Lately some have reminded us of the inherent difficulties in defining Canadian content, especially where a work is the product of several collaborators. Is a movie Canadian by virtue of its actors? Director? Crew? Location? Theme? Even as applied to individuals: Should citizenship be the criterion? Birthplace? Residency? Subject matter?
But the real folly of CanCon is not that it is impractical, or prone to abuse, or even unnecessary, though it is all of those things. It is rather that it is nonsensical at its root, in its very purpose – again, so far as anyone can define it. Is the point, after all, artistic or political? But it cannot be artistic: there is no theory of aesthetics that prefers that Canadian artists should make Canadian art that teaches Canadians how Canadian they are.
It is, rather, a political project: the inculcation of national feeling in the public, for the purpose of creating a political community, separate and distinct from the colossus to the south. Without the Maginot Line of CanCon quotas, it is suggested, we would be overwhelmed: first the artists, then the country.
But note the assumptions built into this emotive appeal: that a separate nationality cannot be maintained without cultural difference; that our cultural differences with the Americans are both sufficient in themselves to justify our statehood and yet so fragile as to be washed away in an instant; that, left to their own choices, Canadians would unhesitatingly choose the products of an incomprehensibly alien culture over their own; and that, by virtue of this diet of foreignism, we would no longer be Who We Are as Canadians. Therefore we must not be left to our own choices.
Which is nonsense, because we would still be Who We Are, even in that hypothetical dystopian future: it might not be Who We Were, but so what? The Who We Are we are now at such pains to preserve is itself vastly different from Who We Were before.
And who, in the end are we? As the comedian Martin Short once put it: “we’re the people who watch a lot of American TV”. The wholesale ingestion of a foreign culture – albeit much of it made by expat Canadians – is an integral part of our distinct national identity, an irony that must forever elude our cultural nationalists.
Andrew Coyne, “The concept of CanCon is pure folly. That’s the problem at the heart of Bill C-11”, The Globe and Mail, 2023-02-08.
May 13, 2023
QotD: The inherent absurdity of “Canadian content”
May 8, 2023
Grrrrrrl Power is the only acceptable mode for new female characters, it seems
Janice Fiamengo on the strictly monotone representation of female characters in recent years:
The trend to make female movie characters tough and abrasive has been proceeding for some time. We can all predict that the new partner in the police procedural, let’s say a petite black woman whose entrance surprises (and thus reveals the bigotry of) the white man she’ll be working with, will turn out to be the biggest badass on the force. She’ll almost certainly save her partner’s life — and unearth a crime-solving detail he’d overlooked — before the first episode is over. At the same time, viewers will be treated to her sneering refusal of the partner’s banter, her steely gaze, and her fearless embrace of outrider status. She’s a woman with wise-cracking disdain for men as a group who takes quick revenge for even the smallest hint of sexism, benevolent or otherwise, from her fellow officers. And she quickly earns not only their respect but also their unwilling awe.
Whether police officers, first responders, detectives, firefighters, FBI — or, for that matter, nurses, ER doctors, politicians, or lawyers — the message is clear: these women are at least as capable and fearsome as any man: tough-minded, smart as a whip, and street-wise. Even in this era of agitation about the trans peril to women’s sports, the fictional females are as physically strong and combat-ready as any male, their fists and kicks aimed with staggering accuracy. Even tiny Lucy Tara on NCIS Hawai’i comes to the rescue of her far-larger male colleagues in impressive physical struggles with suspects.
But physical characteristics, the notable fearlessness and strength, are to some extent less striking than the women’s personalities and demeanor. An entire character transformation has been taking place, as traditionally feminine characteristics have been decisively minimized and masculine bravura brought to the fore. These women are, seemingly without effort, brusque, foul-mouthed, and contemptuous, particularly of male authority — and we’re to love them for it. They’re often beautiful, but they never try to be. With hair pulled back and aggressive booted stride, they are independent, uninterested in male approval, and largely indifferent to men as romantic partners, unless they are shown pursuing their occasionally voracious sexual needs, at which times their approach is direct and unsentimental. After an evening of bronco-riding athleticism, they wake up in a tousled bed with a slight grimace and duck out of the lover’s offer of breakfast. They’re not interested in commitment or any continued intimacy. A call comes in on their cell phone, they pull on their clothes nonchalantly, and walk out of the man’s life. They’ve already forgotten him as they prepare to conquer evil once again.
A popular new Netflix series, The Diplomat, takes these now-standard elements to the next level, profiling an ambitious, sexy, oft-frowning, brilliant, and explosively hot-tempered woman, Kate Wyler, who engages in uncontrolled physical and verbal abuse of her husband without remorse or narrative comeuppance. Though one might expect that a portrait of reckless physical violence by one spouse against another would be evidence at least of a serious character flaw — if not criminality (as it certainly would be if the male spouse were delivering the blows) — it is not at all clear in this case that the character’s actions deserve any condemnation. Her violence is simply the most extreme manifestation of her (rather admirable and plucky) unconventionality in breaking the rules of propriety in order to save the liberal world order.
Father Ted as Ireland’s answer to Fawlty Towers
Conor Fitzgerald on the tragically short run of the classic Irish comedy Father Ted:
Fondly remembered and occasionally quoted, Father Ted has its place in the broad canon of the British sitcom. But in Ireland, even 25 years since its finale, it has always been so much more. Its status is closer to Fawlty Towers in England or Cheers in the United States: the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us.
Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.
It’s not the sort of thing that national epics are normally made of. The programme is about three Catholic Priests — Fathers Ted Crilly, Dougal McGuire, and Jack Hackett — on Craggy Island, a remote settlement off the west coast of Ireland. All three priests have been exiled to this purgatory by the terrifying Bishop Len Brennan (their misdemeanours are never referred to directly, but Ted often makes oblique reference to the fact that “the funds were only resting in my account”). Most episodes revolve around an absurdist version of Church life, Ted’s schemes to escape the island and their interactions with the island’s townsfolk.
Rarely for domestic Irish TV, it was a sitcom written by Irish people and it was set within a central Irish institution, the Catholic Church. And the dearth of representations of Irish people in entertainment meant it crystallised many Irish archetypes for the first time. Ireland itself hadn’t always been a welcoming place for satirists. Ted star Dermot Morgan knew this well — his major project before Ted had been a political comedy radio show named Scrap Saturday, which upset all the wrong people, and was eventually cancelled amid allegations of political interference.
Unlike Scrap Saturday, Ted never sought to be political or self-consciously “relevant”. But Craggy Island is a capsule of Irish life at this time of major social change — not least for gender relations and the Church. Take one married couple, John and Mary, who own the corner shop on Craggy Island. They contrive to show a winsome, loving front to the priest whenever they encounter him, but turn to violent bickering once his back is turned. At one point, Mary tries to drown John in a bucket of water; at another, Father Ted comes into the shop and finds John has locked Mary in a cupboard. When he leaves, they’re arguing over a shotgun.
This peck-and-scratch marriage is still funny, but in 2023 the laughter it provokes is nervous. It’s a product of an Irish society still processing the reality of divorce, only legalised by a referendum in Ireland in 1995, the same year Ted first aired. Though it was not uncommon at that time for people to separate, the divorce campaign had been ugly and emotional. One billboard for No bore the slogan “Hello divorce, goodbye daddy”. The referendum was passed by the tiny margin of 9,000 votes.
Divorce was only one step in the very gradual withering of religious power in Ireland — far more gradual than the rest of Europe. Remember that abortion was only legalised in Ireland five years ago. When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.
May 2, 2023
Dad’s Army: What Was The Military Career of Lance Corporal Jones?
The History Chap
Published 25 Jan 2023Lance Corporal Jack Jones is one of the most loved characters in the classic British comedy Dad’s Army. Constantly referring to his exploits in the Sudan, the North West Frontier (India) and the First World War.
So I thought I would make a short video exploring his long (& fictitious) military career.
The local butcher, Jack Jones, is a member of Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard during World War Two. This fictitious Home Guard unit are the stars of the classic BBC comedy: Dad’s Army.
What I found amazing is that the BBC created a back story for the character of Lance Corporal Jones. researching the medal ribbons that Jones wears on his Home Guard uniform I have put together a timeline of his military career in the 1st battalion, Warwickshire Regiment.
The story starts when young Jack Jones joins the Royal Warwickshire’s in 1884 as a drummer boy. He is to spend 31 years serving in the British army where he participates in the Gordon Relief Expedition, the re-conquest of Sudan under General Kitchener, the Boer War, the North West Frontier of India, and the First World War.
April 27, 2023
“… the Department of Defense is rejoicing that Tucker Carlson has been driven off of Fox News”
Chris Bray on the odd phenomenon of the US military formally having opinions on who is sitting at the big desk for Fox News these days:
In 2001, I was a nominal infantryman assigned to some exceptionally tedious duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. That spring, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army decided to symbolically make the whole army feel elite by changing the uniform and putting everyone into the black beret that had been unique to the Ranger battalions. See, now you have a special hat, so morale and esprit de corps and stuff.
Because I was in the infantry, surrounded all day every day by infantrymen, I can report the absolutely rock-solid consensus in the combat arms branches with complete confidence: we wondered why we were being led by idiots.* Quietly, but not quietly enough, we said things like, “See, the lethality of a combat force is tied directly to the quality of its fashion design“. A series of impromptu briefings and formal training sessions reminded us that we were not allowed to express open contempt for our senior leaders, so shut up about the dumbassery with the berets.
In retrospect, I think history shows us that new hats really were the most pressing challenge facing the American military as we rolled into the summer of 2001, but whatever.
So Politico, the most reliably wrong publication in the history of the known universe, reports this week that the Department of Defense is rejoicing that Tucker Carlson has been driven off of Fox News.
See, Tucker Carlson was an authoritarian, a Trumpian protofascist. For example, he criticized the leadership of the military, who therefore rejoiced in his departure. Anti-authoritarianism, on the other hand, is when the leaders of the armed forces have a hand in shaping the culture and deciding who’s allowed to speak in the public sphere. Fascism is open discourse, so we need the military to say who should be on television so we can have freedom.
[…]
See, it’s good when the military “smites” civilian critics and expresses “revulsion” for them. In fascist countries, critics of the military are just allowed to speak freely. The culture has gone full Alice In Wonderland, and freedom is compliance.
* See also the switch from BDUs and ACUs.
April 23, 2023
Dylan Mulvaney’s “triumph of performance and marketing”
Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon:
Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney
I’ve largely ignored the entire Bud Light tempest in a toxic teacup because social media outrages and brand boycotts come and go and tend to leave little trace behind. But the fuss over the beer brand’s brief commercial dalliance with trans newbie Dylan Mulvaney — with her 10.8 million TikTok followers — nonetheless fascinates. It shows, it seems to me, just how much everyone is projecting, and how (almost) everyone is getting it wrong.
There are, it seems, many layers to Dylan. To countless straight people, left and right, Dylan is a transgender star — because she is biologically male, and yet has been saying she is a girl now for more than a year, wears women’s clothes and is pretty and charming and full of manic energy. (I’m mostly using her preferred pronouns here, the least clumsy option). The woke left therefore loves her, and the Matt Walsh right has had a collective aneurysm. But for many gay men, including yours truly, Dylan’s latest, year-long performance as a “girl” looks and sounds like something much more familiar.
Dylan, to us at least, is a pretty classic, child-actor, musical theater queen — an effeminate gay man who finds great joy and relief in Broadway camp and drama, and is liable to burst into song at any moment. (I used to wonder if this very specific manifestation would die out as gays integrated more. But no! It seems to be in our collective DNA. Every generation mints a new variety.) And she’s managed to bait both the woke left and the anti-woke right into making her very famous and a lot richer than a year ago.
It’s a triumph of performance and marketing. It can be frustrating for a young actor among so many. You can do your best, become a finalist in Campus Superstar in 2018, wear only briefs for a performance at Joe’s Pub, perform, however well, in the cast of Book Of Mormon, camp it up for Ellen, or do the exact same ditzy-girl act on The Price Is Right as a man (Dylan’s previous attempts at fame). But become a parody of a “girl” and provide breathless, daily updates on your transition — and nearly 11 million people on TikTok will follow. At the same time brand yourself as a pioneer for greater understanding, love, and civil rights … and you can get an extended interview on The Today Show and an audience at the White House.
The gimmick was simple: a TikTok clip for every day of “becoming a girl.” As Dylan explained:
When the pandemic hit, I was doing the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. I found myself jobless and without the creative means to do what I loved. I downloaded TikTok, assuming it was a kids’ app. … [R]ight before I started creating content with “Days of Girlhood”, I thought, “What am I going to do to afford my rent this month?”
Well, she no longer has to worry about that. Dylan has brand partnerships with Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Crest, Instacart, Ulta Beauty, Kate Spade and many more. And here is what Dylan means by “becoming a girl” in his/her own words. Trigger warning for feminists:
Day One of being a girl and I’ve already cried three times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then, uh, when someone asked me how I was, I said I’m fine — when I wasn’t fine [applies lip gloss]. How’d I do, ladies? Good? Girl power!
If you think this has to be a joke, a parody making fun of sexist ideas about women, you’re not the only one. (Trans YouTuber Blaire White also assumed it was a spoof at first, and her video on Dylan’s “womanface” is well worth a watch.) But no! Here’s more:
“Hangin with the girlieeees, woohoo! [The camera pans across a series of dolls sitting in chairs] … I almost bought this Audrey [Hepburn] portrait. I just love her, she’s everything I want to be.”
“Day Three of being a girl and I’ve already become a bimbo. … I think it’s a good fit for me. What do you think, ladies?”
“Day Four of being a girl and I’m exhausted — the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the high heels. It’s a lot to keep up with!”
“Day 12 of being a girl and I just picked up some tampons.”She never subsequently seems to put them down. At one point, we see Dylan hiking in high heels, and running hysterically away from a flying bug. In another clip, she dresses up in a skimpy evening gown and fantasizes about her future husband:
I want them to know I’ll be their cheerleader on and off the field. So they can picture me walking down the aisle to be their trophy bride, or trophy wife. I would totally be good at that, don’t you think? “Dinner’s ready! Yoo-hoo!”
Call me a transphobe, but I just don’t think that someone who has been struggling with gender identity her whole life and found a pathway to womanhood … would ever celebrate it quite like that. Yet this firehose of misogynistic tropes was one of a handful of people who were invited to the White House to interview Biden personally.
The only thing more absurd than this was the far right falling for the whole schtick as well. After the Bud Light ad, Kid Rock filmed himself shooting cases of beer with a semi-automatic rifle; a businessman opted for a baseball bat in an ad to promote his new “Ultra Right” beer; bomb threats rattled some Bud factories; countless tweets popped up alleging a collapse in sales of Bud Light; then the Trumps went to war with Matt Walsh because Anheuser-Busch is a major GOP donor; then the former cover-girl, current Fox News star Caitlyn Jenner called Dylan’s act an “absurdity“; and so on. Good times.
My Review of Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse
Thersites the Historian
Published 17 Jan 2023In this video, I review Graham Hancock’s new series on Netflix, where he presents his case for a globe-spanning prehistoric civilization to a general audience.
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April 21, 2023
The bigger the government, the worse it does everything
Sarah Hoyt wants you to see the illusions that the government and the legacy media have invested so much time and effort to make you believe:
The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.
Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”
However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.
Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.
All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?
Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.
Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control”.
This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.
In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)
The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.
But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)
April 19, 2023
QotD: Transsexuals before Trans* politicization
But that’s the point: Even those far closer to them than I was weren’t aware — because back then the object of having a “sex change” (also as we used to say) was to change from being a man to being a woman. There were still only two teams and you were simply crossing over to bat for the other side. The trans-life had little in common with “gay pride” — because the object wasn’t to come out of the closet, but to blend into it so smoothly no one would know you hadn’t always been there. Before their outing, the two ladies in question were more lady-ier than thou: both used to show up once a month with a box of Tampax “discreetly” poking out from the top of their handbags — even though, as we all understood in retrospect, they had no need of it. But they had chosen to live as women, and so they wished to be as other women. And they were mortified when they were exposed.
This was the conventional view as late as the Nineties, when Armistead Maupin’s celebration of the gay life, Tales Of The City, became must-see TV for sophisticated liberals on Britain’s Channel 4 and America’s PBS. The big plot point was the matriarch Mrs Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis) “revealing” her “secret” — that she was not born a woman.
To be sure, as the chromosomocentrists argue, one cannot, biologically, “change sex”. But I’ll skip that argument, because, as usual, conservatives are fighting over ground the left has already scorched and moved on from for new conquests. I have no great objection to a grown man who “identifies” as a woman and wishes to live as one. Guys have been doing that, to one degree or another, throughout history, and all that’s happened is that cosmetic surgery has caught up with their desires. If half the women in California can walk around with breast implants, I don’t see why the chaps can’t.
But the chromosomocentrists are missing the point. The left’s saying, “Yeah, XY chromosomes, big deal. You’re right, but so what? No one’s saying she’s a woman. We’re saying she’s a transwoman — a new, separate and way more glamorous category that’s taking its seat at the American table and demanding public affirmation. This isn’t your father’s sex change. Changing from man to woman is so last century.”
Mark Steyn, “Birth of the New”, Steyn Online, 2015-06-05.
April 15, 2023
QotD: When the pick-up artist became “coded right”
Today, the global face of pickup artistry is Andrew Tate: sculpted former kickboxing champion, self-described “misogynist”, and, now, alleged human trafficker. Whatever results from the current allegations, his fall is a defining moment in the cultural history of the now inseparable worlds of the political manosphere and pickup artistry, and provides an opportunity to reflect upon their entangled history.
Pickup artistry burst onto the scene in the 2000s, propelled by the success of Neil Strauss’s best-selling book The Game. More a page-turning potboiler cataloguing the mostly empty lives of pickup artists (PUAs) than a how-to guide (though Strauss wrote one of those too), the methods in the book had been developed through years of research shared on internet forums. The “seduction underground”, as the large online community of people doing this research was called, then became the subject of widespread media attention. Through pickup artistry, the aggressive, formulaic predation of women was normalised as esteem boosting, and men such as those described in Strauss’s The Game could be viewed in a positive light: they had transformed from zero to hero and taken what was rightfully theirs.
The emergence of PUAs generated a swift backlash. The feminist blogs of the mid-to-late 2000s internet, of which publications like Jezebel still survive as living fossils, rushed to pillory them. The attacks weren’t without justification, but the world of PUAs during this period, much like the similarly wild-and-woolly bodybuilding forums, had no obvious political dimension beyond some sort of generic libertarianism. It was only after these initial critiques that it began to be coded as Right-wing by those on the Left. Duly labelled, PUAs and other associated manosphere figures drifted in that direction. MTV’s dating coaches were not part of the political landscape, merely feckless goofballs and low-level conmen capable of entertaining the masses. But their successors would be overtly political actors.
Oliver Bateman, “Why pick-up artists joined the Online Right”, UnHerd, 2023-01-08.
April 12, 2023
“Stunning and brave” or “deliberately constructed misogyny”?
In The Critic, Jean Hatchet points out how well Dylan Mulvaney’s act is working to both maximize Mulvaney’s career and to actively denigrate women:
If a man seeks to humiliate a woman he encounters, nothing is easier than reducing her appearance to a mere caricature. Men do this directly in front of the woman they are targeting: lifting their voice to a squeak, exaggerating hand gestures, pushing out pretend breasts, wiggling their bum, pouting and fiddling with their hair. Most of these men confine the taunt to the woman in front of them, and the woman often feels and displays a righteous rage. However, when it comes to Dylan Mulvaney, the Tik Tok user who has become famous for his grotesque parody of women, women are not supposed to react critically. They are seen as cruel or “transphobic” if they express annoyance at being so grossly insulted.
In March 2022 Dylan Mulvaney saw a way to take his barely-concealed disdain for women up a level, with predictable success. After his career as a musical actor had stalled due to the Covid pandemic, with people finding solace daily on Tik Tok, wily Dylan invented a new role that guaranteed his future wealth and success. He announced he was embarking on a journey of “being a girl” and began a series of videos documenting this ludicrous notion.
Shortly before this year-long, very public “transition”, Mulvaney performed a pilot video for his current lucrative act. In it he told the viewer that he “had trouble finding roles” so a friend had invented one for him, a “femme character”. His character wears a pink dress and pearls, white gloves and ankle socks. At this point Mulvaney must have been delighted to glimpse a potential new career path. It was a very savvy move for him to extend and develop this caricature of a 1950s woman. Now, just over a year later, Dylan Mulvaney has highly paid “partnerships” with a number of companies including Budweiser, Kate Spade and — during the past week, to great objection — the Sportwear giant Nike.
In an inflammatory paid partnership video with Nike, an inanely grinning, barefoot Mulvaney wears a Nike sports bra and leggings. He performs a series of ridiculous moves including comedic side stretches, a theatrical run kicking his heels up nonsensically and failed chorus-line high kicks. He almost runs backwards into a hedge at one point and pulls a comedy expression of shock. It all looks ridiculous and slapstick. It mocks women by suggesting they exercise trivially and ineffectively, but smiling throughout.
The media seems unwilling to focus on the actual reasons many women are angry about this. It has focused instead on stating that objections to the sponsorship are because Dylan is trans. This is not why women are outraged. When a man “performs woman” in front of women to such a humiliating degree, when he waggles and jiggles and implies that weakness and silliness are inherent to being a woman who plays sport, women appropriately see this for the deliberately constructed misogyny it is. Ria Chapman, a London PE teacher, told me why she finds this act so irritating and offensive:
Girls are still routinely bullied and mocked for being sporty and or breaking stereotypes, their achievements and ambitions not being celebrated and valued like those of their male peers. For a sports company the size of Nike to use a male performing a parody of what he believes women behave like during sport only adds to the ammunition that boys will use to put girls down.
Utilising female stereotypes is the foundation of Mulvaney’s role. On his “Day 1 of being a girl” video debut, he said:
I’ve already cried three times, written a scathing email I didn’t send, ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford and when someone asked me how I was, I said “I’m fine” but I wasn’t fine. How did I do, ladies?
All of this encapsulates the stereotype of women as emotionally fragile, frivolous spendthrifts, imprudent around clothes and financially inept. In the stereotype Dylan performs, women routinely suppress our emotions and focus on being polite at all times. It is an archaic depiction of requisite female behaviour which was seared into women’s consciousness over decades in the past. This view of “girlhood” took further decades for feminist women to dismantle. Dylan Mulvaney is building it back up before our eyes and we refuse to stay quiet about it.
Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney
April 11, 2023
The end of single-sex spaces began in the 1970s, at least for men
Janice Fiamengo points out that the initial loss of single-sex spaces began a long time ago and for what — at the time — seemed sensible and egalitarian reasons:
Robin Herman of the New York Times was one of the first two female reporters ever allowed into NHL dressing rooms, starting with the 1975 NHL All-Star Game in Montreal.
There has been a good deal of talk lately about women’s spaces being invaded by biologically male persons identifying as women. Some women’s campaigners claim that the trans phenomenon constitutes an attack on womanhood itself, an attempt to “erase” women and replace them with men who perform womanhood. Some even call it a new form of patriarchy.
But well before women had their single-sex spaces threatened, something similar had already happened to men. Beginning in the 1970s, men’s spaces were usurped, their maleness was denigrated, and policies and laws forced changes in male behavior that turned many workplaces into feminized fiefdoms in which men held their jobs only so long as women allowed them to. The very idea of an exclusively male workspace or club — especially if it was a space for socializing (not so much if it was a sewer, oil field, or shop floor in which men did unpleasant, dangerous work) — came to be seen as dangerous. In light of the recent furor over single-sex spaces for women, it is useful to consider the source of some men’s justifiable apathy and resentment.
At my new academic job in the late 1990s, a woman who had been the first female historian hired into her department used to tell a story she’d had passed on to her from a male colleague. After the decision had been made to hire her, one of the historians said to another somewhat dolefully, “I guess that’s the end of our meetings in the urinal.” The joke ruefully acknowledged, and good-naturedly accepted, the end of their all-male work environment.
Though this woman didn’t have any trouble with her male colleagues, who welcomed her civilly, she told the story with an edge of contempt. Even thoroughly modern men, the story suggested, held a foolish nostalgia for pre-feminist days.
But was it foolish — or did the men recognize something real?
No one thought seriously, then, about the disappearance of men’s single-sex spaces. The idea that men and boys need places where they can be with other men (defended, for example, in Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men) would have been cause, amongst the women I knew, for scornful laughter. In 2018, anti-male assumptions had become so deeply entrenched that the female author of a Guardian article titled “Men-only clubs and menace: how the establishment maintains male power” simply could not believe that any decent man could legitimately seek out male-only company.
Under the circumstances of mixed groups of reporters crowding into team locker rooms after games, it’s rather surprising how few “towel malfunction” incidents have been reported.
April 1, 2023
“The Spaghetti Harvest” (1957) | Panorama | Classic BBC clips | BBC Archive
BBC Archive
Published 31 Mar 2022Panorama reports from Switzerland, where the combination of a mild winter and the virtual disappearance of pests like the spaghetti weevil, has resulted in a bumper spaghetti crop.
This clip is believed to be one of the first televised April Fools pranks – the original fake news, if you will. The narrator of the film is the highly respected journalist Richard Dimbleby. Back in 1957, some viewers failed to see the funny side and criticised the BBC for airing the spoof news item on what is supposed to be a serious factual programme. Others, however, were so intrigued that they wrote in to the BBC asking where they could purchase their very own spaghetti bush.
Originally broadcast 1 April, 1957.
(more…)
March 23, 2023
Sometimes, it helps to know how the sausage is actually made
Apologies to the ghost of Otto von Bismarck for misappropriating his famous quote “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.” In this case, it’s actually quite enlightening to see how video magic helps make the progressive media experience:
Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.
As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news — except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.
It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week — not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.
We’d typically tape on Thursday or Friday mornings to turn around by Friday nights. Being of Bill Moyers’ approximate height, I was tasked with showing up early to fill his chair as gruff union guys set up cameras and lighting. Then, as Bill’s blogger and research assistant, I’d watch live interviews from the control room to highlight quotable moments.
Uncut conversations were eye-opening; it was astonishing how often our esteemed guests hemmed and hawed and got basic facts embarrassingly wrong. And how many came off batshit crazy: one, later an anchor on MSNBC, speculated that Captain Sully’s Miracle on the Hudson — visible from our west side offices — had been God blessing the Obamas.
Drafting the Moyers Blog and promotional listings, I’d sit in with producers and video editors to consult on coalescing broadcasts. They were like wizards, casting away awkwardness and errors to sculpt artful vignettes of the most compelling bits of conversations that often stretched well over an hour or more.
So many of the most rousing clips came from when guests were at their most factually inaccurate, and editors deftly dipped in and out to pull and seamlessly reassemble the very best parts. It was wondrous alchemy, and a privilege to work with super-talented creatives, but the reality of our academic pundits remained the same.
Viewers, or at least those motivated enough to weigh in, frequently testified that their social-democratic faith had been wavering until they’d seen whichever inspiring interview affirming what they’d always believed. I always found that frustrating, wondering if they might have reacted more thoughtfully to the real deal than the perfected package that aired.
By no means were Bill Moyers and team operating with any less than the highest of ethics or best of intentions—from their perspective, we were clarifying what our distinguished guests were truly saying. The problem was that the intellectual scene our show channeled was dwindling, but my colleagues so badly wanted things to be better that it was all too easy to paper over the accelerating collapse of discourse. I remember trying to explain to Bill what a Brooklyn hipster was, or how to click around tumblr, but he didn’t really want to know.
H/T to Jesse Walker, by way of Colby Cosh for the link.
March 22, 2023
A 60 Minutes show on the US Navy that wasn’t a hit piece?
CDR Salamander is pleased at the way the CBS team for 60 Minutes presented their US Navy coverage in a recent show:
How China views their eastern seaboard in a military sense.
Screencapture detail from 60 Minutes.
A regular topic of conversation here […] is the lack of discussion in the public space about the importance of a strong Navy to our republic’s economic and military security. Sure, inside our salons, slack channels, and email threads we talk to each other a lot, but we seem to have a hard time getting our message out to the general public.
Sunday night’s 60 Minutes was an exception to the rule. There is a lot of credit to go around here. First of all, you have to give credit to the 60 Minutes team fronted by Norah O’Donnell and lead producers Keith Sharman and Roxanne Feitel. This two-segment effort was not just on a topic we all are interested in, it was just plain good journalism.
Sure, I have a nit to pic here and there, but that is just my nature. Perfect? No … but it is one of the best bits of solid, down the middle journalism about our Navy and its challenges I have seen from a major network for a long time.
If you missed it, CBS has published the video and transcript that I’m going to pull some bits from below for conversation.
The second segment was more meatier than the first, but the first is important. It isn’t just where Big Navy got a chance to make a run at media capture with the “C-2 to the Big Deck at sea” show that we all love, but it will introduce many people to someone who is very good at his job and representing the Navy, Admiral Samuel Paparo, USN.
He gets your attention early by, even though clearly well prepared and sticking to scripted talking points and marketing pitches here and there of questionable utility, he also spoke in blunt terms in a way we don’t hear enough in venues such as this:
Admiral Samuel Paparo commands the U.S. Pacific Fleet, whose 200 ships and 150,000 sailors and civilians make up 60% of the entire U.S. Navy. We met him last month on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz deployed near the U.S. territory of Guam, southeast of Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China, or PRC.
Norah O’Donnell: You’ve been operating as a naval officer for 40 years. How has operating in the Western Pacific changed?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: In the early 2000s the PRC Navy mustered about 37 vessels. Today, they’re mustering 350 vessels.
…
60 Minutes has spent months talking to current and former naval officers, military strategists and politicians about the state of the U.S. Navy. One common thread in our reporting is unease, both about the size of the U.S. fleet and its readiness to fight. The Navy’s ships are being retired faster than they’re getting replaced, while the navy of the People’s Republic of China or PRC, grows larger and more lethal by the year. We asked the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Admiral Samuel Paparo, about this on our visit to the USS Nimitz, the oldest aircraft carrier in the Navy.
Admiral Samuel Paparo: We call it the Decade of Concern. We’ve seen a tenfold increase in the size of the PRC Navy.
Norah O’Donnell: Technically speaking, the Chinese now have the largest navy in the world, in terms of number of ships, correct?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes. Yes.
Norah O’Donnell: Do the numbers matter?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes. As the saying goes, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
This is exactly how the answer needs to be delivered. No squish, no excessive spin — acknowledge the reality of where we are.
More of this from more senior leaders.
There was some subtlety as well. When he first said this, about 10-seconds later I decided to rewind to listen to it again.
Norah O’Donnell: And if China invades Taiwan, what will the U.S. Navy do?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: It’s a decision of the president of the United States and a decision of the Congress. It’s our duty to be ready for that. But the bulk of the United States Navy will be deployed rapidly to the Western Pacific to come to the aid of Taiwan if the order comes to aid Taiwan in thwarting that invasion.
Norah O’Donnell: Is the U.S. Navy ready?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: We’re ready, yes. I’ll never admit to being ready enough.
Did you catch that? He can’t say, “We’re not ready” as if the call comes, we can and will execute what we are tasked … and initially will be ready to do what we can with the reduced numbers we have … but everyone knows there is a huge asterisk next to “ready”.
We don’t have enough escort ships. We don’t have enough VLS tubes. We don’t have a large enough airwing with long enough legs. We don’t have enough reliable and robust tanking. We don’t have much of a bench … so, we are “ready” – but not even close to being “ready enough”. A subtle distinction with not so subtle implications.
We also need to give a nod to our Navy for not having only the 4-stars talk to CBS. LCDR David Ash, USN got some good face time with the camera, and his fellow LCDR Matthew Carlton, USN blessed us with his superb deployment stash.
60 Minutes‘ graphics department also gets credit for the video that the pic at the top of this post is a screen capture of.
Add “PLARF” to you handy list of military acronyms for future reference:
There was another point where Admiral Paparo put a marker down that someone can pick up and run with … hey, I think I’ll do that now;
Norah O’Donnell: How much do you worry about the PLA Rocket Force?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: I worry. You know, I — I’d be a fool to not worry about it. Of course I worry about the PLA Rocket Force. And of course I work every single day to develop the tactics and the techniques and the procedures to counter it, and to continue to develop the systems that can also defend– against them.
Norah O’Donnell: About how far are we from mainland China?
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Fifteen hundred nautical miles.
Norah O’Donnell: They can hit us.
Admiral Samuel Paparo: Yes they can. If they’ve got the targeting in place, they could hit this aircraft carrier. If I don’t want to be hit, there’s something I can do about it.
Ahhhhh, yes. Time to bring back one of my favorite graphics.
Draw a 1,500nm circle from the PLARF launch sites and look at what land based airfields, bases, depots and facilities of all sorts are located under that threat. They cannot move. A navy and sea based facilities can.
Undersold point, but Paparo is leaving it there for you to run with.
