Pointers; setters: picture the two relevant dog breeds . . . their images adorning the usual set of restroom doors. Men and boys are pointers; women and girls are setters. Get it?

Such humorous, quasi-vulgar noms les toilettes for sex-segregated restrooms were brought to mind this week, after the squabbles regarding urinals in New Hampshire’s Milford Middle School and Milford High School.

The regulations that the New Milford School District placed upon restroom and locker rooms in the New Hampshire public school were indeed bizarre, goofily bizarre, but entirely in accord with woke transgenderism. That they had to be rescinded, because of protest, is a good sign. But the premises of wokist demands are still held by most “earnest” people, and the consequences of those premises will keep resurfacing so long as they are held by people with some sort of power, legal, political, or “merely” cultural.
So this is what had been done:

1. urinals in boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms were covered over with black plastic garbage bags;
2. the number of students allowed in a restroom was limited to the number of stalls; and
3. physical ed. students were required to change in toilet stalls, not publicly by their lockers.

All this was protested. And the school board caved to the protests. But the threat of some new goofy policy was not removed.

What our pathetic post-moderns cannot accept is that sex is more important than “gender,” and hetero-normativity better served than the demands of the neurotic. They also do not see that sex is a Schelling Point issue on matters like who gets to use what public restroom, while “gender” is far too flapdoodlish to serve, and trying to make it do so causes huge problems, like the threat of rape and gross inefficiency of restroom use — and general “grossness.”

What is especially interesting are issues like modesty and shame, both huge drivers in all this. The trans “boys” apparently experienced shame, or at the very least modest repulsion, over actual boys using urinals. Hence the original complaint. This element is bad enough for boys and girls with members of their own sex (we’ve all seen Woody Allen discuss urinal etiquette), but add in members of the opposite sex pretending to be members of their sex, and the micro-social negotiations become quite difficult. Surely we can all sympathize.

Or pity. At least.

One thing the transgender crowd hasn’t accepted yet is that some men will game their new system.

Earnest transgenderists set up gender-segregated rather than sex-segregated bathrooms. They say it’s to honor and respect and acknowledge the dignity of trans boys and trans girls, trans men and trans women. But that’s not to say that all men who pretend to be women or all boys who pretend to be girls will be in earnest.

Cross-dressing transvestite men have long been a separate, quite distinct class from “transsexuals” (as we used to call them). For them, it’s about “the kinks” . . . it’s very sexual, and it’s not at all respectful. I say their behavior and comportment is parodic of women and disrespectful of members of the sex; it is indeed astoundingly sexist; and it is brinksmanship in this context.

Until the transgenderists can distinguish earnest from the malign gender-benders, the whole issue is, well, problematic.

Meanwhile, real pointers and setters — the canines — do their “business” outside. Is that where we’re headed?

twv

Though the ”Don’t Say Gay” political brouhaha in Florida is a serious matter, I confess to finding much of it rather funny. Why? One-word answer? Grooming.

So much for Twitter and the comedy. But what about the serious issue regarding the ”groomer” charge? Well, you can always count on Mr. David French for the loopiest quasi-conservative take:

You may not be aware, but right-wing media is swarming with allegations that anyone who, for example, opposes Florida’s House Bill 1557 (the bill misleadingly termed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by Democrats and many in the media) is either a “groomer” or in league with groomers. A groomer is a person who specifically targets and uses “manipulative behaviors” to gain access to victims. The rhetoric is absolutely omnipresent. It’s relentless.

David French, ”Against the ‘Groomer’ Smear” (Substack, April 5, 2022).

I’ve never liked the term “groomers,” which I first heard in the Pakistani/Brit context of Rotherham. Edward ”Jolly Heretic” Dutton used it in his book on the Finnish experience with Muslim men turning teenage Finnish girls into their whores. I had sort of got used to it by that point, but never completely. 

What we are dealing with appear to me to be two semi-distinct things:

1. The training of youngsters into a state of sexual willingness to fiddle around, sexually, sans parental chaperones and with a variety of partners some of whom might be adults, and

2. the training of youngsters into states of sexual willingness to specific sets of adult clientele.

The latter would be ‘grooming’ proper; the former, a looser form of ‘grooming.’ 

Interestingly, all instruction of youngsters into sexual relations — including No Sex Acts Until Married — is a kind of grooming. Note the word ‘groom’ as in ‘bride and groom.’

It seems to me that parents should want to control this kind of instruction more closely than they would on matters of, say, learning math or literature. And surely only the most servile fool of a parent would welcome paid agents of the state to encourage their youngsters to develop active sexual behavior before puberty, or orient themselves sexually towards adults rather than a special compeer of the opposite sex.

So I do not see any major problem using the term ‘grooming’ in the looser sense. Sure, grooming has been understood as the activity of training children to become sexually active with specific adults. But the more general activity, of training kids to be more generally accepting of specific adult panderings, propositions, flirtations and the like. Think of it like the normal case for schooling: while job training is usually used as a quite specific term for educating students to perform in a specific job, the usual instruction in schools is widely understood to be a more general form of a job training program — job training not for a specific job or industry but for ‘jobs and industry’ in general.

Sex education in First World countries seems to have become, to a shocking degree, a program of job training in that looser sense: educating youngsters to accept sexual partners and sexual positions that would formerly have been called perversions.

Sex education started out as a ”family planning” agenda — excused to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases — but morphed within recent memory to “gay acceptance,” and not only encompasses the encouragement not merely of something that hardly needs encouragement (namely masturbation) but also ‘trans gender’ sexual apery, all based on the half-baked pseudo-science of ‘gender theory.’

I am now a strong advocate for positive heteronormativity, and believe non-heterosexual people should be on board with this position too. Sure, I’m against negative heteronormativity. But my backing of positive heteronormativity has indeed been reinforced by my fear that the recent Norming of the Queer is going to produce a new reaction in the form of a strong, society-wide negative heteronormativity — that is, the kind of norming of heterosexuality that entails the persecution of homosexuals and bisexuals and the sexually weirder — queerer — yet.

twv

…a year ago on Facebook….

Much of today’s political tribal warfare strikes me as superficial and stupid, and my friends here on Fb and elsewhere no doubt often note that I sport no great respect for most participants, especially the movers at the top, but also anyone who is relentlessly partisan.

One reason is that I do not think very many people reason their way into their ideologies. Reason appears later in the filiation of ideas, as rationalization. And of course it does to some extent with me, too. But I read Jefferson, Locke, Nozick, Plato, Nietzsche, Peirce and a lot of political philosophy and economics and even sociology and anthropology in my teens before I adopted my current perspective. So my occasional gloating is rationalized on the excuse of past reason. (And in my defense I never have really stopped reading or reasoning.)

So what is really behind political ideological “identification”? It is “tribal,” yes, but more important is that it is sexual.

Usually I bring up the religious nature of political ideology, but a few of my friends may note that I not irregularly bring up sex.

Why?

Well — It is almost all about sex.

And honor.

Sexual honor is a main standard of hierarchy legitimation.

Which is why people take it all so personally. Why is Trump so awful? He is sexually icky! Why is he so great? He is just so tough and impressive! Sure, ideological discord sure looks like it should be seen as a technical policy matter — at least from a superificially reasonable perspective. But it is not. Because fundamentally it is really about sex, family, work, and honor, and the idealized styles of same.

It always has been, and probably always will be, about Our Sex versus Theirs. “We do sex right” while “They do sex wrong.”

And this is why leftism, hollowed out by the failure of so many socialist and technocratic programs, now is reduced to a husk of thought, obsessed with gender and trans activism and things like that. Because all the left really has left is the defense of non-heterosexual sexual activity and its lurking-in-the-background anti-natalism. Meanwhile, the right is on the verge of reviving a defense of full-blown heteronormativity. Wait for it, wait for it….

I find this rather funny. A comedy of ideas reduced to sex farce.

Time to read Tom Sharpe again.

N.B. A few weeks ago I read Sharpe’s latest
Wilt sequel. It was not very relevant to this subject, alas.
Perhaps The Gropes’ll be more relevant.