It’s PLEDGE DRIVE time again! WHTM is ad free and entirely dependent on folks like you for its continued existence. If you can afford it, please DONATE HERE NOW! Thanks!
By David Futrelle
Last week Celine Dion launched a new clothing line for children with a slick but exceedingly strange little video in which the oddball Canadian chanteuse, playing the part of some action movie heroine, slipped into the maternity ward of a hospital and magically replaced the pink and blue outfits of a roomful of newborns with gender-neutral, black-and-white onesies from her collection — before being wrestled to the ground by a security guard.
The creepy ad, and the minimalist unisex outfits themselves — some sporting stars and triangles, others featuring the phrase “New Order” — seem almost calculated to cause conspiracy theorists and right-wing religionists alike to lose it. And so they have, with an assortment of unhinged YouTubers posting countless videos denouncing Celine’s “ILLUMINATI GENDERLESS CLOTHING LINE FOR CHILDREN,” and one Catholic priest — literally an exorcist — telling the National Catholic Reporter that the clothing line was “definitely satanic,” possibly stemming from a demonic dimension. “The devil is going after children by confusing gender,” he explained.
On Twitter, conspiracy enthusiasts and religious fanatics alike are spelling out their objection in countless furious and sometimes all-caps tweets. Some, like the aforementioned exorcist, see evidence of the work of … could it be? … SATAN?
More than a few of the comments have a rather threatening tone to them.
One commenter even goes so far as to suggest that Celine’s famous song from Titanic is somewhat overrated.
While some of Celine’s fashion critics focus on the supposed occult symbolism — with some seeing the plus signs on some of the clothes as inverted crosses — others are more distressed by the fact that the boy babies and the girl babies are wearing the same clothes, seeing the unisex outfits as evidence that Celine is attacking the gender binary itself, conspiring to make children genderless and destroy the family to boot.
While some worry about the world being taken over by the Prince of Darkness himself, this Wall-loving Trump fan thinks the real endgame of Celine’s gender-neutral clothing line is … tighter gun laws!
Some of Celine’s critics are convinced that one of the outfits in the collection is intended to turn small children into budding antifa activists.
A few think the real point of Celine’s gender-neutral stance is to undermine fathers and men in general.
These people have convinced themselves that unisex onesies with stars on them are part of a vast evil plot, possibly orchestrated by Satan himself, to destroy families and possibly the world itself.
How do they manage to make it through Halloween every year without their heads exploding?
@KindaSortaHarmless:
Well, yeah. Like I said, I was taught (by my formerly-Catholic parents) that she could have said no. Checking the catechism, Catholic teaching is that Mary could have refused. God, being omniscient, knew she would accept, but God didn’t force her. Wonder what a Calvinist would say to that.
@Rattus: I remember a baby mobile that had black-and-white shapes for newborns, and full-color shapes that you could swap in when the child grew older.
@KindaSortaHarmless
I’ve been told that the whole point of the story is that she does assent, and does it willingly. Which compared to the biblical text has always seemed like special pleading to me, especially since it doesn’t really get emphasized all that much, and Gabriel doesn’t seem to say “So, want to bear the Lord?” so much as “Hey, guess what you’re going to get to do?”
Still, that interpretation does allow for the argument that “No, no, see, Yawheh is way better than Zeus, he doesn’t just rape her and knock her up.”
Waitaminute…holdup…where in all this fuckery does Walnut Sauce fit in?
And how does one serve it ordinarily?
I missed the meeting where we made 4channers the guardians of public moralityand childhood innocence.
@Bina
You serve it with Soylent Green, by the sounds of it.
Ugh, I love that any female celebrity that annoys these fools gets called transgender, and with a pedo insinuation too! Taylor Swift, Michelle Obama, Celine Dion, etc, just stop it assholes. Fuck
And Eliphas Levi’s drawing of Baphomet does include breasts and a caduceus, a symbol used in place of a phallus in this instance. Though it was meant to be a positive thing, expressing duality and creative forces.
Tania Groth, the one starting off the “Antifa-starter-suit” tirade, is a former leader in the Danish PEGIDA.
Sad to see that she’s still at it.
One of Dion’s early English language hits in a lot of places was “Think Twice.” The lyricist was Peter Sinfield, whose initial success was as lyricist for King Crimson. He was the one who came up with the name King Crimson, which some people wrongly assume is a synonym for Beelzebub. King Crimson main man Robert Fripp was interested in things like Wicca(he recorded an album in 1972 with Wiccan Walli Elmark which was never released) before discovering the works of mystic George Gurdjieff and his followers, including fellow Englishman J.G. Bennett. Lots in that minor connection to get the conspiracy mongers going.
Since my kids (daughter & 2 sons) were born way before Celine, my gender neutral onsies were all green & yellow. It kept the idiots guessing.
@AsAboveSoBelow:
“she could have refused” is a deadly game to play. Let’s not forget it was not so long ago when the catholic church (and some denominations still today) claimed that if a woman, even under threat of death or bodily harm, “accepted” sexual violation, she was a sinner and it wasn’t real rape.
So how about we don’t go there.
@Lumipuna (page 1)
Oh see I like those options a lot better! Some cheerful colours and all; we don’t have to throw fun clothes out with the gender binary 🙂
Weird. I was taught that God didn’t have a gender, even though we did say “he” and say the “O Father, who art in heaven” prayer.* And I was raised Christian.** I assume this guy is Jewish by the way he spells “G-d,” so he’d have even less reason to believe in a gendered god, since there’s no part-of-god Jesus dude around to confuse things.
*Which doesn’t teach the greatest lesson either, since it assumes male is the default… like others were saying earlier about some gender-neutral clothing.
**Presbyterian, specifically. Y’know, the group that the witches are overtaking! (Rooting for the witches unless the Presbyterians have that gloriously unwholesome ambrosia “salad” I had at a church potluck as a kid. And only if it has the little marshmallows.)
I mean, I don’t think Dion was doing any favors by putting “new order” on those clothes. That was kinda asking for some conspiracy shit, plus it just looks creepy.
To be fair to them it is well documented that certain rogue angels are willing to unsink the Titanic just to assure Celine Dion ends up as a poor lounge singer in Montreal.
In light of that it seems logical that she would provide a onesie for Satan’s Jack.
@Saint Somnia
I mean, from a marketing perspective it’s one way to get extra publicity: triggering the alt-right/conspiracists. Buuuut seeing as the clothing line is for kids, she could have toned it down a bit..
That said I wonder if the designs will change to something more subtle once the free advertising dies down.
Re “gender neutral G-d” that is quite odd.
My friend Shonaleigh, who grew up in the drutsy’la storytelling tradition and may be its surviving last exponent, learnt the stories in Yiddish and tells them in English and Dutch and Yiddish. They often riff off themes from the Torah – you get Eziekiel turning up a bit like Gandalf in LoTR, and so on.
When she was telling one cycle I noticed she varied between using She and He for the deity – usually She when referring to the creator aspect, and also to the all-knowing aspect. She said she wasn’t doing it consciously, but that’s how she learnt it, and apparently how it is used in the Torah.
So G-d is at least gender-fluid.
In Christian tradition, Greek biblical texts also have aspects of God given female names: the Holy Spirit for instance (who after all, “brooded on the face of the waters”) and is also known as the Holy Wisdom, Haghia Sophia. It was a bit heterodox of Julian of Norwich to write of “God the Mother”, though.
Have they never seen pre-twentieth century portraits with boys in them? Before then, in Europe, and starting in the sixteenth century it was normal to dress young children of both sexes in what we now think of as specifically girls’ clothing.
Also pink used to be considered a strong colour, and so suitable for boys. Indeed the “blue for a boy pink for a girl” rule didn’t become a fixed and holy rule until after WWII!!
These people react to small children in genderless clothing the way decent people react to small children being locked in cages or tear gassed.
Also what @Lucas said about gender being an objective, hard-wired, immutable quality that can be overridden by dressing a baby in specific colours. It’s a bit like the old fascist thing of the enemy being desperately strong and pathetically weak at the same time.
Less importantly, I think babies prefering black and white is only the first 6 weeks or so.
Maybe they think that Celine sings at such a high pitch that her words contain Satanic lyrics that only kids can hear.
Huh, and I just now realised reading Bluecat’s post that (without consciously thinking about it) I always vaguely assumed the “brooding on the face of the waters” bit meant the ghost was floating around in a sunk-deep-in-thought attitude, a bit like Rodin’s Thinker, in a sulky sort of way.
Brooding the way hens do just didn’t occur to me :-s
So much this.
(also, we dyed some cheap onesies black, and got given a very chic grey one from du pareil au même, lo these many many years ago for our spawn. Very cool 🙂 )
The walnut sauce is a reference to an element of the Pizzagate memeplex. There are occasional references to food in the “Podesta emails”, which the conspiracy theorists believe are code for terrible things. Pedophilia, mostly. Someone mentioned pasta with walnut sauce and added “was the sauce tasty?”
I will refrain from details, because sweet Christmas those people are vile.
@Jane Done:
Pointing to or describing the source of a belief isn’t an endorsement of that belief. I am intimately and sadly aware of how too many Christians have treated and continue to treat women and victims of sexual violence.
@bluecat: I love Julian of Norwich’s Showings.
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
Same. I’ve experimented with using “god” as a pronoun to avoid identifying the divine with any human gender or sex: “godself” instead of “herself,” etc.
@AsAboveSoBelow: ah, that’s fair
@Jane Done: Thank you.
The one I heard the most was “Forgive, or you can’t be forgiven” (a paraphrase of Mark 11:26). Great. Thanks. Even now, typing this, it hurts.
Wow, these people are totally deluded, it’s Satanic Panic on steroids!