The “Kiss”

Though many readers have sent me the link, I haven’t been inclined to post about, let alone to post the repulsive photo of, the famous lesbian kiss between two “female” “military” persons, one of them a “sailor” returning from an 80 day cruise. But Laura Wood has both posted the photo and commented on it, and her first point is the first one I would have made:

Notice the way this couple is imitating a man and woman, with the one on the left playing the dominant male and the other the submissive female. They are playing roles. This is theater. So why not be real women instead? Wouldn’t it make life simpler?

The answer to this question is that it is no longer acceptable to be a real man or a real woman. But it is acceptable to play a real man or a real woman.

Indeed, the “kiss” between the two “female” “sailors” (see how more and more of reality must be placed in scare quotes nowadays, as per Laura’s second point?) is a perverted copy of the sort of romantic kiss we remember from the World War II period, like the famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt of a sailor embracing (in the French sense of the word) a woman in Times Square on VJ Day:

Meanwhile, culturally approved “kisses” between “men” and “women” today all look something like this:

Actually this is not the most typical movie kiss today, because the woman, though above the man, is not very dominant, but you get the idea.

In any case, “women” are now dominant and above when they “kiss” “men,” and “women” are also dominant and above when they “kiss” “women.” Reality has been replaced by a perverted ideological game, a game played according to very precise and consistent rules. But perhaps because feminism and homosexualism seem so unreal, many mainstream “conservatives” continue to insist that feminism and homosexualism are nothing but a big joke, even as those movements have taken over our society, assuring that the guffawing “conservatives” have done nothing, and will continue to do nothing, to oppose that takeover.

- end of initial entry -

Max P. writes:

I got this story off a Drudge link. According to the L.A. Times blog, they are calling this the “kiss heard “round the world.” Two lesbians engaged in a public kiss upon the return the USS Oak HIll to San Diego. However, we now find out this event was staged, and worse, it was staged by our very own U.S. Navy:

Navy officials said it was the first time a same-sex couple was chosen to have the first kiss. The first-kiss is a Navy tradition for ships returning to port.

David Bauer, the commanding officer of the Oak Hill, said the crew’s reaction was positive when learning that Gaeta and Snell would have the first kiss. Before the kiss took place, he told AP: “It’s going to happen and the crew’s going to enjoy it.”

I guess what has disappointed me most is the degree to which the military readily accepts and then follows through on any order it receives. Yes, I understand the military is subordinate to the civilian leadership and must follow lawful orders. But I always believed that our military would act as a safeguard against any abuse a rogue civilian leadership might throw at us. Similar to how those in Turkey believe their military is the backbone to keeping a secularized government.

Now I am not suggesting that allowing gays is akin to the suspension of the Constitution. But, having been in the military, I always believed that if gays were allowed to serve we would see mass resignations. We have not, and given that the Navy has now arranged for this lesbian publicity photo, it makes me wonder how the military would protect us in a real crisis, for example, if the government ever decided to confiscate private firearms or suspend the Bill of Rights. In the past I’d assumed the red-blooded conservatives who make up our military would rather quit than take part in the repression of their own countrymen. But now I am not so sure. It appears they would probably follow through with extreme efficiency.

Brandon F. writes:

I read the article with that lesbian kiss. Supposedly all the sailors buy lottery tickets to win the first kiss off the boat. The she-male said she bought 50 and some may have bought some for her. Funny how a media person was there for the picture and the lesbians won by total random chance to make their scene. Brian J. Clark, the photographer, of the A.P. just happened to be there.

The president made it a point to post the photo.

Dimitri K. writes:

I completely agree with you that our culture has become completely “women above men.” That is especially well seen in love scenes in movies and posters. I also found out that very few people notice it or pay any attention to it. But my point is different.

Before, I attributed that fact to feminism, just like you do. But with time I changed my opinion. Now I think that it is not feminists who force that on culture, but rather audiences who eagerly accept and even want it. I especially noticed something about so-called technocrats, who pretend to be led by pure reason. I found that they actually like to submit. Diana West remarked in her book that there are no more adults in public life. I think its not a conspiracy; rather, in order to be a technocrat, you need to be somehow childish.

Therefore my (completely original) hypothesis is that the current state of affairs in the West is not due to the actions of feminists and other vocal groups, but rather to the complete control by technocrats over our society.

LA replies:

I don’t entirely follow your point. However, we should ask Jim Kalb what he thinks of it, since he is always saying that the result of liberal equal freedom is rule by technocracy. Maybe there’s a connection between your idea and his.

A female reader writes:

To Max P.:

I think that the reason that there have been no mass resignations in the military is that the changes have happened piecemeal over the course of several decades AND that “conservatism” has been redefined downward during that period of time.

When my ex-husband was in the Air Force in the late ’70s, they started letting females pilot the C-141 (a cargo plane). The male C-141 pilots were laughing because the Air Force had exempted the female pilots from training for emergencies in which there is a complete failure of the hydraulic systems while in flight. “I hope this means that the females will also be exempted from experiencing actual hydraulic failures, since they won’t be training for it!” But by the mid 1990s, all of these officers would have been eligible for retirement, assuming that they hadn’t left the Air Force years earlier after gaining enough experience to be hired by an airline.

I also remember seeing articles in the Stars and Stripes during that period in which the main obstacle to putting women on board ships appeared to be the extreme hostility toward the idea by the wives of Navy enlisted men. I think that surveys taken of the wives indicated that around two-thirds of the wives of higher-ranking enlisted men would urge their husbands to leave the Navy immediately if women were brought aboard ships. At the time, the Navy was very worried about this, as the Navy considers the senior enlisted men to be the backbone of the Navy. But when the event occurred, it looks as though most men in the Navy at the time managed to deal with the situation long enough to be eligible for a pension.

Between the women-in-combat issues and the Affirmative Action problems in the military, I wonder how many of the male veterans of the ’70s and ’80s encouraged their own sons to serve. It is no longer a good career for white people, and you would think that as the services become tolerant to every point of view OTHER than traditional Christianity, fewer and fewer men who consider themselves to be Christian conservatives would sign up. Maybe the economy is so bad, and so many men need help with student loans, etc., that they simply grit their teeth and put up with everything in order to have a career of some sort in these difficult times. I think that once a man has 12 or 14 years in the service, and a family to feed, it takes a lot of courage and integrity to quit at that point.

December 23

Jim Kalb replies to LA:

Good question! I say something vaguely relevant at Turnabout but don’t think I’ve written much of anything on the topic.

Anyway, I agree that feminism couldn’t have won if it were an alien force imposed on general tendencies that have nothing to do with it. It also seems to me that in some basic respects technocracy goes with feminization.

In general, men establish order, women make nice within an order someone else has made. In a technocracy, order is ready-made. It’s provided by experts, regulations, industrial-style processes, and a supposedly rational bureaucratic hierarchy. If that’s the idea, the masculine urge to establish and maintain order messes things up. It seems aggressive and disruptive, or maybe it carries the technocratic order too far and provides nothing to soften it.

So men aren’t what seem to be needed. Certainly they’re not what the people who run things want. What’s wanted is women to decorate the cubicles, remember people’s birthdays, do what’s asked of them, go along with the current demands of those in authority, etc. Hence the view that men are really just defective women who ought to straighten out their act. If you want things to go well, you put the women in charge.

That of course puts us back in childhood, with Mommy or Big Sister in the form of the state and its experts telling us what to do. It’s nice being a child though, with no responsibilities and someone to take care of you and toys to play with. The toys can even include video games with lots of slam-bang action if you like that sort of thing. So people don’t object too much.

Anyway, if you don’t like the situation, the experts and authorities and the whole media-soaked environment will tell you you’re wrong and there’s something wrong with you. So how can you possibly resist? If you see something that disturbs the picture, like the 1945 Times Square kiss taking place now, it’ll look like a disruptive violation of how things ought to be. So naturally people who make movies etc. don’t include that sort of thing.

Ken Hechtman writes:

Jim Kalb wrote:

“So naturally people who make movies etc. don’t include that sort of thing.”

I guess you didn’t see Watchmen.

When the Navy set up that shot last week, they weren’t imitating the Times Square Kiss, they were imitating Watchmen imitating the Times Square Kiss. Life imitates art imitating life….

December 24

Buck O. writes:

Is Ken Hechtman serious, in that he really believes that the United States Navy set up that shot to imitate a scene in a movie rather than the actual Times Square kiss? Or, does he mean that the United States Navy stood aside and let some modern liberal sailors on this particular ship control this event and stage it to mimic a lesbian movie scene rather than real life? If these two lesbians meant this as “art imitating art imitating life,” then their shallowness has surfaced. There was nothing sincere about this wholly staged and artifical “event.” After all, aren’t these two females acting and mimicking a man and a woman, which only in “art” can they be?

Pentheus writes:

VFR moves so fast these days, I almost missed this important thread. This is composed in haste, on the way out the door to the in-laws’ for an “unplugged” Christmas weekend, just to get something on this thread before it becomes “stale.”

Here is yet another illustration (as is the NZ lib Anglicans’ Christmas Mary billboard poster) that today’s PC lib-ism is incapable of creating any art of its own; it is all appropriation and parasitism. Remakes, re-imaginings, “deconstructions,” “interrogations,” etc. They cannot really celebrate anything but only seek cheap offensiveness. Note as well that in both cases these images were created by an ad agency, not even the product of some individually-motivated artist.

That this whole thing was set up and publicized by our own military, government and President just shows how far we are from the days of FDR and the works of the WPA artists. It is not merely that they throw the weight of the entire U.S. Government and military to support and promote homosexuals, it is that they think this is important at all, let alone one of their new, central obsessions.

Re Dimitri K. and Jim Kalb: technology, technocracy, feminism—This topic was discussed several years ago on VFR, with a similar comment by Mr. Kalb. This is not an either-or. The correct conception is that the dominant socio-political Weltgeist—the PC “Liberalism” today—is feminization. The self-conscious ideology of feminism is part effect and part cause, as is technology. It is not merely feminism per se, but the dominance of woman’s perspective, of female chauvinism, whether Gloria Steinem or even Laura Wood (sorry, Mrs. Wood) or our own dear mothers (sorry, Mom) of whatever political orientation.

The valorization of weakness and denigration of strength. Man bad, Woman good. Pity is a form of domination and feminization of its objects (e.g., strong black males as victims, Muslim jihadi fighters as victims) In technology: Industrial technology begins the process of increased comfort, but is still masculine. Marxism/Communism were masculine, their “feminism” masculinizing. See Ninotchka/Silk Stockings. Rosie the Riveter is a woman doing a man’s job; and they weren’t just playing dress-up. Post-industrial technology means everyone is an office worker, the man no more capable or necessary than any woman. Post-industrial leftism and feminism are female and anti-masculine. E.g., environmentalism: Mother Earth vs. evil machines; and female affirmative action and sexual harassment law dominating even the traditionally masculine workplace (factory, military).

This “Kiss” picture illustrates my thesis, that we do not live in “Black-Run America” but in “Female/LGBT-Run America.” This was a propaganda set-up. They chose to portray lesbians, of all the potential PC people and causes they could have used. Both white females, notably. Not a black man and woman, not a black man and white woman. And—N.B.—not two gay men; this too is quite revealing.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 22, 2011 08:27 PM | Send