Culture

In her 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” author Joan Didion recalled a Berkeley autumn weekend seventeen years earlier when she was reading Lionel Trilling in a fraternity house instead of going to the football game, a collegiate occasion fixed in the memory of an earlier era, “so exotic as to be almost czarist.” It suggested “the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies,” Didion observed in her crisp, distinctive tone. Before the Sixties, youthful elites were close enough to their patrimony to respect its intellect, energy, values and travail. Liberal guilt, such as it was, rarely went further left than Rockefeller Republican.

Why did Lia Thomas bother changing his name? According to the gender-studies mavens, it wasn’t strictly necessary. A trans woman doesn’t need a vaginoplasty or breast implants. He doesn’t even need to wear dresses. He doesn’t have to date men, or watch Downton Abbey or merge into traffic without checking his blind spots. Those are all socially constructed ideas of femininity. Trans women don’t have to conform to these sexist, patriarchal norms. Womanhood is a state of mind. The question, of course, is: what kind of state? The LGBT lobby refuses to answer that question. The official line is that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman. If Hugh Jackman came out today and said, “Oi, mate, I’m a sheila,” a sheila he’d be. Fair dinkum.

Admiral Rachel Levine, who currently serves as assistant secretary for health in the Biden administration, is not a woman. This is simply a statement of fact. Rachel Levine is also not a powerless, marginalized individual. Yet Twitter as a company seems to believe that pointing out both of these truths is worth suspending accounts over. The conservative satire website Babylon Bee recently found their account locked over a tweet they recently sent naming Rachel Levine their “Man of the Year.” The joke was in response to USA Today naming Levine its Woman of the Year despite Levine not being a woman. By writing this piece and tweeting it out, I and perhaps the Spectator could also find their Twitter accounts suspended.

Black History Month is now over, and we’ve moved on to Women’s History Month. In April, we’ll get the best of both worlds, with Black Women’s History Month. May will be Jewish-American Heritage Month, and then in June the nation will enjoy a blowout celebration of LGBT Pride Month, if the normalization (and commercialization) of the cause in recent years is any indication. The point of all of this is to serve as an annual national re-ratification of diversity, inclusivity and equity as America’s preeminent causes (and doctrines, as Spectator World editor Matt Purple has so perceptively assessed).

When I went to the mall last week, I noticed all the women in their late teens and early twenties were wearing the same thing: long-sleeved tees with little prints, high-waisted jeans and canvas sneakers. It was a little surreal, because that’s how the girls in my preschool used to dress. Apparently, college students have collectively decided to dress like toddlers from the late Nineties. According to pop-culture experts, many of my fellow millennials are feeling a little disoriented, too. We’re undergoing what they call a “vibe shift.” And sadly most of us aren’t going to make it. As Allison P.

Remember when gay people were cool? Libertines and romantics, reviled, spat-upon, defiant and irreverent? Gay life could be sexy and thrilling, tragic and shameful. If the homosexual offered nothing else, he carried an arsenal of bawdy tales that left any housewife glued and dithering at a cocktail party. Judge his life as you may, but never call it ordinary. The mystique is gone. That dusky boundary between the dark and dirty and the workaday has evaporated. Assimilation has meant the faces of gay are either vapid, Instagram-famous semen receptacles, complete goobers or repulsive shrills. And they’ve dragged the rest of us, by association, into their orbit of cringe. The Forces of Biden particularly love the latter two.

Eric Adams had no idea what drill rap was until just last week when his son introduced him to it. Now he’s convinced it’s the reason for rising rates of lethal firearm crimes in New York City. As crime spirals to new highs in urban areas nationwide, Democratic mayors, who have controlled these cities for decades, are looking for any excuse that doesn’t implicate their policies or those of their predecessors. That’s why Mayor Adams has turned his attention to the presence of an aggressive form of hip-hop on YouTube. Adams threatened to pull social media companies into the principal’s office and “sit down with them and state that, ‘you have a civic and corporate responsibility.

This is Black History Month when we are invited to think through a certain spectrum of the people who came before us. As it happens, I am very much interested in black history. I wrote a book about it, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and several books about diversity, and I have been working for several years on a nearly completed documentary about the early days of black theater and film. But, lacking any black ancestors, I must make do with my own sketchy line of progenitors. When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my father attempted to find his great-grandfather — GGF in anthropological parlance. GGF had an air of mystery since all anyone knew about him was his last name and GGM’s inveterate reply when asked about him: “He was lost at sea.

We are spending too much time talking about Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan is spending too much time apologizing. “Whenever you're in a situation where you have to say, ‘I'm not racist,’ you fucked up,” Rogan apologized on February 5. “And I clearly have fucked up.” Rogan was addressing a montage that is circulating on social media, showing him saying the N-word on multiple episodes of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. When Joe describes the montage as “the most regretful and shameful thing that I've ever had to talk about publicly,” I believe him. And I don’t think Joe made a mistake apologizing. That was Joe expressing his authentic self.

No one starves in America. The public schools feed poor children breakfast, lunch and occasionally dinner. Church food banks, private charities and municipal programs are everywhere. Eating soundly is not always exciting, crunchy, convenient or microwave-ready, but getting adequate calories is not the nation’s problem. Buying clean, washed lettuce, firm potatoes or a sweet pineapple during a February snowstorm is a small industrial miracle. In 1900 Americans spent about 40 percent of their income on food, and today about 10 percent. The standard claim that 20 million adults live in households that do not get enough to eat rings false. Americans are the people of plenty and commodities surpluses. They have low-cost, safe, tasty food galore.

It was a nice neighborhood until those people moved in. Now you can’t even swim in the pool. By four in the afternoon, they’re all sitting around drinking Corona, smoking pot, and blasting their awful music. Oh, and the language! I used to love swimming in that pool when I was little. Now, I’m not sure I want my kids anywhere near it. Seriously, the retirement park has gone to the birds since all the boomers moved in. When my grandparents died, my mom and dad inherited their double-wide in this park near Sarasota. From what I remember growing up, it was a lot like the retirement park in Seinfeld, only with old WASPs instead of old Jews. There wasn’t as much shouting. Everything else was the same though. There were lots of pastel sweaters and Bermuda shorts.

You either die a rebel or live long enough to see yourself turn into a snowflake. The generation of free love and free expression have gradually transformed into the baton-wielders. I’m referring to Neil Young’s demand that Spotify either pull his entire catalog or do away with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Spotify reportedly paid $100 million to acquire Rogan’s podcast in 2020. You'd imagine their contract includes legal bulwarks against such demands. Young is reportedly upset with Covid “misinformation” (the media’s new favorite vague term) and is no longer willing to abide by a streaming service that plays host to Rogan. It took Spotify about three seconds to make their decision: Neil Young is no longer on their platform.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who died in 2017 at the age of ninety-one, is facing renewed allegations of sexual misconduct thanks to the new A&E documentary Secrets of Playboy. Former Playmates said they were subjected to cult-like conditions at the Playboy Mansion. Hefner reportedly plied them with drugs and alcohol to get them to participate in wild sexual activities, and threatened them with revenge porn if they ever tried to leave the mansion. "I watched him, I watched his game. And I watched a lot of girls go through [the Playboy Mansion] gates looking farm-fresh, and leaving looking tired and haggard," former Hef girlfriend Sondra Theodore told the New York Post.  How anyone could be surprised by this is beyond me.