Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll assesses THE ICK FACTOR. She writes:

When I was a kid, for many people, baths were a weekly event. It was a smelly world; it was just part of life. Then apparently the good folks on Madison Avenue suddenly noticed that body odor was a problem in search of a profitable solution. But deodorant unfortunately had to be placed in underarms, which were considered somewhat icky and off-limits in those times. What to do? Trust the ad guys to come up with a solution. The first Ban Deodorant commercial I ever saw on television involved marble statuary. No lie.

As the camera focused on the pristine marble armpit, a serious baritone voiceover said, “In the adult male and in the adult female…sometimes you smell so bad you could knock a buzzard off a garbage truck.” (I’m paraphrasing from memory here…)

Is it REALLY a step forward for humanity to turn on television at dinnertime and see obese, incontinent yet vibrantly diverse women pulling on some sort of protective undergarment? Or worse yet, unattractive women sitting on a TOILET saying, “Women poop.” Okay, maybe you have urgent medical information to impart, but I’m eatin’ here…okay? Ick!

I’m reading serious political thoughts on the Internet and, without warning, advertising pop-ups appear for all sorts of medical maladies including but not limited to toenail fungus, featured in full-color pictures. More ick. A Pandora radio commercial for Shopify – occupying the spot that used to feature wretched, nearly continuous BLM ads – has a man talking with his mouth full of the cookies on offer on Shopify. It’s not appealing. Ick. I can’t even listen to my Pandora stations now.

But these things pale in comparison to the Ick Factor of small children exposed to drag queens, cartoon library books with young boys performing oral sex, or ANY overt sexuality, gay OR straight. Double Dog Super Ick. Apparently a sick teacher or librarian gets a pass. But if any other adult – who is not a Democrat – trolled by a schoolyard in a van and showed such a book to a child, “they” would find themselves in serious hot water very quickly.

Even as late as high school, unless they belonged to our church, we had no idea whether any of our teachers were married (we assumed most people WERE) or what they did in bed. I know we had two lady teachers who lived together and everybody loved them both. Maybe they were just roommates, maybe not – nobody cared.

Our handsome Speech teacher (my Debate coach) and our adorable French teacher began dating and soon thereafter got married. For us teenage girls it was an exciting time to watch a Romance Novel come to life. In a small town where everybody knows your car, we got breathless daily reports of dating sightings. I don’t know if any of the boys even noticed.

If you are like me, you have been wondering for some time now what is driving the pronoun-obsessing, child-mutilating, gender-fluid degeneracy? One day American culture was normal and, seemingly, we woke up the next morning and a substantial number of our fellow citizens had gone bat guano crazy. Who is behind it and what do they hope to get out of it, besides the trifecta destruction of academia, the military, and corporate America? Or are they aiming to topple the very foundations of Civilization itself? With mass sterilization of a significant chunk of the current generation of children as a bonus.

All children love to role-play and to dress up. I have pictures of my young son and his cousins (maybe 6, 5 and 2), in funny hats and dresses from Grandma’s play-dressup bin. You can tell by their goofy expressions that they are AWARE that they are stepping outside the parameters of “boy” behavior as a JOKE, not as a hope. I have a picture of myself and my female cousin at about 5 dressed like male hobos. At no point were any of those children pictured at risk of requesting a sex change any more than they thought they would become cowboys, princesses or Ewoks. I was at greater risk of becoming an actual hobo.

We all grew up happy heterosexuals, though I suffered from “height dysphoria” and would have been thrilled to demand that taxpayers pay for eight-inch implants in my legs, so that I could fulfill my lifelong dream to be called – just once – for goaltending. Alas, we can’t all have everything we want. And isn’t that one of the major lessons of life?

Why should a boy who thinks he wants to be a girl be deemed in any more psychic distress than an elfin girl who longs to be tall? Why shouldn’t everyone with imperfect teeth get free braces? And people with large noses get taxpayer-funded nose jobs? Small-breasted women should clearly be entitled to augmentation. Just calling dissatisfaction something medical-sounding and Latin-y like “dysphoria” doesn’t make it any more legitimate.

I have mentioned in a previous column that when our son was about 3 and we lived in a basement apartment, he declared that our home was a “monkey cave” and we were all monkeys. For about a year he had monkey names for us and he answered to “Chip-Chip.” But we did not rush off to tell his nursery school teacher that he needed to be addressed as Chip-Chip or we would see to it that she wound up in prison. We did not find an unethical surgeon to turn him into a monkey, removing his opposable thumbs, installing a tail, and bathing him daily in Rogaine. Why? Because we were not insane. He grew tired of it and one day it just ended.

Children are wonderful little sponges, absorbing much we don’t even know they have noticed. But developing the self-confidence to question authority is something that we learn slowly and later, if at all. In Japan, I’m told, a common expression is “the nail sticking up is the one that gets pounded down.” Many cultures do not much prize “individualism.” Americans are – or were – KNOWN for it.

Kids and teenagers do not yet treasure individualism; they ache to fit in. Even pathetic attempts to break out from the crowd – Goths, blue hair, and such – are within rigidly defined limits. Wearing a pink party dress to a Goth event would be just as outré as a MAGA hat on a National Review cruise.

If a child has an overbearing and mentally ill teacher who believes men can have babies and every day kids can choose a different “gender” from an ever-expanding menu, that teacher will bestow smiles of approval or frowns of disapproval on her helpless little charges every minute of the day. Few grade-school kids would have the confidence to challenge her.

Those of us born with a Lifelong Contrarian Streak paid a considerable price, but one I’m grateful to have paid. I don’t even take much credit for it – it was baked in the genetic cake like my short stature. Thanks, Dad, you wacky but lovable short guy!

I read a book once on how (spit) Charlie Manson — 5’2”, unattractive and repulsive — manipulated a HAREM of loser girls he controlled. He recruited troubled runaways and forced them to perform an escalating series of humiliating, painful, and bizarre sex acts, pushing the boundaries of civilized behavior, breaking down the girls’ inhibitions and very personalities such that eventually murdering several people including a pregnant woman seemed normal.

This is probably just me, but I think all the trans weirdness is also pointed, in-your-face idolatry, a childish nose-thumbing at the Creator: “Ha!” say the gender freaks, “You THINK I was ‘assigned’ by God to be male? Well, watch this. I may not be able to alter my chromosomes, but I can – on pain of Twitter swatting, job loss, or prison – FORCE otherwise sane people to AGREE that I am a woman, even with un-womanly parts still intact. I can mutilate what God has made and re-create myself in whatever image suits me this particular minute. I AM GOD!”

Further, with the new state-sponsored racism against white people, especially white men, a certain percentage of people who have grasped the advantage in being “oppressed” will gravitate toward adopting a preferred category in order to rise higher on the Entitlement Totem Pole.

And finally, in some cases, it isn’t “trans” anything, just rank opportunism. In what sense is Lia Thomas either a woman or even a “trans” thing? He has a penis that he enjoys flopping around in the women’s locker room. He enjoys winning swim meets and being the center of drama and controversy. Period.

What an adult does to surgically and chemically alter himself is none of my business. But neither do I think I should have to pay for it, either as a taxpayer or part of an insurance pool. I don’t think it is “brave” or even interesting. And I refuse to affirm it.

But what is foisted upon children is another story. Previous fads like swallowing goldfish were relatively harmless and no more disgusting than sushi. But this fad has much more tragic consequences. I do not believe it will end well. Who benefits? Who pays? Why is it happening? What is the endgame?