American academic: I would make gender no more important than...

I posted recently on how determined liberals are to make our biological sex not matter. I want to give a second example of how they are campaigning for this. Here in Australia a campaign has been launched called "Buy a boy a Barbie" as part of the "No gender December" movement.

I looked up one of the "experts" behind the No Gender December campaign (she is an American academic) and her ideas are exactly what you might expect them to be - they are "reverse traditionalist". Dr Christia Spears Brown is an associate professor at the University of Kentucky’s Department of Psychology. In an interview about "gendered toys" she said this:

Some people think that boys and girls (and men and women) are so very different from each other that to ignore gender, we are ignoring a key part of who someone is. We think we can better understand someone if we factor in their gender. But the reality is quite different. Individual children naturally differ from one another...Knowing someone’s gender actually tells us very little about what that person is like and what they are good at.

So parents may think that raising kids without gender stereotypes limits their children, pushing them all into a beige world. Really though it is pushing unique, distinct individual children into a pink box or a blue box that is limiting. I don’t advocate gender-neutral kids. I think we should make gender irrelevant, because focusing too much on gender distracts us from focusing on our children’s individuality.

We really need to do away with the assumption that boys and girls are drastically different from one another...

This gets to the heart of the debate. She is right in one sense: traditionalists do believe that men and women are different and that to deny this, and to declare our biological sex irrelevant, is to ignore a key part of who someone is. We do not identify as "its" but as men and women.

Second, she is correct that the liberal view is that having our biological sex matter is limiting to the individual. Liberals often use terms like "prison" and "fetter" and "constraint" when talking about our biological sex.

She is also representative of the liberal view when she states that "we should make gender irrelevant". That is the liberal aim: to make our sex not matter.

Where she is wrong is in the idea that the existence of masculine and feminine essences (i.e. a quality or a principle within reality that men and women identify with and that connects us in our identity to larger, transcendent values) means that there cannot be overlap between men and women in some aspects of life.

Most people, I believe, have a sense at times of a deep gulf between the worlds inhabited by men and women (the men and women are from different planets experience). But we also have experiences of ways in which some men might have more in common with some women than with some other men. For instance, an artsy kind of man might share some attributes with artsy women that he does not share with a rougher kind of man. It is clear, too, that there are some men who "think emotionally" and some women who "think detached and analytically" - so it would not be a surprise to discover that there is some overlap when it comes to the scientific mapping of the male and female brain.

But the existence of this kind of overlap doesn't mean that our manhood or womanhood is not relevant to who we are, to our identity, to our social roles and life purposes, and to the virtues we strive to embody (and, for those of us with a religious view, to how we are made to glorify God).

Therefore, we cannot follow along with Dr Brown's liberal ideal of making our sex irrelevant, as when she declares that:

I would make gender no more important than height or hair color for guiding our assumptions about what children are like.

So I went and bought my boy a barbie

Hanna Lindholm's new video

Hanna Lindhom is a young Swedish woman with a talent for making political videos. In her first video she visited a Swedish University and asked students if they would accept her claims to identify as a man or as a Japanese person, or if they would accept her claim to be two metres tall. Many of the students felt that they must answer "yes" if that is how she defined herself.

She travelled to Budapest in Hungary to ask students there the same questions, but she wasn't taken seriously. So instead she asked the students to guess the ages of those claiming to be refugee children in Sweden ("unaccompanied minors"). The resulting video is really interesting, particularly at the end when the students give their opinions on Sweden's refugee policy (it's mostly in English).

The culture war continues

There was much distress on the left following the election of Donald Trump. But the reality is that the left is still happily pursuing the culture wars. Consider the issue of our biological sex, the fact of being male or female. For liberals, this fact is problematic. Let me briefly restate why:

1. Liberals assume that there is no objective truth that might guide or order our identity, purposes or roles in life.

2. Liberals assume that our dignity as humans rests instead on the freedom we have to autonomously choose our own identity and purposes.

3. Therefore, what matters is that we are able to freely self-determine who we are and what we do.

4. Therefore, predetermined roles, purposes or identities are looked on negatively as artificial constructs which limit or confine the individual. A left-liberal might add that these predetermined identities are designed to maintain the privilege of an oppressor group over those designated as the "other".

5. Our biological sex is predetermined. We don't get to choose whether we are male or female. Therefore, liberals believe that our biological sex has to be made not to matter. This can be done through social engineering to make sure that men and women choose the same life roles and have the same life outcomes. Or, more radically, it can be done by asserting that the "gender binary" (being male and female) is a social construct and that in reality we can express our own individual sexual identity ("gender diversity").

Liberals are serious about all this. They won't give up just because of a few electoral losses. For instance, in the news recently was a story that the Oxford University Student Union had distributed a leaflet pushing the use of the gender neutral pronoun "ze". The Student Union denied this:

We have not produced a leaflet implying that all students must use ‘ze’ pronouns to refer to others, or indeed to themselves. We believe the resources which are referred to within many of the articles could be support materials used by our student leaders and welfare representatives, which alongside other information and tips, reminds individuals of the importance of not assuming the pronouns of their peers while also aiming to normalise stating pronouns in introductions. Further to this, the assumptions made may in fact refer to a policy used with the Students’ Union Council, where it is asked (for accessibility and minuting purposes) that everyone who speaks states their name, college and pronouns. There is also a further possibility that our work and remit has been confused with the work of the wider University, whose Trans Policy and guidance does include a mention of neopronouns (pronoun sets like ‘ze/hir’, ‘ey/em/eirs’).

It's not exactly reassuring, is it? If you want to be in good standing with the Oxford University Student Union you have to start your presentations by stating your preferred pronouns. Even if most people get up and say they prefer "he" or "she," in doing so they will still be affirming the liberal idea that we get to choose our own sexual identity. It's a liberal win.

There have been other similar stories in the media lately which I will report on in coming days. I'd like to end by pointing out that the place for traditionalists to oppose these liberal measures is not in the details but at the liberal starting point (the assumptions that liberals begin with that I listed above).

We have to go back and assert, contrary to liberalism, that there are objective truths embedded within the biological/natural, social and spiritual aspects of reality which help to guide and order our identity and purposes so that we best fulfil who we are as men and women.

The Cairo bombing

The Coptic Cathedral in Cairo has been bombed, it is thought by the Muslim Brotherhood, leaving 25 dead.

It is a strange time to live through, when Christians in the Middle-East have been under attack by Muslims, and yet the mainline Christian churches are falling over themselves to promote Islamic immigration to the West.

Why would you want to set the scene for the same things to happen here?

I know that part of the answer is that the belief systems dominating the West make it seem as if this is a virtuous thing to do. But I can't help but think as well that some people are motivated by their feelings, and this means that what matters to them is their own feelings in the moment, rather than a sober assessment of what the policies they support might lead to in 10 or 20 or 30 years time.

In other words, if you feel right now that you aren't threatened by open borders, and you get a good feeling right now that you are acting selflessly and beneficially to help others, then that is what matters to someone who is motivated by his or her emotions.

The problem is that reality will eventually make itself felt. Eventually mass immigration will transform your own suburb, not just someone else's, so that you yourself become the outsider looking in. And at some point the same negative social consequences of mass immigration will emerge here just as they have elsewhere.

Politics shouldn't be about feelings in the moment. Politics has to be long-sighted, and this requires a healthy dose of prudence.

Merkel's cap

From Happy Acres:

Old Trotskyists never die - they become teachers for refugees

There has been some controversy here in Melbourne about a group of teachers who plan to wear political T-shirts to class tomorrow. The teachers want to close Australia's offshore detention centres, meaning in effect open borders for those arriving by boat.

The spokeswoman for the group is Lucy Honan. It turns out that she is a member of a Trotskyist group. In other words, she is not so much a Cultural Marxist as a real bona fide Marxist.



Lucy Honan addressing a Trotskyist meeting

The little Trotskyist groups get involved in left-wing campaigns in order to recruit people. That is their primary aim. They often squabble with each other in the process (Trotskyist turf wars). One of the Trotskyist groups, Socialist Alternative, complained in a letter that another Trotskyist group, Solidarity, had attended a Refugee Action Collective (RAC) demo simply to pick a fight:

We are writing to you to protest in the strongest terms possible about your behaviour towards our organisation.

Your inexcusable disruption of the RAC speak out on Tuesday 7 February in Melbourne, which prompted this letter, is but the latest example of your disgraceful activities. At this event, several of your members spent the whole time loudly abusing, pushing, shoving and even punching Socialist Alternative members.

In particular, the behaviour of Tom Orsag was so appalling – constantly and loudly abusing our members – that he was repeatedly asked by activists (not SA members) to stop it and show some respect for the scheduled speakers, who he was drowning out. When the crowd were chanting “Free Ismail”, and “No deportations” Orsag tried to get a chant going against Socialist Alternative. All of this is particularly reprehensible [w]hen put in the context of Solidarity member Chris Breen’s admission that Orsag had only come to the speak out in order to harass Socialist Alternative members.

One of our women members was repeatedly pushed, shoved and punched by three Solidarity members – Chris Breen, Lucy Honan and XYZ (XYZ being the one who punched her). David Glanz went out of his way to approach Mick Armstrong to abuse and harangue him, adding to the disruption to the speak out.

According to the letter, the Trotskyist women, including Lucy Honan, had a pushing, shoving, punching fight during the refugee demonstration. It's credible, as this sort of thing happened back in the mid 1980s, when I was at uni - some of the names of the activists are familiar to me from back then. (The Solidarity group wrote a response blaming the Socialist Alternative leadership for instigating the fighting. )

Anyway, the moral of the story is that the refugee issue, in this case, is being pushed by Marxist activists who hope, above all, to recruit people to their little Trotskyist groups through their activism.

Merkel's ugly old right-liberalism

Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, has announced that she is standing again for election, despite the unpopularity of her open borders policy. Merkel is the leader of the CDU, a party similar to the Liberal Party here in Australia. It is a "centre-right" party, meaning it is a party of right-liberals.

At Gates of Vienna, there is a video of Angela Merkel being interviewed about her strategy. She is asked by the reporter whether she is going to change course politically and move rightwards to neutralise the opposition there, or seek refuge in the social democratic left. Merkel answers:

No. I am seeking a solution where the CDU has always firmly stood. That is the social market economy, the liberal-democratic state of laws.

So her first response to the great issues facing Germany is that the solution lies with the market. The market rules. The second response is that the laws of the liberal state will be upheld.

These answers might seem strange but they aren't surprising for a right-liberal. All liberals believe that what matters is the individual pursuing their own self-defined aims and identities. Left-liberals focus on the idea that the state can intervene in society to ensure that predetermined qualities are made not to matter so that everyone is equally free to pursue self-defined aims. Right-liberals focus more on Economic Man, on the ideal of individuals being self-made in the market. That's why our own PM, Malcolm Turnbull, said in his acceptance speech that:

This will be a thoroughly Liberal Government. It will be a thoroughly Liberal Government committed to freedom, the individual and the market.

That is what seemed important to a right-liberal politician.

The problem, of course, is that this type of politics turns a nation of people with a real, historic connection to one another into a collection of atomised individuals inhabiting the same market place. Angela Merkel goes on to say in the interview:

There will be no returning to the times before digitization, before globalization. But we must give people the impression — not just the impression, but solve issues — so that they have stability...City and countryside, the elderly and young people, those who have recently arrived and those who have been living longer with us, questions of freedom of religion, of security, internal security...It is about answering these questions.

Look at what she has done. With a turn of phrase she has obliterated the existence of the German people. The Germans have been reduced to the status of "those who have been living longer with us". The facts of history, kinship, religion and culture are swept aside.

She is being intellectually honest in putting things this way, because it fits in with the political assumptions of right-liberals. She would be lying if she claimed to see people as being embodied within a distinct tradition and identity; in her view, there are no such people, only individuals inhabiting the liberal state and fulfilling themselves as actors within the market.

It makes for grim reading, I know. But a couple of things to help you stay positive. First, right-wing liberalism does seem to be changing, though it's difficult to say yet to what extent. As liberalism itself veers into ever more suicidal territory, there does seem to be something of a rethink happening on the liberal right. Stay posted for updates on this.

Second, the AfD (a patriotic German party) is still doing well in the polls and might make further inroads in Germany's next election. In a recent survey in the German state of Saxony, the AfD had the support of 25% of the population and was the most popular party amongst those aged 35 to 49 (31% support).

We have to keep doing what we can to push back and to break the liberal monopoly on politics.

The unleashed family

This is happening more quickly than I thought it would. A judge in Argentina has ruled that a woman can marry her stepdaughter. Why? According to the judge:

The Argentinian constitution guarantees all its citizens the right to procure their own happiness, which carries with it the right to be treated with dignity by the laws of the country in all areas of life, including marriage.

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that by this logic any kind of consensual marriage is morally justified. It not only justifies two women marrying, it also justifies a woman marrying her stepdaughter and it also clearly justifies a man marrying more than one woman. After all, if a man believes that marrying two or three or four women will make him happy, then he is exercising his constitutional right to "procure his own happiness," is he not?

Unless liberalism is overthrown as the state ideology it is only a matter of time before polygamy becomes legal.

The one virtue of the liberal approach to morality is that it is simple. If it is your desire, and doesn't directly interfere with the desires of others, then it is moral. The alternative is more "intersectional" and therefore more complex for the reason that reality itself has different dimensions, each of which needs to be ordered within a common framework.

For instance, someone might recognise his larger communal tradition as representing an important good and therefore believe that it is important to ask whether a certain action will harm or serve this tradition. He might also recognise the existence of qualities that are inherently good and take these as a measure of the rightness or wrongness of an action. Or he might recognise a natural telos (a purpose or end) to who he is as a man and ask whether his desires are rightly ordered to fulfil this telos or not. Perhaps he has a sense of the sacred in life; of his own higher or lower nature; of what is either noble or base in human conduct; of whether an action produces consequences that harm the individual or the society he lives in, for instance, by leading to crime or instability or poverty or ill health.

Human desires are wayward. We can experience contradictory desires during the course of a day. It is the task of a culture to discipline these desires within a moral framework, one which aims to raise us toward our higher spiritual ends, to fulfil our created nature/telos, and to serve the larger communal tradition we belong to, identify with and love. A society can be measured by the degree to which it gets this moral framework right.

We're meant to listen to this guy?

Adam Kotsko is a professor at Shimer College in Chicago. He is an open borders type and was distressed by Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. elections. He says this of those who voted for Trump:

...Many of us are so disgusted by their ability to ignore his hatred that it makes it difficult to forgive them for their vote. But, our nation’s future depends on our ability to confront Trump and his bigotry through dialogue with our fellow citizens. We must swallow our pride and begin conversation with them.

...Perhaps the burden I am referring to here falls primarily on people like me. People who can hopefully relate in some way to the Trump voter and begin a dialogue. I think as long as those like me check our privilege to be sure we are acting in service to social justice this could be a positive step.

Adam Kotsko believes that he is the right man for the job of relating to Trump supporters. This is despite the fact that last year he posted this on social media:

So he is happy to tweet that whites should commit mass suicide to atone for their privilege and that a white identity exists solely for negative purposes. And yet he is putting himself in charge of outreach to white voters? White voters are supposed to put their trust and faith in him?

Now, it is true that Professor Kotsko, after some criticism of his tweets, wrote a post explaining that he had been "impatient" in suggesting that whites should commit mass suicide, and that what he really meant is that the ultimate logic of the current model of individual justice leads to the idea of white mass suicide, but that he himself prefers a different model of social justice that doesn't logically require this.

Even so, it is obvious that people like Adam Kotsko don't understand the gulf existing between his view of the world and that of most other people. He thinks that by having a dialogue with ordinary whites, that they will suddenly come around to the idea that they should dedicate their lives to atoning for their "privilege".

I expect that most whites will go the other way. They will increasingly look on Professor Kotsko's ideology as being psychologically unhealthy, requiring as it does a willingness to hate and reject one's own identity and tradition. I'm optimistic that white people will increasingly return to a more positive sense of their own identity and heritage.

Melbourne Traditionalists Report

The Melbourne Traditionalists group had its final meeting for 2016 last night. It was another successful get together, with much enthusiastic discussion.

We have succeeded in our basic aim of establishing an offline group for traditionalists here in Melbourne. Although we're doing a few activist things, our primary aim for 2017 will still be to keep growing and consolidating. Another aim will be to improve our social media presence and maybe even to start publishing. There are opportunities as well to liaise with other traditionalists elsewhere in Australia.

Interested readers are welcome to contact either myself of Mark Moncrieff about the group. I can be contacted at swerting@bigpond.com, Mark Moncrieff at his website Upon Hope.

The era of feminised Christianity

Dalrock has an interesting post up about a shift in Christianity said to have taken place around the year 1800. According to Professor Callum Brown, the Britain of the period 1800 to 1963 was a religious one, but during this period Christianity was feminised. In the introduction to his work The Death of Christian Britain Brown writes:

...The book focuses considerable attention on how piety was conceived as an overwhelmingly feminine trait which challenged masculinity and left men demonized and constantly anxious. It was modern evangelicalism that raised the piety of woman, the ‘angel in the house’, to reign over the moral weakness and innate temptations of masculinity.

The typical understanding amongst Christians of the era was that women were naturally good, but that men were roughly natured and tempted to drink, gambling, womanising and so on, until the influence of a good woman brought them around.

I am not an expert on the religious history of the era, but this does explain some of the beliefs about masculinity that were present in the Australia I grew up in as a boy in the 1970s. There was an idea around back then that men were supposed to be more roughly natured than women, coarser in their manners, hard-drinking, brawling and so on. You can see it over and over in the Australian films of the 1970s. Only there was no being rescued by the influence of women; the idea of Christian conversion had dropped off by then.

It seemed a dodgy concept of masculinity to me at the time (drinking beer didn't seem much of a test of manhood) and this whole understanding of men and women has since come crashing down. It is now difficult to see women as more finely-natured, or naturally good or pious than men. What the modern era has revealed is that unless the men of a society are willing to establish a moral frame that supports a stable family life, then that society is likely to decline.

Dalrock has assembled much evidence that there are still church leaders who uphold the older narrative of women being naturally good and only being injured by men's failures, including conservative church leaders, some of whom are perhaps trying to conserve the view from the nineteenth century that really ought to be jettisoned.

One final point. The nineteenth century Christian view has survived in the secular world too. Think of all the TV sitcoms, including shows like The Simpsons, that portray a humorous and sanitised version of the idea that females are the naturally virtuous ones (think Marge or Lisa) and men the wayward, reckless ones captive to temptation (Homer, Bart).

Kellogg's pumps $75,000,000 to radical left - time to boycott

I didn't realise that the Kellogg's cereal company was dedicated to radical leftist causes. It has all come out into the open because of the U.S. election. The left realises it no longer completely monopolises the media (just 90% of it). So they are now going after media sites like Breitbart and the Daily Mail.

As part of this push, Kellogg's decided to withdraw advertising from Breitbart. Breitbart fired back by publicising what the Kellogg's Foundation does with its money. It's astonishing. Kelloggs has announced that it is going to spend $75 million pushing left-liberal "whiteness" theories.

These theories begin with the liberal idea that we should be autonomous, self-determining individuals. Therefore, something predetermined like our race should be made not to matter. Why then are there differences in racial outcomes in a country like America? The leftist theory is that race itself has no biological basis but is a social construct designed by one group of people, "whites," to benefit from an unearned privilege at the expense of those designated as non-whites. The institutions of society, according to the theory, are racist in the sense that they are intended to perpetuate this racial privilege. All whites are implicated in benefiting from structural racism just in virtue of being white.

You can see the radical implications of the theory. It means that white America is, in its essence, a negative phenomenon that needs to be deconstructed. It means that a white identity is a shameful one, and that any defence of it is designed to perpetuate "supremacy". It means that if a white person achieves something it is at least partly undeserved - it has been gained at the expense of others. The role of a white person in life is an odd one of somehow trying to atone for who they are.

That's the ideological background to this announcement by Kellogg's:

Since the birth of America, racial privilege and structural inequities have influenced the nation's policies and social systems, from healthcare, education and child welfare to media, food consumption, justice and countless other facets of everyday life. In America, those who differ from the majority because of race, color, sexual orientation, religion, gender, weight and other characteristics face a deluge of outright discrimination and unconscious bias.

This paradox is routinely denied by its individual and institutional perpetrators, and sometimes even by its victims. But the impact is real. The social consequences of discrimination can be devastating for everyone, as its targets struggle to overcome barriers from artificial constructs, while those in the majority may consciously or subconsciously wrestle with the root causes of their behavior.

Thus, as the W. K. Kellogg Foundation implements a $75 million, five-year initiative to combat structural racism in America, healing the wounds of racism is a key component. "Our America Healing initiative is designed to give communities all over the country opportunities and resources to come together to undo the effects of centuries of racism and to heal the hearts," says Sterling Speirn, president and CEO of the Kellogg Foundation. "We would like to think that twenty years from now racism will be a thing of the past and people will acknowledge that it not only existed but that there was a concerted effort to make it go away. We are proud to be part of that effort."

In effect, Kellogg's is paying $75 million to promote an anti-white political theory. In response there is a campaign gaining momentum to boycott Kellogg's. As I write this, #DumpKelloggs is the top trending hashtag on Twitter and the company's share price is falling.

I will be joining the boycott here in Australia - let's make it international. Kellogg's manufactures not only cereals like Corn Flakes, but also Pringles and LCMs. You can find a detailed list here.

Here are some Twitter posts on the issue:

Kellogg's thinks they can perpetuate mindless PC narratives? It's not about Breitbart. It's about siding with SJWs. #DumpKelloggs

— Hector Morenco (@hectormorenco) December 1, 2016

Kellogg's is a complete MESS! Stick to making poison GMO cereal, not politics! #DumpKelloggs pic.twitter.com/aUa9vGwGrP

— Baked Alaska™ (@bakedalaska) December 1, 2016

. @KelloggsUS #DumpKelloggs lost $553,740,000 (over half a billion) yesterday alone - Investors should think about Class Action lawsuit now https://t.co/uQk9CdRFng

— #WeAreAllMilo (@Military4Trump) December 1, 2016

There is also a petition you can sign here (at the time of posting it has about 150,000 signatures).

Hand gluers disrupt Parliament

A group wanting to close down Australia's offshore detention centres brought about a stop to proceedings in Parliament today. Some of them even tried to glue their hands to the railings.

The protest garnered a lot of media attention but the timing was off. There have been a number of attacks by asylum seekers in the news lately. We have had:

• 27 injured when a Muslim refugee from Myanmar set fire to a bank in the Melbourne suburb of Springvale
• a Somali refugee mow down people with his car at Ohio State University before attacking them with a machete (he was brought to America by Catholic Charities - the Catholic Church seems to be heavily involved in pushing for Muslim immigration to the West)
• 300 recently arrived African migrants in Turin, Italy, throwing bottles and stones at locals
• an African refugee here in Melbourne sentenced to four years in jail for breaking into a home and assaulting a woman while she lay asleep next to her baby in bed

The protesters, who want to allow anyone to fly to Indonesia and then get on a boat to arrive in Australia, do not seem to care about the effects of open borders on existing populations. They cannot think of better alternatives to the refugee issue, such as resettling those claiming asylum somewhere closer to their country of origin - closer in distance, living standards and culture.

A couple of pictures from the protest:

The glued hand



Being escorted out

Melbourne Traditionalists December meeting

Well, our last get together was terrific with three new attendees and some wide-ranging discussion. The next meeting is coming up soon in early December. If you'd like to attend please contact either myself (swerting@bigpond.com) or Mark Moncrieff via his website.

Lena's equality

I posted recently about Lena Dunham after she made a video with her father celebrating the impending extinction of white men.

Lena had promised to move to Canada if Donald Trump won the election but, unsurprisingly, has announced that she will not be fulfilling her vow. In her explanation of why she is going to stay in America she wrote:

I've realized I can survive, as a Jewish pro-choice sexual assault survivor with a queer family member and a belief that we are all exactly and beautifully equal.

On reading this, I thought that maybe she doesn't think white men are "exactly and beautifully equal" as she has extinction in mind for us. But leaving this aside the formulation that "we are all exactly and beautifully equal" struck me as odd.

It doesn't seem to be true. Some people are more low-minded, more criminally-minded and more selfish than others. Some people have evil in their hearts and minds. Some people dwell in what is squalid in life and never rise above it. I do not see how such people are "exactly and beautifully equal" to others.

We can be aware, even in our own lives, of the rise and fall in the quality of our thoughts, actions and feelings. One manifestation of who we are is not equal to another.

So why would Lena Dunham claim that people are exactly equal? You might think she means this in the sense that we are all equal in the sight of God (so that even those most alienated from the good, nonetheless retain an imprint of what is perfect and divine in their nature - even if this is difficult to discern on the surface).

But I doubt that this is it. I suspect the context for her is the liberal belief that there is nothing objectively right or wrong and therefore no way of measuring what is higher or lower in what people aspire to be or do. What liberals do instead is to assert that there is an equal dignity in people defining their own good, their own identity, their own lifestyle and so on. It makes sense, in this liberal context, to assert that people are "exactly equal," just as it is senseless to do so from a more traditional perspective.

The liberal approach to equality comes with problems. It doesn't change the fact that people seek distinction in life. But instead of seeking distinction by disciplining themselves to objective standards of character, they are left to do so in other ways. For instance, if there is no distinction to be had in the traditional moral realm, then material status takes on an even greater importance (educational and career status for the upper classes; phones, designer shoes etc. for those lower down the ranks).

In the moral sphere liberals seek distinction through virtue signalling, i.e. by knowing what political position to take to best represent the latest trends in liberal thought. This alone gives some people a sense of superiority over others.

There's another way for liberals to signal moral distinction/superiority. Liberals don't believe in an objective right or wrong. However, they do believe in a system in which we each define our own good, whilst respecting others' freedom to do the same. This means that it is virtuous in a liberal system to not interfere with how others define their own good. So it is considered especially moral to be non-discriminatory, inclusive, open and tolerant. Therefore, the most virtuous/superior liberal will be the one who is most inclusive to whoever is deemed to be the most "other".

In practice Muslims are usually tagged as the most "other" and so there are many liberals who believe that they are demonstrating moral distinction by being open to the Islamising of the West (the liberal churches seem to be especially prone to this - to promoting Muslim immigration as a great moral cause, even though this will eventually undermine the place of Christianity in the West).

Finally, liberals have brought in inequality via "intersectionality," in which membership of a group thought to be oppressed gives a person greater moral authority and status than those thought to be more privileged. This moral pecking order is taken very seriously by some liberal activists; in an odd way, group victimhood gives people a special place vis-à-vis others, to the point that it is thought that the others ought not to speak but to listen, or to take up less space, or to move aside.

So that is Lena Dunham's "beautiful equality." It is an equality in which people seek to be recognised as superior via such things as career status; politically correct beliefs; upholding the "other" regardless of the practical consequences of doing so; and claiming membership of oppressed groups.

It's a mess. It does not create equality and the drive toward distinction is mostly frittered away on things that do not really confer distinction. And, as for white men, we apparently do not even qualify to be part of Lena's system.