Sexualizing Children & Drag Queens

There’s been so much said about drag queens, trans people, and children, and I don’t really want to detract from any of that. I’ll start with a short video of Free Talk Live’s Tiktok, where a former co-host got really upset about the drag queen thing.

@freetalklive

Free Talk Live’s Ian and Aria have a discussion with Conan about #Drag and dragqueens, and why anyone cares what other people do. #fyp #foryourpage #lgbtq🏳️‍🌈 #lgbtq

♬ original sound – Free Talk Live

Watching that episode, it repeatedly becomes clear that Conan doesn’t have any idea what happens at drag shows, nor is he interested in learning about what happens at drag shows. He has imagined the Worst Possible Thing happening, and he pretends that is what happens at drag shows, and then he becomes upset about it. This is not uncommon. From what I can tell, it is what most conservative people are doing in regard to drag shows, as no amount of telling them that drag shows aren’t inherently sexual gets through to them.

Drag shows and movies have a lot in common. There are definitely some highly sexualized movies, such as “I Spit On Your Grave” and “Jennifer’s Body.” There’s also that movie where Sharon Stone flashed the audience with her crotch, and the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin” has a plot that is entirely about sex and getting laid. However, the existence of these “adult movies” that are highly sexualized obviously doesn’t mean that movies are inherently sexual, and it would be absurd to make such an argument. Just because Jennifer’s Body exists doesn’t mean that The Brave Little Toaster is inherently sexual, and everyone knows this except Brother Jebediah, the most prudish of all Amish people.

Earlier today, I was tagged in a video on Twitter featuring the child drag queen pictured here, with the person who tagged me saying that I’m always asking for evidence of sexualized children, so there it was. While it’s a bit weird to think of this grown adult going around and searching the Internet for sexualized children, the video, of course, was posted to Twitter by LibsOfTikTok. For those who are unaware, LibsofTikTok scours the Internet for sexualized images and videos of children, and then posts them to Twitter. For some reason, this isn’t viewed as obsessive, crazy, and tremendously fucked up. Instead, there are about two million people following this, presumably to see the vast collection of softcore child pornography that they have put together. At least, that is what they allege is going on here. I’m not convinced this stuff is sexualized, and that’s the point of today’s article. However, if it is true that these pictures and videos are inherently sexual, then what we have here are 2 million people who shouldn’t be allowed within 500 feet of a school.

The teen pictured here isn’t wearing a particularly revealing outfit. During spring and summer, it is routine to see people of all ages wearing significantly less clothing than that, and, of course, there are child and teenage cheerleaders who deliberately make it a point to wear more revealing clothing than this. For that matter, the dancing wasn’t especially provocative either. The most revealing part of the outfit was the back, which had a few strings stretching across it, but I must have missed the memo where society decided that backs were sexy.

Different people are aroused by different things, though. There are plenty of people out there who can masturbate to pictures of feet, so what I call the “Can I masturbate to this?” test isn’t foolproof, but, as a general rule, one can find out if something is “sexualized” by asking the question of whether one can masturbate to it. James Joyce wrote many letters about how turned on he was by farts, but no rational person will suggest that farts are inherently sexual, just as no rational person would suggest that all movies are inherently sexual.

This raises the question, then, of what is sexualization? What is sexualized, if the image of the teen above is not sexualized? The answer, believe it or not, is that nothing outside of sex itself is actually sexualized. Even if the drag queen above was completely naked, it wouldn’t automatically be sexualized.

Pavlov’s Dog

“Pavlov’s Dog” is a phrase referring to an experiment conducted in the 19th century where a man rang a bell before he fed a dog. It didn’t take very long before the simple act of ringing the bell would excite the dog and cause the dog to salivate hungrily. The dog had come to associate the ringing bell with eating. This is a phenomenon called conditioning, and it’s extremely useful today for training dogs and for countless other purposes. I carry treats around constantly to reward my dog for good behavior, because psychology has shown that rewarding good behavior is a more effective way of training than rewarding bad behavior, and it is consistency in this that causes her to be very well-behaved.

While we may not like to think of ourselves as easily trained, the simple truth is that we are easily trained. In my early 20s, a friend of mine bought a new vehicle that dinged incessantly if the car was in gear and the driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. In time, to make the annoyance go away, the friend began putting on his seatbelt as soon as he sat down in his vehicle. Within a very short time, my friend had been trained to put on his seatbelt.

Little things like this are happening all the time to us, and most of the time it goes unnoticed, but governments around the world and shadowy, evil corporations are spending untold amounts of time and money figuring out exactly how to train us to be exactly what they want us to be. That, however, isn’t the purpose today’s article, so let’s return to the subject of nudity.

As I said, the teen could be completely naked and it wouldn’t be inherently sexual. Just as Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to associate the ringing bell with food, so have humans come to associate nudity with sex. Because everyone is clothed all the time, we have created a mystique around nudity, such that any nudity at all is exhilarating and feels forbidden to look at. This is why young kids are so excited when they stumble on their parents’ porn stash–even though they are too young to feel sexual arousal, they are looking at something that has been forbidden to them, and for that reason alone they like it.

As we get older, though, we begin to associate nudity with sex. We look at naked people when we masturbate. We get naked in order to masturbate. With few exceptions like showering, the only time we see naked people in person is when we’re about to have sex with them. Of course, orgasms cause the release of all sorts of fun chemicals that act as rewards to our brains, and we come to associate nudity with the pleasure of those chemicals.

Emotional Responsibility

With all this being the case, a person’s sexual arousal in response to a video of a person dancing is that person’s own responsibility. This is true of all emotions. Emotions are internal reactions to external stimuli, and no one has the power to make anyone feel anything. I don’t have the power to make someone angry; only they have that power.

Now, they may be reckless with that power. Indeed, most people are. Most people allow themselves to be readily and easily manipulated by giving strangers power over their emotions, but frivolously allowing other people to control my emotions is, again, my choice, even if it is a choice I’m making without realizing it. You can do whatever you want to try to elicit an angry response from me, but I and I alone have the power to make myself angry. This is true of all emotions. You can’t make me angry, sad, aroused, or happy. Only I can do these things. You have the same control over your emotions. No one can make you angry, sad, aroused, happy, or anything else unless you give them that power over you.

And if you give people the power to control your emotions, then you give people the power to control you. Control yourself and control your emotions. Don’t let other people control you. You alone determine how you feel in reaction to things. Just because you’re aroused doesn’t mean the video is sexualized.

How To Avoid Awful Decisions

While I should be returning to Free Talk Live this upcoming Monday, I used to do a fair bit of writing. Somewhere between working a full-time job and being able to express myself on radio, however, that mostly fell aside, except for a few things written here or there during special circumstances (like my bid for Cheshire County Sheriff).

For those who prefer to live instead of vigilantly watching a 24 hour-a-day news cycle whose chattering has little-to-no actual impact on their daily lives, the big news of the year (thus far) is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it’s important to discuss this topic. By a wide margin, the response people most desire to see from the United States and its European allies are sanctions against Russia–sanctions that I am against, because sanctions are not an alternative to war; sanctions are a prelude to war.

Let’s stop for a moment and consider sanctions. The stated goal of sanctions, as confirmed by even the most double-talking statist, is to squeeze the people of a nation such that they pressure their government to change course. Already, we see a strong reason that any rational person should condemn the use of sanctions: rather than punishing the people who are responsible for the transgression, sanctions deliberately seek to punish people who are innocent bystanders. 

Before anyone reading can spout off with silly platitudes about all governments ultimately requiring the consent of their people in order to take action, let’s rewind to the United States in 2003, and re-evaluate how much it actually mattered whether you or anyone else wanted war with Iraq. We can also go back further, to World War 2, when FDR won re-election by campaigning on how he had “kept the United States out of World War 2”, only to almost immediately involve the United States in World War 2.

We can’t evaluate the past too closely yet, but we will be doing so, because I have no doubt that people are out there, shaking their heads (if not closing this tab) and mumbling “Japan dragged the U.S. into World War 2, not FDR!” or some nonsense like that. We’ll revisit this shortly, because the attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t happen in a vacuum, and neither did the Russian attack on Ukraine.

Back to sanctions, though. I oppose sanctions because they, by definition, target and punish innocent bystanders. For obvious reasons, I oppose military intervention. Escalating a conflict to include more combatants has never made a war less destructive or deadly. The time has long passed (if it ever actually existed, and considerable historical evidence suggests it never existed) that wars were fought on battlefields between armies.

That is how we prefer to think of the Middle Ages, after all, and even more modern wars, such as the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. We imagine them as two armies neatly opposed to each other, ready to smash into one another with bows, swords, guns, and bayonets at the sound of a horn, trumpet, or the waving of flags. While things like that probably happened, the next part of the story rarely gets told. The victorious army went on to ransack the nearest village, looting its treasures, killing its men, and raping its women–punishing the innocent bystanders whose only “crime” was being extorted into paying the taxes with which kings paid their soldiers.

There was considerably less raping and looting in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, more recent conflicts paint a much bleaker picture of the human condition. World War 2, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the War in Iraq–these histories are written in the blood of the innocent as much as the guilty. If we could send the U.S. army into some barren field so that they could shoot at the Russian army, and the Russian army could return fire, until one or the both of them were destroyed, I would have no problem with it, because these members of the military volunteered for that idiocy. I would object to it no more than I object to boxing or MMA. If someone wants to enter an arena and beat the hell out of someone else, and all parties consent to it, then have a good time. If they knowingly agree that death is a possible (even likely) outcome, I still have no objection.

Let the stupid play their stupid games and win their stupid prizes.

War, however, is not equivalent to boxing. In boxing, both parties have consented. A quick look at the numbers shows that, for every member of a military that was killed, two civilians were murdered during World War 2. While World War 2 is garish for countless reasons, it remains one of the best examples we have of why war is so horrific–and it’s appropriate to think about today, with many calling a possible war with Russia “World War 3.”

So if I oppose war and I oppose sanctions, what do I think should be done?

I Don’t Know

I have no idea what “should” be done to end the situation peacefully. I can’t even begin to imagine scenarios where the situation could be ended peacefully. But, and I can’t stress this point enough, I don’t have to have a working solution to point out that your solution is immoral and ineffective.

This seems to be what I encounter most online. “Oh, so you have no plan? You have no idea? And yet you want to criticize sanctions? Sanctions are the best plan we have, moron!” and things of that nature.

Let’s imagine this asinine, childish mindset in other circumstances.

My girlfriend and I are preparing to go out for the evening. She has suggested we go to the local gun range dressed as scarecrows with targets on our chest, and to then stand perfectly still in the area at which people will be shooting guns. Although it would be very easy to come up with better evening plans, let’s assume for a moment that I can’t think of anything else we could do. I don’t require an alternative to say, “That’s stupid, and I’m not doing it.”

Let’s imagine that my shed has caught on fire. Nearby, we have a 5-gallon jug of gasoline. That I don’t have a water hose handy doesn’t mean that my friend’s suggestion of throwing the 5-gallon jug of gasoline into the fire is a good one. Nor does it mean that my failure to suggest “calling the fire department” as an alternative means that we must throw gasoline on the fire.

It’s very easy to see how childish these arguments are. That, because I have no solution that isn’t “sanctions” or “war,” we must therefore go with a stupid, destructive, immoral option. “Doing nothing and coming up with a rational, effective plan” is a viable option. We may not have forever to delay before we come up with the idea of “calling the fire department” about a burning shed, but I can guarantee you that throwing a jug of gasoline onto the burning shed absolutely does not buy us more time in which to think.

This point must be beaten into the ground, because peoples lives are on the line here. We are watching a burning shed, and some of us are saying, “Give us more time to come up with a solution.”

Meanwhile, the hysterical are freaking out, and the only thing they can come up with is to throw gasoline on the shed, because “at least it’s doing something instead of standing around thinking!”

Yes, making the problem worse is definitely “doing something.” I can’t disagree with that. But if you are arguing that we must impose sanctions because we must act–now!–then you are simply saying we don’t have time to think of working solutions, and instead have to do the first thing that we come up with, which is throwing gasoline onto the fire.

American Hubris

If we woke up today, and “some country called Russia” had “invaded some country called Ukraine” and there was no historical context, no geopolitical maneuvering, and no subtle machinations, then things would be easier. However, as alluded to previously, these events, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, did not happen without context.

FDR had done everything in his power to manipulate Japan into attacking. Supplying Japan’s enemies with weapons and money, hitting Japan with embargoes… The United States may have been a non-combatant prior to Pearl Harbor, but it’s historically ignorant to suggest that the United States wasn’t on the side of the Allies. It unequivocally was, and was doing everything it could to avoid combat while taking part in the war. FDR did not keep the United States out of the war prior to Pearl Harbor; he merely kept the United States out of combat. This is not to say that I think the Japanese attack was justified; whether it was justified is irrelevant.

To properly understand the situation in Ukraine and Russia, we don’t even have to look back to the Cold War, to the 60s and 70s, or even to the 80s or 90s. Our task is much easier. We just have to look back to 4 years ago, under President Trump, and consider one very simple, oft-repeated phrase:

“… colluding with Russia.”

Language is important, and it reveals a lot without people really meaning it to. There are countless ways for me to describe hitting my hand on my desk. Here are just a few:

  • I accidentally smacked my knuckles on my desk.
  • I slapped my desk in excitement.
  • I banged my hand on the desk.
  • I drummed my hand on the desk.
  • I pounded the desk with my fist.

In all of these examples, I “hit my hand on my desk.” Yet each of these statements paints a very different picture than the others.

No one ever accused George W. Bush of “colluding” with Tony Blair. No one ever accused the United States of “colluding” with Mexico and Canada. “Colluding” isn’t something that one friend does with another. One colludes… with the enemy.

While “…with the enemy” isn’t part of the literal definition of “collusion,” “…with the enemy” is likely to be one of the most popular follow-ups to the word “collusion.” Even “conspiring” doesn’t have the adversarial implications, and this is why Trump was never accused of “conspiring” with the Russians, even though “conspiracy” is part of the definition of “collusion.” It was never an accident that the word “collusion” was used, over and over, without fail.

That reason is that the overwhelming majority of Americans–civilians, military, and politicians alike–consider Russia to be an adversary. Throughout my life of watching events play out, it has repeatedly struck me that Putin has described the United States as Russia’s “partners,” and I laugh at the notion that the average American would characterize Russia in such a fair way.

The United States looks down on Russia. Even if Americans did not consider Russia to be an enemy (which it does, at the very least unconsciously, hence the overwhelming reliance on the word “collusion” to describe anything Trump may or may not have done with Russia), they would never consider Russia to be an equal, just as they do not consider China to be an equal, and never will.

The United States has deeply embedded in its cultural zeitgeist “We are the best. Everything we do is just. We can do no wrong. We are better than everyone else.” When you add that arrogance and disgusting conceit to the reality that Americans also view Russia (and China, if we’re being honest) as enemies (or, in the case of China, at the very least a potential enemy), a situation was created between the United States and Russia that caused Ukraine to be the rope in a global tug-of-war.

So no, I don’t have a solution to what is happening in Ukraine right now. I will say, however, that the situation was almost entirely created by the United States being unwilling to treat Russia as an equal and as a partner, rather than as an enemy. Ukraine is, sadly, the one paying the price, rather than the politicians who created this mess. But that’s always the case, isn’t it?

It’s always the innocent bystander, and never the government, that is killed.