|
Frank
|
The last dozen years or so have sponsored a rapid succession of social manias. A sudden fetishisation of once vanishingly rare transsexualism. An explosion of female resentment over sexual harassment. Unquestioned mass imprisonment of the healthy during the pandemic. International foaming at the mouth over racism during a period that’s never been less prejudiced. Berserk prophesies of “climate breakdown”, after the average global temperature rose roughly 1.1 degree Celsius over 150 years. Widespread trooping about the streets of nearly every major city, as throngs declared fealty to a terrorist organisation that freely admits its ambitions are genocidal. Good grief, what’s next?
Yet during this febrile period, the West’s arts and arts establishments have hardly covered themselves in glory. In times past, artists by reputation were mavericks and outsiders – visionaries who sometimes paid a price for the trespass of their daring ideas. They were rule breakers who challenged authority and pushed back against social consensus. Not any more. For how did the arts respond to the above hysterias? If anything, they made the hysterias worse.
As programatically as they’d previously inserted gay characters, television promptly began slotting trans characters into scripts (Orange is the New Black, Transparent, Designated Survivor, to name a few). Writers of children’s and young adult fiction have eagerly fed right-on educators’ appetite for books celebrating dissatisfaction with one’s sex (My Princess Boy, Growing Up Trans, If I was Your Girl – but don’t go looking for I Cut Off my Willy and It was a Bad Idea). Fashion designers and retailers began using models who were either conspicuously trans or whose sex was obscure. ...
Fiction and film love a good plague. But why haven’t scriptwriters ever inverted the standard zombie scenario? A relatively mild virus triggers a wild political over-reaction in an easily terrified population unaccustomed to threat. A vaccine is developed in undue haste, preventing thorough testing and tempting evil corporations to make a killing. This ostensible prophylactic is then forced upon the entire human race. Lo, the vaccine turns everyone into zombies. Having risked pariah status, only the few libertarian holdouts who refused to have a chancy substance injected in their bloodstreams now preserve a fragile future for humanity.
Rather than a raft of children’s and young adult fiction about underage protagonists concluding they’d prefer to be the opposite sex, how about a truly imaginative storybook, in which the rage for transgenderism continues to spread? Until all the women and girls decide they’d rather be male, and all the men and boys decide they’d rather be female. Alas, this worldwide Changing Places leaves most born-again males and females incapable of reproducing, often in chronic pain and unable to enjoy sex. Within three generations, the human race dies out. But that’s all right, because at least before they expired everyone was their authentic selves. Lionel Shriver
|