The Summer 2017 WHTM pledge drive is on! Donate generously to enable our continuing coverage of dangerous haircuts! Thanks!
By David Futrelle
My new favorite far-right Twitter weirdo is a fellow called @WesternIdentity, a self-described “right wing urban theologian” and “esoteric image cleric” who uses his Twitter account to promote “occult nationalism,” complain that “underground heretical judaism has pushed cuckoldry into our society,” express his love of skittles and post assorted gifs involving Trump getting the better of CNN.
I discovered @WesternIdentity earlier this week after he launched a tirade against the alleged diabolical evil that is short hair on women.
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/884476141851086848
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/884477604568412160
Yeah, that’s right, he’s getting all philosophical on our asses.
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/884478875560017921
He then decided to “rebrand” the cute-sounding pixie cut.
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/884849174004596736
As longtime readers of this blog know well, @WesternIdentity is hardly the first reactionary doofus to declare war on the pixie cut and short hairdos for women generally.
But he may be the first pixie-cut hater to also suggest that Chelsea Manning — currently sporting, yes, a pixie cut — is some kind of MK Ultra mind control slave, or something.
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/884470152888274944
It turns out that @WesternIdentity has a lot of, well, interesting opinions about all sorts of stuff, including Satanic CNN pedophiles, which he apparently thinks are a real thing.
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/882623038222675968
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/882625249954725888
Oh, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/884284296273547264
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/881919902076071942
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/883748449803526144
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/881352205881815040
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/881299483962822657
And check out what is perhaps the world’s hottest take on robots:
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/881736993151082496
I honestly have no idea if this one is a joke:
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/879554926560587776
He does post some pretty dank gifs from time to time, though.
https://twitter.com/WesternIdentity/status/881723213033680897
H/T — @spookperson
This is a common misconception. In fact this is a dead unicorn: It hardly ever happens, especially not in modern YA, but it seems like it happens all the time because people are constantly decrying it. In fact, the vast majority of YA protagonists are strongly feminine and extremely few are actually gender-nonconforming, and the constant narrative that girlie girls are somehow under attack actually creates strong pressure forcing conformity to traditional gender expression. I did a long-form piece on this problem here.
This woman is definitely not arguing against gender policing—she demands these ultra-femme characters, to the extent that girls in actual Victorian ball gowns were rejected as insufficiently feminine for her tastes. She DGAF about anyone else’s gender expression; anything that’s not extremely feminine is personally attacking her, which is why she has a problem with girls in jeans and T-shirts. Normal clothes. That everyone wears. She’s a piece of work.
Extra irony points for that, because for most of human history, skirts were considered eminently practical clothing to wear, for all sexes. Kilts, togas, robes, etc. — very little clothing actually had legs.
Until the horse, and especially, the cavalry. Once the horse became a hugely important military technology, with that came pants, which are more practical wear for horse-riding than skirts. And pants became associated with powerful warrior dudes, knights and suchlike, and so masculinized. Then it became a norm for men to wear pants whether or not they used horses in their work lives, because pants = manly.
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/why-do-we-wear-pants/
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/cultural-evolution-of-pants/
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/cultural-evolution-of-pants-ii/