930s just on the onset of the War. Once it had started he had moved to New York City and would explore the East Coast. He worked whatever menial jobs he could - even irking a living in a pickle factory - and filled his spare time with typing and drinking. He was first published at the age of 24 and that same year he was arrested by the FBI on suspicion of draft evasion. Bukowski was held for seventeen days in Moyamensing Prison before going on to fail a mandatory psychological exam. He had escaped conscription. Given the militaristic culture of the US there has been some discussion on whether Bukowski harboured pro-Nazi sympathies in those days. It seems more plausible that the young Bukowski simply evaded the draft because he didn't see any worthwhile effectuality in military service. It doesn't take a Nazi to believe that.

Besides, the most laden prejudice in Bukowski's work is not anti-Semitism by any match. It is misogyny, not racism. If Bukowski had been a fascist it would have been obvious. He had a lot to hide, but he chose not to. He was certainly a male chauvinist. In Post Office Bukowski puts it bluntly "Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love." Misogyny is certainly a major part of Bukowski's writing. The same year that the book came out Bukowski wrote in a letter to a friend "Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell." We got a glimpse into this 'living hell' in The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1985) in which we can witness him verbally abusing and kicking his wife Linda off of their sofa.

We shouldn't turn a blind eye to Bukowski's misogyny even if we do take pleasure in the unexpected exuberance in his melancholic free-verse. It's charged with a life-affirming spark. Unlike the domesticated version of individuality Hank Chinaski finds more life in the bars than in the sweat and toil of the factory. This was at a time when the US was a major industrial and manufacturing hub, yet it was on its way to deindustrialisation. It's not clear where this man would fit in today. It was a different America where Chinaski roamed free. It's plausible he would have much more company in a post-industrial capitalist society. He writes "The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me." Elsewhere the dirty realist invites us to "go all the way" even at great cost to ourselves.