Tempest in a Foxhole — Mixed Metaphors & Mixed Messages
It’s kind of a big deal when the NYT slips a story through the paywall. Why this one?
The Times piece is excerpted above. The Breitbart post is a mere throwaway item, located far down the Main Page of the website with no names mentioned.
Here’s a quick clip of the show Breitbart was referencing:
I think both publications sense that something significant is going on here, but they just don’t quite know what it is.
That’s when the title of this post occurred to me. “Tempest in a Foxhole.” Mixed metaphor obviously. Tempest in a teapot is a standard dismissal. The memorable line about foxholes is that you won’t find an atheist in one. Different meanings. ‘Foxhole’, of course, takes on another connotation when we think of the Fox media consortium, suggesting the place where careers are buried by sexual harassment cases. Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Greg Kelly, and Eric Bolling all come to mind as FNC personnel who were publicly accused or embarrassed by rumors of inappropriate sexual behavior or language before leaving the network. Fox is by no means alone in this kind of tabloid purgatory. Other media casualties have included Matt Lauer of NBC, Don Lemmon of CNN, and Ed Henry of America’s Voice Network.
A major factor in such scandals has been a trend in treatment of the whole she said/he said dynamic between men and women in institutional settings. It was somehow tolerable in the public mind that Hillary Clinton systematically attacked and destroyed the reputations of all the women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct. These are incredibly complicated, so much so that they form a jungle of weeds that usually towers over a seemingly small story like the one we’ll be focusing on here. The necessary first step in understanding what’s going on is to acquaint ourselves with the principals involved in this latest development:
A rising star at Fox Sports. Click the graphic to see the video.
A heretofore unknown hairdresser at Fox Sports. Click the pic the see the video.
What’s most interesting about this confrontation is that this time it’s woman versus woman, both of them physically attractive, both biracial, both employed successfully till now in the same predominantly male environment. Laboratory conditions if you will for study of behaviors that involve sex but also race, legal precedents, politics, and cultural trends generally. This is out of the ordinary. When it comes to highly publicized conflicts about sexual matters it’s almost always women versus men, regardless of the specific topical context of the moment. You may nor may not remember when sex has provoked controversy and legal action in the past. A quick overview screen-grabbed from the Internet, starting at the beginning of the 21st Century:
This was not an isolated event, just a symbolic one. It was backed by a manifesto of sorts, and was followed by a wave of artistic expressions on the subject, ranging from photography to graphics and paintings and museums, as well as kinetic and performance art. It set the tone for an aggressive new stance by women rebelling against the patriarchy. They reclaimed the metaphors of male sexual dominance and mixed them with their own passive aggression and thought they owned men thereby. They owned sex too. And they weren’t going to put up with any more patriarchal abuse and other crap by men. Period (pun intended).
Another highly symbolic scandal, this time pitting a minority “bad girl” (i.e., a black stripper) against the privileged players of a privileged sport at a privileged university. Perfect clickbait for the Social Justice activists, in whose eyes it did not matter that there were no witnesses or other corroboration of the complainant’s charges. The trial occurred in the press. The actual legal outcome was immaterial. All those accused were tarred for decades by the charges themselves. More significantly, universities across the country instituted internal investigative/punishment procedures that assigned immediate credulity to the accuser and severely restricted the rights of the accused to defend themselves from a verdict of guilty and punishment in the form of expulsion with no access to legal counsel and no appeals process. In this fashion the accused could be extra-legally stigmatized for life as a rapist All of this served two purposes. It enabled universities to conceal how many such cases they were experiencing, and it prevented external law enforcement from investigating accusers, physical evidence, and other unacceptable exculpatory activities that would generate bad publicity for the college or university in question. The ascendancy of such kangaroo courts inside the ivied walls of academia led eventually to this:
One can only imagine how any serious enforcement of these documented consent procedures affected the sex lives of students on college campuses. It seems like the basis for any number of Roman, Shakespearean, and Wilde-ian comedies that could be turned into SRO Broadway musicals if anyone had the nerve to write or stage them. In the absence of such creative satire, the nation got to experience the self-parody of the Stalinization of sex in the United States in 2018, when the television audience got to experience the trial of Brett Kavanaugh as it might have occurred on any number of American college campuses of the day:
Click anywhere on the screen to view the video.
Did this lugubriously ludicrous episode kill sex in America? The simple answer is “No.” Sex made a huge comeback during the Biden administration, led in part by the LGBTQ+++ movement whose most unifying mission was to dispense with all conventional stigmas on private AND public sexual practice, with the sole exception of rape by any man of any woman, however either of those terms is conveniently explained on a case by case basis. All clear? No? While you think about it, immerse yourselves in the twerk artistry of Megan Thee Stallion, who famously campaigned in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid:
But men are still losing their careers over inappropriate sexual words that offend
Now comes the Faraji Vs. Taylor bout, which will not occur in the UPC Octagon but in the figurative cage of the unexpected confrontation between ‘MeToo#’ and ‘DEI.’ Let’s get ready to rumble…
It may not have occurred to anyone that there’s a built-in conflict between DEI’s ideals of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ and the MeToo# movement that has taken down the reputations and sometimes the freedom of prominent men ranging from Andrew Cuomo to Matt Lauer to Prince Andrew to Harvey Weinstein. The conflict is there, though, and it is built in, just hard to see for all the weeds that hide the less acceptable realities of both movements.
Can you see what’s lurking in the weeds?
Initial successes of DEI were facilitated by its Trojan Horse entry on the national scene. People were being hired for jobs they didn’t qualify for precisely because they didn’t qualify for them. Quotas were put in place that would have horrified large majorities of the populace if they had known about them. White men, for example, were suddenly persona non grata as airline pilots and mechanics. Say whut? Not generally known until Boeing planes started falling apart in the sky and setting records for near misses in flight and on runways. The people responsible for the mysterious collapse of the invincible Disney brand wasn’t ascribed to DEI until we finally met the 20-something, sexually and racially ambiguous female who turned the company’s Star Wars and Cartoon Remake franchises into LGTBQ propaganda vehicles nobody came to see. The headline of the DEI public relations disaster was not identified as a female issue per sē but rather as a progressive political issue causing safety concerns about air travel, policing, firefighting, and the federal government’s strange new fascination with prosecution as a simultaneous excuse for releasing violent criminals without bail AND jailing grandmothers who prayed at abortion clinics, and conducting a multi-year, multi-jurisdiction vendetta against Donald Trump for the crime of being Donald Trump. Something wasn’t adding up, and it didn’t look like any intended outcomes were advantageous to the citizens at large. But there’s so much noise around the subject of DEI that it’s hard to tell what’s driving it underneath all those weeds.
The caption to the only print I could find of the first toon is “So you cast a giant shadow…”
The history shows us that ‘MeToo’ and DEI are not truly separate from one another, even when their intended outcomes are contradictory. They share the same two points of origin: Affirmative Action and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In the modern era, both of these change vectors were launched in 1965, the year in which birth control pills became legally available in all 50 states and LBJ ordered implementation of Affirmative Action in hiring by the federal government.
Reliable birth control became the basis for the sexual liberation of women. Not only free to be as promiscuous as men without much risk, they were also free to postpone decisions about bearing children until after they had established careers outside the home. Counterintuitively, the pill also led directly to the demand for legalized abortion. Pills could fail because the 1 or 2 percent risk of pregnancy does manifest itself, and personal carelessness about even important matters is not confined to men. It took 8 years from one-a-day birth control to Roe v Wade. Sounds about right. It took Affirmative Action longer to have unintended consequences, but consequential they were. Colleges and universities wasted no time copying LBJ’s initiative, and prestigious colleges and graduate schools established quotas to increase minority admissions. The corporate world did not follow suit, however. They had other fish to fry, namely a population of a well-financed constituency that wanted serious affirmative action of their own. Women then as now were a majority of the total population and had proportionately more and louder voices carping about “The Glass Ceiling.” They were also lower risk than black candidates, many of whom came from impoverished backgrounds cursed with bad schools and whose prestigious university credentials were suspect because Affirmative Action was a very famous term with many negative connotations.
Women did not come from poorer households than male candidates. They also had solid educational credentials, including their own distaff Ivy League (‘The Seven Sisters’) that were much better endowed than the Historically Black Colleges. Women had also been routinely admitted for generations to most of the Ivy League schools, who were actually quicker to go co-ed than the Seven Sisters were. In the end, the intended beneficiaries of formal Affirmative Action programs were elbowed aside, not intentionally perhaps but definitely, by ambitious women.
Why there was a need for what became DEI. As Affirmative Action was abandoned legally and programmatically, the legacy of Black Studies Departments in universities developed a creative new interpretation of history that led to a phony discipline called ‘Critical Race Theory,’ followed by ‘The 1619 Project,’ both of which made a coercive argument for redress from the evil white supremacist founders by compelling access to power and financial compensation by all large institutions. This was justified by the milder sounding umbrella term ‘Social Justice.’ Entitlement was established by promoting people not in spite of substandard qualifications but because of them. In this, DEI was, in fact, cleverly stealing from feminism just as feminism had stolen tools and tactics from the Civil Rights movement.
The next step is well summed up by the axiom “Set a thief to catch a thief.’ The latest wave of feminism saw the promise in fictions like CRT and the 1619 Project, as well as LGBTQ’s Alinsky-ite subversions of tradition, and so they signed right up and joined with other victim niches to commandeer school boards and proclaim sexual perversion as preferable to the missionary position. The most economically ambitious of the New Wave feminists finally took stock of the real progress they had made in the century since obtaining the vote and saw that the lack of real progress was shocking enough to send them into the embrace of socialist-Marxist anti-capitalism cant. Accordingly, they took full advantage of corporate ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) and DEI rhetoric to dominate the Social Justice hiring practices in every industry and institution they could penetrate. In all their Biden-era endeavors, the New Wavers pragmatically joined forces with black and biracial women, plus all the eccentrics from the TG and pedophile camps. They got the most high-profile wins, though, as always:
This lineup was an artifact of the Biden Administration, now in disrepute.
Interestingly, we have almost all of these elements in play in the case of Faraji vs.Taylor. They’re both biracial, which has been in vogue since first Obama and then Kamala took credit for being black when they were the progeny of more than one race in their parentage. How can they get away with that? They’re still beneficiaries of what used to be called “The One Drop Rule.” Any black blood makes you a black person. This was probably true in the old days as an economic fact of life. Unless you could “pass,” you were blocked from most kinds of advancement, excepting sports and show business. (Carol Channing never spoke of her own multiracial heritage, for example). Since the anointing of Obama, we have seen the rise of many celebrities who claim allegiance to a convenient racial identity, including Sunny Hostin, Jemele Hill, Kristin Welker, Melissa Harris-Perry, Don Lemon, Linsey Davis, Soledad O’Brien, Kimberly Godwin, Meghan Markle, Halle Berry, and others. For our two opponents in the Cage, this as a variable is a wash. Dead even as to genitalia, race, and sports affiliation. Either or both may owe something to the DEI mentality which has infected the cable sports world more than almost any other celebrity niche.
Shouldn’t they just bury the hatchet, shake hands, and go write nasty tweets about Trump together?
Sorry but no. As usual, sex is at the core of the problem. In particular, sex between men and women in the workplace, which long predates any political or cultural movement. Which is where we run smack dab into the worst possible situation when it comes to sexual harassment-slash-molestation. This time we’re looking squarely at a she said/she said dilemma. Faraji says she was, effectively, stalked and pressured by a reprehensible white man named Skip Bayless, who offered her $1.5 million to have sex with him, which she refused not once but multiple times, even when he raised the ante to more millions. In accordance with MeToo# orthodoxy, we should believe her, shouldn’t we? Forget that it’s pretty easy to believe her, since most of us have had the opportunity to see Bayless for ourselves on TV (what man his age still calls himself ‘Skip’?!). It’s also arguable that there’s nothing in this whistleblowing on her part that benefits her. The most frequent result of a woman charging sexual harassment by a superior to whom she reports is a speedy end to any hope of a career in that industry. Word gets out. No one else wants to hire her.
On the other hand… When you look at it from the DEI perspective, things get muddier. A lot muddier. What are the weapons in the DEI arsenal? Doing/being what it takes to get ahead, given the historic unfairness of the environment we’re dealing with. What does that entail? Sticking together, first and foremost. You don’t rat out one of your own. The history of women in corporate America is rife with examples of the fact that they never seem to form the female counterpart of the “The Old Boy Network.” When push comes to shove, or a petty grudge arises, they turn on each other like nobody’s business (pun intended, again). Taylor gave Faraji some good advice. “If you know what’s good for you, ignore it.” The position of hairdresser may seem lowly to us in the context of the very famous personalities we see on camera at sports networks. Yet it’s by no means clear that Faraji was mired in any kind of dead-end occupation. Has a hairdresser ever become a tycoon in the entertainment biz? Yessirree. Jon Peters began as a hairdresser to the stars in Hollywood (“legend has it the movie “Shampoo” was about him) and rose to become a major movie producer. What if Faraji had exploited Bayless’s affections to achieve the impossible dream of becoming a Fox Sports on-air correspondent? Is there any evidence this can happen? Um, yes. Faraji says it happened to Joy Taylor. According to rumors and other sources, Taylor slept her way to success at Fox Sports. What’s that first rule? Doing/being what it takes to get ahead. And why shouldn’t Taylor feel aggrieved about being outed in this way? Note that DEI poster child Fani Willis has shown no remorse, or tolerance of criticism, for her illegal sexual dalliance with direct-report Nathan Wade. Taylor likewise probably has no regrets about her own advantageous sexual liaisons.
Are we starting to see the mixed messages at work in this story? It gets more stark when we realize one of the deepest, darkest secrets of DEI, feminism, and the chromosomal essence of being female in the first place is the ancient tool called ‘sleeping your way to getting what you want.’ Women hate this part of the conversation. Always have. There’s a reality nobody ever forgets which is that the designation “World’s Oldest Profession” is true.
The biggest can of worms of all. Where the mixed messages smash into one another and shatter like glass, impenetrable ceilings notwithstanding. Messages we don’t want to get. We kid ourselves, for example, that there was an age, an aeon perhaps, when cave men didn’t understand what caused babies to grow inside women’s bellies. Ridiculous. Everyone has always known where babies come from and how they are conceived. The most isolated cave tribe you can imagine witnessed more animal inseminations than people do today on average. They also witnessed the males battling sometimes to the death for the right to
sire the spring crop of young’uns. Sexual desire plays the most obvious part in the perpetuation of the species, but it does not account for the gauntlet of risks a caveman had to withstand to protect a child-heavy woman from predation, starvation and theft by another male. Nor does it account for the near lifetime it took to raise a son to hunting- and defense-capable adulthood. The nuclear family is hard-wired, no matter how much we want to rule it out of existence or deliberately destroy it.
Where does sexual virtue for women enter the picture? With religions that acknowledge the advantage of women who do not sell or trade their bodies to anyone who has something they want. It’s different for men. Their virtue, their fidelity in marriage, is a trade to ensure that their biological sons and therefore their own traits and strengths can be counted on to provide for them and the rest of the family in their old age (30-ish with luck?).
That virtue seems to be the message Faraji is sticking to. It’s not a feminist message in the age of Diddy parties, celebrity twerking, and girlpower unleashed with the added daggers of ‘MeToo’ and a ‘License to Kill’ in the waistband of her pantsuit. It’s not, as we’ve seen, the DEI message of using sex if you have to for the purpose of securing physical and financial protection in a dangerous environment — or to get what you want even if you don’t have what it takes to succeed on your own without lipstick, push-up bras, short skirts, lacy underwear, and subtly promissory hips. These are, in fact, squarely in tune with both feminism and DEI. Nobody on either side of the political aisle seemed overly concerned about Kamala’s history of turning an extra-marital sexual relationship with a much older man into a series of political opportunities, promotions, and elections. It didn’t succeed during her final turn at the roulette wheel, but chances are a man named Donald Trump had a lot to do with that. With more than a little help from the Faraji’s of this world who don’t believe a woman should sleep her way to the top or encourage other women to do so because it’s wrong.
Her message, if she has one consciously in mind, may not get through, to the people, the courts, or the Castrati who write the narrative for the Mainstream Media.
As it turns out, there are atheists in foxholes. They’re the ones who can’t read the mixed messages they send and receive.
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