Feed the Wolf, and the Wolf Feeds on You
An article from the New York Times:
Imagine a world in which all the men disappear from the planet in a single moment: Planes they were piloting are left unmanned (literally), their female passengers abandoned in midair; men in bed with their girlfriends mysteriously vanish; boys in the playground dematerialize before their mothers’ eyes. The girls and women left behind are given no apparent reason for the sudden absence of half the world’s population.
Now imagine another world — one in which an author proudly announces her forthcoming novel only to be attacked online for its fantastical premise. Months before the book comes out, it is described on Goodreads as a “transphobic, racist, ableist, misogynist nightmare of a book.” On Twitter, people who have yet to read the novel declare that it’s their responsibility to “deplatform” it. When one of the author’s friends, herself a writer, defends the book, she is similarly attacked, and a prominent literary organization withdraws her nomination for a prize for her own book.
Only one of these nightmare scenarios is real.
The first describes the premise of a novel that comes out this week: “The Men” by Sandra Newman. The second is what actually happened when the premise of Newman’s book was revealed.
…That a fictional world would assert the salience of biological sex, however fanciful the context, was enough to upset a vocal number of transgender activists online. They would argue that “men” is a cultural category to which anyone can choose to belong, as opposed to “maleness,” which is defined by genetics and biology.
Let the insanity of that objection sink in for a moment. The activists demonize a book for positing, as a science fictional premise, that all men vanish from the globe, on the grounds that the category of men does not exist.
The article mentions that an all-woman world is a commonplace in science fiction. It has been treated seriously by feminists or suffragettes in such books as The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975 ) , and Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915). Please note one book is fifty year old; the other is a century old. It has been treated less seriously in such works as the film Queen of Outer Space (1958) starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, and the flashcomic Gotham Girls.
Indeed, in Gotham Girls this exact conceit happens: all the men in Gotham City disappear, including one police officer who is a cross-dresser.
The article goes on to say that Miss Newman describes herself as “nonbinary.” Moreover, the column says the book grants the basic premise of the Gender Cult, namely, that manhood is a cultural category to which men and women alike can belong.
In this fictional world, where the presence of a Y-chromosome dictates who disappears, a strictly biological definition of “man” is viewed as a moral wrong. The main characters are horrified by the fate of the transgender women who get swept up (“unjustly condemned”) and sympathetic to the plight of the transgender men who remain (one character is “paralyzed by the idea that transgender people were still here”).
In other words, she is herself a member of the Critical Gender Cult. Her fellow cultists are turning on her, not for any particular treatment of sexually deviant characters in the book, but merely because the book postulates, as a science fiction hypothetical, that biological sex exists.
The column goes on to mention that when Lauren Hough, a friend of hers, defended her online, this friend had her Lambda Prize nomination revoked by the award committee for badthink.
Please note that it is unlikely that these critics have read the book, which will not be released until later this month.
My comment:
Dear Leftists and Libertarians, if you have the urge, out of compassion or out of a desire to live in a world without moral order, to tolerate, condone, or support sexual perversion, behold the end result of such toleration. It leads to intolerance.
The fact of the matter is that you cannot live in a world without moral order, any more than you can live without time or space. The only thing you can do is serve the moral order, or invert it, but you cannot be rid of it. Sex is not different from other moral questions, unless, perhaps, it is more salient. Dishonesty, dishonor, loss of self-control, lack of command over one’s passions, if anything, trench deeper scars and longer lasting than vices in other areas.
Inverting the moral order merely calls badness good and goodness bad. The inverted system is unstable, for it is illogical, and must bring ever more parts of human life into it, and enact rules and customs ever more totalitarian and arbitrary.
Do not feed the wolf. The wolf grows. The wolf cannot be tamed. The wolf will consume you and your world.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
