Mick Hartley

The embrace of gender has led, predictably enough, to an increased stress on sex stereotypes – as exemplified by the latest Met Gala, where men are men, and women, especially, very much dress and present themselves as pornified fashion objects. Those who feel they can't match these fantasy visions of masculinity and femininity, as a result, now call themselves non-binary. It's back to the old sexism, but in new progressive clothes. 

Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times today:

On the flight home, I listened to Louis Theroux’s interview with Bella Ramsey, a 21-year-old actress. She identifies as non-binary, which means in every interview she gives she has to describe what that is, because no one really knows. Ramsey acknowledged to Theroux that sexism exists, saying that gender-neutral awards wouldn’t work, because women would never win again. But she couldn’t acknowledge that it’s exactly the same prejudice that makes her describe herself as non-binary. “I always felt more masculine,” she said. So because she doesn’t feel feminine, she’s not a woman. That is her conclusion. But another word for equating women with femininity is, quite simply, sexism….

Once artists rebelled against old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and femininity, like Boy George, KD Lang and Madonna. Now those who don’t fit into today’s Kardashianised mould of celebrity beauty, such as Ramsey, Sam Smith, Emma Corrin and so on, describe themselves as “non-binary”, as if not having pumped-up breasts or biceps de-sexes them. The irony of the “non-binary” term is it reinforces today’s binary ideas about how women and men should look and behave….

The left has been notoriously bad at dealing with gender theory, preferring to see it as the vanguard of progressivism rather than the sexist backlash it clearly is. Ramsey’s co-star in HBO’s zombie drama The Last of Us, Pedro Pascal, exemplifies that sexism. He protested against the UK Supreme Court’s recent clarification that “woman” in the Equality Act means an actual woman, not a trans one, by wearing a T-shirt with the trans rights slogan “Protect the dolls”. Because that’s what the perfect woman is now: a doll, fragile and fake. It will probably be the theme at next year’s Met Gala.

It used to be straightforward back in the heady days of women's lib and gay lib: cast aside the sex stereotypes and live as you want to live. Men can knit and cook and do the dishes; women can put up a shelf and play football. Now…well, whoever does the dishes is a woman, and if you play with cars you must be a man.

Thanks very much to all those sex-as-a-social-construct theorists. Somewhere down the line the postmodern account, with America leading the way, escaped the academy and infested the world…