Milo Yiannopoulos has declared that “feminism is cancer”. He was banned from Twitter for encouraging the sexist and racist abuse of Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones. He is a leading proponent of the white nationalist “alt-right” movement, has advised neo-Nazi groups and has publicly suggested that sex with children can be OK (although he claims his comments were taken out of context). In the USA, this last revelation resulted in a cancellation of his book contract, the rescinding of an invitation to speak at the conservative CPAC conference and a resignation under pressure from his job as technology editor at the rightwing website, Breitbart.
But he’s touring Australia and has been invited to speak at Parliament House.
The invitation is from Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm – no doubt because in the flurry of dual citizenship scandals, no one’s bothered to pay him any attention for five entire minutes. Congratulations, David, you now have our attention – for providing a serious national political platform to a man who thinks Nazism is funny. Maybe the senator may wish to repeat some of Milo’s hilarious white supremacist schtick to Australia’s veteran community, Jewish community or the millions of Australians from families who emigrated to this country because the punchline to actual European Nazism wasn’t so jovial.
The attention-seeking senator isn’t the only white, desperate, feminist-fearing, rightwing crank fawning over Yiannopoulos’s visit. Touring the country with him are Andrew Bolt and the animated political corpse known as Mark Latham.
Yiannopoulos’s apologists insist that he can’t possibly be homophobic, racist or antisemitic because he claims some Jewish heritage and is married to a black man. Which sounds marvellously like claiming men married to women are never misogynists. Oh, please.
It’s interesting that for a man who has declared “feminism is cancer”, Yiannpoulos praises himself as “activating cells in unexpected places”, which is pretty much a perfect description of endometriosis. It’s a useful comparison. Cancer, of course, is powerful, terrifying and changes everything it touches. Whereas endometriosis is never lethal, just very painful and irritating.
It does compromise your quality of life, though. Just ask any remaining traditional Republicans obliged to watch Yiannopoulous and his ilk reduce the party of Abraham Lincolnand Teddy Roosevelt to little more than the host for a parasite comprised of unambiguous internet trolling. The supremacist behaviour for which Yiannopoulos agitates was unthinkable 10 years ago and yet today it’s pursuing a dogged conquest of what it means to be mainstream.
No group is more aware of this than feminists, who have borne the brunt of the campaign to harass, silence, bully, humiliate and intimidate women away from activist involvement in the project of social equality. How very cancerous of us to insist on a common morality in which disadvantage is righted, difference accommodated and gender stereotypes dissolved. It’s an agenda which has now liberated generations of men from destructive, cruel expectation that the performance of dominant masculinity depends on repressed human feelings, social isolation, vocational denial and high-risk competitions of often violent, dangerous physical activity.
It’s for this reason I’d like to see men protesting Yiannopoulos’s visit, especially those so vocal in their “wokeness”, so articulate in their feminist solidarity, so keen to insist they are our allies. Because while Yiannopoulos insists rape culture is a myth, that sexual consent is too difficult for men to understand and that women’s equality somehow turns men into sexually impotent mice – and, no, I am not making this up – he’s purporting ideas of masculinity that truly insult men. There has been some critical commentary from men, which is good but it’s not enough. As long as Yiannopoulous enjoys his platforms without active male protest, it’s his own warped ideas of what it means to be a man that are entering the public arena unchecked.
May I remind you that Yiannopoulos has lost a book contract, two jobs and a prominent speaking role and yet is still very much breathing. There are engines of power and influence who are still promoting his views and if they are not opposed with equal power, the influence of those views will spread and grow. Or is no one following political events in America?
So far, one federal senator has invited Yiannopoulos into our parliament; one former political leader and one mainstream media commentator are supporting him on tour. He claims Australia is his biggest fanbase outside the US. I’d love to know how many more Yiannopoulos may win over, before those men made of better values allow themselves to stand up and fight back.
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