Take the Bait, Feed Each Other.
Warning: I use the word discourse a lot.
A famous person makes a video. It is mostly harmless, vaguely liberal, and (for me) a tad out of touch with the current discourse. The video is a comedy video, Chelsea Handler’s ‘a day in the life of a childless woman.’ It is hardly controversial.
A cast of idiot commentators reliant on attention (you know their names) start speaking so people listen to them. They speak about the video. They both take it seriously and miss the point. They analyse it as something representative of something it is not, and together, they throw words and bad ideas to each other, until these vacuous silly arguments construct something held together with the glue of hate and fake outrage.
What is it that they have built? A stupid definition of feminism which doesn’t really exist (in which feminism is a practice of lying to oneself) for themselves to debunk. Another stupid obelisk of discourse that adorns the plane of stupid conversations. What next? Manning comes back with a scalding epic takedown video that is awesome where she proves not only that she is happy as a feminist, but also very rich. Her audience are vindicated and love this video, and so they share it. Because I follow a bunch of women in their 30s on Instagram (don’t ask, its nothing weird) I see it too.
What am I trying to say? Without attacking Chelsea and her fanbase, I did think the video was a bit stupid and annoying, not for the same reasons as Mr Shapiro, I think its awesome that she doesn’t have kids and does what she wants, but having wealth is something I am suspicious of. But what can ya do? My issue is of course one of class consciousness in mainstream conversation – freedom is essentially the financial freedom to determine your choices, whereabouts, and opportunities. Many people who could have children, but don’t, still lack this freedom for financial reasons. Blah blah blah you know what I’m talking about.
What I’m trying to say isn’t the angle taken by Shapiro & the gang. They don’t want to do actual discourse. They just want to say the things they say. We are left with reactions to things and reactions to reactions of things that seem essentially ersatz. We are left with an irrelevant empty ouroboros of horseshit which becomes our media discourse.
Probably not my place to weigh in on having children, not having a uterus and all, but I needed to write something, and I was coming up short. When my contemporaries (my two friends and I) talk about not having children, the conversation revolves mainly around the subject of
1. Will there be a world they can live in?
2. Do I want anyone else to experience the potential pain and chaos of an altered climate planet.?
The concern isn’t as much about having more time for yourself (we like connecting our feminism with prefixes now, be they eco, Marxist, etc.). But see! I am becoming sucked in! Analysing an object for something it is not! What I’m trying to get to, through this quagmire of discussion, is this. How can we say, without the fancy words and illusory political statementing, that some stuff is just kinda dumb, and we don’t need to talk about it anymore.
And yes, I am also talking about that whole Sam Smith red carpet outrage discussion.
