Perversity Is Our Strength!

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What is perversity? “A deliberate desire to behave in an unreasonable or unacceptable way,” says Oxford. “Sexual behavior that is considered strange or unpleasant to most people,” chimes in Cambridge. (Those British schoolboys should know.)

The slogan “diversity is our strength,” which is rapidly becoming the new Pledge of Allegiance, perversely demands that we celebrate not just diversity, but perversity as well. Unreasonable and unacceptable behavior is becoming our new norm, and those who proudly identify with and celebrate strange and unpleasant sexual acts are our new idols.

But even without the outright perversity, mandatory diversity is already perverse. In the new False Flag Weekly News, Cat McGuire cites Robert Putnam’s famous “bowling alone” research showing the more diverse a community, the less of a community it really is:

“Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

Obligatory disclaimer: I didn’t vote for Trump, and I harbor no personal distaste for diversity. I like spicy ethic cuisine, world music (especially African and Middle Eastern), and people who speak more than one language. I spent more than a dozen years in San Francisco in the 1980s and 1990s and lived in the heart of the famously gay Castro neighborhood for a full year, committing no sodomy but otherwise fully participating in the life of that unusually lively neighborhood. I had homosexual friends, some who identified with the subculture and others who didn’t. I even had a tranny friend before trannies were a thing. The majority of my non-Castro-dwelling San Francisco years were spent in black (Fillmore) and hispanic (Mission) neighborhoods. I also spent a lot of time among the Pacific Islanders and Filipinos of Visitacion Valley. Admittedly my favorite neighborhoods were the Outer Sunset and Outer Richmond—but not because they were majority-white, but because they were by the beach and I enjoyed body surfing.

More disclaimers: When I lived in Paris in 1988-1989, I mostly hung around with “diverse” folks: Arabs, Africans, Greeks, and Portuguese people, roughly in that order. I played on the University of Paris 8 basketball team and I can tell you that in that particular instance, diversity was our strength. Our motley array of Cameroonians, Malians, Moroccans, Algerians, and a very good black kid from New York, along with me at starting center (don’t laugh) easily won our division, trouncing the lilly-white native French kids of the Ecoles Polytechniques and no doubt pissing off les racistes.

And of course (final disclaimer) I am a Muslim convert, married to a Moroccan Muslim, and in the process of moving to Morocco—an admirably diverse society, in a good way.

But despite my personal predilection for diversity, as a card-carrying member of the reality-based community I am forced to admit that…well, I’m weird! I’ve led an unusual life. Most people are more comfortable among their own kind. Trying to make everyone share my tastes would be…perverse.

And that’s what I really dislike about LGBTQXYZ idolatry: These people are weird, and by being coercively normalized they are being deprived of the right to be weird, just as normal people are being deprived of the right to be normal.

John Waters (the notorious oddball filmmaker not the wise Irish pundit) spent the early 1970s waging a cinematic war on normalcy. Waters and his stable of freaks, including the grossly overweight gender-dubious starlets Divine and Edith Massey, produced three magnificently perverse encomiums to filth and depravity: Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, and Female Trouble. Waters’ films deliberately set out to be perverse, and succeeded. They used shock value to force us to really think about, and to viscerally confront, values and esthetics. By displaying exaggerated bad taste and perversity, they implicitly questioned—yet to a certain extent reinforced—good taste and normalcy.

Waters sympathized with the perverse, but he didn’t endorse it, much less normalize it. He perversely amused himself by attending trials of the most vile and depraved criminals, empathizing with them to a degree as fellow suffering human beings. But he certainly didn’t approve of their crimes.

Fifty years later, perversity is becoming the new normalcy. Today, if the 350-pound transvestite Divine said “I identify as a person who eats steaming-hot dog shit right out of the butt of a pooping poodle,” anybody who couldn’t keep a straight face would be immediately deplatformed. The way things are going, we’ll soon have to prostrate ourselves before people who identify as child molesters and serial killers (CMs and SKs).

And what makes all this especially galling is that the new arbiters of taste and convention have the unmitigated audacity, nay, the chutzpah, to tell us that we are the perverse ones! Don’t like “gay marriage” (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one)? What are you, some kind of freak? You think legitimate sexuality should be closely tethered to reproduction, as it always has been in almost all cultures? You’re obviously a complete weirdo. The rainbow flag’s mindless ubiquity makes you want to puke? Don’t tell me, you must be a straight white cisgendered male…pervert!

In his wonderfully overwrought essay “The Imp of the Perverse,” Edgar Allan Poe dissected the human tendency “to act, for the reason that we should not,” writing of “this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake.” The urge to violate norms and taboos, to perpetrate outrages against reason, to behave in abysmally self-destructive ways, Poe explains, is entirely natural.

Poe’s perverse imp was implicated in his creativity: imaginative confrontations with transgressions we are better off not committing in real life can be the stuff of masterpieces, as Dostoevsky so brilliantly demonstrated. Submitting established norms to occasional carnivalesque interrogation, as in Waters’ movies, is not necessarily a bad thing. But bombastically, sanctimoniously, and nihilistically tearing down those norms, then offering deified deviance as their half-assed replacement, is a fool’s errand. If you want to spit on God and country and worship trannies, rip up the stars and stripes and fly a rainbow flag, and substitute filth for scripture, I suppose that is your prerogative. But it isn’t exactly a recipe for sustained sanity on an individual level, or for a viable society on a collective one.