As I was concluding in my last piece, before the interruption of a crummy birthday, if we are unwilling to have our realities dictated by others, then we also should find distaste in wanting to dictate the reality of others ourselves. What we like or what we prefer is rarely what truly is, and in a shared universe it really is pivotal that all participants accept that. So much of what gets charged as being fake news is only a matter of differing opinions. Any and every fantasy requires a suspension of disbelief, and the uplifting of any singular voice above others is no different, from cult leaders to tech entrepreneurs to Hollywood celebrities. They are all just people, in the same way that Jesus Christ likely got a woody every now and then. All born into this world as nihilists by default, and over the course of their existences wrestling their own angels for rent money equivalency through good days and bad before ultimately dying, the same as everybody else. Hardly respectable.
Yet everybody persists in indulging the most ingratiating myth, in placating fantasy and illusion, and in return everybody accepts influence from these myths and fantasies and illusions over themselves and their individual definitions of reality. Even with social media as the new religion, the online avatar proxies you create are voodoo dolls to be weaponized against you, granting full control over you. Influence is never give and take, just as survivors of fascism tend to be weary of permitting fascists to be relegated by degrees.
Let’s pretend that I suddenly declare myself to be a reincarnated slave, lynched on some forgotten plantation over the ass of the master’s wife proving a homing beacon for my line of sight. The modern, progressive mentality is to accept such a claim at face value, lest my freedom of religion and basic human rights to personal identity be infringed. But then I go and take things even further by insisting that I now have a claim to some financial restitution for my past lifetime of unchosen slavery. As no coin grows on trees, but rather is reappropriated, then the money for my restitution should need to come from somewhere. In this case, through federal payout, which would mean that public tax-monies paid by persons of diverse beliefs of their own must then be rendered unto me, for no other reason than to perpetuate this lie I have birthed. Rendered unto my personal delusions rather than to benefit the public trust of repairing assorted infrastructure concerns which respond to tangible needs well and beyond private quirks of what any singular voice may simply like or prefer. There is nothing sane about that, about obligating strangers to comply with my own fantasy. I should be free to see myself as a reincarnated slave, but it is ethically and morally wrong to insist that others oblige as well. Or else no standard of equality is actually at play in the situation. Artificial culture means catering to illusion over reality itself. From Terry Gilliam being attacked for jokingly suggesting that he identifies as a BLT, a biracial lesbian transsexual, to ulterior motives for the South American army of desperate immigrants, migrants and refugees trekking up to invade the USA. From the notion that fandom defines one’s character in any positive or meaningful way, to the inflamed insistence that people you have never met acknowledge you with the pronoun of your choosing. The world is not about you, or your favorite cult leader or tech entrepreneur or Hollywood celebrity. You can control your own experience here and how you react to it, but never the context or syntax of others. Were I to self-identify as a reincarnated slave, that would be no concern of yours. But were I to then make motions for restitution over such an ordeal, then you absolutely must cause me to bite a curb. I would do the same for you.
The truest worldviews are extraordinarily personal and private experiences. The profundity of one DMT trip touches more deeply than any mass-marketed thing or amplified voice or trending ideology. We can and must define the boundaries of reality for ourselves inside our own heads, but absolutely never for others, because that is fascism. For myself, I do not believe in necessary evils, although I obviously accept the necessity of virtue. Still, I also believe that one can exist beyond good and evil. And this can largely be done through simply not using or abusing others, as well as resisting the usage and abusage of myself by others. Ignore the lingerie. Consider that outward projections are not necessity, but rather in fact destructively detrimental.
If we can exist in a state beyond good and evil where good and evil co-exist and exist fully simultaneously, overlapping the way realities do, then might this translate to masculinity and femininity as well? In biological terms, it takes a man and a woman to create a life, and though science may find workarounds, replacing Fallopian tubes with test tubes or whatever, we cannot eternally count on science always playing savior, because if we examine science free from scrutiny we see that it rarely has thus far. Glaring sins of nukes and pharmaceuticals aside. Perhaps the root of many evils in the world is the lack of necessity we give to proving our own claims, wanting masks at face value even should our genitals be exposed.
I’ve never been attracted to males, but there have been chunks of my life where I have been made to feel androgynous or asexual, and I generally look as I feel. I am a far cry from joining the Prom Kings Union, but I get a lot of unwanted attention in public, married women grabbing my ass at the grocery store, lady bosses cornering me inside the walk-in cooler with ultimatums kinda stuff. Best friends not wanting to be buds anymore after their wives drunkenly lament not knowing me first, etc. I stopped going to bars because the exact same scenario kept happening over and over, where some girl would start buying me drinks, and after an hour or so her boyfriend would suddenly appear wanting to know why his girl was buying me so many drinks. I receive all the same hookups as pretty girls famously receive, deals at the cash register and all, even though I am consciously trying to avoid coercion or misunderstandings. I get so lonely, and I think those flashes increase with age, but I believe that by depriving myself, as did the Cathars through their concept of consalamentum, it amounts to a bloodless sacrifice in my ultimate favor, with the focus of a lightning rod. Without some fine and comely celestial body eclipsing the universe from my view, I can do more, and I can do more good. It can be no other way, because I understand that in interfering in the lives of others, in hoping to influence them and theirs, would I be inviting it upon my own. That is give and take.
In the quest for defining one’s own sexuality, should one consider bucking the trends as well as bucking the truths of nature’s physicality, your choice could be to either avoid the masculine and feminine altogether, whether to give the finger to the gods or to shake the (world-)tree hard enough to see what other options fall. Or, to go both ways, reclaiming the masculinity of old while equally embracing the femininity of the now. The first would appear to be a depressing path, while the latter would appear to drive everybody insane.
There are some people who take me as the second coming, and others who can view the same actions and take me as the antichrist. A singular act can be both tragic and beneficial. As noted by Oscar Wilde, Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. Also, people change, so which point along their current incarnation should they be judged or measured by, the imprisoned serial rapist life sentencer who finds god in captivity and elects to become a born-again pastafarian, or the young church-going mother in Houston who one morning snapped and drowned all 4 of her kids in the bathtub, one right after another? Not to say that either gender is particularly good or evil. Memories of walking back from work in my old chef coat, a car full of teen girls going by would call out to me like they wanted to rape me on the spot, “Hey Mr Depp you filming a movie here sexy boy?” The very next vehicle, a muddied pickup truck whose mulleted driver swerves halfway off the road just to call me a faggot at the top of his lungs (to which I’d always reply, YOU WISH). If the masses object so strongly to being recipients of the wrong labeling, then why entertain labels at all?
Why not reserve judgement and allow measuring of character to rest solely on accountable merits, on whatever waits to be revealed from underneath the costuming, instead of what we merely like or prefer? Because social media influencers may get unemployed? Or because what we want and desire to possess as defined by our dreams, our bias, politics and our lies, may not prove to hold any truthful correlation to who we really are or the actual abounding world? Nobody puts their money where their mouth is, but rather where they want their mouths to be.
I think, that you can just be you, and others pending on circumstances can take your actions or demeanor as either masculine or feminine or good or bad, and that’s aright. I say people will choose to see what they want, reason or logic or fetish be darned, which ideally should free you to just do as you do and let others carry on with the branding irons. If we can be beyond good and evil, then why not be beyond masculine and feminine as well? If it feels right and leaves nobody lied to or cheated or stolen from, that should be all that matters. Nuts to the details, the checklists, the purity tests and pledges of allegiance. This culture we find ourselves in gives a ridiculous level of weight to labels, to branding and packaging and distraction, beyond the magic of mere identifying words even, like naming a thing grants power over said thing. It’s a false power though, as testified by the millions of Muslims condemned for no other reason.
And, if that power is false then with all false things we honestly do not need it, this verbal agreement manifesting of unnecessarily further divides. Naming a child is nowhere near as important as who that child is under the brand. An angel-invested tech startup may have a hellacool name, but if it delivers jack and shit then not even the name will be remembered, come the wash. Proper society focuses on surface level over-classification because it is afraid to probe deeper, to examine what a thing truly is. Everything, 2-dimensional in value, which denies this whole other dimension that completes us. If we do not wish others to complete us, then we must do it ourselves, individually, and we must respect that others may not wish to be completed by us in turn. That is give and take. If you are outraged that others are not kneeling before your pipe-dreams, your make-believe identity and your edited reality, you are not being oppressed. You’re just being a cunt. Nobody needs to lie, cheat or steal, and absolutely nobody needs to ever kill anybody for any reason, but that doesn’t mean we all have to praise each other either. Body-positivity or not, there is nothing positive about demanding love.