Our upside down world of progress
EVEN THE HORRIFYING MISOGYNIST LYRICS OF RAP STRIKE ME AS A DEMENTED PROTEST AGAINST A LACK OF SUITABLE MALE ROLES AND ROLE MODELS. — JOHN ROBSON
The world really is upside down. How else can you explain the strange juxtaposition of stories on the National Post’s front page last Wednesday about the Ontario Human Rights Commission targeting waitresses in skirts, while a foul-mouthed singer gets invited to a glittering prime ministerial reception in Washington?
The first story alleges “a growing outcry over ‘sexualized’ dress codes in the workplace,” perhaps more evident to government apparatchiks talking to journalists interviewing sociology professors than to normal people. But within that selfsatisfied echo chamber, the burning human rights issue is women wearing skirts and men wearing pants while working in restaurants. And the solution is men wearing skirts.
No. Just kidding about the last part. The solution is, of course, women wearing pants, because “Why can’t a women be more like a man?” is the battle cry of feminists who, as G.K. Chesterton pointedly said over a century ago, are “so-called from their detestation of everything feminine.”
Of course, if you tried to make men wear skirts, they would be less willing to engage with the brave, new world unfolding around them. Can you blame them?
Especially since on the same page we read that while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is visiting Washington, he will attend a reception featuring “Grammywinning Toronto artist” The Weeknd, whose “morose blend of profanity, sexism and proscribed behaviour will add to the impression that Canada has changed; that this is not the boring little brother in the attic bedroom Americans have grown complacent living alongside.”
So suddenly profanity, sexism and proscribed behaviour make you cool instead of a threat to social justice? Apparently so. Canada 2020, “Canada’s leading, independent, progressive think-tank” and official host of this elite, “invite-only” do, put out a press release boasting that The Weeknd would be there and quoting its president and co-founder that, “The Weeknd personifies the creative and dynamic spirit of the Canadian arts community.”
Personally, I’d think soap manufacturers would be sponsoring his appearance in hopes of massive oral application of their product. But it seems I’m out of touch with the modern world, in which if a woman wears a skirt it’s traumatic patriarchal oppression, whereas when you sing that … OK. This is awkward. To explain the problem properly I actually have to quote some of the gutter lyrics that made this person a star fit to hobnob with Canada’s prime minister.
If you’re willing to take my word for it, don’t read on. But when he sings that he “f---ed two b--ches” and “she ride it like a f---ing pony” and “we don’t need no protection” and “look at all this cash … bring your love baby I could bring my shame/ bring the drugs baby I could bring my pain,” he’s proof that Canada is cool and gets to hang with the prime minister, instead of facing the Ontario Human Rights Commission complaint that might loom if you said dresses look elegant on women but silly on men.
If I made it up as some biting satire of modernity, you’d reject it as too contrived, heavy-handed and didactic. So what do you do when it’s real?
Personally, I seek a hint of method in this modern madness, based on a conservation of erotic energy in a society. Humans are sexual creatures and it’s not actually a bad thing whatever old-fashioned Puritans or the modern kind may say. Actually, old-fashioned Puritans, for all their failings, had such a lively interest in sex in marriage that their journals had to be censored for 19th-century publication. The modern PC crowd, I’m not so sure.
Healthy sexuality, directed toward the creation and raising of children (yes, sex is about babies, a startling thought nowadays), channelled into women’s desire to be nurturing mothers and men’s to be responsible fathers, expressed in a respectful “vive la différence” way, is a good thing. But if it is repressed, family is mocked, the state separates children from parents, husbands from wives and procreation from pleasure, it leaks out in grotesquely unwholesome ways.
Even the horrifying misogynist lyrics of rap strike me as a demented protest against a lack of suitable male roles and role models, one of those infamous cries for help. Like the hookup culture and massive use of antidepressants along with birth control on campuses.
The tighter the lips of PC censors press together as they rap our knuckles for preferring, all else being equal, a pretty waitress or handsome waiter pleasantly dressed (yes, you, admit it, it’s not why you go out to dinner, but if it happens, it’s a bonus), the more we plunge with desperate, unhappy urgency into foul pleasures from pornography to socially sanctioned sexual aggression.
Worse, we boast about it, in the upside down world all this progress has given us.