The stupid regards the stupider. Pic: Rod Fleming
Balls: why ‘Gay Marriage’ is as dumb as it gets.
I have had the dubious privilege of being exposed to some really stupid ideas in my near six decades on this dear planet. Some of these came when I was engaged as a Media Consultant to a quango that helped new entrepreneurs, which, to avoid embarrassment, shall remain nameless.
Consider, a propos of this, the Glow in the Dark Golf Ball. This thoroughly spiffing notion was — yes, a golf ball that was luminous and so emitted a faint, ghoulish green glow in darkness. Don’t believe me? Here’s a picture of a well-known Scottish idiot. ‘Lord’ Peter Fraser with one of these balls at the launch ‘Media Event’. (And people wonder why journalists are prone to drink.)
No matter that to have any purpose, this technological miracle had to be used in complete darkness, meaning that players could not see the pin, the green, the bunkers, the trees in the way, the fairway or the fucking golf course, because — it was totally dark. I never followed up on the sales of this piece of unadulterated brilliance.
Then, thanks to the same organisation, a belter that had me so choking with suppressed laughter that I had to invent a prior engagement and leave. What was it this time? A top secret, eyes-only, breakthrough development that could help address water shortages the world over. Or so I was told. You know what it was? It was a little white plastic wall about 20cm or so tall that had suckers fitted all round. The idea was — wait for it — that you stuck this in your bathtub and then you could have a bath using only half the water.
Have you any idea how hard it is not to collapse on the floor laughing when confronted with noodle-headedness like this? And, you know, I am not known for suffering fools gladly.
2015 had its crop of the blindingly stupid, but few matched the moment when millions all over the world cheered the US Supreme Court’s decision that same sex marriages were indeed constitutional. Now I have no argument with the decision, which was a weighty one pondered over by the best legal minds in that most litigious of nations; I am confident that the judges’ decision was a reasonable and realistic interpretation of the letter of the US Constitution. Well done them.
What was just agonisingly stupid was the reaction. And I admit, I got carried along, for a while, till I actually thought it through and realised how boneheadedly dumb all this is. Not, I hasten to add, because I have an intrinsic objection to two individuals with willies — or for that matter fannies — setting up home together and desiring the same privileges (they’re not rights) as a couple possessed of a willy and a fanny might enjoy.
No, what was so utterly, exasperatingly stupid about all this is that marriage is a contract of property ownership which places a woman’s fertility under the control of a man. It is the very keystone of the patriarchy, the leaden weight that suppresses us all. We should be doing everything we possibly can to utterly eradicate the patriarchy, to crush and destroy it, to tear up its ridiculous rules and conventions and to throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs.
And you’d think that LGBT (if the term has any meaning today) people would be the very first in line to smash the patriarchy, their mattocks and pickaxes at the ready. But no, there they all are, straining at the leash to jump on the patriarchal bandwagon, to access the privilege that they know the patriarchy will give them for being its poodles. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas? This is worse. Let’s be quite clear: the patriarchy cares not a fig for the concerns of gays or lesbians. If it can shut them up and turn them into fully mind-controlled drones, it’s happy. That’s all the patriarchy ever wants — your soul, your mind and your body. Just be its obedient poodle and accept the place it gives you, work out your life and die. It’s happy. You fed it. You succoured it. You nourished it. And what did it give you in return?
A little bit of ephemeral status. It’s not even yours, it’s just on loan, like a worn and tattered library book. Yet you suck it up, denying yourself, lying to the world, lying to your friends, your lovers and yourself. All so the patriarchy will stop hating you. But it never will. The patriarchy is hate. It’s nothing more. It can’t give any more because that is all it is: hatred. Hatred, destruction and enslavement; and you, my LGBT friends are now enslaved to it, by the simple process of taking its shilling, of accepting the horrible contract of slavery that it offers, of surrendering yourself to it for an illusion.
You should have seen by now that the patriarchy has not changed its attitude towards you. It still hates you. It might have given you this fig but it is a poisoned chalice and you are its victim, not the victor.
You died years ago, of course; your death went unremarked. You stopped being important, you stopped being cutting edge. You gave all that up for a suburban house and a bad suit, a middle-management job that will wear you out, watching the partner you once found so beautiful age, hair and teeth fall out, as you are both worked to your graves. Well done. Your achievement is incredible. You have become the tool of the patriarchy, its latest set of fangs with which to rend those who oppose it. I applaud you.
But now, with your soul ripped out and sold to the patriarchy for an illusion of acceptance — because do you really think it accepts how you have sex? Really? If you do, you are either delusional or you don’t understand the patriarchy. So its acceptance of you, two balding men in bad suits taking turns to bugger each other, is entirely bogus. It just lets you think you’re accepted so it can exploit you more. That’s all.
And you, the proud lesbian ‘married’ couple — do you really imagine that you are accepted? The only condition that the patriarchy accepts for a woman is her enslavement to a man. You know that; you always knew that. This honeymoon of dreams is just that — a dream. The patriarchy has sold you the mother of all stitch-ups — look like a couple of nice schoolteachers and don’t say too much about that cunnilingus thing — and as long as you throw the butch lesbians, transmen, actual transsexuals (as opposed to those autogynephilic cross-dressing men, who, because they are men, retain all their male privilege; that’s how they get away with regularly browbeating and bullying women — or had you not noticed?) and feminine gays to the wolves, nay, assist the patriarchy in their defenestrations — literal or metaphorical — go to work every day and be a good girl, no rocking the boat now, it will shut up and accept the terms of your bondage to it. As if it would ever do anything else.
I’m not against love and I don’t care a monkey’s who expresses it to whom and how. I have been in love many times and there is not one of those that I would erase, not one that I would deny. Love comes in all forms from the powerful sexual love we feel with a lover to the slowburn of the love for a child that, perhaps is really the only love that lasts; from the bittersweet love for a parent to the undemanding love of a true friend, one that will never deny you; even to the love for those we tame, our animals and the places we grew up in and put our evanescent marks upon, I have known and know now all of them. Every one and I would not deny a single one.
But why should we accept love on the patriarchy’s terms? Why should we buy into its ersatz fakery, a mockery indeed of love, in the ridiculous farce of a ceremony that has served, these last 6000 years or so, to enslave one partner to the other, to make a man possessor of a woman. Does it make this offence against human dignity any less galling that both parties happen to have the same sort of genitalia? How does that work? How do we end up slavering in ecstasy over a condition of enslavement to new groups of people?
If we want to be free, we begin by destroying the patriarchy, extirpating it root and branch, together with all its horrible social codes and contracts of servitude. We begin by getting rid of formal marriage and understanding that people are free to make whatever interpersonal arrangements they desire, when they desire. That is the definition of a free society, or a major part of it at least.
‘Gay marriage’, ‘marriage equality’, call it what you will, is the nastiest and most successful con-trick the patriarchy has turned in decades. It’s about time we got our heads out of the trough of swill it feeds us and recognise that we have been duped.
The post Balls. appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.
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