They will lose social currency because virtually everyone can access and obtain them, probably on Amazon.Ī week later, the Washington Post strikes again. Bezos’ newspaper has started to redefine these aesthetics in the same way left-liberal media has successfully hijacked gay culture. This transgression will obviously be minimised within a few years. I used to admire the aesthetics of fetishism, even latently as a full-blown radical feminist, because they were genuinely transgressive, not ‘queer’-transgressive - they gained their efficacy from their appropriation of universal ‘wrongs’ seated at the depths of the human psyche, rather than from the pretense that perfectly socially acceptable behaviours were acts of extreme rebellion. It does not occur to her that these symbols themselves (fetish items in leather and latex) are the sources of sexual fantasy and gratification for the people involved. people ‘celebrating who they are’ by adorning themselves with identity-specific symbols. The author of the WaPo piece, an ex-sex worker, seems to see fetishism as a transactional second incarnation of mass-market ‘queerness’, eg. The same thing is happening to fetishism, and ironically this is going to ruin fetishism for fetishists because the whole point of fetishism is that fetishism is taboo. mass-marketed, squashed into a collection of colourful symbols (the black-and-brown-striped rainbow flag was designed by an advertising firm - pass it on and probably stop using it) and used to decorate bare-minimum Netflix shows so straight people can play at being special too. The sexual reality of homosexuality has now been ‘queered’, eg. In short, I know how hard this job is - but if I was able to reassemble the worst articles I was sent into something almost reminiscent of coherence, surely somebody hired by the Washington Post might also be expected to possess some modicum of editorial sense? Due to article shortages, I was compelled to publish a) a clumsy postmodern ESL rewriting of the 1942 film Cat People, which I attempted to pass off as surrealist fiction, b) someone’s insufferable highly-philanthropic-and-productive-and-sought-out ‘a day in my life’ brag, which I tried to spice up with clever subheadings like ‘Working hard or hardly working?’ I was employed for a year as a section editor of my university newspaper, a job that involved interfacing with a self-selected group of the most bizarre and blindly confident people in the entire school. Well, it can’t be all bad, can it? She still seems like a good liberal, doesn’t she? Can we give her the benefit of the doubt? It appears to be about…the progressive dimension of exposing young children to public displays of sexual fetishism.
Nice, she has a piece for you! It seems to be about - hmmmm. It’s also important to get that extra revenue from rage clicks - maybe you should publish something contentious?Īnd then you’re approached by a woman - she seems nice, she seems down with the kids, she uses the word ‘queer’ a lot. It is Pride Month and the Instagram infographic gold rush means that lots of people care about the gays this time around, so that probably means it’s appropriate to publish some relevant articles.