People get turned on by all kindsa weird things. That big burly guy in a business suit? he’s wearing ladies lingerie underneath. Or he has a closet full of women’s shoes, or he likes to put on an an adult diaper and pretend to be a baby—or a paraplegic. “Little do they know!” He’s thinking as he argues a case in court or speeds along in an 18 wheeler. Cue Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK”.
Isnt that the frisson: that it’s a SECRET pleasure? They’re totally making fools of the world, suckers, normies! How shocked the bourgeoisie would be! But of course they DONT know, and they’ll never suspect! Thrilling!
Does cross-dressing, f’rinstance, still turn ‘em on, now that everybody has to condone it? Everybody has to wonder what genitalia she might see in a lady’s room, everybody hasta worry we might stain our pants with some guy’s marinara sauce menses? We’re subjected to fat ugly long-greasy-haired men making videos about how they are ready to kill anybody who tries to stop ‘em from excreting in a ladies room. They will DIE on that (dung)hill!
Familiarity breeds contempt. This stuff is contemptible, but shocking, it is NOT, in 2023. And it’s all TOO out in the open.
So are there pervs still turned on by the charade? Or are they like addicts for whom the pleasure of the magical substance has worn off, desperately trying to recover the thrill by upping the dose, by increasingly outrageous and self-harming behavior?
That’s not a rhetorical question, dear polymaths. Do you agree with me that
(A) transsexual practices (and also “trans-ableism” where people identify as disabled) have their roots in sexual fetishism, and
(B) a fetish loses its power to stimulate a sexual response when it is no longer an object or practice kept secret because the society at large finds shocking and repulsive?
It is a commonplace observation among addictive/compulsive behaviours that those who engage in them become jaded with the stimulation they originally found satisfying and seek ever more extreme and “edgy” stimulation to recapture the original high. This can be seen in drug addiction, consumption of pornography, or compulsive programmers building intricate software systems only they understand.
It seems to me that we’re witnessing the same phenomenon in Western society as a whole. Remember how with every step along the road to decadence killjoys were warning of the steepening slippery slope toward the yawning abyss? “First it’s the birth control pill, then first trimester abortion, then abortion on demand until the moment of birth, and then infanticide.” “First it’s abolishing anti-sodomy laws, then it’s sanctioning homosexual ‘marriage’, then polyamory, then pedophilia, then—what—necrophilia?” The moment one thing becomes normalised, the next click of the ratchet rolls out as the next great human rights crisis of the time about which every bien pensant must be “proud”.
Further, it appears this addictive progression applies to a much broader scope of destructive behaviour than “social issues”. It used to be that politicians of both parties worried about deficits and debts. Now we have a Nobel Prize winning economist endorsing striking a trillion dollar coin to permit the government to print as much money as it wishes. One risks being excluded from polite discourse for using the term “illegal alien”, which is defined and used throughout Title 8 of the U.S. Code, and to-morrow, 2023-05-11, the borders of the U.S. will be opened to an unprecedented invasion of “undocumented migrants”. In testimony before a committee of the U.S. Senate, a witness declined to use the word “woman”, preferring “people with a capacity for pregnancy”.
I started the “Crazy Years” topic here because the madness seemed to be growing exponentially and the insanity defying parody. I find myself increasingly thinking of another Heinlein story, “The Year of the Jackpot”.
There is also another addictive behavior at work: control of others. This, too, requires ever more to satisfy the impulse. As I see it, all these addictions are a form of denial. “If I can control everyone, maybe I’m not mortal after all. Look at all my power “. This is the driving force of politicians, bureaucrats, and Soros types.
It is difficult, now, to find much about “transableism”, people who believe they are disabled people born in fully functional bodies. I think the transgenders have suppressed anything about that because, y’know, until the water in the boiling pot of total cultural absurdity gets a little hotter, most people would balk at the idea of surgical mutilation in order to fulfil some nutcase’s fantasy of being blind or paralyzed. (I read somewhere that the wished-for disability is always something kinda…romantic…nobody dreams of being a brittle diabetic, f’rinstance.) But I used to be able to find whole websites about it. There was even the obligatory class-kvetching because SOME people could afford to buy their own wheelchairs!
Eventually though, if the present trend continues, the “medical” “profession” will capitulate: if it is ethically ok, even socially laudatory, to cut off people’s perfectly healthy genitals, why NOT their perfectly healthy legs, why NOT sever their spinal cords?
I read an essay by a gent whose dream (wet dream) is to be a paraplegic. He got himself a wheelchair and put on an adult diaper, and settled in—but, he wrote, he was so turned on he couldn’t pee. If that isn’t sexual fetishism, I don’t know what is.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he wouldn’t be turned on ,or wouldn’t feel it, if he were really dead from the waist down.
So transableism, like those articles bout how Muslims were cheering in the mosques in NYC on 9/11, has been effectively scrubbed from the Internet. But its time will come, it’s the logical next-step in voluntary surgical self-mutilation.
P.S whaddya think will happen when some boy asks to be castrated so he can dedicate his beautiful soprano voice to God? Will the “medical” “profession”,(yuh BOTH words deserve scare quotes these days) respect the minor child’s “self-identification” as…a Christian? I cannot effing WAIT!!
Terminology-wise, you may be hanging too many (fully functional) toes off the front of the surfboard while riding the cultural wave circling the toilet bowl. “Transable” may not risen far enough to the top of public discourse to have shown up as a candidate for a coming current thing, but the under original, more medical, and rather judgemental term “body integrity disorder” or “body identity dysphoria” there are abundant references to the phenomenon. For example:
We haven’t yet gotten to the point where the Transable Liberation Front are marching (or hobbling, or rolling their wheelchairs) to demand insurance cover elective amputation, doctors and hospitals be mandated to provide this “derangement-affirming medical care”, or the addition of their own stripe on the Pride Flag but…patience…it’s in the queue.
Now, as a Flaming Libertarian™, my inclination is toward total self-ownership and individual autonomy, which implies that if an adult in full possession of their mental faculties and free of compulsion wishes to alter their body in any way, pay for the medical procedures involved, and be responsible for the consequences of them (for example, no applying for disability benefits because you had your leg sawed off), then they should be able to, just as Professor Crazy-Eyes Nose-Rings can have holes punched in her schnozz in order to look like Unga-Bunga the cave woman. But where the tiny minority of “afflicted” nutballs cross the line into pure evil is where they promote their disorder, demand others respect their “pride”, and attempt to recruit others into their cult of derangement and destroy their lives, particularly the young who are incapable or deliberately untrained in critical thinking and vulnerable to peer pressure and mass hysteria. Looking at it from an evolutionary standpoint, since many of the people with these disorders do not reproduce naturally, the only way the mind virus (the proper word is “meme”, but that has been corrupted to mean something else entirely) can propagate is by recruiting the healthy. This is what is at the root of the battle over the introduction of literature promoting sexual perversity in elementary school libraries and curricula.
I think you’re saying the same thing I did. Yes I’ve read about BIID. The key word there is “disorder”. CAN someone be called “sane” if obsessed with the idea that one’s left hand or right leg is not really part of one’s body? Because it IS, okay? It just is, it formed in embryo along with the rest of you. If you become obsessed with a desire to cut it off—that’s crazy.
But BIID (obsession with one particular appendage, the compulsion to get rid of it) is IMHO different than transableism, which is the desire to change one’s entire status and possess all the paraphernalia that goes with it: wheelchairs, diapers, white-tipped canes, seeing eye dogs ( o God let’s not go there ) and yet there seems to be growing acceptance for the idea. It reminds me of the Ol’ debate about “back alley” abortions: people are going to do it anyway so why not make it safe ‘n’ sanitary? I just read an article about a guy who deliberately crushed his own legs, but doctors saved them, so “He limps, but it isn’t the disability he wanted”. AWWW,poor bozo!
Let’s take a moment to consider something less drastic than surgical mutilation in the pursuit of “transableism” – the current female fetish with tattoos.
It is impossible to go to a grocery store these days without seeing some once-pretty young women who have disfigured themselves with tattoos – on arms, legs, necks; for the more adventurous, on their breasts. Worse, some of those women are no longer quite so young, and the tattoo which may have looked good on taut young skin no longer is quite so attractive on sagging older female skin. Within living memory, tattoos were the mark of hard-drinking sailors, and tattooed women were rare enough to be exhibits in carny sideshows. What happened to cause this change?
We can be quite content with a woman’s desire to do what she wants with her own skin – her body, her choice. Flaming Libertarians can approve of the fact that the woman pays for her own tattoos. But the question is – Why do so many young women choose to do this? Enduring a certain amount of discomfort to make a permanent mark on her body does seem like a baby step towards full blown surgical transableism. Is it simply herd instinct causing young women to follow fashion … or is it a reflection of something deeper?
I wrote about this in the Mischief: “ Inkin’ Nation”, I think I titled it. We took a Caribbean cruise a few years ago, and when we got into tropical waters and these Ample Americans began shedding their garments, I could NOT BELIEVE how many of them were covered with tattoos. And I mean covered. Mountains of quivering white flesh emblazoned with slogans and designs of all kinds.
This was a Norwegian cruise lines ship, the cruise one week, outta New York and back. (I love winter but I yielded to my BMD’s desire for some midwinter warmth, so don’t judge me.) I had always heard cruise ships don’t have classes, but these do: the “first class” is called The Haven. They have their own pool and segregated deck area; their own dining room. In the Haven, people are thin and generally Un-tattooed. So this tattoo thing, I think, is an example of a modish fad , maybe a cute li’l butterfly tattoo on a Valley Girl’s butt, which trickled down to the working class.
I thought at the time, though, how wonderful it was that this Dome of Pleasure existed for, and catered to , the definitely NON-elite Americans. The passengers looked like they had been raptured onto the ship in the clothes they stood up in; there were lotsa guys who wore their baseball caps night and day, above decks and below. Jeans, workout clothes in jumbo sizes—people hardly appeared to be dressed at all, let alone dressed up! And these palatial surroundings, crystal chandeliers, lounges with overstuffed chairs, fancy restaurants representing all the world’s cuisines: these things were for THEM! It was kinda glorious, tattoos and all.
I’ve always associated various desires for bodily mutilation with John Varley’s haunting 1978 novella “The Persistence of Vision” (link is to the Kindle edition of a collection including the story; the paperback appears to be out of print). This story won the Nebula award in 1978 and Hugo award in 1979 for Best Novella. The plot summary from Wikipedia is:
A hitchhiker discovers the town of Keller, a commune whose adult inhabitants are all deafblind. He gradually explores the increasingly sophisticated levels of communication the inhabitants of the town have created, eventually realizing that he will never be able to fully attain the highest levels of communication. Unable to cope with this reality, he leaves the commune for the increasingly decrepit outside world. On New Year’s Eve of 2000, he decides to return to Keller, where he discovers the adults have all vanished through some uncommunicable means. The remaining children have blinded and deafened themselves to remove the obstacles to comprehension, and the narrator soon chooses to join them.
The story ends with the following, which I can almost summon from memory 45 years later.
She reached up and lightly touched my ears with her cold fingers. The sound of the wind was shut out, and when her hands came away it never came back. She touched my eyes, shut out all the light, and I saw no more.
We live in the lovely quiet and dark.
This is a vision of handicap as transcendence. Perhaps the real-world phenomenon is due to deeply unhappy people seeking an escape from “normality” into being somehow “special”.
(If you’re inclined to hoist the Jolly Roger, there’s a ratty scanned PDF of the story out there.)
Well, cruise ship companies are for-profit enterprises (although few have been actually making profits in the last few years), and there are a lot more of “THEM” than there are customers for “The Haven”. I’ve never been on a cruise ship, but the same phenomenon was on display in Las Vegas when we went there for the COMDEX trade shows in the 1980s.
“Being special”: :so apt! Yes we’ve made disabled people into “special”,people. And briefly ( it always IS brief, when it comes to women) we made women into very special, defenseless, precious blossoms not to be defiled by touch nor breath. That was #metoo, remember, at its height just 4-5 years ago?
And so, just as dissatisfied people might crave the attention, sympathy, the “special” treatment —or as the statutes call it “accommodation” —awarded to the disabled, so certain hopeless and lonely men began to crave the attention the Weaker Sex was getting. And that’s why #metoo is SOOO out now, and “trans visibility” as Ol’ Bygone would put it, is IN.
Yes but the point is, the…morlocks, if you will, can afford these pleasures, which a generation ago (mebbe 2) they never woulda even aspired to! And it wasn’t a trip-of -a- lifetime kinda thing—many of them were veterans of many such voyages.
This is a great thing—one of the triumphs of the prosperity that free markets created in the second half of the 20th century. The origin of the cruise ship industry was in the 1920s, when prohibition in the U.S. spurred the development of the “booze cruise” or “cruise to nowhere” in which ships registered outside the U.S. would travel to destinations like the Bahamas or Cuba or just float around outside the (then) three-mile territorial limit of Puritan America for a well-lubricated party. This was primarily a dodge for the upper class, as were the early dedicated cruise ships. But just as jumbo jets and then then-strong U.S. dollar made international holidays available to the masses, so the cruise industry saw where the money was and adapted to address that lucrative market segment.
The élites always sniff at the boorish traits of the those who make up the bulk of the customers, but in this demotic age they tend to be just as boorish and more corrupt, but in different and more refined ways.
One thing Freud got right was that “sexual repression leads to sexual perversion” but what he got wrong was the very definition of “sex” hence he couldn’t understand what constitutes its “repression”. Oh, he made a valiant effort with “Civilization and Its Discontents”, but ultimately what civilization really represses isn’t the act of procreation so much as it is individual masculine aggression as a secondary sexual characteristic going back to the Cambrian Explosion. Until civil authorities come to terms with this at least as well as does the Catholic Church, with its sexual restrictions (on birth control, polygamy, divorce, infidelity, etc.), they have no business thinking of themselves as “civil” in any substantive sense. Those restrictions are about the best that civilization has come up with consistent with individuality. Sex is the origin of individuality and if you are going to protect positions of authority from enforced challenges to single combat from young men, you’d better be deadly serious about the consequences of what you are doing. Feminism? That’s just Africanization.
I love it! You sound like BAP!
I reckon it’s a very old idea, that male sexual aggression has to be tamed, that in fact that’s what civilization IS.
I mean, lookit the wild man Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh. He lives with the beasts, but then he shacks up with some prostitute and after that the beasts fear him and run from him. But it’s ok cuz then he becomes the king’s boon companion, he and Gilgamesh get a thang goin’ on. Civilizational hijinks ensue.
