So, for the last month I’ve been intending to write an overview on Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex?. However, it’s such a theory-laden book and I'm terrified of getting something wrong, so there’s going to be a long delay.
Rather than leave you with nothing this month, I thought I’d do something fairly light and delve into some of the opinion pieces, images and infographics from the first week of the worst of all months - Pride Month.
Pride Month is an American cultural export designed to perpetuate the many myths regarding gay ‘identity’ in the service of narcissistic self-actualisation (the real American hegemonic ideology) whilst providing an opportunity for safe PR from governments, businesses and NGOs.
The cultural output during this month is usually a good read for where we are at in terms of sexual politics, a subject which is becoming increasingly intolerable and incoherent, and which I’m unfortunately professionally intertwined.
The most representative example of Pride weirdness I stumbled upon was trans actress Laverne Cox appearing in SodaStream’s Pride Month campaign. SodaStream is the Israel-based manufacturing company occasionally embroiled in controversy over firing Palestinian workers and an ongoing target for BDS efforts.
In the ad, Cox talks about how she always knew her life would “become a rainbow story”. We then shift into the SodaStream to a cartoony female child version of Cox being transformed into an adult superhero, who then attends a “LGBTQ+ rights” rally with someone holding a sign saying “Call Me They”. Superhero Cox also visits two men in the navy who hold hands after she fires a rainbow at them.
The ad ends with cartoon Cox receiving an award and a headline outlining the 2020 US Supreme Court decision on anti-discrimination protection, followed by the real Cox using a SodaStream and saying “Let’s change the world together, one rainbow at a time”.
At LifeHacker, owned by all things clickbait G/O Media, we get the instructional How to Tell If Your Company’s Pride Campaign Is Bullshit (and What to Do About It).
The article spruiks “Progressive Shopper” as a way to check whether your employer supports the wrong candidates. It then suggests proactive steps employers can take including “talking openly about the use of non-binary pronouns or normalizing the singular use of ‘they’” and hiring “a specialist to train workers on the fundamentals of LGBTQ inclusivity, ideally through in-person workshop”.
In more creative contributions, Xbox created a “Pride Controller” for the month showcasing the increasingly obscure array of Pride Flags on its wireless controller. Blue’s Clue’s had a virtual Pride Parade. Wall Street launched a LGBTQ exchange-traded fund for some reason.
In terms of capital ‘C’ content, the infographic below was doing the rounds online, exclaiming that “What People Think Pride Is” being rainbows and parades apparently, contrasted with what it is actually about including “validating intersections” and “gender euphoria”. I also recently learned the term “Fraysexual” from a tweet - one of the many increasing subcategorisations of desire and gender expression.
There were also the usual op-eds about “Cops at Pride” and “Kink at Pride”. The former frequently citing dodgy statistics about trans murder rates and the latter believing there is some clear dividing line between having a kink and a sexual orientation (there isn’t). Nobody who has strong views on these topics is in any way interesting.
You may ask: what does any of this have to do with fucking?
The answer of course is: nothing at all.
There is a continuing trend towards a cartoonish juvenilisation of LGBT cultural imagery. My only explanation is that this tracks with the Zoomer generation’s decreasing interest in sex, but increasing interest in LGBT identity.
Strap in though folks! We’ve still got three more weeks of this!