Fighting the 'Woke' Culture

 From The New York Post:

I realize the faddish thing to say these days is that we live in the worst, most broken and backward country in the world and maybe in the history of civilization. It’s utter nonsense.

I have a few basic litmus tests in my own life: Can I wear a tank top in public? Can I walk down the street holding the hand of my partner, a (beautiful) woman, in many places in America without getting a second glance? Can I wear a Jewish star without fear?

I do not take those things for granted. I know very well that in many other places, the answers would be different, and my life wouldn’t be possible at all.

America is imperfect. (Does it even need to be said?) There is bigotry toward blacks and gays and Jews and immigrants; there is intense polarization; political violence is becoming more regular; elected representatives believe conspiracy theories. All true here as in many other countries being torn apart by the dislocations of the 21st century.

But there is no gulag in America. There are no laws permitting honor killings. There is no formal social credit system of the kind that exists right now in China. By any measure, we have achieved incredible progress and enjoy extraordinary freedoms. And yet people aren’t acting that way. They are acting, increasingly, like subjects in a totalitarian country.

These people write to me daily. They admit to regularly censoring themselves at work and with friends; succumbing to social pressure to tweet the right hashtag; to parroting slogans they do not believe to protect their livelihoods, like the greengrocer in Václav Havel’s famous essay “The Power of the Powerless.”

These people aren’t crazy. They are scared for good reason.

How much does it cost me to log on to Twitter and accuse you, right now, of an -ism? America is fast developing its own informal social credit system, as the writer Rod Dreher has noted, in which people with the wrong politics or online persona are banned from social media sites and online financial networks.

When everything is recorded for eternity, when making mistakes and taking risks are transformed into capital offenses, when things that were common sense until two seconds ago become unsayable, people make the understandable decision to simply shut up. (Read more.)

 

From Elizabeth Johnston:

Heterosexual relationships are “tragic” and the cause of misogyny, so-called toxic masculinity, inequality, abuse, and much more according to a professor at the University of California-Riverside.

Jane Ward, a self-described lesbian and professor of gender and sexuality studies at the west coast state school, is making waves with wild claims that heterosexuality emphasizes inequality and leaves heterosexual individuals worse off than were they in a same-sex relationship.

In a December editorial Ward told Insider that “she feels sorry for straight people, especially straight women, who typically report some of the lowest sexual satisfaction in society…But she also feels sorry for straight men, who are pigeon-holed into toxic-masculine culture that teaches them they both need, and yet should also demean, women.”

“It really looks like straight men and women don’t like each other very much, that women spend so much time complaining about men, and we still have so much evidence of misogyny,” Ward added, explaining that “from an LGBT perspective, [heterosexuality] looks actually very tragic.”

Ward also pointed to an uptick in divorce rates among the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns and quarantines as “revealing the tragedy of heterosexuality to people who might not have otherwise paid attention to it.”

Ward is also an author and has a book unsurprisingly titled “The Tragedy of Heterosexuality” under her belt. (Read more.)

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