I
Further to the essay I wrote on TRANSLOGIC some time ago, I now want to consider not the logic but the causes of the current disarray in our marital law, identity politics and sexual behaviour.
The short argument, here, is that our current disarray is the long consequence of a SEXUAL FEEDBACK LOOP. For at least a century we have sought to achieve sexual freedom. Against the old marital morality, we have tried to do whatever we want with whomever is agreeable as long as this is qualified by consent. This experiment has been premissed on the idea that it is about freedom of activity. But the experiment has not been controlled and limited to activity. By an elaborate feedback loop our tendency to greater sexual experimentation has come back in a great arc to undermine our sense of our own original sexual nature.
In the article on TRANSLOGIC I suggested that there are three logics, which accompany three stages of sexual history.
The first logic is that I am a man, you are a woman, we commit ourselves to each other ‘until death us do part’, and we have children, where we can.
The second is that I am a man (say, or a woman), and I am free to engage in what we call sexual activity (redefined so it is not simply sexual commerce in the old sense but any activity between any of us which involves our sexual organs) with anyone (man or woman, men or women), as long as they are sexually mature, consenting to this activity, and that no harm (also redefined so it is no longer intrinsic harm but consequential harm) comes to any of the consenting adults.
The third is that I am whatever I want to be, be it a man or a woman, or even what is now called ‘two-spirit’ (with both a male and female soul), and am free to ‘identify’ myself in my chosen manner, but also insist that I should be ‘identified’ by others in this way: any sexual activity is secondary to this.
Now, what I want to observe about this is that there is very likely a causal relation between the second and third stages.
We broke the old imperatives: about living in harmony and commitment, about fulfilling our sexual natures in committed sexual relations, about taking responsibility for the consequences of those sexual relations, and about building our institutions around the virtues of the relations as sanctified by care of children.
The second stage, I now think, depended on the assumption that every one of us is whatever we were supposed to be in the first stage: a man or a woman. But then it is assumed that we could do whatever we wanted. The particular claim I want to make here is I think that it is very likely that this freedom to do whatever ‘I’ want dissolved my certainty about who the ‘I’ was who possessed this freedom. Our free sexual activity was not simply free activity: the freedom was a corrosive agent which acted upon our nature – or what we formerly supposed, but now were inclined to doubt, was our nature. In a word, sexual possibility (concerning what we could do) fed back into sexual identity (concerning what we are).
This is the sexual feedback loop.
The result has been chaos: the chaos of LGBT, and now of Trudeau’s 2SLGBTQ+. There is, as critical commentators frequently suggest, no limit to the conveyor belt of initial letters of this contemporary set of movements. But, in terms of my argument, what I want to say is that L and G and B were originally meant to be terms about what we do. They then became terms for what we are, accompanied by T and the rest: where ‘what we are’ is our nature, that is, our chosen nature, that is, our artificial self-representation.
II
The root cause of this was uncovered 150 years ago. In the second half of the 19th Century, the historian J.R. Seeley wrote an astonishing piece called ‘The English Revolution of the Nineteenth Century’. In it he claimed that the fundamental principle of all new politics was the abolition of monopolies. One of the significant monopolies which was in the process of being abolished was what Seeley in 1870 called the ‘male monopoly’ (and what is now called ‘patriarchy’). The monopoly was broken by an unbuttoning of culture associated particularly with the recognition of homosexuality and the rise of feminism, but also, importantly, with the liberation from nature made possible by technology, and of course the opportunities these offered to both men and women. What were the consequences of this abolition of the male monopoly?
First we achieved freedom of activity. Then we achieved freedom of identity.
By the first step we lost the asymmetries which used to steer everyone into marriage: and so we saw the relaxation of marital law, up to and including the passing of the laws which recognised ‘civil unions’ and then ‘same-sex marriages’ as equally acceptable to traditional marriage. This state sanctioning of sexual freedom – through contraception, divorce and abortion to same-sex marriage – was originally premissed on the view that we know who we are and know what we want.
But, now, as a consequence of the second step we increasingly do not know who we are or what we want. The breakdown of traditional marriage has been accompanied by the breakdown of male responsibility and the breakdown of female instinct, both of which have gone into chaos: as men are torn between the old inclination to take a woman and bear the consequences and the new inclination to enjoy whatever they can without consequence (as well as the new cultural encouragement to show empathy, be a ‘feminist’, ‘raise the kids’, etc.), and as women are torn between the old inclination to take a man and bear the consequences and the new inclination to see enjoyment without consequence as legitimate (as well as the new cultural encouragement to be ambitious and adventurous, ‘kick ass’, etc.). Women are discovering the Old Adam, and men are trying to compensate by trying to adopt a bit of the Old Eve. (There’s quite a worm in that apple.) Plus there are now a lot of belligerent, censorious and sententious New Evams and Adeves.
This confusion (which I see Genevieve Gluck in Spiked claims has been magnified by pornography) has arguably led us into marital affray, mental disorder, substance addiction, perpetual depression, social irresponsibility, and medical tortures, all now sanctified by the ideologies of the diversity movements which declare that one should be proud of being confused and that individual confusion is in fact not confusion but membership of a proud community. By the second step we have seen the concretisation of this confusion – through inversion – from something negative into something positive: a movement which is now come to convert everyone to its exotic and unnatural and inclusive totalitarian creed.
III
At the moment in the West there are three ‘communities’.
- The first community supports the entire LGBT+ canon. They advocate the new ‘liberal’ [sic] position: the Woke position, the New Enlightened Position, the Nice Totalitarian position.
- The second community declares, “Thus far, and no further.” Figures like Douglas Murray, Brendan O’Neill and probably Piers Morgan defend freedom, including sexual freedom, but excoriate the consequences of the recent ‘Trans’ movement. This was the standard (old) liberal position: dominant between 1968 and 2008. It should be a bore, but it has suddenly become interesting because of the advent of the first community. It is still just about legitimate to argue from this position in our mainstream culture.
- The third community is composed of Christians, and pagans whose instincts are, if not Christian, then traditional in the sense of concerned with faithful or old-fashioned marriage. This is the conservative position, now, though it was anything but a conservative position for, let’s say, a thousand years at least. It is now becoming almost impossible to articulate this position in public: especially if it comes armed with condemnations of or cautions about all irregular sexual activity and now irregular sexual identity.
The whole debate has an air of unreality about it, since it is a game of tennis played between the first and second communities, with the third community silent. The debate has gone so far to the left that the third community, ironically, has to depend on homosexuals, lesbians and their liberal ‘allies’ to defend whatever vestiges of respectability and good order still remain in our society.
The point of the argument here is to make people like Douglas Murray and Brendan O’Neill think again. For the root of the problem is not what they think it is. It is not ‘Trans’. It is, in a word, ‘Gay’. The root of the problem is the abolition of the male monopoly associated with homosexuality, and, of course, feminism. Now, I am not condemning or blaming homosexuality as a set of dispositions, proclivities, indulgences, activities or interests. These have always existed in some form, along with other forms of libidinism and libertinism. Feminism is, in part, unobjectionable. But obviously ‘Homosexuality’ as an institutionalised ideology is a different matter. So is ‘Feminism’ as an institutionalised ideology. The cause of our malaise is not any particular behaviour. It is the public sanction of this behaviour, and the institutional establishment of it. If I am right – and I may not be (one makes an argument but, as a sceptic, one also shrugs one’s shoulders at it) – then this has caused the confusion that has recently thrown up the strangely corporation-ready ideology of paradoxically diversitarian sexual totalitarianism.
We have added ‘experiments in being’ to John Stuart Mill’s ‘experiments in living’. There has been too much experimenting in the last century.
Some liberals are caught in a bind because at the moment they want to approve of ‘Feminism’ and ‘Homosexuality’ but disapprove of ‘Trans’. This may seem to be a coherent position, and certainly for the moment it is a politically acceptable one, because the liberals are saying that although they are on board with equality, freedom, consent etc., they are not on board with novel sorts of harm. But I would say that this position is ultimately incoherent. It is a transitional position. The liberals will eventually find out – if it is not yet obvious to them – that the very freedom they think they want has generated the consequences they now want to deny.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Nonsense from start to finish. We should especially beware snake oil salesman bearing the old rule of three – such as the revolting Marx and his feudalism, capitalism, socialism schtick. Here we have monogamy, polygamy and chaos posing as a natural progression.
No it is not. In the first place there never was a golden age of monogamy. As an ideal it was restricted to a particular period in European history and was honoured in the breach like many such customs. Pre-Christian Rome allowed a far greater degree of latitude in this matter – and NO this did not bring about the decline and fall – whilst Islam gives men the right to four wives. Where is this “golden age” now? Nowhere.
In the second place, doing what you like with the body you have involves no necessary moves towards mutilation. It may disgust the rest of us; it might bring about bruises, lesions, injuries – but this falls far short of emasculation, puberty blockers and the other panoply of torture dreamt up by vile “woke” doctors.
Yet again, a clerical reactionary is trying to take us back from modern forms of Gnostic torture to older forms of Gnostic torture, when what we need is a full, forceful restoration of the FREEDOM we at last enjoyed in the twentieth century.
I politely disagree. I thought the article was bang on the money. Although many Welsh farmers have been self-identifying as rams since well before the sexual revolution! Does that attempted joke make me some kind of ‘ist’? I’m sure it does!
No, it just makes you appear puerile and adolescent.
I think you’re on the wrong forum pal. We don’t call each other names just because we don’t like what someone said; that’s what you do in the playground. And you think I’m “puerile and adolescent” (in your context they’re both the same thing btw, so you’ve just repeated yourself)? Funny. By the way, am I ‘puerile and adolescent’ for agreeing with the author, or because I told a crap joke? Probably both I reckon, right? Back to the BBC for you me thinks.
You asked the question, ‘does that attempted joke make me some kind of ‘ist’?’, to which I offered an answer.
Don’t like the answer? Don’t ask the question … buddy.
I said it was an “attempted joke” i.e. I was being self-deprecating about a crap joke. Jesus, lighten up a bit for heavens sake. And don’t be so aggressive with your replies, there’s absolutely zero need. I know hiding behind a monitor makes some people feel brave, but if you wouldn’t say it to my face then don’t say it.
Is Prophet a common first name in your neck of the woods, Mr, Ms or Mrs Orwell?
I hope you are not unwittingly giving ground to com 1.
They will cancel you.
But com 3 will pull you into their life raft.
I am not silencing you but worried you will be quoted at me on my next silencing .
Just a thought on this thankful open forum .
More of a kind of title bestowed upon someone with certain abilities. There’s actually millions of us. I foresaw, for example, that you would want the last word! Anyway, I’m now off to chat to Prophet Smith and Prophet Jones who are busy trying to predict when you’ll take your place amongst the champions of the BBC.
oooo-kay….
Unless it’s not clear to those who seem to take everything literally, I’m taking the p*ss
. People. Wow.
Ignore the hypocrite. He can clearly dish it out but can’t take it, as evidenced by his former identity. I mean, what kind of narcissist comes back after a hiatus with a name change and assumes they’re fooling anybody?
Different name, exact same axes to grind. But keyboard warriors these days, eh? What can you do?
Now let’s see if he has the balls to fess up shall we? When you’re caught out in a lie you only really have two options…
Anyhoo, just to say I concur 100%.
I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You’re just repeating some weird, nonsensical stuff you’ve blathered about before. My initial comment was a polite one, to which the reply from Espedair was impolite. I can’t make any sense of the personal axe you have to grind with me, but I don’t have (still don’t as yet, regardless of your bizarre post) an axe to grind with you. Please explain how you think I’m being hypocritical rather than answering in kind. I think you’re the one that started ranting about people not liking your off-topic posts aren’t you? Pot, kettle, black.
Come on smile
You’ll be laughing in a minute!!!
My dear sir, I note the politeness of your disagreement and I welcome it. To tell the truth, I may have overstated my case a little. The good doctor may not be a cleric at all and as for “reactionary”, ’tis a nasty, Marxist word and I should disdain to use it. Still, it all makes for good polemical stuff.
As to the whole business of liberty in the amorous sphere, I am, on the whole, in favour of it, but with the strict, Old Liberal proviso that those who dislike it, or who dislike aspects of it, should certainly and always be allowed to say so.
Just as I am more than happy for A to bed B (under the usual, final restrictions of age, consent etc), I am happy to hear C’s objections, whatever they may be.
Too many Old Liberals have forgotten, under the baleful influence of their haughty, ignorant children, that if we are free to act we must equally be free to judge; that the free use of the body must be complemented by the free use of mind and that speech should be as liberated as conduct.
Rather than condoning or condemning I find it helpful to identify the consequences of actions and let that speak for itself.
Sexual libertinism to me is like any other natural instinct. Overindulgence is not great. Take eating, for example. Too much of it creates problems and straying outside well established habits also creates problems. So too with sexuality I would argue.
Conservative sexual norms were probably the acquired wisdom of generations. And just like those who wish to remain healthy in an age of abundant food have had to learn temperance, so it will be with sexuality.
That’s on a personal level.
The political dimension is pointless to discuss as far as I’m concerned. Sexuality is just another battle line, another artefact for one side to get at the other. And those who want to turn sexuality into a political issue are not really concerned about what is good for people in general but what is best for their team. Of that I’m quite certain.
Good post. Good points.
Ah yes the old welly boot brigade! Like it! I assume all those po-faced thumbs downers have no sense of humour.
Signed
A purile adolescent old man, oh and an ex-public schoolboy. There’s nothing like a bit of schoolboy humour and that was…..
Cheating I know but at least I get some thumbs ups even if they’re my own.
A technical remark: Marx’s sequence of econmically dominant social paradigms has four members and not three, the first being slaveholder society.
Indeed, you are quite right. Many thanks for the point of information.
Well-said. The mental gymnastics in this specious article can really tie one in a Gordian knot.
Beneath the supposedly detached academese of this piece, you can tell the author really wants to just let it all hang out and say, ‘see, told you! It was the fault of those filthy, deviant gays all along!’. Extraordinary that c3-4% of the population has such power over the rest … I wonder where we’ve heard that before. The fact that many if not most trans people are themselves heterosexual (see the Genevieve Gluck piece he references) is explained by a Scooby-Dooism: ‘those fine, upstanding, procreating straights wouldn’t have chopped their c0cks or t!ts off if it wasn’t for those meddling gays’. Quite why two gay dudes gettin’ it on is the inspiration for hetero Stan putting on a Bodega wig, lippie and heels and waiving his girldick in his wife’s face is a mystery for another day. I wonder what his solution is. For gay and lesbian people to be shamed back into the closet and into the loveless, unfulfilling marriages of yesteryear where, I emphasise, the closeted homosexual is but one of the miserable partners, the heterosexual being lied to the other? Sadly, the author is too polite – or gutless? – to say. The sly elision of homosexuality as just another form of ‘libidinism and libertinism’ is a real tell.
I do give him credit for his ‘three communities’, though. These seem to neatly sum up the current situation: team 2, in which I obviously sit, represents civilised, tolerant living where private rights are balanced with collective responsibilities. Team 1 and 3 are mirror images of each other offering nouveau and old school versions of authoritarian moralism. No ta.
I can see why Dr. Alexander has made a home and career in Erdogan’s Turkey where his views align nicely with the regime’s. Islam, of course, has a long history of the most sophisticated hypocrisies where homosexuality is concerned.
… and yet we keep being born …
What evidence is there that anybody is born with a sexual orientation?
Well if it was nurture over nature, don’t you think that human societies which have historically abhorred it might have figured out a sure-fire way to parent away the gay by now?
So you aren’t aware of any evidence that we’re born with a sexual orientation.
But if it is genetic the fact that homosexuals can’t be more likely to have children than heterosexuals must result in it being eliminated, surely?
“Societies which have historically abhorred it”
Muslim men are far, far more likely to have engaged in homosexual activity than Christian men. Just like – until very recently – men in prisons, warships and public schools.
What if it is partially learned behaviour, partially the result of a pathogen?
Uh huh …
I accept your surrender.
Just to be clear, do you mean you’d like to go back to imposing criminal penalties (fines, prison, etc) for adults who enter homosexual relationships?
While they may not want to say the quiet part out loud just yet, I would wager that they probably would.
After conversing online with a woman last night that ‘young gay men must be made to feel afraid and insecure again’, that day seems not far off.
The Muslim population of the UK is doubling every decade.
BINGO
And yet it still remains widespread in the animal kingdom, including our primate cousins. If it was really an evolution dead-end, it would have died out long ago.
I think you not only, as you say make an “argument” it is a coherent convincing common sense natural biology linear one and is also my understanding of it; just as you write it, thanks.
But when you “shrug” at it!!! DON’T! As this is where you reveal weaknesses in the arguments from ‘our’ side which I am with Community 2/3.
DON’T shrug, compromise, apologies or give any ground at all because,.. community 3 are both ruthless selfish intolerant and pounce on our weakness? they use and go for their pound of flesh one example is the cancel culture at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Another immensely damaging and abuse of Com 3 self belief power is teenagers in schools do not trust their biological birth sex and are mentally ill with it! Institutions fall in line with Com 3 bullying and embed the dysmorphia, that includes staff in schools and local CAHMS Children and Adult Mental Health NHS.
Due to the weakness shown (shrug, give ground) it makes it doubly impossible for Com 2/3 to stand up for these teenagers and children.
I tried at work and dared to speak up!!in a high school and was silenced! by being reminded that what I had ‘said’ so my speech could have me cancelled from that school.
That is why ordinary folk in Com 3 are bullied into non action so perhaps the higher profile people in Com 2 that you named should stand up more robustly to bullies 1 and stop ‘shrugging’ and instead collectively stick to your conviction.
Because I can say as a normal person with a lot to lose, my job I still stood up and because of others weakness I was silenced.
! Silence
There are a lot of people in Com 2 trying to stand up – the LGB Alliance being perhaps the most prominent organized e.g. in the UK.
That is good to know. I will have a look thank you.
Slightly O/T, I have just read the FSU weekly round up of news.
In the case of Dr Almut Gadow at the Open University (sic), and all similar cases and issues, it should surely be left to people to inform their colleages, businesses and institutions how they wish to be addressed, especially if the obvious “Mr” (for example) is not what they want. A PhD or medical doctor might like to be addressed as Dr in writing and doctor by voice. Similarly with Professors and peers of the realm. It is not up to others to go out of hteir way to ask and if they get it wrong a simple correction should be enough. Some women might object to Ms, for example, and definitely want Mrs or Miss.
For this to be discussed and become controversial at an internal meeting of OU suggests they have far too much staff resources and their budgets should be cut.
The travel booker at my Uni used to put Dr in all my bookings. I put a stop to that, fearing being called on to perform an emergency tracheotomy at 35K feet. I saw two fellow passengers who were medics deal with a medical emergency on a recent flight and wouldn’t want to waste the crew’s time in filtering out useless (in that situation) credentials like mine.
Wrong. The reason for this chaos is that Stonewall, having got all they wanted with LGB rights had to find another battle to fight. That it has nothing to do with sexuality (look at the way they have co-opted Intersex as well) is irrelevant. It’s a means to an end, the destruction of the family based society.
Witness – nobody got hairy about Pride marches back in the day; my wife indeed attended a few. Now they are Perv & Gimp marches, and the intent seems to be to shove filth into kids’ faces. Same with drag stuff for kids in libraries.
That the government still takes money off us to fund Stonewall in various institutions is simply a mark of their complete spinelessness. A real conservative government would have booted Stonewall out of the public sector and repealed the appalling “Equality” Act as a matter of priority.
FUBAR now doesn’t even begin to describe our broken and fractures society. And Covid finished us off.
As a rather fine Blogger (The Slog) used to say – “Why on earth have we not risen up and slaughtered them?”. Good question. So pissed with the West is the Slog he moved to Gambia. Fair play
Well said. It’s mission creep by gender grifters.
There’s an important break in this sequence. The so-called sexual revolution was about people gaining the permission to do something they want despite the church-state had outlawed it. The transsexual oppression is the church-state (including state-like institutions) trying to force the people to accept some piece of (religious) fiction they generally don’t want.
Struggled to follow this, tbh. I’ve got no great axe to grind one way or the other regarding “gayness” – it seems a bit like an aberration but then I indulge in all sorts of aberrant behaviour too. I think it fairly unlikely that enough gays will emerge to spell the end of our species, and would be more worried about white Europeans not having enough kids. I don’t see that the madness we have currently necessarily follows from legalising gay activity or it becoming socially acceptable. The mad, malevolent exhibitionism of the extremists in the alphabet movement seems in keeping with general decadence of all sorts, but would be reasonably harmless if we could just ignore it rather than what we have now where they are being used by the political left to enforce some kind of test of faith to enable you to enter “polite society”.
It’s not only polite society. Paying lip services to this is required for all kinds of public and (semi-)private jobs and – to a degree – to be allowed to buy certain services for money such as Barclays bank accounts (if I remember the name of the employer of this customer services guy who told customers unwilling to pronoun that they’d better get lost correctly).
Good point
Regardless of some of the comments I have read here, as with all of the Doctors articles, I thought it was well written and a good discussion document. It is worth reading twice and then pondering on its content, old fashioned I know, but more measured than the modern trend of click and claque.
An excellent article. Study after study has shown that children thrive best when brought up by biological parents who are married and stay married. Our responsibility to the next generation should encourage us to uphold this ideal.
Generalizing on this a little:
1) Most human ideas are stupid in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
2) Traditions are known-to-work stuff destilled from our mostly stupid ideas by a long and painstaking process of trial and error.
This means whatever the issue at hand is, the traditional way of dealing with it will usually be the one which produces the best results. Cum grano salis, obviously, as some of our traditions are only old stupid ideas and because new problems will occasionally require new solutions.
Chesterton’s Fence comes to mind. However, at the same time, so does the apocryphal “monkey, stairs, banana” experiment as well. There is a reason why appeal to novelty as well as appeal to tradition are both considered logical fallacies.
‘…then this has caused the confusion that has recently thrown up the strangely corporation-ready ideology of paradoxically diversitarian sexual totalitarianism.’
Oh, for god’s sake. Who who had something remotely clear in his head and wanted to articulate it could write that?
‘Now, I am not condemning or blaming homosexuality as a set of dispositions, proclivities, indulgences, activities or interests. These have always existed in some form,..’
All forms of mental disorder have always existed in some form, and so has the strong positive correlation between mental disorder and the parallel occurrence of homosexuality. It is no longer permissible to say homosexuality is a mental disorder, or even to ask how a proclivity for members of the same sex could continue in the gene pool, not simply be naturally selected out. But does anyone know the answer to that?
It is ‘progress’ towards self-gratification as a religion and the most important mindset in a person’s life. Pride before a fall, to coin an apposite phrase.
Posted a response to this article yesterday. Nothing offensive, simply my observation that “Pride Parade” now means “Gimp & Perv Parade”.
Post gone.
If I’m going to get censored here we are beyond ****ed.