Is anyone else sick and tired of public life being dominated by the neuroses of the upper middle classes? By Brendan O’Neill.
The petty concerns of the self-pitying rich have colonised politics, culture and the media. Newspapers overflow with sob stories from plummy writers about the horror of being misgendered or the abject terror of someone asking them, ‘But where are you really from?’. Netflix is a hotbed of dramas about privileged suicidal teens and their goddamn pronouns. MPs and celebrities and princes tell all about their struggles with mental illness. Bipolar is all the rage. It’s the new adopting babies from Africa in the celeb world. Schools have been overrun by PhD-wielding culture warriors telling teenage girls to bind their shameful breasts and reprimanding infants who aren’t au fait with all the new linguistic rules on race, gender and sexuality. Even the once stiff civil service now regularly invites in race-baiting columnists and think-tankers to drone on about the horrors of life in ‘white supremacist’ Britain. …
Day-to-day life feels like living in the brain of a posh person who has mistaken having hang-ups for a personality. …
Browse Instagram and there’s Lena Dunham going on about being fat or having recovered from addiction. Switch on a political-discussion show and I guarantee you’ll see an earnest middle-class campaigner explaining how racism is getting worse and worse. …
The Smart Set really is neurotically convinced that it is surrounded by dim, bovine racists, xenophobes, transphobes and fascists and that Brexit Britain is one angry Daily Mail leader away from the next Beer Hall Putsch. And of course they’re all traumatised. Or exhausted. Feeling exhausted is the new feeling traumatised. ‘I’m so tired’, say the upper-class neurotics, which is amazing given none of them has ever done a day’s work.
Now — because why not? — Laurie Penny has served up peak posh neurosis. Her new book, Sexual Revolution: Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback, is the ultimate expression of the political, sexual and cultural hang-ups that have become so vogue among the well-brought-up, socially aware set.
(Beautiful artwork!)
Seriously, this book is crackers. At first it’s depressing — Ms Penny paints an image of the West in which women are kept in line by threats of rape, where fragile white men with ‘sweaty hands’ (?) are making life miserable for minorities, and where everything exists within a ‘framework of trauma’. Ready my noose! But eventually it becomes funny. It’s so relentlessly grim that all you can do is laugh. If you tell yourself it’s parody — parody of those intense millennials from privileged backgrounds who have managed to convince themselves that they’re oppressed — you will enjoy it enormously. Five stars! …
Most strikingly, this is a book written by someone who has a very serious problem with democracy. … She seems convinced that the majority of people are being shaped by forces beyond their control. Our societies are being ‘held hostage to the psychic fragility of whiteness and the hysteria of straight masculinity’, she says. Populists and autocrats have ‘exploited [the] prejudices’ of wider society in order to get into power. …
She even cites Wilhelm Reich’s 1933 book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, to explain the continual emergence of ‘mass-psychological factors’ such as ‘brutal sadism’. Without question the most reactionary lesson drawn by the intellectual classes from the experience of Nazism was that it was the fault of the easily manipulated masses, rather than of the racially deranged elites, and it is a lesson Penny resuscitates for her book.
This rather confirms what this book is about. In essence, the terrifying sweaty white men represent democracy, while Penny and all her right-thinking feminist friends — to whom she refers, frequently — represent the pushback of the clever and the enlightened against democracy’s excesses.
What is presented to us as a book about the coming battle between ‘feminism’ and ‘fascism’ is really a book about what Penny seems to view as the truly urgent struggle of our age — the rage of the right-on few against the foul political leaders that the psychologically misled masses have foisted on society. Behind all the progressive terminology, I spy a fundamentally reactionary argument. …
Ms Penny — privately educated, time-rich, her labour unsold, her hands uncalloused, straight, married, etc etc — can magically reposition herself as a member of the downtrodden by announcing that she is genderqueer, a they/them, abused, terrorised, yada yada. And so do the privileged elites culturally appropriate the language of oppression and position us as the oppressors of them.
Us lizards and gammon — reptiles and pigs — are the true oppressors, while they, the endlessly fascinating gender-experimenting new elites, are the true victims. Now that, my friends, is gaslighting.
Heroes in their own echo chamber.
