Shaming Is Back! - The Demise Of Inclusivity And The Return Of Ethos, Universal Standards, And History

Hedy Lamarr was an American Hollywood actress known for her classic beauty. 

Despite the claim to the contrary, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, and even those who may prefer a woman of less classic, dark looks and more sensuously alluring, will agree that Lamarr was  beautiful.  Her type of beauty, with predictable cultural variations over time, is reflective of those characteristics which have always made women attractive. 

Symmetrical features, luminescent eyes, full lips, and luxuriant hair all express health, wealth, and well-being as well as being pleasing to a natural sense of geometrical order (the golden mean is universally appealing), and sexual appeal.  There is little difference between the women painted by Leonardo and Hedy Lamarr.

It is no surprise that the women portrayed in art – the women of Botticelli, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Ingres, and the sculptors of ancient Greece, Egypt, and Rome – have been beautiful.  The wives and courtesans of royalty, the aristocracy, and the socially prominent have been beautiful, and while kings like Henry VIII, desperate for an offspring, chose as much for fertility as for beauty as he continued to remain childless, most demanded only the most attractive.

The standards of female beauty have endured for millennia for beautiful women whose facial symmetry, balance, and sexual suggestion are desirable regardless of status and class.  

The last few years of 'diversity, inclusivity, equity' (DEI) have denied this. There are no such things as universal standards of beauty, or of anything for that matter say progressives, and each individual and his racial, ethnic, or gender group is unique, special, and deserving of the same attention, respect, admiration and emulation as those more resembling historical models. 

The obese, the diminutive, and those whose fearful symmetry is misshapen, are equal to Hedy Lamarr, Nefertiti, Dido, Athena, La Gioconda, or any of the classically beautiful women of the past. Men should look past the superficial, meaningless, attributes of physical beauty and look to the real woman within.  

Women should not be enslaved by the past, but should follow their own inclinations.  Women who are overweight - obese in fact - should not be intimidated by the covers of Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, and Harpers Bazaar, the Rockettes, runway models, Hollywood, or the line dancers at the Sands. 

Nonsense, of course, and anyone looking at them, conditioned by so many millennia of classically beautiful women and attuned to their symmetry as a marker for health, wealth, and well-being, can see beauty no matter how much they try to suspend disbelief. 

This progressive, woke reform is reminiscent of Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 - frighteningly prescient, dystopian novels where the State so manipulated the obvious, the truth, and reality that its subjects came to believe the lie.  'Four legs good, two legs bad' was the State mantra in Animal Farm, and with that invented conviction, it created its own version of civil society. 

Fortunately the woke era is behind us, and the febrile, illusionary, fantastical assumptions of progressivism are receding.  Obese people are unattractive, unhealthy, ungainly, and far off the bell curve.  Beautiful white women are no longer dismissed as irrelevant in a multicultural society in which African blackness should be the standard, but considered the closest to the classical norm. 

When black models are featured in fashion magazines, they are chosen for their white features.  They are not Bantu but Fulani or Hamitic - a look appealing to both white and black readers.  

 

The cult of inclusivity does not end with fashion or standards of beauty, but extends to all aspects of society.  There is no such thing as a model American, patriotic, hardworking, socially responsible, ethically and morally just, nor anything remotely considered a universal ethos. 

Anything goes - criminals are the disaffected, ghetto slums honor the street and the vibrancy of black culture, illegal immigrants are refugees from injustice and incivility, gangs are alternate communities for the disenfranchised, dwarves are little people with the same insights and ambitions as the height-favored. 

The Orwellian world exists in the United States, and although it is being dismantled and dismissed, its infection is widespread. Under the current conservative administration, Americans are being asked to call out the ridiculous assumptions of the recent past.  It is now OK to depict the inner city as a crime-ridden, drug-infested, dysfunctional place; that slavery is no longer an excuse for anti-social behavior; that entitlements based on reverse racism are nothing but patronizing political largesse; that prisons are full of young black men because they belong there. 

We no longer have to see a black face on every television commercial, or a gay couple, or happy interracial bonhomie when little exists in real life. Most of all, we can call fat people fat. again. 

Shaming has always worked as a psycho-social dynamic.  Shame a fat person enough, and she will lose weight.  Refuse to accept ghetto culture as a legitimate American expression and call it out for the corrosive force that it is. Stop lionizing African culture and criticizing European civilization when the former has given us little and the latter everything. 

'White is beautiful...White lives matter...European colonialism gave the world civilization'.  These and other mantras are increasingly heard in America.  Of course the progressive Left cries, 'Racism!' but few pay attention to that overused, inchoate, desperate howl.  An originalist society based on the federalist principles of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams - individualism, individual enterprise, opportunity, and mobility - deny no one the chance for health, wealth, and well-being.  On the contrary it is the best way to achieve it. 

The tributes to European history, the objective analysis of world cultures and migrations, the irreversible standards of behavior, beauty, and social probity are meant to expose the cultural monopoly of the discredited Left.  The turning of progressive memes on their heads is meant to reset the cultural, historical balance.

Progressives cringe at the parade of blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful young things parading to and from the Trump White House.  Not only have the tables been turned but decades of liberal discontent and faux reformism are out the window.  

 

Liberals are at sixes and sevens, still bitching and moaning about the continued oppression of the black man and the return of heterosexuality, but are at a loss as to what to do.  For ten years they have run on nothing but Trump hatred, and now that he is dismantling their most cherished programs, they are upset, troubled, and lost. 

'About time', say many, delighted at Trump's cleaning of the Augean Stables and putting America right.  It is as though a great, censorious, dark cloud has been lifted and the nonsense of the past is finally being dissipated and removed. 

Oh, yes,  'God Bless America'.  Religion is also back.