Moral Panic for Everyone

When one looks at the media's discussion of younger adults' attitudes toward gender they see some expressing panic that traditional ideas about gender (supposedly) have lost their purchase on them, and their heads instead full of something they call "gender ideology" that has them all so unhappy with whatever they were born as to want sex reassignment surgery. At the same time others panic that, far from all having rejected tradition they are all ultra-traditionalists, the males threatening reactionaries raised by a "manosphere" inhabited by the likes of un-parodyable figures like Andrew Tate, the females taught by the online influencers of the complementary "femosphere" to embrace these reactionaries' game and rely on old-fashioned "feminine wiles" to exploit them for their own crass ends. Meanwhile still others panic that far from being brought up on "ruthlessly playing the game" the young are rejecting the game altogether as they withdraw from the dating market and seek solace in digital "virtual companions," threatening human civilization with the very calamity the Space Pope warned us all against!

The mutually exclusive character of these courses means that these people can't all be right, all as one can't help but notice that one gets one of these narratives in, for example, the New York Post, and another quite different narrative in the Guardian, not coincidentally the one lining up with its ideological stance and its favored narrative. Thus do the avowedly right-wing outlets insist that, in spite of the "end of history" over which they so crowed such a short time ago the Marxists they thought they had defeated forever are somehow a mighty conspiracy tearing the foundations out from under Western civilization--like monsters you only thought were dead in crappy sci-fi movies. Thus do the not-so-avowedly right-wing centrist outlets tell us that the issue is "patriarchy," which makes the feminist and LGBTQ+ identity politics that have so roiled the culture all the more necessary as a corrective, and that the unpoliced spaces of the Internet are a menace everyone should reject in favor of deference to safe and sound Big Media and the Established Expertise of its Establishment Experts--oblivious to how much the last part of their claptrap can sound like the totalitarian societies of so many crappy sci-fi movies. And thus do they both readily agree with those who insist that young people hanging out with Virtual People instead of the other kind is a bad, bad thing, because, you know, Frankenstein complex-mongering crappy sci-fi movies, and also that What Young People Really Want is Authority figures telling them what to do like good Strict Parents, the male youth especially needing more Red Forman in their lives, the alternative, again, being something you might see in a piece of crappy sci-fi as well.

Blatant as this is no one anywhere near the mainstream points out the obvious, perhaps because what seems obvious to a person with a functioning brain isn't obvious to these idiots whose brains, feeble to begin with, have been rotted by too many crappy sci-fi movies. This is that, as Matt Taibbi argued in his update to the Herman-Chomsky critique of the mainstream news media, the digital age has seen the old "three networks" model of that media splinter into narrower offerings tailored to differing views within the range of what is ideologically plausible and financially viable for the mainstream, and relentlessly fighting for their attention with algorithms ceaselessly baiting them through appeals to rage and . . . well, mostly rage. (Really, getting sucked into their vortex is "not good.") Meanwhile anyone looking not to have their anxieties stoked but instead get some perspective on the "big picture" has to look far beyond the mainstream for that. Still, if it is very clear that the moral panic-mongerers must be as wrong in their assessment of the overall picture as they are obviously cynical in their pursuit of the attention by which they live (they just about always are) one can credit them with at least indicating parts of the picture genuinely discernible through their wearisome hysteria, with what they may add up to also not terribly hard to figure out for anyone not mentally crippled by the elite education and acculturation of the commentariat.

Simply put, society is in a state of crisis on just about every front, the old rules regardless are not only not working but increasingly intolerable to the young in the new circumstances in manifold ways, and Authority is, as usual, stupidly insisting on the young living by those same old rules rather than adapting them because they have the power to refuse any concession where its official pronouncements are concerned. But not the power to actually make the young do what Authority wants them to do--which is to display the requisite "convenient social virtue," forget what they actually want in life (their gender identity, their desire for freedom, etc.), and marry people they don't necessarily want to be with and uncomplainingly and without making themselves burdens on the State raise children with them in poverty and insecurity if need be (the half-century revolution of falling expectations that has made the old quasi-middle classness supposedly the American norm and reasonable expectation of every "college graduate" more elusive than ever sees to that) so as to keep business in cheap labor and the armed forces in recruits and, preferably, bid this world their Final Exit before they can add to the public's pensions-and-health care bill. Of course, those on the other side of the culture war do not quite see things the same way, skeptical as they are of traditional mores in the realm of gender, but also far from being entirely at odds here. (One notes that feminists stand firmly for the right of women to reject societal pressure to marry and have children. But they do not stand for the right of men to reject the same pressures, indeed see men choosing the "single life" as suspect or worse--as refusing to accept how "modern" marriage will demand more of them in many ways than it did their elders--all as they refuse to admit any inconsistency in the position.)

And so Authority seethes over the situation in that way that adds intergenerational warfare to the loathsomeness of our already hypertrophied and ultra-variegated status politics and its contributions to the toxicity of our social life that I can only imagine will make more, not fewer, people look to the company of artificial intelligences as a refuge in the increasingly stupid storm that is life in the twenty-first century we actually got instead of the one we were promised in sci-fi movies that at least predicted a world that wasn't crappy.