AN IDEOLOGICAL DRAG RACE: Part One

By: Aphra

March 2023

This is Part One of a three part post which expresses the writer’s personal opinion. It may not be that of all members of WLA.

Part One: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

If we all dressed in sex neutral clothes, wore our hair etc in sex-neutral styles, would we have such a thing as gender identity?

Do the existential crises and social conflicts flowing from the claims that an individual gender identity outweighs biological sex, have their roots in the soil of the capitalist era’s heavily sex-defined personal appearance standards, i.e., the male corporate suit or blue collar work wear, which create a masculine monochromic contrast to multi-hued feminine finery?

If men were still allowed to dress to impress in flowing lace, silks, and satins, wore high heel shoes to show off the shape of a manly calf, would we have the current rash of gender anxiety and unease? Would we have cross-dressing or drag?

So many questions.

The harmful thing about rigid belief systems is that within them, questions themselves may be structured to provide politically prescribed answers.

We also live in the era of the sound bite. The reality of whose teeth do the biting, what they bite into, what they keep and what they discard, are often masked by folds of ideological froth.

When we are fighting for liberation, we have to scrape off the froth of appearance to see through to the essentials of the things we are fighting against and for. In other words, we have to know precisely what we are struggling to be liberated from, and what we want to put in its place.

A key part of that is finding and focussing on points of commonality with others – the mass collective focus that our economic and political masters hate and fear the most. It’s why, in the neo-liberal era, there has been an intensification of capitalism’s drive to break society down to the level of the individual, and allowing only approved re-aggregations to form.

Reservoirs of Hope

For humans, as a highly social species, community is all. In their various forms, communities are where we learn to be human. For oppressed humans, which is pretty much most all of us to some degree, communities and collective action can also be what Angela Davis calls “reservoirs of hope”. If you smash them, and strip people down even past the nuclear family to the level of the individual, you drain those reservoirs. The divides which arise from a narrow and competitive focus on appearance help keep them dry.

So powerful is the drive to create social connections in this weird, asocial world, communities may be virtual ones. These are better than nothing, but are no substitute for truly human forms of connection.

Davis also says that freedom is a constant struggle, and that feminism must create methods of thought and action which motivate us to think about apparently separate things together, and to disaggregate things that appear to naturally belong together.

All those on the left must strip away the ideological appearance of things, even those that we may never have questioned before, to ensure that what we are seeing is the essence of the thing.

When life itself is a commodity

The modern era in the west is not just hyper-individualised, it is ultra-commodified. Everything, from people to intangibles, is reduced to a thing that can be bought and sold.

The imperial heartlands are also saturated with forms of gratuitous violence and pornography – two destructive social storms gravitating towards, and intensifying each other.

Women may have gained almost full equal rights with men in law, but women and children are paying a price for it in still being the targets of male violence, and of its partner in crime, extreme porn.

The tower of gender ideology stands as proudly erect as ever, ensuring the straitjackets of sex-role stereotypes – hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity – are fitted as tightly and to as many of us as possible.

Most women dress in heavily gender-coded clothes – many obediently engaging in the endless primping, plucking, painting, dyeing, and consuming involved in fitting the female body into current social-media enforced appearance standards.

We force our bio-mechanically complex feet into what were once fetish shoes; push up breasts with the remnant of the wired corset, or undergo surgery to alter their size, shape, and firmness. We pay for hips, lips, and butts to be plumped up with cosmetic fillers. Many grow or glue on long fingernails that make the practically minded like me ponder how they manage to wipe their bums, and remove all body hair apart from on that on the head, which is augmented by extensions made by poor people from the hair of other poor people.

More widely, the tsunami of porn-deformed expectations of sex is harming women and men, its ugly realities masked by euphemisms like breath play.

It’s little wonder a lot of socially conservative people, especially women, are saying “enough!” But who do many of these people now blame for this sorry mess?

They line up with the right-wing to blame the 21^st century version of political correctness as promulgated by the so-called “woke left” which, by some truly weird logical contortion, is said to control governments and the media.

And who in turn do the “woke left” blame when those women who they deride as “Nazis”, “ugly old cunts”, “deplorable cunts”, “bigoted fascists” – look rightward for support?

By an equally weird contortion of political common sense and logic, they blame women.

All this is, in my view, is being promoted solely in order that people do not look upwards for the origin of the whole sorry mess or seek to create or reinforce mass communities of interest. The creation of yet more divisions serves only to consolidate existing power structures.

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