Eton Woke, Eton Mess

A teacher at the prestigious (and very expensive) school, Eton Colege (founded by King Henry Vi in 1440 mostly for poor boys), has been sacked following a dispute about a video he upladed to YouTube (linked below).

The incident has enabled a chorus of angry people to express their horror at the cultural revolution they claim is undermining Western Civilization, part of a long-term plot by Marxists to prepare the world for the inevitable revolution which will sweep away everything 'we' have achieved and loved, leaving humanity in a hell of socialism and misery, the two complimenting each other. Hence their use of the word 'woke' as an insult- it originated among Black Americans as a plea to 'wake up' and perceive the extent to which they have been and are discriminated against in the US at every level.

For them, to be 'woke' marks a moral collapse by people who have betrayed their class, their genders and their nation, collapsing on their knees in front of angry feminists, transgendered people, and ethnic minorities demanding compensation for the sins of Empire. So we have the Prince and Princess of 'Woke' (Harry and Meghan, or 'Cash and Harry' to their critics), the BBC, 'the media' and of course, every University in the Western world, staffed as it is by 'Woke' leftists and Marxists.

At the core of this argument is Masculinity, and the way in which Feminists present it as a 'social construct' which has been created to dominate women, oppress their freedom, and suppress their desires.

Transgendered people in this context, have become the warriors of the war against oppression and suppression, who, by appearing to contradict biological reality, challenge the fact that there is no security in the concepts of Male and Female as biological 'enitities'.

We can be whoever we want to be, so Masculinity is a choice, albeit one perceived to bring with it the negative connotations of that 'Toxic Mascuinity' which emphasis male violence and aggression, contempt for weak people, and the need to give women a slap when they deserve it, and stop them taking over men's 'tradtional' social roles, and their jobs.

William Kirkland, the teacher at the heart of this controverssy, calls his video lecture 'The Patriarchy Paradox', and argues that the paradox is the extent to which, by attempting to challenge 'Toxic Masculinity', the feminist argument is actually reinforcing 'traditional' concepts of Male and Female, because these categories are not fluid, socially constructed, but fixed as they are based on and shaped by nature.

But the paradox of his Paradox, is that in his own attempt to dilute 'Toxic Masculinity' he selects from history precisely the kind of men who reinforce his view, while ignoring those who challenge it, indeed, who challenge the view of men the Feminists in the Dock also rely on.

He presents Marvel Action Heroes as archetypes of the Virile Man good fighting evil, but also Man as Saviour, leaving aside the fact that the most famous male saviour of all time, Jesus of Nazareth, hated violence and preached against it. So this image of the aggressive, no-nonsense man who defeats evil with a silver hammer, or a sword, or a gun, is the opposite of what Christianity teaches, even if in reality the Bishops had to fnd way to allow men to be violent murdering soldiers, replacing love with hate -and called it the 'Just War'.

Thus, another fact that undermines 'Toxic Masculinity' is that women don't want to be liberated from men, because men serve the usuful purpose of making them pregnant, protecting their home, and putting food on the table, in contrast to that 1970s pamphlet 'The Rapist who pays the rent'. To some extent this is true, and it is not even remarkable that it is. What some of the radical feminists have done, and as they are Lesbians anyway their need for men is limited, is take examples of genuine oppression and domestic violence, and transform them into general facts about people and society, as if no man every loved a woman and treated her equally.

It means Kirkland can ignore the intriguing fact that men fight wars, and the women 'stay behind' -yet look again -in both the First and Second World Wars in Europe and the US, when the men left those 'men's job's on the factory floor, women stepped in to do them, so were they 'men's jobs' all along? And, while most women have not fought 'on the front line', many volunteered as spies and saboteurs, and it can thus be said that their bravery and courage was equal to men.

But, again, so lame are Kirkland's examples, he does not address the fact that in modern warfare, most soldiers never see their enemy in combat. They can kill from hundreds of yards, where in the past the enemy was literally inches away -has modern warfare de-masculinized the troops? No discussion. Or it would come down to how one copes with extreme weather conditions.

So for me Kirkland has raised important questions but has exposed the weakness of his side of the argument. There is no serious discussion about how the philosophy of language has been critical in the dismantling of categories which on investigation, as Gadamer might put it, 'veil' rather than expose 'the truth' even if it is frustrating for debate the idea that everythng is socially constructed, suggesting nothing has fixed meanings.

In the case of the transgendered women I have known, and still know, there was no debate to be had that included obscure trends in philosophy -they were and are women, their biology was a mistake, pure and simple, and they have sought to correct it, and in at least two cases I know, have done so. You might say they have been surgically re-constructed, but that in itself does not explain the complexity that lies behind it.

So I feel that a marginal theory in culture has become the occasion for an hysterical reaction that denies the causes of the debate. If we do not want to live in a society that makes it illegal to be gay, but also describes all forms of 'deviant' sexuality as an ilness, and bans or makes the use of abusive words socially unacceptable; a world in which we do accept Empire was the occasion for criminal and immoral acts, and that 'race' has distorted and destroyed people's lives, then we do need to 'wake up' to the causes, and so something about it. And that something means treating people equally and with respect whoever they are. Diversity is a strength not a weakness

So Eton has made a mess of this debate, and I would not have sacked Kirkland, but challenged his ideas.

An account in support of Kirkland is here-
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/...-what-is-left/

Kirkland's video (just over half an hour) is here-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTHgMxQEoPI

I have to say I haven’t watched the video, (on a side note the fact Eton was opened for the poor is shocking, funny and sad) what I find troubling about “wokes” and I think most people that I know use that description like “alt right” is used, is the power they seem to have gotten in the media, that is used to cancel anyone who has a different view, and not just males, the female professor that was no-platformed from Oxford university, I believe she was deemed to be anti trans, she’d worked for female rights for 30+ years, and you can just be gone , no trial, chance to explain, debate or apologise if she was wrong, just cancelled.

Plus it seems to be a every level, wasn’t there a New York Times editor sacked for printing a story from a us senator, during the recent protests/riots (depending on your viewpoint)
Even on youtube a football team fan channel a member was cancelled over a insult about another teams player, no apology was enough, has to be cancelled.

I find the ability the wokes have to cancel people who they deem to be not woke, troubling at the least.

Sidney 111, thank you for your response to my post.

I take the view that there is a confusion of issues here. On the philosophical level, there is the impact of an age old argument about what constitutes reality, and the way in which language can or can not describe it, whether language confirms that reality is socially constucted, or is the means by which the natural world is described.

The current arguments pivot on the view that there are no fixed categories, that everything is fluid. It marks the departure from the Structuralism that is associated with Lévi-Strauss or the universal pragmatics of Habermas, to recruit the concept of Deconstruction that has been pioneered by Jacques Derrida, even though at times it is a warning as much as a recommendation. The most famous, or notorious of the theorists, Judith Butler, once argued she could be a heterosexual on a Monday, a Lesbian on a Tuesday, Transgendered on a Wednesday, and so on. But even here, Butler and those like her have been challenging categories assumed to be eternally fixed which history shows are at least flexible. It is difficult to make a precise link to homosexuality in the ancient world with its contemporary example, and with gender there are plenty of examples from a diverse range of cultures that there have always been men who dressed and behaved as if they were women, and vice versa, and not always excused as 'eunuchs', 'witches' 'shamans' or given some special social role. But when it comes to biology, there the arguments diverge.
However it is used, language cannot alter the fact that only one species menstruates and gives birth to humans when a seed is planted in the womb. Obviously there are also many women who for various reasons are sterile and cannot give birth though they can and do adopt, but here 'Mothering' is not gender specific, how many single parents, male or female have said 'I had to be mother and father in the house'?

So I think there is a confusion of categories, where the social roles that humans perform need not be locked behind a gender wall. But of the transexuals I have known, none of them would accept 'Male' as their authentic gender, and none of them would have or want to have sexual intercourse with other women, though plenty do. The argument that there is no fixed biological category is thus nonsense, and an abuse of language.

What one does with that biology is different, but this is often ignored in the debate. For example, anorexic women do not menstruate, indeed, may use anorexia to avoid having periods, and in the UK series Love Island, one contestant was candid about the management of her and the other women's biology-

"Skimpy bikinis and white sheets are not ideal when a woman is on her period, which is why most female contestants go on the pill and take packets back to back to avoid having a period when in the villa, Montana says. “It would be horrendous,” she adds."
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-a8445231.html

So the philosophy is itself not fixed, just as Habermas objects to Derrida's claims about the fluidity of categories, so the Left, who are often either accused of being part of the vicious caampaign against feminists, are themselves locked into categories, class being the most obvious -and it is not as if Marxism offers much flexibility given its addiction to 'historical necessity'.

Politically, this feeds into the 'Woke' thing because if you play it backwards, what is claimed to be a campaign for free speech, raises the question, free speech to say what? In a democracy, everyone has equal rights, indeed, this is the crux of the problem, because it means that what is right or wrong is perpetually contested. Practically, one party, one President gets to make the decisions, though some will be the result of multi-party compromise, but the truth is out there, but spread across diverse members of society.

Society has decided, in Liberal Democracies, that it is wrong to discriminate against fellow citizens because of their 'race, religion and sexual orientation', yet for the so-called Conservatives and the more extreme alt-right, these rights have 'gone too far' because they claim a defence of rights, has become an assault that appears to them to be a promotion of minority interests at the expense of the majority equivalent to an assault on freedom -it is quite bizarre because society cannot make an entire generation gay any more than it can make them Black or Jewish.

And where this 'woke' trend is mostly found is in the media, but what the people who complain that King Henry or Romeo or James Bond MUST be played by a Black actor, or that Newsreaders must be Muslim, are objecting to is the reality that we live in multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies where minorities have a right to be treated equally, and be seen to be treated equally. To me it feeds into this problem that one category of people who have dominated society for generations, are afraid of losing that power, it is at the heart of the so-called debate on Immigration and Culture. But here we are where a marginal group in society has become the anvil on which a lot of anxieties are being stressed that need not be.

If you look at the Suzanne Moore predicament, you can see how absurd much of this has become, with similar echoes to JK Rowling, Germaine Greer and the academics you have alluded to. Suzanne Moore was a Guardian journalist who has now left the paper because she has been denounced as a TERF -'trans exclusionary feminist'. She has explained her position in the link below, a conversation that can also be seen on YouTube. It dates back some years when she complained about the way in which women are depicted in the media, where she wrote-

“We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.”
...
Suddenly I was inundated with tweets about the murder rate of Brazilian transsexuals which is appallingly high. Many of them are forced into sex work (I prefer the term prostitution but the new feminism likes to pretend all jobs are equal when they clearly are not. “Phoebe got four A-stars but hopes to become a sex worker” is not something you hear often.) But it’s true I had carelessly used a certain phrase to talk about the then fashionable shape for women; slim hips and big breasts. Indeed, transsexual models did appear on catwalks.
...the abuse I got over the trans issue was different, and worse than anything that had come before. Social media was beginning to flex its muscles. It was a mindfuck. Twitter was full of people telling me how they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me. This was all somehow to do with the Brazilian transsexual remark. The police came round but they didn’t really get Twitter. They said things like: “Don’t email them back, love”. The worst threats were from people who knew where I lived and said that they would give my then 11-year-old a good fisting."
https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had...-the-guardian/

I am puzzled that 'the left' are identified as the culprits of this abuse, because my understanding is that the left, if they have a background in Marxism, but even more so if their roots are in Leninist and/or Trotskyist associations, are either not interested in transgender issues, or merely use them as campaigning issues on rights, just as they are if anything, anti-feminist, as Sheila Rowbotham argued in her essay in Beyond the Fragments (1979) -one of the finest books on radical feminism ever produced.

I believe that social media has given a voice to everyone, but not everyone needs to be heard, whether it is QAnon or some nasty activists who take the view that only their view of gender issues matters. A cleavage between feminists who object to the category arguments that insist transgendered people are biologically the same as men and women thus fails to recognize that many of the same feminists who support trans issues, can't make the category leap the activists demand.

A lot of this should be called out for what it is, namely bullshit.

The more serious argument now turns on the klaxon brigade being part of a trend where teenagers are being persuaded to change their biology when they express gender confusion which in reaity may just be a common occurrence among teenagers who wonder if they are gay. I don't actually know if the activists are responsible, but the recent court case highights a problem more serious than philosophical 'category mistakes'-

"In a 36-page ruling, the court concluded that children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs, in effect curtailing medical intervention for under-16s with gender dysphoria."
https://www.theguardian.com/society/...-common-sense-

Here, the Tavistock Clinic and its Gender Identity Development Service for Children and Adolescents is the focus of much anxiety and debate. I don't have the medical expertise to go far with this, but it is clearly a sensitive issue, and as children develop differently it cannot be easy to deal with gender issues. I would separate out from this, those children born without clearly defined genitalia so that parents have to make profound decisions soon after birth.
In cases where someone objects to the years that the NHS demands as part of the whole process of surgical based gender re-assignment, it is there for a reason, and I think we must accept that not all of the candidates for gender re-assignment are genuine, but have psychological problems that insist their gender status is the source of a problem whose origin might be something else. I once met someone who to my mind had this issue, but that's all I can say about it.

In addition, there is an intense debate taking place about Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria and how there is claimed to be something close to an epidemic of young girls questioning their gender status being given puberty blockers that is denying them a future as women and mothers, similar to the court case referred to above. The book at issue is Irreversible Damage (2020), by Abigail Shrier, and there is a stringent critique of it here-
https://theorion.com/85233/opinion/a...-limited-data/

How does any of the above relate to the 'Woke' theories? It is the crucial argument that what began as a cultural amendment that granted equal staus to minorities, has become an Institutional Necessity, and that there has been, in gender issues, a clinical trend that appears to some to fail children by recommeding a course of treatment they don't need, by adopting an activist procedure where caution and delay might be required, simply because what someone wants at 16 might not be what they want at 26. There are no simple answers to this, and though the Tavistock Clinic has been the focus of much criticism, I recall a case some years ago of someone who complained after their surgery the physician who recommended it was too keen to do it rather than take the caution and delay decision. These are not new issues, they have been around for years.

But then again, do we want to return to the days when the right to be offensive, meant degrading others through words we no longer use, precisely because they are degrading? When the US President describes his fellow Americans as 'Total scum, they're human scum' he degrades himself, which is in itself remarkable for a man who has such a lack of respect at every level for the citizens he is supposed to represent. It seems to me the 'Woke' brigade want to elevate their loathing of the usual suspects -Muslims, Marxists, the Media and Trans People- to a political debate about who 'we' are, and to stop what they view as 'speical protection'. But as the Kirkland video also shows, their views on what it means to be a Man, seem more relevant to a comic book image of Stone Age Man, and I don't think we want, or need to return that far into history to live a good life, and allow our fellow citizens to share it with us.

Hi Stravos you know way more about this than I do, I do remember the world wide headlines about J K Rowling being anti trans and the attempts to have her cancelled ,but it’s difficult to actually cancel a billionaire, I read a few articles about it and it seemed to be the fact she was calling for more counsellors to be available to young people who were questioning their identity/gender and the apparent willingness to do hysterectomies on these young women, it seemed to come from J K Rowlings person experiences in her youth. I don’t think that’s anti trans myself, but apparently it’s not woke.

I also seen the news article about the use of puberty blockers and the ruling saying the young person must fully understand the consequences of using them, and I know journalists love the extreme part of story, but how could the youngest patient be 3 years old, even if there only on a waiting list to be seen.

I agree Twitter/ social media is not the real world, and we don’t want a world with hatred or racism but I don’t understand how wokes have gotten so much influence in the mainstream media so quickly. We seem to be hurtling toward a world where it’s your woke or unemployed, maybe in the future in jail or even worse on your way to a re-education camp.

Another weird thing other than perhaps the US senator AOC and her squad, who are these all powerful wokes who can have people fired from the jobs, arrange companies to boycott google ads , costing them hundreds of millions of dollars, attempt to have Facebook censor politics, i for one don’t know and I find that strange.

Sidney, as I suggested above, there is too much confusion in the use of language to make sense of some of the positions people are taking, not just on gender issues, but on what it means to be 'woke' -or enlightened- and what it is that people object to.

If we consider the social construction of gender, including biology, we are in a position shaped by the fact that this is not new, and that it's past has a devastatig history. I refer to the 19th century science of 'Race' in which the measurement of an African head, and the size of a Jewish nose was scientific proof that Africans and Jews are inferior to White Europeans. If this was an example of the social construction of biology, it was motivated by an explanation, or justification of Empire, but in time went further to offer scientific explanations for the 'Criminal mind'.

And what these so-called scientific claims asked, when presented with people now designated as 'pure' and 'impure', 'what should we do with them?' the answer was -Exterminate! It was a common part of the Eugenics movement to assume that exterminating undesirable people was a good, even a necessary thing, but discredited when the Nazis industrialized extermination on the basis that Jews were impure, undesirabe and in fact, not entirely human.

But if you think that explanations of biology have become more scientific, by which we mean, more rational, and less offensive, consider how in the last 10 years some supposedly intelligent people have attempted to use biology to explain why Usain Bolt can run faster than you or I, and do so with reference to his ankles. But if Black people can run faster than white people, why is this not true of all Black people, and would it be the case if they had the same amount of time and resources to train as Bolt had?

It is of course, complete rubbish and further undermined when it is the interference of human biology with performance enhancing drugs that often explains why some people run faster than others. The social construction taking place here has nothing to do with biology, but a lot to do with culture and how we perceive competitions and winning, and the thrill of watching people compete.

Again, the critics of 'Woke' are desperate to save what they see as an assault on free speech and culture. In most cases, I don't believe people should be banned from speaking in public or on University campuses -I am not impressed by Jordan Peterson, for example, but my disagreement with him and his ideas is not based on the claim he is dangerous, or a threat to us, whoever we are. In fact I am disappointed that he does not participate more in competitive speaking engagements in which his views are challenged.

On the other hand, if you take someone like Alex Jones, or Milo Yiannopoulos, I would ask why they are being invited at all, when their primary aim is not to inform, educate and debate, but to be provocative, to be offensive just as an act of theatre. Moreover, as they have websites, radio shows and other means of expression which they control, the free speech claim falls flat.

The next level, if you like, where people in academia or public life, such as the media, are harassed or even sacked because of their views is a dangerous one. I am not impressed by an Englsh historian often seen on tv, Dominic Sandbrook. In his most recent series on the 1980s, it is unfortunate that his tailoring makes him look like a well read office cleaner, but again, I would prefer him to be challenged on his warped view of the 1980s as bad has the three volumes of superficial dross he wrote on the 1970s. The example is on YouTube where, in 2014 I think, he participated in a debate on Britain's role in the First World War. Sandbrook offered an opening speech in which he explained why Britain need not have gone to war, his impressive sounding, but weak arguments later demolished with superb acuity by Margaret Macmillan, a far superior historian to him. This is how we should proceed, because we can't have an audit of every school teacher, be they in Eton or a State School to find out if they think the British Empire was wicked, or if the Bible is the Word of God.

In a desperate attempt to prevent people being offended, we are losing the ability to ask why, with catastrophic consequences, and while you offer the example of AOC and others like her creating an agenda which by definition some people will fail, on another level an open debate among Muslim students in France on visual depictions of Muhammad led to the teacher concerned being first harassed, and then murdered, but by a relative of one of the students who in fact had no real idea what the lesson concerned was about and what it attempted to achieve.

If there are teachers who are so obnoxious and offensive they are sacked, the proof must be offered. I am not sure if Kirkland was sacked from Eton because of his views, and most people would probably not be surprised a teacher at Eton held them, or he was sacked because he violated a clause in his contract. Are his views so offensive they cannot be tolerated, and more to the point, are Eton's students not capable of listening to him and offering their own, alternative views?

Ultimately, we are asked to distinguish between hate speech and reasonable argument, between a crtique of the historical record, and a defence of it shaped by a conflict of values where one party is claiming to protect itself from the cultural equivalent of a foreign invasion. The irony of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign a few years ago, is that the statue sits above an arch in a College quad, so most people in Oxford have never seen it, and never will. As for another legacy of this deeply controversial man, Rhodes House remains standing and anyone in Oxford can walk past it, but no use the library as it is not open to the public. They are not going to re-name it Mandela House, or even worse, Empire House, even though that is what the library collection consists of. Rhodes may have been a shit, but history is crowded with clever people whose legacy is a stunning achievement in one field -consider Wagner and Opera- while they themselves were in simple terms, people with horrible, nasty views.

In the US, one asks why people defend as 'our monuments' the Confederate Generals and Politicians who by definition attacked the United States from which they had seceded. Whats 'patriotism' is on show here? This anxiety, that a new generation is re-defining the past, the present and the future, is merely a re-run of what we have experienced for millenia. On one level it is generating a needless hysteria when we could instead have a good natured argument about really serious things, like the definition of poverty. One wonders if the true legacy of slavery for those ranting and raving against the campaigns to excavate the 'reality' is to argue it would have been better for all had slavery never happened -and suggest on this basis that Black Americans 'go back' to Africa.

Words matter, and how we use language literally defines us. I think we have a responsibilty to respect it, but in an age when social media cannot be controlled, and probably ought not to be controlled (Margaret Hodge MP wants a law to make anonymous ID's illegal on social media platforms), we have a torrent of sickening abuse --would it not be best to just ignore it? Or does it begin to threaten our way of life when the President of the USA re-tweets QAnon tweets 150 times while claiming not to know who they are? But there are ways of preventing idiots like Trump from entering public office, such as electoral and party reform, we don't need to drag him to a bonfire, and often, is it not the case that unreasonable people condemn themselves when they speak?

Two articles to take this into the realm where, in the US, transgendered people are being expoited for political purposes by those devotees of the Trump 'Republican' Party for whom Biology is Religion rather than science, for whom 'trans' issues are woven into the 'woke' 'liberal' 'anti-family' policies of 'the left' -as if to be transgendered meant automatically losing one's citizenship. The other a coser look at the problems in the Tavistock Clinic in London.

There are no easy solutions here, and one now can only hope that transgendered people of whatever age are at least treated with respect, hard as it is for some.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...are-ban-minors

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56539466