Conservative Men.

The Claremont Conservative is one of my favorite blogs. Ever.

I’m serious. The lead writer, Charles Johnson, remains one of my longstanding fascinations. I hang–no, I cling to his every word. I enjoy his musings on The Student Life newspaper, bias-related incidents, and his recent work to ensure every CMC freshman has the right to personal automotive transportation. He even had a delightful exchange with Zoe Yang and her Asian detractors during the G. I. sex fetish debacle last year, and he shared my opinions on the matter more or less exactly.

But most of all, I just enjoy him, the image of him, the idea of him. I squawk at his woefully under-read formulations on gender yet love him for being woefully under-read. There exists a base, carnal pleasure in tying into traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, a pleasure even more enthralling after reading heaps and heaps of Butler (sorry, Judith. I love you to death but I welcomed your work on an airplane for its soporific effects as well as for its delicious content). This, I believe, was what Ms. Yang was “tapping” into during her fantastical roleplays with her “Nam vet;” the “masculine” soldier claiming his “object” in the visceral act of fornicating. Perhaps this drive to maintain classical notions of masculinity and femininity illuminates Mr. Johnson’s leap to Yang’s defense as an individual writer responsible for her own ideas.

Subjects and objects make for good sex, as anyone with half a brain could tell you, and conservative men, it appears, understand that far more than the objects they conquer. One of Johnson’s favorite professors, Charles Kesler, articulates his views on gender thusly:

Women and men are different in certain ways. I mean, they’re equally human beings, deserving of the kind of rights that human beings are possessed of…though it was always understood that they were beings of equal worth, they were beings of a different fate, because nature had made them different…the attempt to liberate women from femininity, and also to liberate men from masculinity, has been the source of great unhappiness.

Though I agree with Butler and Wittig on just about everything they say, I’m not going to work to undo gender unless theorists find some way to promise me that sex without objects is good sex. As extremely nonsensical/idiotic that drivel from Kesler is, it remains, and probably always will remain, fucking sexy.

Though it will never be quite as sexy as the escalating conflict between Jewish men and goys. Or so I’ve heard.