Enough Already!

In 2018, I decided to become a commercial photographer. This required attending industry events, where photographers could meet clients and other photographers. At one such event, about a dozen photographers complained about “the new aesthetic”. They were talking about all the morbidly obese models currently in fashion as fitness models.

“I want to tear my eyes out.”

“What if my model has a heart attack running on the beach?”

“In a couple of years it will be over. Until then, I hate my job.”

These were normal men and women (many fashion photographers are women) reacting in a normal way to abnormal instructions from their clients. They thought the clients were incredible morons. The instructions couldn’t help but lose customers, thus negating the value of doing the shoots in the first place. None of the photographers wanted to put the photos in their portfolios.

For the client, they’d say “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes sir”, and do the job, but they’d be doing it like a plumber who’d just been asked to install sieves in place of pipes “for the aesthetic”.

At the time, transvestites hadn’t yet broken into the world of modeling for beauty magazines, though a few had appeared in fashion layouts as mysterious androgenous figures. Pretty soon, it seemed like there wasn’t anything else. Not that women had ceased to be used in advertising, but the transvestites got so much attention it was hard to notice. The transvestites were still the minority, but a very visible minority.

Dylan Mulvaney was great. When he destroyed Bud Light, I thought he’d killed the entire trend. At least I hoped that would be the case. Instead, advertisers and media doubled down. We got more, not less. Obviously, the people didn’t understand the message and needed some training. Kind of like training people to eat cockroaches. It might take a while, but with enough effort, it could be done. So they kept trying.

The problem faced by advertisers and other figures trying to promote the transvestite agenda is that there are certain physical realities that are difficult to overcome. It reminds me of those cat videos where someone feeds a cat a dish full of food, then places a giant cucumber behind the cat. When the cat turns and sees the giant green vegetable, it leaps into the air and it’s hilarious. That’s essentially how I react to transvestites. I don’t jump into the air, but in my mind, the shock and horror are just as real.

This morning, I woke up to the news that the Minnesota Vikings and New England Patriots, among other NFL football teams, now had male cheerleaders. Male cheerleaders are a fixture of high school and college football cheer squads. These are big guys who get out there to throw the much smaller female cheerleaders in the air, or catch them after jumps and so on. They are not feminine.

The NFL version, on the other hand, is different. I took a look at a couple videos of these new male cheerleaders, and they are trying to behave like women. As is usual, like with Mulvaney and others, a transvestite version of a “woman” is an insulting behavioral caricature. They giggle and pose as if they are little girls, though unlike every real little girl I’ve ever seen. If I didn’t know they were trying to emulate the behavior of women, I’d think they were trying to mock them. They might as well have lots of traffic accidents and then giggle as they fix their makeup afterwards “oh, thilly me, I’m just a woman, what do you expect?”

And then there is the blortch factor. For those who may not be familiar with this measure of repugnance, it originated as a sound effect in EC Comics. They were so well-known for the grotesque nature of stories in titles like Crime Suspenstories and Vault of Horror that senate hearings featured their comics as prime examples of why children shouldn’t be allowed to read comics. That, or comic book publishers had to clean up their act. At EC Comics, for something to be blortch-worthy, it had to be so disgusting that I can’t even write a description here.

When I think of transvestites, and that is far more often than I would like these days, I picture two types: great big hairy ugly men with makeup and dresses who couldn’t pass for a woman in a million years, and petite fine-boned young men who can pass for a woman if you don’t look too carefully. Both have high blortch factors.

The first group is blortch-worthy, because they only intensify their ugliness by wearing inappropriate clothes and makeup that accentuates every craggy pimple they have. The second group is blortch-worthy because they inspire the cucumber effect. You think everything is normal, and then are suddenly alarmed to discover that your view of reality made a serious mistake, causing such a massive overload of cognitive dissonance that if you were a proper male cheerleader, you’d reflexively jump high in the air, vaulting backward as you did so, to escape the threat.

It’s gotten to the point that our daily reality has such a high blortch factor that, like poison, it overwhelms everything else. I used to enjoy art, media, and entertainment. Now, it’s all a bunch of cucumbers.