Mainstreaming Sodom

“Hitting the Road for Some Hot Man-on-Bike Action.”

A personal ad in the Village Voice? A travel article in the Advocate? In fact, it’s the title of a movie review in the New York Times, by A.O. Scott.

By the way, something that has never been written about, but that is evident to anyone with eyes, is the way the Times plants not-so-subtle—indeed, at times, quite unsettling and bizarre—homosexual images and messages in its headlines, photographs, captions, and so on. The other day there was a huge top-of-the-front-page photo of an American soldier and an Iraqi soldier on patrol in Iraq. You didn’t see either soldier’s face. All you saw was the boots of one of them, magnified to enormous size, and the other one napping at his feet. It was fantastically inappropriate as a photo for a newspaper, but would have made complete sense in, say, a collection of Robert Mapplethorpe photograghs.

This is parallel with the not-so-subliminal homosexual messages that have become common in tv advertisements in the last couple of years. Messages that are built into the cultural environment rather than made explicit—such as, as I mentioned the other day, the moral non-judgmentalism in referring to a mass murder as “tragic”—are the most pervasive and the hardest to notice and criticize. None of the social-conservative organizations or writers ever talks about these kinds of things. They implicitly accept the radical-liberal cultural environment in which we live, and only attack the most obvious aspects of it.

Here’s another typical Times message, from today’s paper:

Quotation of the Day
“A lot of folks wanted to get out, listen to the blues and fight and shoot.”
WILLIE SEABERRY, of Merigold, Miss., on how juke joints became popular.

Really? Juke joints were mainly places to fight and shoot, rather than places to socialize and dance? But that’s the way the Times wants to portray America. Day after day, the liberal media, led by the Times, pump out these negative, false images of America, without facing any criticism or opposition. It’s not a cultural war. It’s unresisted cultural domination.

- end of initial entry -

Ben W. writes:

You mention the subliminal messages often found in the New York Times. Television has become a vehicle for advocating multiculturalism. These days there are many ads showing multi-racial families—with such frequency that one would assume that these were the norm in American life.

As well, several companies have been using what appear to be ostensibly “gay” men to announce their products.

Their voices tell the story… Or accents that are quite pronouncedly Latino. Gone is the pure Anglo-Saxon announcer of the ‘50s.

A lot of television commercials have become little social vignettes. There is the one with two lesbian looking girls sharing a moment over yogurt. Or the one with a single mom whose child is of another race.

Then there is the role reversal being enacted these days in ads. White males come across as bumbling fools and idiots while black men are made to appear sage and wise. One of my friends who is a medical doctor told me, “So many times you see a 50’ish black male as a doctor in pharmaceutical ads, with white hair and a distinguished beard, “seriously” dispensing medical advice. And yet black males form about 1% of the medical profession as doctors.”

Ads have also started “enumerating” what racial profiles appear. One never sees these days white kids playing with each other; there always has to be one of each race in a group. A Latino, a black, a white, a Hindu, an Oriental all playing ball together. As if this represented the demographic proportions of Americal life. Ah liberal idealization…

Laura W. writes:

The New York Times is positively prim compared to the Atlantic Monthly. I was stunned to read this. Don’t bother with the whole thing, it’s too tedious. The first paragraph gives you the drift, though it does get worse.

This isn’t even literary porn, just the real thing.

Laura did not send me the actual text, but here it is. I’m in a state of disbelief that this appeared in the Atlantic.

Books

She’s Just Not That Into You

Women prefer food to sex with their husbands—and that’s OK.
by Sandra Tsing Loh

I’d Rather Eat Chocolate
by Joan Sewell
Broadway Books

Here’s the next wild turn in the female sexual revolution. Goodness! we hear you wondering, half in excitement, half in alarm. Is it some hot new wave of Seattle girl-on-girl action? (Or is that “grrrl-on-grrrl”? Indeed, do we even have grrrls anymore—are they still in bisexual vogue, with their tattoos, piercings, perky magenta pigtails, and combat boots?) Or is the latest sex trend something America’s desperate housewives are doing? One pictures sleek gated communities in Scottsdale, Arizona, where randy Hot Moms—possibly the bored, blonde, ex-model wives of millionaire athletes—are defiantly throwing Chardonnay-soaked house parties involving dildos and Botox, where Botox is actually shot, into the forehead, from a dildo. Or can it be … octogenarian pole dancing? Or perhaps it’s a crunchy-granola California womyn’s thing involving shaving, much gentle shaving—shaving circles, in fact, that are starting in Esalen, during luxurious weekend retreats led by Gail Sheehy, who, unlike Nora Ephron, does not feel bad about her neck but at sixtysomething feels rather more like a delicious peach, laughingly sensual, newly juicy. Never mind the lubrication issues, the vaginal dryness some may experience: There are Vitamin E creams and aloe vera unguents for that. In fact, today’s young men report how surprised they are by how much they prefer older women. The sheer brazen confidence is refreshing; the blithe sensuality, the lack of inhibition, except about the neck, but that’s why there are turtlenecks. Turtlenecks and no pants—that’s the ticket! And lots of Pilates—nude, nude Pilates.

Ken Hechtman, a Canadian leftist, writes:

The technical term for what you’re talking about is “homo-erotic subtext.” It’s a well-known literary/artistic technique. My brother is a stage director, he uses it all the time. Ideally it’s supposed to be more subtle than the movie review, about the same level as the Iraq photo. The object is to leave some of the audience laughing because they got the in-joke and the rest vaguely disturbed without quite knowing why. Either way they remember your work.

LA replies:

I notice that Mr. Hechtman makes it seem as if the main purpose of the homoerotic subtext is to make people remember the writer’s or the photographer’s work, rather than to disseminate and normalize the homosexual sensibility throughout the society, making it impossible to oppose it. It is hard for leftists, even those as honest and informative as Mr. Hechtman, to be entirely straightforward about what the left is really about.

Mr. Hechtman replies:

For the kind of people who use homo-erotic subtext in their work, homosexuality is already (to them) normal and (in their circles) well-disseminated. If the audience gets it, fine. If they don’t get it, also fine.

Deliberately selling homosexuality to the mainstream is something else again and it’s done differently. You make it fun and colorful and over the top. Subtlety goes out the window here. You make it something young urban parents want to bring their kids to see. This is how my brother does that.

One of the events in his theater festival is the Drag Races. That’s “drag” as in “drag queens”. He gets all the big name drag queens in the city to run an obstacle course in a city park, with the major makeup labels like Avon and Maybelline putting up the money. After 5 years it’s become a huge neighborhood event. Last summer you couldn’t have fit another spectator into the Parc des Ameriques with grease and a crowbar.

LA replies:

Leaving aside the repellant nature of what Mr. Hechtman’s brother is doing with the support of the Canadian public and of families with children (earning Canada a rain of sulphur and brimstone from heaven, except that that’s not the way it will happen, it will happen through the steady decay of the society and its takeover by Muslims), Mr. Hechtman originally wrote:

The technical term for what you’re talking about is “homo-erotic subtext”. It’s a well-known literary/artistic technique. My brother is a stage director, he uses it all the time. Ideally it’s supposed to be more subtle than the movie review, about the same level as the Iraq photo. The object is to leave some of the audience laughing because they got the in-joke and the rest vaguely disturbed without quite knowing why. Either way they remember your work.

So he was saying that the homo-erotic subtext is directed both at the “in-group” and at the general society.

But now he’s saying that the subtext is only directed at the in-group, and that when it comes to the general society, more open methods are used. But this contradicts Mr. Hechtman’s own comment about leaving people “vaguely disturbed” and glosses over the subtext methods used in tv ads, NY Times photos, etc., as I discussed.

KH replies:

I’m saying they’re different techniques, used at different times to produce different effects. You want to make the straights cringe, there’s a way to do that. You want to to make them laugh and bring their kids, there’s a way to do that too, but it’s different. So it has to be done in a different time and place.

LA replies:

Cringe, laugh; but there’s another way, of planting perverse images and notions in the environment and insensibly removing people’s ability to notice and criticize them. And even the cringe method accomplishes the same: people recoil, but the society gives them no material with which to explain or justify the recoil, so they end up accepting the thing that made them recoil.

KH adds, about the juke joint “quote of the day”:

Tell you something else, a friend of mine is an old woman now, but she was a young girl in the 1950s, in the golden age of the Chicago blues scene. She was the only white person in the blues clubs she hung out in, but that wasn’t her problem. What put her off was that she was the only one without prison tattoos and knife scars on her face.

The blues come out of a criminal subculture. Like it, don’t like it, but that’s the way it is.

LA replies:

The black juke joint described in the article is a bit rawer than what I was thinking of, with strippers and all. I was just thinking of bars with juke boxes where people danced, the kind I used to hang out in when I was in college. No shooting, no fighting, no strippers.

And by the way, the club owner quoted in the article says his own place does not have shooting and fighting; so it seems he was engaged in a bit of rhetoric. So why did the Times make that its quote of the day? It backs up my point that they want America to seem worse than it is.

Ben W. writes:

Concerning the discussion of subliminal messages and sub-texts, the purpose of all these techniques is to “normalize” the variety of “cultures” and “orientations” as if they significantly represented a “valid” proportion of the social landscape. This is to acclimate the populace in making “familiar” what used to be “strange.”

A reader writes:

I’ve got to add to the discussion on how liberals subtly push their multi-culti agenda.

At the Atlanta airport, there is a large set of escalators that all travelers must use as they leave the terminals to reach baggage claim/ground transportation. As you’re climbing these escalators, there is a giant mural on the wall in front of you that reads something like “Welcome to Atlanta,” with scenes of the city and lots of people. I tell you, there is hardly any white people on this mural. Looking at it, I’ve thought to myself, “Did I just land in an African city?” The most prominent figure is a black person with arms outstretched in a welcoming gesture. You can see the mural here, called “Spirit of Atlanta,” on the airport’s website.

The most disturbing figure on the mural is a toddler on the right, who is crouching down and appears naked except for maybe a diaper, with a mass of wild curly hair. The kid looks like a savage. And this is what the city chose to create a first impression on travelers to Atlanta. Frightening.

LA replies:

Doesn’t sound subtle to me!

Subtlety is part of the left’s tactics, but is not the key thing. The key thing is the planting of anti-cultural or sexually perverse images in the midst of ordinary people’s ordinary experience of life so that there is no way of saying no to them without resisting one’s entire social and cultural environment. The Atlanta airport murals are a typical example. People are arriving at the airport of a modern city, an airport and a city that are the product of modern Western freedom, order, and technology. And what are the dominating symbols of this airport? A series of murals conveying Afro-centric multiculturalism, black magic, things like that, things that are the contrary of what made that airport possible.

Stephen F. writes:

The cover of the Valentine’s Day issue of the New Yorker portrays all sorts of “diverse” love interests among people riding the subway. The black woman with the baby is interested in the blind white man with the guide dog, the priest is having gay thoughts about the man across him, etc. The “heterosexual” scenarios tend to make the men look bad.

It is interesting that Mr. Hechtman reveals that the “homo-erotic subtext” is an established, taught, and consciously-used technique. I wonder how many other such techniques are well-known in the media and the arts.

When these concepts become prominent they also become self-fulfilling. For instance, a college English class will teach students about cultural hegemony, construction of gender identity, the falseness of transcendent values, the ubiquitousness of invisible white “privilege,” and so forth, and will demonstrate these concepts by having students read and analyze books and films created by artists who were schooled in these very ideas!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 02, 2007 07:36 AM | Send