Scolding dullness and brain death by conformity
You disapprove of me liking things? That's nice for you
A video clip on LinkedIn depicts someone called Hannah Waddingham wagging her finger and saying “Oh my God you’d never say that to a man. Don’t be a dick or else I’ll move off.” A photographer has apparently said "show a leg".
It's been shared into my timeline by someone I know irl who says 'Love this!'.
I want to ask my irl contact 'why?'.
Can we discuss what's so good about it?
The professionally painted and sculpted person in the video is apparently unhappy about ... er ... being noticed and spoken to in a different way than men.
She's technically right, of course. 'Show a leg' is definitely not something that photographers would say to a man displaying to the cameras in traditional hot man garb.
They might say 'flex a muscle', though, depending on the context and who he is.
It's inconceivable that he would respond 'you'd never say that to a woman'.
Although my question would be sincere, I'd be seen as trolling if I really did ask my contact 'why do you like this riposte so much'.
This ‘classroom’ moment has somehow made the newspapers. It made another little ritual spat in the culture war.
One side observing the miserable scolding of 'feminism' and the other observing that women are still 'objectified' and that this needs to change for justice to be served.
These get-nowhere to and fros are curious to look at dispassionately. They could be quite interesting to discuss. But no, I'm not going there.
I have no idea whether girls and women in general are really 'harmed' by men admiring and desiring certain members of their class. I'm assured that this is the case by most things that come up when asking Google, but the evidence seems sketchy. It mostly consists of theory rather than actual data.
It all seems to be governed by vibe and I'm deeply mistrustful of vibe.
But if they really are harmed, I must accept my part in contributing to this harm all the time by enjoying the sight of a woman presenting in ways they wouldn't, say, when they first stumble out of bed of a morning. Even when they have gone to some pains to stand out from other people of their own biological class.
This means I'm careful and polite about it when I see someone who appears in a way I experience as sexually inspiring. I take pains to steal no more than a glance at a nice ankle, hoping no one will notice.
Interrogating this reveals that my caution is not because I think women hate to be admired. Or that it will harm them or anyone else. But because there's a societal rule about that sort of thing and I know it.
The rule is Do Not Be Real.
So I end up furtively admiring someone and hoping no one will notice how 'creepy' this makes me.
I grew up so aware of the rules around this that I even used to identify myself as a 'feminist'. Yes, I was one of those craven men. The ones right-wing Twitter trolls would rib all the time, as we all pretended to agree that the Male Gaze is a terrible iniquity.
She looks impressive, that woman in the LinkedIn clip. It's a plastic look that I'm not personally hot for, but as a kind of art installation that pulls on a few cliched western erotic threads, Hannah Waddingham's efforts are successful.
The rule about what one can or cannot signal about how one experiences this seems to require a kind of ritual behaviour.
I would stake reasonable money on the proposition that she wasn't really upset by the request. And that her pained expression and scolding tone was a performance.
She is just responding to incentives. We all mostly are.
The photographer is responding to the incentive that many picture editors want a spicy photo, because many people like a spicy photo too. Ms Waddingham is responding to the incentive that in our culture one is expected to look down on such things.
I would think quite differently if the photographer had said 'get yer tits out'. That seems qualitatively different from asking a woman to use the long slit in a dress for what it's designed for.
The comments are predictable, on that LinkedIn post.
One female person stentoriously observes that there is 'more work to be done'.
This is apparently aimed at other women. Because some have suggested that Ms Waddingham's dress encourages the idea of showing a leg. Those women are right. They. Are. Obviously. Right.
But there is 'work to be done' to eradicate all obviously true things until everyone conforms to The Rule About This Sort Of Thing.
But it's not just any rule. Breaking it makes you a misogynist. An actual hater of women.
Which means that women who don't conform to the rule have ... consults notes ... internalised misogyny.
Like almost every theory in identity politics it relies on rhetorical heft and fear of being labelled, rather than any evidence.
It's an odd aspect of western liberal culture, this subtle difference between reality and norms.
Many of us go around saying one thing while thinking another.
It's a kind of class snobbery.
We worry about our status, because posing an emperor's new clothes kind of question in the face of these assertions pushes you down in the class structure.
A structure which has - some might say conveniently - ensured that the working class remains below everyone else, because it tends to be more honest in the absence of the correct form of ̶i̶n̶d̶o̶c̶t̶r̶i̶n̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ education.
In cultured and sophisticated society you must conform, if you worry about people thinking less of you.
Someone makes the claim that criticising Hannah Waddingham's sneering scorn is 'victim-blaming'.
Although she did invite a sexualised kind of attention (good for her - nothing wrong with that, especially if appearance is part of your personal brand), this absolutely must never be acknowledged.
She's actually no more a victim than I would be, if I went around kicking a copy of the Quran on a majority Muslim street. Someone might well be incited to say something or I might get a slap.
I would obviously own some responsibility for this happening.
'Well, Mike asked for it' wouldn't be victim-blaming. It would be obviously true.
The concept of 'victim blaming' is another of those genius ideas that stuck so fast that we're all scared to question it. Even though the most cursory investigation reveals a woolliness there. A feels-based notion and nothing more substantial than that.
But it carries so much heft.
I remember thinking this when Judge Lindsey Kushner QC was pilloried for comments about personal responsibility in a sexual assault case. She was only saying what everyone knew and didn't dare say.
These are the words that made activist journalists so upset.
“I don’t think it’s wrong for a judge to beg women to take actions to protect themselves. That must not put responsibility on them rather than the perpetrator. How I see it is burglars are out there and nobody says burglars are OK but we do say: ‘Please don’t leave your back door open at night, take steps to protect yourselves’.
“It should not be like that but it does happen and we see it time and time again.”
This led to a tumult of opinion columns about 'victim-blaming'.
This isn't an argument against feminist principles that seem obviously correct and necessary.
Like treating women respectfully as people (not mobile genitalia) and always in context. If Hannah Waddingham is your boss, colleague or Starbucks barrista and comes to work looking like that, as is her absolute God-given right, don't ask her to show a leg. Show her respect in the context of your situation.
If you pass her in the street, don't ask her to show a leg. Her leg is none of your fucking business in that context.
Where I call bullshit is on elevating the photographer's suggestion in this instance to the status of misogyny and lamenting all women as oppressed just because there would be a market for the picture the photographer hopes for in that context.
To argue that women are oppressed by men admiring physical aspects of them even in the context of an obviously sexualised display is just one of those claims we all know to be basically stupid.
A grain of truth amid the usual nonsense of hyper-moralising racial politics
Rarely Certain's paying subscriber base grew fastest when it involved a lot more Woke-bashing. There was a real market for that.
I found it boring to keep covering the same ground.
Nor does it jibe with the point of pursuing a 'post-ideological' way of thinking.
So at risk of disappointing everyone who signed up to enjoy anti-Woke takes, here's one about 'structural racism'.
It's real. It's just that it's not real in the way that most activists say.
I have an excellent podcast discussion by Clearer Thinking to thank for this insight.
It's not about skin colour or racism. It's about economic class.
Wealth, privilege and opportunity beget the same. Everyone knows this. The convenient stories of 'trickledown' economics don't like to include this annoying fact.
For a multitude of reasons, which include historical oppression and maltreatment, many black people in post-colonial, post-slavery societies haven't caught up to their majority white neighbours because they started out further down the economic pecking order.
Why it took this podcast episode to remind me that everything is about class, really, is because so much of the hectoring and lecturing about it comes from the most privileged class.
They are so busy moralising about how those below them in the pecking order should be, I've ended up tuning them out.
I'm not the first to notice that it's typically the most comfortably off who identify as leftish. And how, for example, the current 'pro-Palestinian' protests are mostly a campus elite phenomenon. People least exposed to the 'injustices' and problems they rail against.
Last week I lost my main income. That's two gigs now, where I've been replaced by keyword-rich AI-generated articles that no one but search engines will ever read.
I have tax to pay and I've noticed that I'll need to draw from savings to pay last year's income tax.
I'll then be taxed on drawing out that money. So I'm paying more tax just to afford tax payments, when I'm on a subsistence lifestyle.
It's the first time I've really understood where economic conservatives are coming from when they balk at the argument that we all have a moral duty to pay our way. Leaving aside the fact that economic conservatives tend to do more voluntary giving than leftishist elites - who prefer to tell the rest of us that we should be giving - it's been a tiny epiphany.
And a reminder that you can't really argue against the conservative mind unless you can understand it.
Shameless pitch for money #2
These men have been overlooked in the popular accounts of Europe's liberation 80 years ago and I'm doing something about it.
For example, this is Barrett Collyer Dillow, pictured in 2012. You won’t have heard of him.
It was August 24 1944 when Captain Barrett Collyer Dillow (service number 0466686) led Troop A to the outskirts of a town called Corbeil, east of Paris.
On encountering an enemy road block Captain Dillow took his armoured car around it and entered the town. His intention seems to have been to open fire on whatever forces were behind the roadblock, as a signal for the rest of his men to assault.
All hell broke loose as the Germans opened fire on Capt. Dillow's M8 Greyhound from the town square. Under a hail of fire Capt. Dillow immediately attempted to subdue the enemy using the anti-aircraft gun mounted on the car's turret.
Unsatisfied with his angles of fire from the turret Capt. Dillow jumped out and onto the deck of the Greyhound to improve his aim. The rest of Troop A raced in to join him and the enemy were driven out of the town. He was wounded by shrapnel. And received a Silver Star medal.
Evacuated for treatment he was back soon after, taking command of reconnaissance Troop C, in bitter fighting in Germany. There he led a bayonet charge in hand-to-hand trench combat. He was wounded again on Christmas Day.
It's expensive to do research like this and until there's a publisher for the eventual book, this project is unfunded except (at this point) from my savings and the generosity of a handful of people who have donated to a crowd-funder.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-to-honour-the-24th-cavalry-reconnaissance-squadron
Take a look and chip in if you can. Meeting the initial target of €3,000 would cover two years of research costs and get the project to a point where the book is a viable proposition to pitch at publishers.
Alternatively, you can always drop a tip in the jar here, if you enjoy Rarely Certain but don’t feel like committing over time. Hopefully I'll find work again, but in the meantime, but every little helps right now.
Another good piece Mike, on all topics. Sorry to hear of your income loss, but hopefully my subscriptions (Rarely Certain and 24th Cavalry) will help a little. Keep up the good work !
Another excellent piece. Such a relief to know I'm not alone in being bored to death (not that you say this exactly) by women (or men) trying to convince me, a woman, that I shouldn't enjoy being admired in some way or another as a woman. I'm not a victim.