By David Futrelle
Are Maocels now a thing?
The Twitterer who calls himself @mass__line is a South Asian Maoist living in Canada. He’s also, he says, a lifelong celibate, but by no means does he consider himself an involuntary one; he’s proud of this virginity. Indeed, he considers his continued celibacy to be part of his duties as a revolutionary.
In other words, he’s taken those lines in the Beatles’ “Revolution” — “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow” — and turned them into a lifestyle choice.
@mass_line’s recent Twitter feed is filled with fervid denunciations of sex, which he considers a counterrevolutionary act; his Tweets read like a weird mixture of Chairman Mao, Andrea Dworkin, and Reverend Moore from Footloose. “We must view sex as an act that the enemy commits,” he explains in one tweet. “We are a People’s Army not a house of coitus,” he declares in another.
Well, that’s one revolution in which, to paraphrase Emma Goldman, there will be no dancing.
So is this a genuinely Maoist thing? I’m obviously not a scholar of Mao Zedong Thought, but my understanding is that life in the Red Guards was indeed pretty sexually repressed.
It’s also my understanding that Mao himself fucked constantly with an assortment of partners, at least according to his former personal physician.
I somehow suspect that @mass_line would dismiss such reports as fascist propaganda. It takes a lot of self-gaslighting to remain a Maoist in this day and age.
Ah well, at least @mass_line is something of a break from the regular old incels and their whining.
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The man doth protest too much, methinks.
This sounds like the beginning of a joke: “Chairman Mao, Andrea Dworkin, and Reverend Moore walk into a bar…”
IIRC Dworkin clarified that she didn’t think all sex was rape, and that was mostly something attributed to her by enemies. There are certainly things on which I disagree with her, but I don’t think she sounded quite as odd as this fellow.
This guy reminds me a bit of a troll we had a while ago calling himself Semen_Retention_Lieutenant_Officer, who claimed a similar line of logic.
Does anyone else get pedestalization sexist vibes from this?
Where does he think babies come from? And has he ever had an orgasm?
That’s not the great recruiting pitch he thinks it is. People like sex. And if you ban it entirely you will eventually run out of new comrades for the workforce.
You know, I can actually buy this as genuine. It’s very reminiscent of 1984 and “obliteration of the self”; and he has ideas very like Ingsoc’s approach to sex. So I can see a self described ‘Maoist’ as believing this.
This dude is giving me flashbacks to my strident anti-sex Christian phase when I was a teen grappling with my asexuality.
No idea if this dude is ace as well, but I do think that he needs to calm down and realize that sex or a lack thereof doesn’t make you any better or worse than anyone else.
The “all sex is rape” line didn’t originate with Andrea Dworkin; If I remember correctly, it was originally from Simone de Beauvoir. And the line was actually “…in that context, all heterosexual sex is rape.” The context being men having an inherent coercive power over women, making consent questionable at best; but by the time the quote became well known, bastardized, and attributed to Dworkin, that line of thinking had been almost entirely rejected by feminism anyway. So it’s a misunderstanding of a misattributed misquote. And also obsolete, but I couldn’t find a synonym for “obsolete” starting with “mis-“.
(Though admittedly, Dworkin did more or less say that, she was just talking about De Beauvoir’s views at the time.)
If cupid works how I think it does this man is headed for the Maoist love of a lifetime, just like Shrek. Cue “Believer” by Smash Mouth.
@Catalpa
I’m not ace, but I had a similar phase growing up Jewish and dysphoric where I was very anti sex and self repressing as a way of coping with my dysphoria. This phase eventually resolved when I was about 17 or 18, but it still took me longer to understand what I felt and why.
I have a hard time believing this is real. It reads like a troll.
Holy shit, lmao. I used to be a part of a lefty subreddit where a running joke would be that we were all required to be volcels (it involved a volcel police bot). This is that but sincere and I don’t know how to deal with it.
@Nalgfar
Yeah, actually. Like, what if your female comrades (like most people) disagree with you and want to have sex sometimes? It’s also weird how he frames his sex negativity purity as behavior that men engage in towards women rather than something that everyone engages in regardless. Especially since he clearly sees it as vital to his political praxis.
I’m guessing he has some hot takes about queer people.
@Perry
That’s what I thought the issue with his reasoning was, it reminds me a bit of Alyssa Milano’s panned “sex strike” idea in that it denies women sexual freedom. He sounds a lot like a man who thinks he’s a feminist ally but really misses the mark.
Interestingly, I just searched his TL and he claims to support trans* rights and seems to not have much to say about gay people. There’s not much to see, but he generally seems supportive. Maybe he just hates hetero sex, or is more secretive about his true views to appear progressive.
Yeah, Maoists are deeply repressed and prone to making every damn silly thing into a pillar of the Revolution. It’s the same kind of thought process that leads people to devote their businesses to Jesus or the like.
What exactly are the tenets of modern day Maoists? Do they acknowledge the dumb stuff and mistakes like with the sparrows?
I also had a similar phase as a disaffected teen. Asceticism is kinda popular among people who don’t like where they are in life, so they can form a feeling of superiority from self-flagellation.
Good to see that the tankies have their share of sex-obsessed weirdos too.
Now someone point this man in the direction of his fellow misogynists and see how long it takes for them to go at each other’s throats.
@Alan Robertshaw
Correct. There’s a specific passage in the book saying how the Party seeks to “abolish the orgasm”, and one of the commentaries I’ve read explains that the Party’s ultimate goal is to prevent sex from leading into any kind of intimate relationship (which would act as a rival to a citizen’s devotion to Big Brother) by essentially rendering it into something like an enema: a somewhat disgusting minor operation that has to be done as a “duty to the Party”, with as little pleasure as possible for anyone involved.
And the sex drive isn’t repressed so much as redirected- remember the Two Minutes Hate?
@Anonymous
I think a big split is that incels and the like often self identify as misogynists and do it deliberately, while this man (or group of men, it’s unclear) seems to think he is supporting women, while really he is parroting a lot of sexist patriarchal stuff. As a result, I think they’d fight quickly.
Re: ‘Two minutes hate.’ Did Orwell get this from reports of ‘Morning Hate’ in the trenches of the Western Front during WWI or might it be earlier?
Buddy couldn’t you just like not have sex and stay quite it about it. Become a monk or something
Well, bless his little heart.
Well, this is certainly a change. After hearing about an endless assortment of wanna-be Daleks, tonight we get a wanna-be Cyberman instead!
Reading the guys twitter there are a lot of similar talking points to far righters: He goes on about the democrats supported slavery 150 years ago which makes the party racist today, supports conspiracy theories that protesters (in Hong Kong) are controlled by the government, supports violence in response to the government trying to keep guns away from assholes. Plus lots of the same edgelord posturing about how he wants to kill liberals who he seems to hate more then right wingers.
personally I have to wonder how this guy’s Maoist “utopia” is supposed to thrive and even survive for that matter, if all sex is somehow “evil” and “counter revolutionary”
Strange thing is that “लाल सलाम !!” seems to mean “Red salute” in… hindi. Looking at the current relations between India and China, that sounds quite bizarre.
Ah, well, how can they be called ? MGTRW ? Maoïsts Going Their Red Way ? One would think that for a revolution the more you are, the better it is. And as children just not pop out of cabages…
I think I may have a crush on @mass_line:
Oh no. No, I don’t:
@An Autistic Giraffe:
So basically he’s trying to prove horseshoe theory correct all by his lonesome?
Interestingly enough, actual communists (at least those in Eastern Europe) were much better for people’s sex life than the capitalists on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
I’ve got numerous very good sex ed books from communist times from my mom (because after communism fell the Catholic Church colonised schools in my country very effectively, and sex ed almost died out), and there’s also the famous East/West Germany orgasm gap: https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/why-east-germany-was-for-lovers/
Soviet communism sucked in very many ways, don’t get me wrong (the repressions for opposition were truly horrific in many places), but it wasn’t half bad for sex life and many women’s rights.
@An Autistic Giraffe
This seems to be a fairly common stance among a certain segment of the left, who want to convert alt rightists rather than trying to convert liberals and centrists. I don’t agree, because I think it’s better to convert people in the middle than on the opposite side, but this isn’t a rare opinion. The main danger I find in converting alt right people is that they can slip back too easily and make the left more like the alt right, making the left unsafe for minorities that have typically been on the left.
@Kat
Yeah, I can’t say it’s the height of feminism to want to imprison women you don’t agree with. And I’m not sure how many women will feel safe when they’re always a few words away from getting sent to a gulag.
@ziroonderel
I can also think of a lot of other modern ways in which capitalism has harmed sex lives as well. Like how people have less time to have sex, or how private health care companies don’t always cover contraceptives. Or how the constant expectation of productivity precludes intimacy.