Emergency Brake

then emergency exit

Give me five minutes to sum up a century, and to show where it leaves us.

Taylor Lorenz interviewing Chaya Raichik is an instant classic of anthropological fieldwork, and it tells us far more about the interviewer and the culture she represents than it tells us about the interviewee. I warn you that watching the whole thing rewards Taylor Lorenz with a click, but just look at the thumbnail to get started:

To get the whole flavor in condensed form, click here to watch an extraordinary five-minute excerpt. They’re talking about graphic sexual materials in schools, and Chaya Raichik shows batshit cat lady some of the images that are at the center of the debate. Then she asks batshit if she thinks it’s reasonable to show those pictures — graphic pictures of anal sex — to young children.

Batshit’s answer, around the 4:22 mark, takes a century of cultural decline and neatly distills it into a few seconds of lunatic babbling:

I guess…I don’t know. I don’t know. Because — you know who I would defer to on that, just because neither of us are sex educators? I would defer that question to a qualified professional, a sex educator, and say hey, you’re an expert, you’ve treated tons, you know, you’ve educated tons of people, you’re a full-time sex educator, you’ve really studied this. What are the appropriate boundaries? I don’t think that myself, as a journalist, or a media personality, I don’t think I’m the right one to make that decision. And I guess I’m wondering why you….I’m wondering why you feel like you’re qualified to be a sex educator when you have no background in that.

Should we sodomize kittens? Should old men recruit toddlers for dildo play? Should you invite middle-schoolers you meet on the street to your golden showers party in Vegas? Look, who can even say, right? I mean, do you even have a graduate degree in the field? There are simply no questions about appropriateness or decency or propriety that you can even begin to think about until the committee approves your dissertation. Bend over and defer, because you don’t have the credentials to understand the question.

Fuck these people, and fuck the hole they’ve dug. Chaya Raichik’s response: “I don’t want to be a sex educator — I just don’t want to give kids porn in school.” Of course. You know right and wrong, and the babbling idiot asking if you’re a credentialed sex educator knows it too. Leave children alone, scumbags, and stop pretending it’s complicated.

Remember that Christopher Lasch wrote about the displacement of family functions by the “helping professions,” starting with the Progressive Era, and remember what Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote about bread, discussed in the middle of this post. The long descent into rule by experts is a project of cultural disempowerment, in which you — you personally — are being gaslit into abandoning your own eyes and your own mind.

Q: Should we show graphic sexual pictures to very young children at school?

A: Well, I don’t know, what are your credentials?

No more of this. Not another second. No more.