There is a logical fallacy called the Kafka Trap. It describes the condition of always being wrong. If you are accused of something, and you deny it, that denial is taken as an admission of guilt; only a guilty party would go out of their way to deny an allegation of wrongdoing. Alternatively, if you say nothing in the face of the allegation, that’s also an admission of guilt: your silence means you have accepted the allegation.
Many describe Franz Kafka’s disenchanted fables as tragic. And this is certainly true. But they are also farcical. To watch someone being relentlessly wrong can be grimly enjoyable — as long as you’re not the person in question.
The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle.
White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right.
Tomiwa Owolade, “The problem with white saviours”, UnHerd.com, 2021-09-12.
December 17, 2021
QotD: The Kafkatrap that is known as “white feminism”
September 7, 2021
QotD: Calvin was right
Hobbes: “‘The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study In Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes.'”
Calvin: “Academia, here I come!”
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes.
June 12, 2021
Canadian “Conservatives” start listing their preferred pronouns
Mark Steyn surveys the “conservatives” in the UK, the US, and last-and-least, Canada:
Michelle Rempel Garner, Conservative MP for Calgary Nose Hill (preferred pronouns she/her).
Photo attributed to “Michelle Staff” via Wikimedia Commons.
So much for UK conservatism. What of Canada? The two most rock-ribbed “right-wingers” in the Dominion’s politics, Doug Ford of Ontario and Jason Kenney of Alberta, have taken the position that conservatism is an indulgence you can’t afford in a pandemic: Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, so there are no conservatives in lockdowns.
At the federal level, the cautious and eventually stalled incrementalism of Stephen Harper was followed by the unprincipled hollowness of Andrew Scheer and, after his predictable failure, the everything-must-go massive-storewide-clearances of Erin O’Toole. Even so, I was startled by a tweet from Michelle Rempel Garner, an Alberta MP whom I knew only as an occasionally lively thorn in the side of Justin & Co. Ms Rempel Garner was responding to the appalling killings of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, which within minutes had been seized on by the media-left alliance for the usual purposes, notwithstanding that the perp does not appear to fit the desired narrative. Nevertheless, the outbreak of vehicular “Islamophobia” was taken by Michelle Rempel Garner as the perfect opportunity for an express checkout:
I humble myself and ask forgiveness, and seek to make things right.
I have privilege; I am cis/straight/white. But I am also a woman who works in a system dominated by white maleness.
But no excuses. I will do what I can.
Seeing the above at the great Kate McMillan’s website, I assumed it was a giant leg-pull by Ms Rempel Garner, as did many other of Miss McMillan’s readers. So, as she clarified, no, sorry, it’s for real. The Tory member’s Twitter account now shows her pronouns: “she/her” (at the time of writing). In 2019 it was a big deal when Kamala Harris, at the start of a Democrat debate, announced her pronouns. Less than two years later, “conservative” politicians want a piece of the pronoun action too. Already a key player in O’Toole’s shadow cabinet, the she/her move could make Michelle a shoo-in for Deputy Prime Minister.
Except, of course, that that would require the Tories to win an election.
Guys, it was a joke that modern conservatism is just progressive policies on a five-year delay … please stop taking it seriously!
September 30, 2020
QotD: Victimhood culture
Victimhood culture departs from dignity culture in several important ways. Moral worth is in large part defined by the color of one’s skin, or at least one’s membership in a fixed identity group: i.e., women, people of color, LGBTIQ, Muslims, or indigenous peoples. Such groups are sacred, and a lack of deference to them is seen as a sign of deviance. The reverse is true for those who belong to groups that are considered historical oppressors: whites, males, straight people, Zionists. Anyone belonging to an “oppressor” group is stained by their privilege, or “whiteness,” and is cast onto the moral scrapheap.
Claire Lehmann, “The Evils of Cultural Appropriation”, Tablet, 2018-06-11.
August 22, 2020
Debra Soh’s new book is “a cancel-culture grenade”
Jen Gerson knows that any positive mention of Debra Soh’s The End of Gender: Debunking Myths About Sex and Identity has a strong resemblance to square-dancing in a minefield. Cancellations may fall like raindrops on the career of anyone so unenlightened as to even acknowledge the existence of such a work:
For that, at its heart, is what Soh’s book is: a lucid discussion of the best science we have to date on the nature of gender and sex, written for a lay audience. What gives the title its sizzle is not the content, but rather the cultural climate in which it is being published.
It maps the depth, scope and scale of current Culture War trenches in this particular theatre of battle. The End of Gender stomps on tripwires like the gender binary, whether transgender women are women, autogynephilia, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, bathroom bans, and more.
It’s a cancel-culture grenade.
That’s not because these subjects ought to be contentious. Soh’s approach and tone are largely neutral. Rather, the controversy the book will inevitably incite is a reflection of a culture that has been warped into a state of existential terror by the very notion that these ideas can be responsibly discussed.
Soh begins by defining her terms.
So much of the debate around the most difficult topics of sex and gender stem from the simple fact that we are misusing the basic language. For example, sex and gender are not interchangeable concepts, even though they are often treated as such.
Sex is a term of biology. One’s sex, Soh argues, is determined by his or her gametes. With the exception of rare intersex disorders, 99 per cent of the population has a clearly defined biological sex that slots into one of two dimorphic categories: male or female.
Gender is more complicated. It’s now popular to state that there are more than two genders, but Soh disputes this. She argues that gender — or the set of characteristics that signal one’s sex to society — is also dimorphic. For 99 per cent of the population, gender correlates with sex. Further, even when expressions of gender are at odds with one’s biological sex, this, too, is mediated by biology. Whether one presents as gender typical or gender atypical is the result of prenatal testosterone exposure.
Soh notes that claiming to be gender non-binary, or gender fluid — or any one of a thousand variations that transcend the limiting concepts of male and female — is increasingly trendy, especially among teenagers and young adults. It seems to be the latest form of identity experimentation.
There are two reasons for this trend.
The first is that seeing the world through an intersectional framework encourages progressives to reverse the traditional hierarchies of race, sex and power. Therefore, claiming a marginalized identity — like genderqueer non-binary unicorn — accrues status within progressive peer circles.
The second is that the culture has undergone a massive awakening to transgender rights over the past decade. This has contributed expressive categories and vocabularies for people who otherwise might have struggled to find the language to explore their most authentic selves. As the cues, like cosmetics and dress, that we used to signal our gender are socially constructed, gender expression is limited only by our creativity.
April 10, 2020
QotD: Ketman
The problem, though, is that the sour pleasure of ketman is addictive, and like any addiction, you need to keep upping the dose to feel the same effect.
My first few years in grad school, anyone who cared to look could’ve easily spotted me as a secret shitlord. For one thing, I was the only guy in the whole damn town who actually looked happy. For one thing, professing is a 24/7 job — that’s “24 hours a week, 7 months a year,” and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. All that free time is lovely, especially in a college town with 24-hour everything and scads of scantily clad undergraduate eye candy.
But more importantly, there’s the pleasure of ketman. So long as I make a few radical noises, I can get you sheep to believe anything I say. I used to tell people I studied transgendered potato farmers in the Kenyan uplands. I told this obnoxious girl from the Gender Studies department my dissertation was on resistance strategies of Eskimos in the Waffen-SS. I cited Alan Sokal’s hoax paper on the social construction of gravity in every seminar taught by a radical feminist, and no one ever called me on it. Anyone who thinks I’m kidding obviously hasn’t been on campus in the last 20 years or so. It was fucking hilarious …
… for a time. And then it got sad, then nauseating, because I eventually realized I was no different from the fools who swallowed my bullshit. It doesn’t matter if you’re being exquisitely ironic when you tell a room full of freshmen that “gender is a social construction.” They can’t recognize irony anyway, and even if they could, parroting the phrase “gender is a social construction” is still required to pass the class. More importantly, what if they did recognize it? I’m up there thinking I’m a shitlord, speaking truth to power to anyone smart enough to figure it out, but all they see is another fat, middle-aged sellout parroting nonsense. If I were serious about my shitlordery, they think, then I’d quit. But I don’t quit, which must mean my so-called “principles” are worth … what? We’ve already established you’re a whore, madam; now we’re just haggling over the price.
Severian, “The Pleasures of Ketman”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-09.
March 14, 2020
“The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all”
In Quillette, Matt Johnson remembers the great anti-identitarian writer and speaker, Christopher Hitchens:
Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.
Hitchens thought fearlessly. As Martin Amis put it, he liked “the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.” This is why he told the publisher of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything to organize a book tour that ran through the pulpits of the American South instead of remaining confined to the coasts. It’s why he relished every opportunity to lambaste Bill and Hillary Clinton in front of liberal audiences. It’s why he went after Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. He was an inveterate iconoclast — if there was a bloated reputation to puncture or a cherished dogma to deflate, he saw it as a duty and a pleasure to do so.
It’s no surprise that this oppositional inclination, coupled with blistering rhetorical ability, made Hitchens a deadly debater. After his death in December 2011, countless tributes and articles about Hitchens emphasized what a force he was in the studio and on the debate stage — his erudition and wit, his fluency, his seemingly superhuman memory. Hitchens is unforgettable for all these reasons, but people don’t miss him because he could turn a phrase or win an argument on CNN — they miss him because he thought for himself and refused to apologize for it. He didn’t want to write and speak as the representative of a community: “My own opinion is enough for me,” he told the audience at a debate on free speech in 2007, “and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority.”
“Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban,” Orwell wrote in his original introduction to Animal Farm (which was, ironically, suppressed). He continued: “Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.” While there was far more official censorship in Orwell’s time, we’re living through an era of pervasive self-censorship, and as Packer explains, this type of silencing is “more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind.”
[…]
Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was — cliché is arguably forgivable here — very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
It’s easy to imagine what Hitchens would have thought about a recent New York Times headline that declared “The Next President Should Not Be a Man” or a prominent writer and activist who announced that she “will not support white male candidates in the Dem primary.” The people who write such things are thinking with their epidermis and genitalia, which is to say they’re not thinking at all. You don’t have to bother defending candidates’ principles and positions when gender and race are the only relevant variables.
February 13, 2020
“Titania McGrath thinks you’re scum. That is because of how tolerant she is.”
Spencer Klavan interviews the mind behind the Twitter legend that is Titania McGrath:
In April 2018, Oxford-educated comedian and journalist Andrew Doyle created a satirical Twitter persona, an “activist,” “healer,” and “radical intersectionalist poet” who self-identifies as “selfless and brave.” Titania, an imaginary amalgam of all the worst excesses in the modern social justice movement, fancies herself a voice for minorities of all kinds (whether they know they agree with her or not). What she lacks in self-awareness, she makes up for in conviction.
There are other parody accounts in a vein similar to Titania’s: Jarvis Dupont of the Spectator USA, for example, or Wrightly Willowleaf (who moved to Williamsburg before it was cool). But none of them has achieved Titania’s notoriety, or her reach (418.4K followers). Doyle attributes some of this success to a much-publicized Twitter ban. But that’s perhaps too modest: Titania is a note-perfect creation, as frighteningly accurate as she is screamingly funny. “[Y]ou need to understand that which you are critiquing,” Doyle told me: more than anything, his tweets as Titania demonstrate an incisive grasp of how radical progressivism functions and why woke politics commands such hypnotic power over the 21st-century Western psyche.
Doyle is among a growing number of classical liberals who have simply had enough: witty, thoughtful, and profoundly humane, he is the kind of eloquent sophisticate who would have been quite uncontroversial as a cultural critic and public intellectual in a less turbulent era. But that wasn’t his fate. Comedy and culture have been so strangled by political correctness that he is “at that point where I feel that it would be morally wrong to be silent” about the crisis of free public discourse in the West. Still, there is much more to Doyle than politics and polemic. I spoke to him at some length about his philosophical outlook, his academic interests, and his career beyond Titania.
[…]
S.K. Yes, something you capture really well with Titania is the complete lack of self-awareness, the oblivion of people to their own racism even as they criticize racism in others.
Let’s talk about that moment when Titania got banned: you’ve written elsewhere that “those in power cannot tolerate being ridiculed.” That was a theme when we interviewed Kyle Mann of the Babylon Bee as well: why do you think ridicule gets woke people so angry?
A.D. Because it’s an effective way to expose their folly. There’s something very instinctive that we all have as human beings: we don’t like being laughed at. And that makes sense: it feels like a form of humiliation. But I also think that’s why it’s a good way to puncture and deflate those kinds of pretensions. And they absolutely don’t like it — I mean, tyrants throughout history have locked up and killed satirists. We had the Bishop’s Ban on any satirical work in Great Britain, and that was in 1599. You’ve got president Erdogan in Turkey who will lock up satirists and call for their arrest — so it’s a pretty standard feature of history.
Of course, with Titania, the misinterpretation of what she’s doing is that she’s punching down, she’s attacking minorities. That’s not the point at all: it’s attacking the social justice movement, which is very very powerful but doesn’t perceive itself to be powerful. That’s why they claim victimhood: so that they can say mocking social justice is mocking the weak. It’s not, of course. It’s mocking those who are in power.
S.K. You’re absolutely right that persecution of satire by the powerful is as old as satire itself — goes back to the court of Ptolemy II, probably further. So let’s talk about power.
Based on what you’ve written it seems as if you feel that wokeness wields a kind of soft power — a cultural power more than a legal or a political power. I’m reminded a bit of Shelley’s argument that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” How is it that you think the woke and the social justice movement came to acquire the overwhelming degree of cultural power they now have?
A.D. I think it’s because the woke movement is largely driven by people who are independently wealthy and privately educated. Just to give you an example from the U.K.: 7% of our country is educated privately. So those are the richest people, but those 7% dominate the arts, and the media, and journalism, and the law, and education, and the government. So what you have is a very small coterie of very powerful people who disproportionately control the direction of culture.
The BBC is a good example of an institution that is overly dominated by privately educated people, and it’s very very woke. So there seems to be a correlation. And similarly, the universities where they have the most woke students, and the most people wanting to de-platform and censor — which comes hand-in-hand, obviously, with woke culture — there is a clear correlation between the economic privilege of students and how woke they are. So the worst examples you’ll find are in places like Oxford University, Cambridge University, Yale, and Harvard. Those will be the ones where you get the most egregious examples of censorial wokeness. And of course those are the kids who come from the most privileged backgrounds.
It is no surprise to me that those with the most would like to claim to have the least and to be the most oppressed. There was a survey in the Atlantic about political correctness, and by a long way, the people who resent political correctness the most are the ones whom it purports to defend: the ethnic minorities and the sexual minorities and so on. And the people who support political correctness the most tend to be rich white liberals, by a long way. I think there’s something quite strategic about holding on to power by claiming to be oppressed or claiming to stand up for the oppressed. It’s something which I think is unprecedented in history: those who claim to be the victims also seize the power. It’s very unusual.
January 22, 2020
You – yes, you – and your “White Supremacy” issues
Antonia Senior is shocked, shocked to discover that she’s struggling with a whole bunch of internalized issues, according to a new book by Layla F. Saad:
I am a white supremacist. Who knew? I didn’t. I have, however, just read Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad, published next month by Quercus, which has made clear to me that I am white, therefore I am a racist. In fact, Ms Saad told me in the introduction to prepare to “become overwhelmed when you begin to discover the depths of your internalised white supremacy”.
On a similar note, a friend recently told me that my failure to recognise a vast malevolent patriarchy was as a result of “internalising your own oppression”. There seems to be a lot of internalised weirdness going on: gender victim battling it out with racist in my gut. I thought it was wind.
The publisher is pretty sure that the ranks of underpaid, bookish folk who work for them are also all white supremacists. It is distributing the tome to all the British employees of its parent company Hachette, and telling them to spend 28 days “reflecting on manifestations of white supremacy, including white privilege”.
The self-flagellation of all the white supremacists at Hachette is yet another example of how much the Woke borrow from the Church. Identity politics has become a secular religion, and “white privilege” is one of its shibboleths. Indeed Ms Saad makes the point clearly in her book, stating that “I strongly believe that anti-racism practice and social justice work are also spiritual work.”
To be woke demands faith in certain creeds, with the twins Equality and Diversity as unassailable deities. It demands a knowledge of the right language. You must believe in certain disprovable evils — like the existence of a malevolent patriarchy — and like many strict sects, it punishes its apostates most severely. The Twitter storms are fierce for those who express a non-woke view but should have known better than for those outside of the faith altogether.
Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, The making of the Western Mind, identifies the “trace elements” of Christianity in the woke world. The example he used was the intersectional feminists in the #MeToo movement offering white feminists the chance to “acknowledge their own entitlement, to confess their sins and to be granted absolution”.
December 11, 2019
Toward a working definition of “social justice”
David Thompson hacks through the jungle of misinformation to craft an initial working definition that appears to hit all the high points quite nicely:
“Social justice” entails treating people not as individuals but as mascots and categories. And judging a person and their actions based on which Designated Victim Group they supposedly belong to and then assigning various exemptions and indulgences depending on that notional group identity and whatever presumptuous baggage can be attached to it, with varying degrees of perversity. And conversely, assigning imaginary sins and “privilege” to someone else based on whatever Designated Oppressor Group they can be said to belong to, however fatuously, and regardless of the particulars of the actual person.
Which is to say, “social justice” is largely about judging people tribally, cartoonishly, and by different and contradictory standards, based on some supposed group identity, which apparently — and conveniently — overrides all else. It’s glib, question-begging and pernicious. Cargo-cult morality. Viewed with a cool eye, it’s something close to the opposite of justice. And yet, among our self-imagined betters, it’s the latest must-have.
In much the same way, “diversity” seems to be the belief that the less we have in common, and feel we have in common, the happier we will be. An unobvious proposition, to say the least. And then there’s “equity” — another word favoured by both educators and campus activists — and which is defined, if at all, only in the woolliest and most evasive of terms. And which, when used by those same educators and activists, seems to mean something like “equality of outcome regardless of inputs.” Inputs including diligence and punctuality. And that isn’t fair either.
September 24, 2019
More on the demands from the “climate strike” protests
Arthur Chrenkoff on the far beyond pie-in-the-sky demands coming discordantly from the amorphous climate protest groups coalescing around poor Greta Thunberg and her “climate strike”:
Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Fighting “climate change” is a very broad umbrella. What does the Global Climate Strike actually stand for? Greta Thunberg’s (I jokingly referred to her as St Joan of Arc of the Children’s Crusade against Carbon, but the marchers in Paris did carry a poster of Thunberg as a saint) initiative does not offer any extensive manifestos or programs on its website, perhaps not unexpectedly for a child-centric project, but it does provide a brief answer to the question “What are you [as a participant asking for?”:
The climate crisis is an emergency – we want everyone to start acting like it. We demand climate justice for everyone. Our hotter planet is already hurting millions of people. If we don’t act now to transition fairly and swiftly away from fossil fuels to 100% renewable energy for all, the injustice of the climate crisis will only get worse. We need to act right now to stop burning fossil fuels and ensure a rapid energy revolution with equity, reparations and climate justice at its heart [emphasis in the original].
It’s not much, but already more than a great majority of those taking part are probably aware of they were striking for.
It doesn’t help that some of the more outrageous claims are clearly not true:
What of the other aspects of the Global Climate Strike’s five-sentence program? What exactly is “climate justice”? And what the hell are the “reparations” in this context?
The Strike site doesn’t provide answers, but “climate justice” in the last sentence hyperlinks to the website for The People’s Demands for Climate Justice, which explains itself as “Collectively shaped by people’s movements around the world, these demands are an international statement rooted in southern movements, and with input from numerous climate justice organizations and people’s movements around the world. The People’s Demands lays out a vision for a truly just international climate policy. We must ensure the demands of people, not the fossil fuel industry and other Big Polluters, is what is centered in the lead up to and during COP24 in Poland this December, 2018.” (a case here for updating your website.) While the Global Climate Strike is neither a “convening” nor an “endorsing” organisation among the 403 groups who are, by linking it clearly subscribes to the People’s Demands’ vision. Some of which includes:
Support global efforts for a just and equitable transition that enables energy democracy, creates new job opportunities, encourages distributed renewable energy, and protects workers and communities most affected by extractive economies …
Adopt a technology framework that recognizes the importance of endogenous and indigenous technologies and innovations in addressing climate change, and enables developing countries and communities to develop, access, and transfer environmentally sound, socially acceptable, gender responsive and equitable climate technologies.
Respect and enable non-corporate, community-led climate solutions that recognize the traditional knowledge, practices, wisdom, and resilience of indigenous peoples and local communities, and protect rights over their lands and territories …
Developed countries must make new concrete pledges of public climate finance accompanied by a definite timeline for delivery.
Commit to climate reparations to those most affected but least responsible for climate change.
In addition to fossil fuels, the People’s Demands are also against any market mechanisms to reduce emissions (like emission trading schemes), carbon offsets, carbon sequestration technologies, geoengineering and other “techno-fixes”, nuclear power, biofuels and use of biomass to generate energy, and large scale hydro projects – i.e. most of the potential solutions accepted by the serious mainstream climate change political-scientific consensus. This pretty much leaves only solar and wind, geothermal in a few lucky places (like Iceland, which is sitting on top of volcanoes) and small scale hydro to power the entire world post 2030. In other words, a complete fantasy world of green Luddites.
September 23, 2019
The “Global Climate Strike”
The big “let’s all play hooky from school” event’s Toronto organizers have been getting positive coverage from some of the local media, because of course they have. Here’s Tanya Mok for BlogTO, listing the totally reasonable and not in any way unrealistic “demands” of the movement:
FridaysForFuture Demonstration, 25 January 2018 in Berlin.
Photo by C. Suthorn via Wikimedia Commons.
The coalition has made a list of seven demands, which “reflect the rallying cries of the intersectional movements” they belong to. Some of those demands include:
- Indigenous rights and sovereignty.
- The protection of forests, land, and water sources.
- A shift to publicly-owned renewable energy, and reducing national carbon emission by 65% by 203, reaching zero emissions by 2040.
- A $15 minimum wage for all, and higher taxation on the rich.
- Universal public services like health care and dental care, free university and college, housing as a human right, and free public transit.
- Justice for migrants and refugees, allowing status for all. That includes putting an end to deportations and allowing for the full access to public services.
There will be a concert at Queen’s Park after the rally, as well as a follow-up benefit concert at the Tranzac Club in the evening. A giant street mural project run by Greenpeace will also be taking place prior to the rally, around 10 a.m., at the southern point of Queen’s Park.
August 13, 2019
Titania McGrath reviews the very best show at the Edinburgh Fringe this year
It is, of course, her own show:
There are over 2,000 shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, but only one that is really worth seeing. Titania McGrath’s Mxnifesto is a tour de force of political oratory that is unlikely to be surpassed in my lifetime. I have seen every single performance, except for the nights I’ve had off (usually when my self-diagnosed PTSD has flared up), and its cultural significance is indisputable. I’d go so far as to suggest that the Edinburgh Fringe should cease after this current year, given that its purpose has now surely been fulfilled.
I was warned against writing this piece. Apparently, it is frowned upon to write a review for your own show. I consider this yet another attempt to silence women’s voices by the forces of heteronormative patriarchy. Why should I, as a proud independent woman, not proclaim my own worth? I will not bend the knee to swaggering males who seek to oppress me with their “opinions”. I will not seek permission before declaring my own genius. Mxnifesto is a fucking masterpiece and I am only awarding it five stars because to give it six it might seem arrogant.
As one walks into the auditorium at the Pleasance Above, a charming little theater space that emphasizes McGrath’s humility, there is a collective tremble of anticipation among the crowd. After all, McGrath has a reputation not only for her wisdom, but also for her righteous anger. Like Joan of Arc, she has successfully fought for justice against incredible odds. But unlike Joan of Arc, she didn’t make the stupid mistake of getting herself burned to death in the process.
From the program description:
Titania McGrath is a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest. As a millennial icon on the forefront of online activism, Titania is uniquely placed to explain to you why you are wrong about everything and how to become truly woke. “The latest genius twist in Britain’s long tradition of satirical spoof” (Daily Express). “Outrageous and hilarious” (Irish Independent). “Brilliant” (Daniel Sloss). “Titania McGrath is a genius” (Spectator). “Hilarious… perfectly captures the joyless tone of the woke Stasi” (Times). “Lampooning the language of social justice is a cheap shot” (Observer).
