French authorities imposed on students ridiculous books such as Daddy Wears a Dress. It would have been comical if the following years would not have been so tragic. What, in fact, wrecked these French illusions was Islamic terrorism.
The only enemy these French élites knew were patriarchal privileges, since for them “domination” comes only from the white male Europeans.
Obsession with gender is a convenient distraction to avoid facing matters that are more difficult and less pleasant. If the West will not commit itself to preserving Western societies and values, it will fall. And its extraordinary progress will be blanketed over by darkness, along with all those gender rights.
Welcome to the progressive “next frontier of ‘liberation'”, where the most urgent question in Western democracies is “genderism”.
North Carolina was subjected to a year of being boycotted, until it withdrew its transgender bathroom law. Last month, the National Union of Teachers in Great Britain asked the government to teach children as young as two new transgender theories. New York recently presented the first “trans-doll”. American universities are wracked with hysteria over the correct use of neutral pronouns. Even National Geographic, instead of writing about lions and elephants, started covering the “Gender Revolution”. One of the first announcements of Emmanuel Macron, as the French President-elect, was that he would appoint officials from a “gender equal” list.
(Image source: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)
What does it mean that this gender mania is permeating every corner of Western societies and culture? According to Camille Paglia, the contrarian feminist, it is a sign of the decline of Western civilization. In her new book, Free Women, Free Men, she writes:
“Civilizations have gone through recurrent cycles. Extravaganzas of gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Weimar Germany. Now as then, there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force”.
She then asks:
“How has it happened that so many of today’s most daring and radical young people now define themselves by sexual identity alone? There has been a collapse of perspective here that will surely have mixed consequences for our art and culture and that may perhaps undermine the ability of Western societies to understand or react to the vehemently contrary beliefs of others who do not wish us well. Transgender phenomena multiply and spread in ‘late’ phases of culture, as religious, political, and family traditions weaken and civilizations begin to decline”.
It is not a coincidence that this obsession with gender grew out of Western culture during the 1990s, the decade of peace and prosperity before 9/11. The decade was free of any existential angst, consumed by the Monica Lewinski scandal and dominated by Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”. According to Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, gender ideology is a symbol of our epoch of “weakening”, pointing to a globalized future “governed by the hearth gods of health, wealth, and pleasure”. The high priests of this ideology, however, did not take into account the rise of radical Islam.
Before the French cities of Paris, Nice and Rouen came under the assault of jihadist groups, the French Socialist government had just one cultural priority: the “ABC of gender equality”. The name came from a controversial program that France’s women’s rights minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, had launched in 500 schools.
