Just a reminder that
there are other ways men can predate upon women. That man who had genteel
manners with you and accorded you every respect, but who voted for Bernie
Sanders over Hillary Clinton... ostensibly over policies, but one couldn't help
but wonder, given the ample vile thinking directed towards Hillary, and also
perhaps because the Sanders movement noticeably eschewed talk of the
empowerment of women for talk on a suffering mass of pictured as virtuous for
their being so deprived and for having taken on the suffering for so long
without complaint, if it was because somehow mostly out of hate of empowered,
strong, professional women -- yes, that person unconsciously knows that revenge
can be delivered while keeping your hands clean and yourself, in a sense,
totally out of the loop as to motive. (This, btw, was Hillary's own sense of
the movement. Also Gloria Steinem's. Also Salon blogger Amanda Marcotte's.)
This should be what
we'll see, I suspect. For this is not an age which responds well to further
encouraging people to reach their full heights. I suspect a Hollywood (and
Washington) under fierce strictures... something akin to what happens later on
in Dave Eggers' "The Circle"). On the surface, amaze-balls great in
providing support for women (and, as we'll see, children) in the future so that
they never have to experience the same. But at the same time I suspect the idea
of "professionalization" itself, the idea of thorough
self-empowerment, regardless of gender, will become suspect as a selfish
endeavour in an age where we need to obliterate our desire to be distinct and
rather allow that that is one of the things we need to sacrifice, this
ambition, this desire to become totally self-realized, as we agree to commit
more to what the country needs as a whole. (The former desire will be seen as
linked to a country that was, ostensibly, left to rot while individuals thought
only on themselves and on their own kids.) The exploitation will stop, but
human reach that you once could have accomplished for yourself had it never
occurred to you, will socially be withdrawn, as we come to regard people who
carry themselves in a fully self-individuated manner as belonging to an now
rejected age of selfish, individual, "me me" empowerment. The praise
will be descended upon people who are, rather, mostly interchangeable with one
another -- members of a social type, a social role, that has one looking beyond
them to the great nation they keep afloat through their hard work, their
self-sacrifice, their activity. We'll stop becoming adults for remaining
perpetual children. It's the only way to garner social approval.
Over the next few
years, Hollywood will slowly come to be regarded as a "cesspool"
which empowered the most vile people imaginable. Anti-semitism will rise, and
be seen as justified by multitudes who never suspected the possibility in them.
The idea of Hollywood as a place where you might become an empowered star -- if
you could only escape the many pitfalls -- will lapse to a sense of it as a place
that created a self-righteous grotesquerie who lauded themselves over good
everyday citizens, while themselves taking delight in being completely wanton
and free of all controls. A culture -- Hollywood; Washington -- that possessed
the great virtue of being almost universally Democratic in politics; that
possessed the great virtue of loudly showcasing the most essential thing about
progressivism -- that it takes delight in showcasing and developing your true
inner stardom rather than deigning it a sin that must be covered up -- will be
inverted to an example of the most depraved.
There will be no
language to oppose it. For the (overt) antifeminism, the pedophilia, will be
gone; become impossible. (Subtle antifeminism and subtle hatred of children
will be ample, in that it'll be a culture that will willfully ignore individual
unique development as a pretension belonging to a now-disproven, retrograde
age.) The only redress for the individual trying to sort out how an age that
has become so "respectful" became also so barren. That would involve
a kind of psychological analysis that has been started but is near impossible
to recover, as its alphabet components are now alien to us, which'd explore how
so fearful we are of growth, so "Calvinistic" we remain, that at some
point in ongoing postwar social growth the only way it could continue was to
make it have it necessarily accompanied by lapsing many multitudes into a maw
of abandonment and use. Past about the mid 1970s, the only way to have further
avenues for growth to express itself, was to offer it a 99 percent vs. the 1
percent culture, a culture of accomplishing professionals but also of loads of
the forgotten, abused and ignored. After the growth enabled by this society
itself becomes intolerable, there is no recourse. Then it's time for complete
submission to a unit beyond one -- the mother nation -- whom all pronounce
themselves as having guiltily forgotten in pursuit of selfish ambitions, and
you have an end of a age. Rebirth, a period where no one is required to carry
the society's sense that for good things to happen some allotted group must
carry in themselves demonstrated proof of the costs of ambition, gets enabled
immediately after the purge; after a generation, all that it might have
accomplished, gets lost... historically, at least, as subsequent generations
feel more talents that never really let themselves loose, and not therefore
worth remembering, unless -- like the "Greatest Generation" -- for
their bearing pain and loss without complaint.
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