hese days, we Americans are so desperate for news that we're turning to outlets
run by our former Cold War enemies. When your news media are so dishonest that Kremlin
mouthpieces run by former members of the KGB seem like fragrant breaths of clean
air, you know there's room for improvement somewhere.
Take Slavoj Zizek, the communist philosopher. Zizek is to communism what Camille Paglia is to feminism: a believer with a strong streak of independence and a knack for making insightful statements, provided you ignore all that stuff about class oppression and how capitalism is teetering on the brink of collapse. That makes him one of the few interesting commentators out there: someone with whom you might not agree but who avoids lazy conformity with the herd and challenges us to think in a different way.
His article at rt.com discussing this “man in a woman's body” business is a good example. Zizek says it's intended to liberate women from objectivization, but objectivization is an integral part of sexuality. So, he says, when people say “X in a Y's body”, they're actually de-sexualizing themselves. He says if you try to get rid of this heterosexual normativity, thinking, perhaps, that you're oppressed, you end up with even worse oppression. You might even end up oppressing yourself.
Which brings me to an even better meme: “self-partnering,” which is a new term for being single. What better way to oppress oneself than by marrying them? (And notice, we now have a bona fide reason to use them as a singular pronoun.)
It's not entirely clear who invented that expression, but it strikes me as brilliant: “self-partnering” is at once logically contradictory, amusingly impossible, and sexually suggestive, and therefore impossible not to think about. It challenges the mind to figure out how it might work; while some people have indeed married themselves, there's no word on how the cute couple will manage alimony payments should it end unhappily. Does one whack oneself over the head with a frying pan? Call oneself nasty names? This is how many of us remember male-female interactions among our elders, and it's probably why remaining single is increasingly popular, despite that little voice coming from your selfish genes reminding you that biological life has but one purpose.
Every day on the Internet I come across libs and cons hurling the same humorless arguments against each other. Both sides are struggling to think something new, and failing. That's why the Left is constantly forced to invent new terms for global warming: to activists, as with goldfish, if a cause is more than two minutes old, it's already forgotten. Looking in their closet, you'd probably find it overflowing with pussy hats, Occupy signs, and ragged Che T-shirts covered with pizza stains and indelible brown smudges of bong grease. All props from the previous crises that breezed in and then fluttered away without making a dent in those mathematically perfect delta waves.
Another meme shows a picture of that angry teenager with her scoldy face and the words “How dare you!” printed underneath, not to stop people emitting carbon dioxide, but to stop them from taking more than one napkin. As FDR would have said, creating one of the most enduring memes of all time, it is a meme that will live in infamy.
But the “X in a Y's body” meme is the most revealing. It sounds as if it's intended as a factual statement; almost, perhaps, a medical condition, or a brain swap like that invented by the Professor Seltzman who turned Patrick McGoohan into Nigel Stock in The Prisoner, but it's actually an assertion that whatever one feels emotionally is automatically valid: a way of saying that feelings are truth.
Nor can we be sure it's not a medical condition. We all know about toxoplasmosis, a brain infection contracted from cats which, it's hypothesized, makes the victim love cats and collect as many of them as possible. Or Cotard's syndrome, the brain disorder that causes people to believe they're dead. They refuse to eat, believing (quite reasonably) that eating is no longer necessary because they're dead, and they hang out in cemeteries and quite often die there. It was originally said to be a purely psychiatric delusion, treatable with drugs like aripiprazole and escitalopram. But neurologists now think there's a part of our brain dedicated to convincing us that we are individuals who are alive. Cotard's may be associated with insular hypometabolism, which is a dysfunction of the brain region (the insular cortex) important for empathy and awareness of bodily health.
Maybe gender dysphoria is like that. Or maybe not. Now that it's been politicized, we may never know the truth.
There are many other memes, like “multiple chemical sensitivities” and “electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome,” which are dubious nosological entities. People with EHS claim to be able to detect radio waves and . . . and . . . hang on a sec. Oh, never mind.
These memes aren't just euphemisms. They're intended to make an emotional state sound real. You can't argue that someone who says they're offended isn't really offended, any more than you can argue that they don't really have gender dysphoria or that they aren't really picking up Cuban numbers stations on their dental fillings. They're unfalsifiable, and therefore not really truths, but the name plays on how the mind works. Giving something a name makes it sound real even when it's not. Even the Bible says it: in the beginning was the word.
When that happens, names create a sort of cultural abyss. Once people get trapped by words, there is no logical escape for them and they gradually get pried away from their ability to distinguish truth from falsity.
But what we really need are new ideas, and memes help us think about them. Ideas give us new ways of looking at things. Even self-contradictory expressions like ‘self-partnering‘ are useful because they test our ability to think. All we need to do is get our minds out of the gutter, stop snickering, and remind ourselves that memes, like love and labyrinthitis, make the world go round.
nov 10 2019, 5:26 am
