What seems like a million years ago, after one of my divorces, I moved from a house I owned to an apartment I was renting, which came equipped with a built-in washer and dryer, which wasn’t just convenient, it was palliative. Nothing is more depressing post-divorced than being at a laundromat on a Sunday afternoon in a bathing suit and a sweater asking strangers if they have four quarters for a buck. At the entrance to the apartment complex, more to the point here, featured an indoor/outdoor pool/workout room, and sauna.
And that’s where I saw it.
This sign:
Pregnant persons should not spend more than 15 minutes in sauna.
Pregnant Persons? This was 1993, so even then, even among residential apartment management companies, the world was becoming a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place. I wasn’t thinking that back then. I thought it absurd, an abuse of language and biology, not to mention sanity — that we were unable to unequivocally say that only one of the two genders could get pregnant, without being tagged as politically incorrect misogynistic dolts.
In today’s light, 30 years later, you could see this sign as the work of a culturally prescient sauna sign-maker.
In the past few years, the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook are now accepting they/them/their as examples of singular and/or gender-neutral pronouns; the American Dialect Society, and who knew we had one of those, named “they” its word of the year in 2015.
The problem is that culturally prescient sauna sign-makers are not a key voting demographic.
Here’s James Carville:
“What went wrong is stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools, people see that. And it really has had a suppressive effect on all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a Woke detox center or something. We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries.”
Carville is loud and annoying, and it’s a good idea to separate correct pronoun usage from police brutality, but he may be on to something here about what Democrats are up against. A Hill-HarrisX poll earlier this year found that 20% of Republicans said being woke was a good thing, 39% said being woke is a bad thing, and 41% said being woke is neither, while 72% of them believed overall wokeness is stoking differences and causing social and political unrest.
The math seems to indicate that most Republicans are against all things woke, but don’t know what woke is.
Forget it, Jake, it’s America.
It reminds me of a conversation I had once with my rabbi about whether Jews believed in heaven.
“Barry,” he said, “ask two Jews that question, you’ll get three answers.”
Legislators, who couldn’t give you a definition of critical race theory if their racist forefathers’ lives depended on it, are still excising textbooks that speak too kindly of Betty Friedan and Malcolm X. And even though today’s GOP is largely made up of science-denying, women-as-chattel, Trump-worshipping oleaginous eunuchs, there are conservative Americans who aren’t insane who simply don’t want to be reminded by liberals that the Pilgrims were terrible Thanksgiving Day hosts and that three of the four guys on Mount Rushmore owned slaves.
Carville has company.
In “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle, who said he’s going to stop talking about his battle with the LGBTQQIP2SAA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit [2S], androgynous, and asexual) community — though not, evidently, going to stop talking about talking about it — brought up the rapper DaBaby to discuss, as well, progressives’ fascination with the easy outrage.
DaBaby shot and killed a nigga in Walmart in North Carolina. Nothing bad happened to his career. Do you see where I am going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a nigga, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.
This isn’t particularly funny — maybe it’s not supposed to be — and it’s also a pretty piss-poor parallel. Nevertheless, when someone as brilliantly hip as Chappelle (just ask him) and someone as politically savvy as Carville (just ask him) tell progressives to stop obsessing over the third person singular and to stop embracing every new outrage of every group, no matter how newly formed or grieved, they may be on to something.
“Gender is a fact. Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth.”
That isn’t from the always execrable Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert.
Chappelle said it.
I don’t know what’s style and what’s substance anymore — much less whether to concentrate on the offense or the reaction to the offense — but it’s enough to make Barry want to sit in the sauna for, at least, 20 minutes, with other persons.
Barry Friedman is a satirist in Tulsa, Okla., and a lot of people are saying he is doing some very good work there. He is author of at least four books, including “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me: A Comedian’s Memoir.” See barrysfriedman.com.
From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2022
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