Some of the Wokish opinion pieces being belched out of The Great Stupid are so outlandish they transcend being selected as Ethics Alarms “Unethical Quotes of the Month.” A truly deranged quote isn’t unethical so much as it is tragic, even one as brain-melting as this one, from “The Conversation,” a website which risibly claims to provide “academic rigor, journalistic flair.” Yeah, only academic rigor could produce an essay like “Pantry porn’ on TikTok and Instagram makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol.”
Here’s the ‘money quote’, the section that proves beyond all doubt that the only reason to take the time to read this precious, arrogant clap-trap is to gain insight into just how crazy the victim-obsessed Left has become:
What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.
The sentence is from a 1200 plus word essay in which the writer claims “research” has led to the conclusion that “influencers who produce pantry porn are predominantly white women who demonstrate what it looks like to maintain a ‘nice’ home by creating a new status symbol: the perfectly organized, fully stocked pantry.” Apparently photos or illustrations of impossibly neat shelves and closets like the one above are a variety of “porn.”
Wow.
Please reassure me that in a decade or so, the people who took this crap seriously will feel the way survivors of the Seventies do looking back on what they wore in that tasteless decade: Qiana shirts, leisure suits, bell-bottom jeans, head-to-toe plaid, shrink-tops, long side-burns and ascots (like Fred in “Scooby-Doo”). I am proud to say that I skipped most of those, but not enough. We see old photos and slap ourselves in the forehead, exclaiming, “What was the matter with us???”
I’m hoping The Great Stupid and contrived woke idiocy like finding “pro-niceness” racist will eventually follow the same path.
But I have my doubts…
________________
Pointer: siegalwriter
Are there pictures of you somewhere rocking a plaid leisure suit and a white-fro?
At what point will a majority of “POC” individuals say ENOUGH of this crap? Enough of the woke pretending to care while claiming it’s racist to expect POC to register to vote without handholding, do math, follow the law, show up on time to work, have a strong work ethic, interact positively with those who don’t look like them, or keep a neat tidy pantry. At what point will POC squawk about lowered standards for medical, engineering, and law schools deemed necessary by woke libs who think coddling is helping, without realizing THEY are the racist ones to suggest that POC can’t compete on a tough playing field.
Is this any example of AI generating articles? Maybe? Hopefully?
jvb
Fear not. After receiving a single comment that rejected the accusation of racism in the article, The Conversation took appropriate action regarding the article.
“community standards”
This is simply the culmination of something dating back at least to the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. Foundational feminist books like “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan assume as fact that anything appearing in a women’s magazine, or an advertisement of any sort, immediately and irrefutably creates self-destructive behavior in women. I think this goofy assumption has become a Ph.D. thesis generator. All an aspiring academic needs to do is find something going on in media, allege it is causing powerless women to do all sorts of stupid things, and you’ve got yourself a publishable article or even an entire graduate level thesis. Women’s magazines are evidently more powerful and addictive than heroin or fentanyl. And more dangerous.
I have to ask the question, and I don’t have the tact to ask it any nice way. But if someone is seeing the TikTok videos of neat and organized pantries as “racism”, is it possible that someone, to put it delicately, comes from a demographic where slovenliness is so present that it is somehow perceived as cultural? Yes, I understand that the perpetually offended are always on the prowl for something by which they can take offense. Yes, I understand that when the only tool one has to engage in the culture is to level accusations of racism, then everything becomes racist. So this may not be the case. But I have to ask the question. If having an neat, organized pantry is seen as somehow racist, the person making the accusation must at least have a disorganized pantry that is not well-stocked. And surely this person must be looking around at similar pantries and also seeing them disorganized. And then, because these pantries all seem to belong to people in a certain demographic, somehow it clicks that assailing disorganized pantries must be assailing that demographic?
Or, to cast this another way, does the author of this accusation of racism not realize that, by claiming organized pantries are racist, it must mean that disorganized pantries are then to be identified with a certain demographic? And to follow these to utmost extreme, does that mean that my slovenly-kept pantry is cultural appropriation?