When Harry Styles agreed to model a series of dresses and skirts for a Vogue cover shoot, he knew it would stir up controversy. He probably didn’t think he was going to be blamed for undermining civilization itself. But that’s what some right-wing opinion-havers would have you believe.
“Blexit” leader Candace Owens started the brouhaha with this melodramatic tweet:
She followed up with a swipe at feminism:
It wasn’t long until fast-talking dunderhead Ben Shapiro decided to chime in.
But Ben wasn’t content to simply share a couple of tweets on the issue, and so he took it to his podcast today, delivering a nearly half-hour rant on the subject, interrupted only by Shapiro reading out ads for luxury bedsheets and his publication the Daily Wire.
He began by not-so-subtly suggesting that men wearing dresses might deserve a punch in the mouth, and followed with a rambling, repetitive rant taking on what he, likes Owens, sees as a dire threat to western civilization: men in “floofy” frocks.
This excerpt will give you some of the flavor of the thing:
But Shapiro wasn’t just annoyed; he presented himself as a noble guardian of civilization fighting off the cross-dressing barbarians.
“This stuff matters,” he declared.
It matters. Because these are fundamental ideas for the preservation of civilization. Boys and girls are different. Boys and girls are different. And it’s important to inculcate in your children that boys and girls are different. And any parents who fail to inculcate in a boy that manliness is a good thing, and that responsible manliness helped build civilizations … any parent that does not teach their girls that femininity, meaning the protection of hearth and home in a different way than masculinity, is a good thing. Any parent that doesn’t teach their girls that is not doing their kid any favors. They’re undermining the civilizational compact that men and women [have], based on biology and in every human culture.
Dude, it’s just a man in a dress. Cis male musicians have been donning dresses for decades — from David Bowie to Kurt Cobain — and somehow civilization hasn’t come tumbling down.
But Shapiro thinks this is a Very Important Topic.
We shouldn’t be shy about discussing these issuesl the left certainly isn’t shy about discussing these issues. They’ll put these [ideas] in public schools, they’ll tell your kindergartener that real men wear dresses. And then you’ll be explaining to a five year old that real men don’t wear dresses. And I don’t feel that’s an acceptable ramification of our cultural discussion.
I really don’t think there’s much discussion of cross-dressing in kindergarten.
Shapiro throws in a weird racial aside:
Harry Styles is a free man, living in a western country, in a west by the way that is defended by white masculine men, as a general rule.
Shapiro insists he has nothing against Harry Styles. It’s just that when Styles puts on a dress he is TEARING APART THE VERY FABRIC OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
I’m not saying don’t pick up his CDs; I’m not saying don’t listen to his music; I’m not saying don’t watch the movies he’s in. All I’m saying is that when you put out an argument that men ought to act like women and that this is a good thing you’re doing something that tears at the fabric of not only civilization but family and the fabric of childrearing and everybody with half a brain knows this.
Again, Ben, it’s just a man in a dress, a playful tweak of conventional notions of masculinity. How fragile is masculinity — how fragile is civilization itself — if it can be brought to its knees by a handful of pictures of a man in a dress?
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@LindsayIrene
JFL at people who think that the we need the state to tell us not to drink radium. If the state didn’t insist on coddling everyone, we’d all possess the knowledge to take care of ourselves. To the extent that the state doesn’t get its power from violently repressing anyone who refuses to submit to its whims, it gets its power from wresting control from private individuals and depriving them of the capacity to learn things on their own – thus creating a demand for its services to begin with.
The state is a parasite.
Kid, you might as well skip the Qanon stuff, no one actually thinks you’re that unintelligent.
@Eric
232.
@The Depletionist
Defund the police.
@Eric
I thought you didn’t like the state. Who do you think cops work for?
Oh no. Eric is trying to be buddies with Depletionist, but Depletionist is too busy ranting about the state to pay him any mind.
Eric, please get some friends your own age. School sports and clubs are a great way to get some interaction in with your peers. You may also want to do an activity outside of school so that you’re not limited to just your class mates. Don’t try to befriend a troll who’s been coming here on and off for years with different names each time. That’s no way to live, kid.
Eric, what ever happened to igor? lol!
@Depletionist
Dude, patent medicines of the past didn’t even disclose their ingredients much of the time. Because there were no regulations requiring them to. Medicines made for babies often had opiates and alcohol in them and parents had no way of knowing. This killed babies. How do you force drug merchants to tell the truth about their products without regulations? Should sick or injured people not be able to buy medicine from a pharmacy without fear?
Women talk about periods and you need smelling salts. Talk about people dying from lack of regulations and you’re all teeheeheehee. Wow, I hope Eric doesn’t grow up to be like you.
I’m banning Eric for pointless trollery.
@Eric
Show evidence or retract. This’ll be fun.
Also, what does that have to do with cops?
@Singerdog
Probably filling up the moderation queue.
Anyway, haven’t seen you in a while, how are you?
@LindsayIrene
Something something invisible hand of the market something non-aggression principle something.
@David
Fair enough. I enjoyed watching Eric try to get the Depletionist’s attention, but he’s rather annoying.
@LindsayIrene
So, we have this thing called “Yelp” nowadays: have you heard of it? There are so many sites out there where one could post a product review if something bad were to happen, or if a doctor were to engage in some kind of shady shit.
@The Depletionist
Yelp won’t resurrect your dead children.
@Naglfar:
Ancaps want to own that mine instead. The problem is, if they got their way, exactly one of them would end up owning it, and the rest …
Put another way: bringing about ancap would be like purchasing a lottery ticket with the usual odds of winning the grand prize, the usual size of the grand prize, but if you don’t win the grand prize, and anyone else does, you go to Hell immediately and for the usual duration of stays there.
Seems like a bad deal, but so does the regular ordinary lottery, and, disturbingly, millions of idiots buy tickets for that one every single day. And 70 million of them voted for four more years of Trump early this month, i.e. bought the other kind as well.
@DepletedBrainium
There’s no such thing as property without the state! There’s just what you can keep hold of by hiding it or by defending it at gunpoint. And it’s a near certainty that someone else will have more guns.
No, that knowledge would be priced out of reach of most of the population. Think “5th grade education and easily persuaded to drink radium”.
Yelp lets you remove bad reviews if you pay them. My sister used to do that for a casino she worked at.
@Depletionist
How would you even know if it was in your food until it was too late? It’s not like radium has a taste or a distinctive odor. Same with salmonella, or melamine, or any of a thousand contaminants.
The people of Flint know not to consume lead. That didn’t prevent officials from taking safety shortcuts with the pipes and exposing thousands of children to it.
You’re delusional if you think people should be omniscient enough to know every ingredient in their foods, cosmetics, and medicines. Without the FDA, you’d be much less healthy than you are now.
There’s a Dunning-Kreuger variation in people who vastly overestimate their luck and talent in hypothetical situations. They feel sure they wouldn’t be one of the victims/suckers/serfs in the olden days/the apocalypse/wartime/unfettered capitalism. Prime example here.
@Naglfarce
Under our current arrangements, they work primarily to provide assistance to a government within the throes of gynocracy. Men who have, in some way, violated some new-fangled “right” which the state, in all of its beneficent wisdom, has bestowed upon women, allowing them to further police the lives of men, find themselves guilty of such victimless crimes as smoking blunts or whistling in the presence of women. Police are then called and, principally, they work by dragging away men that have done nothing wrong and casting them into tiny, confined spaces where they will be ravaged by ravenous sodomites hungry for some hot hetero meat from the streets. One of the primary reasons for why the state has long desired to criminalize homosexuality, I believe is because it allows them to stuff their prisons chock-full of them, thereby using them as an effective deterrent against any man who refuses the draft, fails to make his alimony and/or child support payments, or fails to pay off any debts that his wife has run up.
I just got off the phone with Eric mother and father. They both had no idea he was doing this or how he got around child blocks they put on. Apparently they caught Eric watching gay rape porn on the family computer and he got in trouble for that. She sounded like a lovely woman. I warned them they had some letters coming in the mail as well from me.
God, I hope Depletionist is just doing this for lulz. How sad would it be if he wasn’t putting on an act.
Oh, and here’s the story of the radium girls, for people who actually like to learn stuff.
@Eric:
Sure, and my broken 486 is the Queen of France.
In re: ancapism
As an anarchist, I too hate the state. However, I recognize that ancapism is not the answer. I recognize that property rights do not inhere in any action or claim, not without any forcible backing. I recognize that a return to a world of private militaries is a return to serfdom. Finally, I recognize that ancaps probably like that, and fancy that they will be the barons in their ideal dystopia.
On the other hand, I as an anarchist want to abolish all such hierarchy as gives rise to management and labour, or to lord and serf, or to king and subject. Like all right-wingers, ancaps don’t want to abolish it; they want merely to rearrange it so that they are the management, the lord, the king.
@The Depletionist
So your solution is to let corporations do all of that? Great plan you’ve got. And holy shit that’s homophobic.
@Lainy
Thank you for doing that. David just banned Eric, but it’s good that his parents now know what he’s up to.
He’s also password protected the post about us.
@Mabret
They’re also all convinced that they’d be the CEO, when in reality most would be serfs.
@Surplus
If property wouldn’t exist without the state, then how would information be priced out of people’s reach? I believe I’ve detected a fatal flaw in your “argument.”
Also, gotta lol at the implicit notion here that school actually educates anyone anywhere, or even teaches anything remotely useful. Compulsory education was invented to indoctrinate boys into thinking that physical activity and boisterousness were bad qualities to possess, and until homework and “paying attention” were invented (largely by feminists), a boy’s life was built upon a solid foundation of hard work, gumption, and learning to be master of his environment. School is just another way in which the state deprives men of the capacity to think big and pursue their goals on their own terms. For men, society is prison.
@ dumbass
I’m bleeding out of my vagina again. It’s a really bloody one. I got off the toilet this morning and it looked like a murder scene
@The Depletionist
Easy. Refuse anyone an education beyond elementary school unless they can pay you an exorbitant sum.
Reedeng iz badd, skool sukz. No liek lurn.
So men built society and hunted the mammoth for women, but society is a prison? Wow, men did a bad job on that one. Maybe some education would have helped.
@Lainy, that was a very kind and thoughtful thing to do. Nobody, no matter how bratty, ever deserves to be at risk of grooming and worse like Eric appears to be, and it was generous of you to go the extra mile and contact his parents directly. If Eric is half as smart as he thinks he is, he will understand that some day – though probably not for quite a long time :-s
If nothing else, maybe he will at least realise that if you put your family’s contact details online … another human being in the real world might actually contact them o.O
You can believe that, but your belief would be incorrect. The reality is that, while fiat currency is a creature of the state, currency in general is not, and it is 100% possible for a private actor, in the absence of any regulation or enforcement otherwise, to create its own currency. With currency comes economy, and in any unregulated economy everything is priced such that some quantity of people can’t afford it. In some cases, only the very poor can’t afford it, and in others all but the super-wealthy can’t afford it. But in all cases, some group can’t afford whatever you’re talking about, in the absence of regulation.
(This is basic microeconomics, by the way, and I’m really shocked that such a superior specimen as yourself needs this explained!)
Being priced out of goods and services is all fine and dandy when the good in question is 75″ TVs, but when the good is the information that radium is bad, by relying entirely on the unregulated market, you’re deciding that the very poor are disposable and it’s fine if they die. Which … is a position to take, I suppose.