No, Madonna, not everything is sexism and ageism

 So, apparently, when Madonna showed up looking like a nightmare from a horror movie, the criticism and mockery is obviously sexism and ageism.

It did not occur to her (well...) that maybe it is only directed at her, her person, and the choices she made about her face. No, obviously not. It was directed at all women by a Patriarchal system hell-bent on oppressing her. Of course.

I guess all the criticism of Leo's questionable choice of dating partners is also sexism and ageism, right? Right?

Let's be real: Madonna is trying to deflect any criticism by claiming it to be sexism. Apparently any and all criticism of a woman is sexism, any and all criticism of a person of color is racism -there cannot be other explanation. (Funnily it does not work the other way around...) 

It is the same as labelling all critics of certain movies racists and sexist pigs instead of, you know, accepting that the result is shit. (It is part of the fan baiting strategy by the way, and Disney, Marvel and Amazon Studios are very keen on it.) It may seem work to some extent, but only as long as the "high culture" (journalists, opinion makers, etc.) accepts it as fact. The problem is that it is increasingly clear for everyone else, who has no vested interest in taking part in this collective delusion,  that the emperor has no clothes. All it does is causing further divide between the "elite" and the "masses" - something an unscrupulous individual, like Trump, took advantage of. It does not work. You only lose credibility if you do it. 

Why be very careful when you are trying to address the "gender pay gap"

 So, it has been established that the Gender Pay Gap is not a result of some evil male-conspiracy to pay women less for the same amount of work, but mostly the result of lifestyle choices: women -in general- realizing they want families once they reach a certain age, and want to spend more time with their families, rather than spending 70+ hours at work.

Regardless, many activists, journalists, and people with bullhorns want to redress this situation in a way to "elevate" these women in the expense of those evil men who make more money.

There is one problem with this viewpoint: it looks at individuals rather than family units. Because if one partner has a lowered income due to childcare duties, you know what happens? The other will try to make up for this shortfall. He will put in more work. He will fight harder to progress his career and increase his earning potential. He will spend more time at work (which ironically means he will have less time to chip in around the house.) So if you somehow make it more difficult for men to earn money (or favor women in general with diversity quotas and other methods in hiring), you will make life really, really difficult for those women who are at home tending the children.

Now I understand that for a feminist this is no way for a woman to live (we only respect choices if they are the right choice), however, it is still the result. You make families (and hence women) worse off. Which is a textbook case of unintended consequences of poorly though-out policies. Trust me, these things end horribly almost always; I came from an ex-communist country - I should know.

Gwen Stefani and the contradictions of "the Woke"

  So Gwen Stefani said she felt she was Japanese.

Well, weird, but good for her. She feels close to Japanese culture, cudos and all. (I have a strong feeling she does not actually think she is an actual Japanese; she probably meant she feels closest to Japanese culture.)

But this landed her in some serious hot water, too, because apparently your cultural and genetic traits do not allow you to do so. Simply put if you do not have Japanese ancestry, you cannot declare yourself to be one. Cultural appropriation, privileged white woman and whatnot. Fair enough, I guess; you are what you are born to be. It is a bit too strict even for conservatives, but whatever. (Does it mean, for example, that a Chinese person cannot feel himself or herself to be English?)

Yet. Yet, if someone declares himself to be a woman (or herself a man), apparently it is fine. More than fine, it should be celebrated. Even though someone who is genetically a man declaring himself to be a woman did not experience of all the injustices and whatnot that women have to face in this patriarchal, racist society of ours (not to mention genetics, you know).

So which one is it going to be? I still do not understand the selective application of these lofty ideals, but Stefani's case highlights them pretty well. 

Who gets to play what

  Well, this is about actors. It seems that lately even the supposedly smart and wholesome actors fell victim of this trend of wanting only people from a particular identity group play characters who belong to that particular identity group. Tom Hanks said he would not do Philadelphia (but taking this line of thinking further, surely only a HIV positive gay actor would be eligible to play, no?), there were issues of non-Jewish actresses playing Jewish characters, and so on and so forth. In the same time, of course, we have the constant gender and race swapping, which is apparently fine with the very same people. More on that later. 

But what about Spanish actors? Is Banderas forgiven for playing a Mexican guitar player, or is he considered to be white? Where do the lines lie exactly? Can someone, who is bisexual, play a gay character? Can a gender fluid person play a gay character? Isn't the point of being an actor is to, you know, act? I saw a video of Luke Evans saying how proud he is about playing a straight character convincingly. I mean, yeah -this is your job, isn't it? It should not be such a big issue... I do not recall Arnold being proud to play a cyborg, or Benedict Cumberbatch being proud to play a dragon after all. (And the last I checked, he was NOT an actual dragon, either.)

The scary thing about this is that if you just give it one second to think about this idea, it leads to really, really weird (and stupid) places.

So if only gay people can play gay people, if only Jewish people can play Jewish people, and so on and so forth, that means you are forcing everyone into an ever decreasing box. That also means they cannot play any other characters. That means that Jewish people cannot play non-Jewish characters, and like it or not, there are more gay actors, than gay characters on screen -which means they would have severely limited opportunities if you apply this "rule". This only would only benefit those evil white actors who, being the "vanilla favor", could play almost any other character not falling into one of your pet categories. So identity politics -as usual- kind of shoots itself in the foot.

But what really scares me, is the fact that stupidity, like this, is being pushed by people in "high culture". It is being talked about in NYT, WaPo, whatever, as if it was a worthy ideal to live up to. It is one of those "the emperor is naked" cases, and if people can pretend that the simple and obvious flaws do not exist... well, what else are they pretending about? And even scarier yet: do they actually believe this? Is our "intellectual elite" really that limited intellectually? Are they really this stupid?

Rules for thee and not for me - the curious case of casting

  I have two contrasting cases for your consideration.

Exhibit A: Hungarian Opera dares to play Porgy and Bess with an all white cast. HOW DARE THEY DEFY THE AUTHORS' WISHES

Exibit B: A Becket play gets cancelled because the director did not want to defy the author's wishes, and auditioned for an all-male cast. (In an all-male play, but whatever.)

This kind of makes you think, doesn't it? What makes it OK in one case not to respect what the author wanted, but in the same time absolutely not accept when others choose to ignore these wishes in another case?

To make it a bit more interesting: how is an opera house of a Central European country supposed to show Porgy and Bess when the number of black people in the country -not opera singers, simply black people- would probably be just enough to fill up the cast, but even that is not a given? Hm? Are they to be denied of this opera because it is not America? Should they import black singers and teach them Hungarian? Who pays for the differences in wages? (And how would this go down with Trade Unions? And what about the whole progressive sensitivity of importing overpaid, privileged workforce to push out the indigenous, cheap labor? Isn't that a big no-no?) Why is it a problem that they adopted it to "modern audiences"? (It is about refugees in an unnamed country, not blacks in the US.) If it is, why it was NOT a problem when well-established stories are adopted (or rather abused) in a similar way?

And also: should we cancel all Vagina Monologues plays where men are excluded from the casting?

Confusing questions, aren't they, in these confusing times ruled by identity politics?

Or perhaps just a demonstration about how utterly stupid and idiotic the whole ideology is.

Star Wars and the hierarchy of victimhood

 Well, identity politics is an insane ideology. On face value, if you do not think about it much, it may make a tiny bit of sense for "oppressed" groups, but if you really, really, really think about it it really quickly becomes clear how stupid and how dangerous the whole thing really is. And I do mean dangerous. Just because you are not an Aryan German in the '30s defining yourself and those dastardly Jews based on their group identity and not as individuals, it does not mean it is not the same idea. Only you approach it from the "victims' " side, not the perpetrators' - and you are free to define who the victim is. As long as you keep in mind who is not a victim: white males. Perhaps just white people in general, and sometimes it could be just males in general, even though that would include males who happen to belong to a victim group otherwise.

But it gets confusing really fast because it leads to a weird hierarchy of victimhood where you need to weight different victim groups against each other to determine who the victim is in any particular case where there are no white males to blame, which is made even more confusing considering the issue that a person can belong to several different victim groups at the same time. After all, how do you judge the group of black males against white females, for example? Does having black skin outweight having a vagina in this victimhood olympics? How about black bisexual males vs black transgender females? How about a disabled gay white male vs a lesbian Asian female? Do you count Jews as white or as a minority? What about Caribbean blacks and African blacks in the UK?

See: the sequel trilogies of Star Wars.

It has become clear very early that Disney approached the whole trilogy not from the side of telling a good Star Wars story, but from the perspective of social justice, more importantly, feminist social justice.

From the ridiculously Mary Sue female lead(s), the "The Force is female" stupidity, the disregard of extended lore, the emasculation and killing off important and beloved characters, the weak writing, to the vilification of the fanbase, it was very clear from the start that they were not interested in telling a good story or build the universe. They were interested in pushing an agenda even if it meant the destruction of the franchise. The agenda being some sort of warped version of feminism (4th wave now I believe).

So they pushed and pushed the unrelatable female characters -starting from Rey to that weird purple-haired admiral-, and forced everyone else to the background.

Which ranked some actors who were poised to play a much bigger role based on the first movie that came out. And who also had their victimhood agenda -in case not centered on their gonads, but on their skin color. Enter: John Boyega. 

The poor chap is really, really into how much he is suppressed, and how much he is fighting the good fight. The fact is that he is not the victim of racism. He simply lost the victimhood olympics. Apparently in this case his skin color was not enough to elevate him into a victim status - he merely became "just another male" in the trilogy, pushed aside to give way to the female heroes. And no, it is not because Disney is racist (they might be, who knows), it is because they were doing the feminist thing in identity politics, and kinda forgot about the race stuff. Sorry buddy, having a vagina trumps your skin color. Try again next time, will you?

But this is the issue with this whole exercise... you can't include all victim groups. You can never achieve inclusivity, and it means you will by definition exclude certain groups, meaning you are going to be the very evil you fight against if you believe in this nonsense. It is literally impossible to cram every single downtrodden identity groups into a 2 hour movie (it might be possible to do in a TV series, though -they are trying their utmost with Star Trek Discovery and Picard), and even if you try, it will be like trying to shovel sand in the desert: as you get more and more groups, they will fragment into further groups, and you will never be able to include them all. You included females? Great- now include black females you racist. Black females are included? How about Asian? South-East Asian? Non-able? Inuit? Aboriginal? Lesbian? Bisexual? Pansexual? And the list goes on. You can't include all female groups to begin with, let alone all groups you take to be victims. Which will make the members of those groups really angry at you, and you will be probably scratching your head like Katherine Kennedy is probably currently doing about what you did wrong. She made one mistake: she thought the only victim group is the female one, and forgot about the others. If you play this game you can only lose -even if you try your best to be the most socially justicest (I know it is not a word) warrior. Which makes it a delicious irony to see all the accusations they levelled at the "toxic fandom" come back at them.

Equal pay, entitlement and women's soccer team -how our reality is manufactured by the media

So the news have been full of how unfairly the US' women's soccer team is treated by the Patriarchy. The poor souls get paid less than the males! How horrible, right? Sue the fuckers responsible!

And they did.

And the lawsuit was promtly dismissed by the judge.

The reasons were simple: the women actually made more than the men did. Had the situaton of the two teams been reversed, the men would have received less money than the women. Initially they were offered the same contract as the men, which they rejected in favor of a different contract, and now they realized that if they had taken the original contract they would have made even more with their present success, so now they want the original contract retroactively.

Which seems to me less than a fight against the Patriarchy, and more a case of greed. Which is fine, because you can be as a greedy motherfucker as you want to be, it is a free country after all.

However, wrapping your greed into the flags of Social Justice to press your case, well, is not cool, to say the least. It does not just make you greedy, it makes you an asshole.

And here comes the actual point of this post: the media manufactures our reality. This really is a clear-cut case. And yet, the most prominent media outlets, Biden, everyone are still pushing the social justice angle, going into tortorous arguments about how it is a clear violation of the law, even while the women did make more money than the men would have, using this case as a clear demonstration of the existence of the Gender Pay Gap. Which it isn't. But reality is defined not by facts, but by narratives, so there you go. 

Either people who are supposed to be our betters really are so simple they cannot understand this concept as they are blinded by their ideology -or they are so cynical they decided not to understand why the lawsuit was dismissed. Either way the prospects are scary. It matters not what the truth is -what matters is that you use your bullhorn to shape it to your liking. And this is scary because what started out as a fringe social studies experiment now is used to shape government policy and our culture. The most powerful person in the world (Biden, presently), should not be standing there spouting nonsense. He, of all people, should really, really make sure he has all the facts on the ground available.