The Week in Woke: “Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien” Edition

When they’re not trying to catch Critical Race Theory and tackle it to the ground, reactionaries today like nothing more than attacking things as “woke.” What’s woke? The list changes every day, and so I’ve decided I need to track the new additions as they emerge in right-wing media and social media. I’ll be putting out these Week in Woke updates every, well, week, for at least as long as the right-wingers remain obsessed with the word.

So lets see what things are woke this week:

Children’s Television

The suppsedly evil forces ofLGBTQ are making steady inroads into television programming for young children, antiwoke agents insist. According to Andrea Widburg at The American Thinker,

Of late … Nickelodeon has been bringing [its] edginess to the preschool set, culminating, this year, in the station’s going all out to ensure that the pre-kindergarten crowd learned about pansexuals and the magical LGBT rainbow.  It must have come as a surprise to the woke college graduates staffing Nickelodeon that parents dislike the new pedophile-esque edge to the programming, because the cable channel, a Viacom flagship, has seen a 70% drop in its audience in just four years. …

Nickelodeon used Blue’s Clues & You, a program aimed at preschoolers, as the basis for a video in which … a singularly untalented man who prances about in a crude, mocking stereotype of femininity named “Nina West, sings a graceless song about a cutesy gay pride parade.  Those little ones who watched the video got to learn about lesbians, gay men, asexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, and transsexuals.

Hey, we wrote about that here. I guess we’re on top of the whole woke thing.

Meanwhile, Christian Toto of American Greatness complains that the “wokification” of TV for slightly older children is also getting LGBTQ-ized out the wazoo.

today’s kid-friendly shows routinely address sex, gender fluidity, race, and other complex topics that some parents think their youngsters aren’t ready to absorb. They are part of a broader cultural shift, often called the Great Awokening, that includes the advancement of social justice themes in many television shows and other media aimed at older teens and adults. ….

These shows include:

Netflix’s animated series “She-Ra and the Power of Princess” featuring gay, transgender, and nonbinary characters. …

DreamWorks Animation’s “Madagascar: A Little Wild,” a series on both Peacock and Hulu, featuring an LGBTQ pride-themed episode along with a new, nonbinary character, Odee Elliot, voiced by nonbinary actor Ezra Menas. …

Netflix is preparing an animated version of “Antiracist Baby,” a book by Ibram X. Kendi based on his adult work, which teaches toddlers to confess their racism. Nickelodeon recently announced that its reboot of “Rugrats,” a popular 1990s series, will feature a single lesbian mom.

It’s almost as if LGBTQ people are … people, deserving space in the vast arena of television.

Victoria’s Secret:

The iconic female lingerie company has gone “woke,” accuses Occidental Dissent, and is taking aim at “sizeism, lookism, racism, sexism and transphobia” by replacing its famous “Angels” with a radically more diverse selection of models who aren’t necessarily even models, including athletes Megan Rapinoe and Eileen Gu, actor and tech investor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, plus size model Paloma Essler, Brazilian trans model Valentina Sampaio, and South Sudanese refugee/model Adut Akech. Some of these so-called models are even (brace yourself) in their thirties. Sounds utterly boner-crushing.

“The brand is pivoting to fat, ugly and “trans” models because it was using too many attractive models to sell lingerie,” Occidental Dissent’s Hunter Wallace complains, joking that “Victoria’s Secret in our new progressive era is that she has a dick.”

“Wokeness Warriors Take Over the Pentagon“

According to lawyer and former Marine officer Mike Berry, writing in the Washington Examiner, the aforementioned Wokeness Warriors are deliberately distracting the US military from its mission to protect the country, attempting to turn it into “a testing ground for social policy experimentation.”

Berry continues:

Instead of monitoring external threats, the Pentagon is on a mission to identify and remove whomever it labels as extremists from America’s armed forces. Ironically, the CEWG has yet to define what it means by “extremism.” Extremism is usually defined as the threat or use of violence to achieve an ideological agenda. But the Pentagon is now poised to expand upon that definition to include constitutionally protected speech. In other words, sticks and stones may break our bones, but words are the biggest threat.

This should be alarming to everyone, no matter their political persuasion. If the Constitution no longer presents an impediment to appeasing the woke commissars on the far Left, it won’t be long before speech that has always been protected by the First Amendment suddenly becomes criminal.

Pretty sure they’re looking for white supremacists trying to use the armed forces as a fertile ground for recruitment; these guys are generally fairly easy to identify.

Meanwhile, American Renaissance warns that the increasingly “woke” Pentagon is handing out “reading lists of critical race theory books as part of the Pentagon’s new anti-extremism and diversity training within the ranks.

No, not THE READING LISTS. We’d better ban these books before they ban us!

The Tolkien Society Goes Woke

Speaking of reading: the very serious and reverent Tolkien Society is losing the plot, John Daniel Davidson in The Federalist laments. Its upcoming summer seminar is set to feature a whole bunch of papers that, Davidson insists, would be an “affront” to the old man himself, were he here to hear them.

[T[his year, seminar attendees will be subjected to something different. Papers to be presented include, “Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings,” “The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism,” and “‘Something Mighty Queer’: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien.” Pretty much the entire program is like this.

The best thing we can say about a Tolkien conference that presents papers on, say, “Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” or “The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack,’” is that the scholars in question do not know the first thing about Tolkien or the meaning of his work.

The worst we can say is that they hate Tolkien and his work, and would like very much to destroy it.

Indeed, how else can we account for such a conference? “The Lord of the Rings,” like “The Hobbit” and “The Silmarillion” and Tolkien’s entire corpus of writings on Middle Earth, has almost nothing to say about the concerns expressed in these papers or the worldview from which they spring. There are no “transgender realities” in the Lord of the Rings.

Ah, go orc yourself.

More The Week in Woke in a week. Stay tuned.

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