Dr. Dawg

The case of the BC MILF

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Christy Clark.JPG

The slow-season silliness about BC Premier Christy Clark’s answer to a sexist on-air question has an odd, tangential relation to a productive comment thread under co-blogger Mandos’ most recent political post.

I have no time for Clark’s politics, but even less for the vulgar, leering sexism inevitably thrown at attractive women in positions of power. This is the end of 2012, for crying out loud, yet too many commentators still think it’s clever to remark on a female politician’s appearance and gender rather than her ideas and commentary.

And that’s just as true of some progressives, unfortunately, as of the Right.

Why does the Left have such difficulty communicating its vision of the good life? I’ve been content to watch the ever-questioning Mandos and others duke it out on that question, but let me offer two underdetermining possibilities, one of which I actually discussed with Mandos over coffee yesterday.

The first is the collection of authoritarian behaviours that many of us refer to as Stalinism, arising again and again within our ranks like poisonous mushrooms. Most of us on the Left think we’ve learned those lessons by now, but we seem incapable of abolishing the tendency and preventing its destructive effects within our own ranks. So we divide, and we divide again, and by doing so we give in to those who favour shrieking denunciations over authentic engagement. We seem to insist on weakening ourselves. Ally after ally is pared away because of insufficient obeisance to doctrine, the latter all too often conflated with personal quirks and idiosyncrasies. Mere disagreement can get one banned, shunned and/or publicly reviled and lied about.

(No, I am not going to be any more specific, except in the one glaring instance linked to above by way of illustration. We all know what I’m talking about, and whom I mean.)

The second is a kind of puritanical prudery, caricatured in 1984 as the Junior Anti-Sex League. This once again is hardly typical of the Left, but it is a recognizable tendency nonetheless. “Sexism,” for example, can come to mean all expressions of sexuality. We’re supposedly on board now with sex workers, defending their rights and supporting decriminalization and what-not—but some of us get a bit uncomfortable when folks in the trade get too upfront and personal about it (not that there’s anything wrong with honest ambivalence, I hasten to add).

The stupid foofaraw about Christy Clark at the moment—in which she has been drawing more fire than her sexist questioner—is something that should concern us. If people are not flocking to join our progressive ranks, it could be in part because of our perceived humourlessness, our earnestness, our apparent rejection of the bodily appetites and pleasures of life on behalf of a grim dedication to duty. Then we find ourselves wondering why ordinary apolitical SUN-reading souls find this all rather repellant, too much like work, and prefer, as some of us might soberly put it, to simmer in their false consciousness.

In answer to the criticism of a comrade for dancing, Emma Goldman wrote:

I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.

To which Christy Clark, certainly no revolutionary but with a similar joie-de-vivre, added in so many words: “And I like being sexually attractive—since you ask.” Kudos.

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This page contains a single entry by Dr. Dawg published on December 29, 2012 12:37 PM.

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