Well, it’s Friday, so it must be time to round up the feedback from your correspondent’s mailbag. Going in reverse order: first retro-chic cap off the rank is Per Capita gunslinger Tim Lyons, whom we outed yesterday as a “Labor intellectual” — a term Tim does not like, citing, in a tweet, an ancient union leader who describes intellectuals as “Silly bastards [who] write books”. The tweet above that one? An expression of how good it is when your editor approves your latest copy. Fifteen tweets below?

lyons

No, we don’t know either. His pinned tweet? An ad for Adaptation & Transformation, his co-written report on the future of the union movement. Deleuzian presumably. The Parramatta branch has ordered 15 copies for their reading group.

***

That morning, we had a counterblast from Cut & Paste, the Oz‘s op-ed graveyard, where journalism careers go to die. A subbing glitch outed the latest Cut & Pastie, Bernard Lane (Christian Kerr used to be on C&P duty; he has now left the building). But, aha, we were wrong! As James Jeffrey revealed in Strewth, Bernard is only a locum. The real Cut’n’Pasties remain anonymous. Jeffrey himself scrambled to explain: “And while we’re here, it ain’t me.” We know it’s not, James. You’ve got talent. And options.

***

But that was all a footnote to the carousel of contumely that greeted your correspondent’s essay on Marxism, Safe Schools and queer theory (funny, after Orlando, the Oz appears to have lost all enthusiasm for bird-dogging “Marxist Roz Ward”. Hmm, presumably they ran out of material at exactly the time it occurred). The centrepiece was an extraordinary round starting from a tweet by the writer Alison Croggon, who wondered if I thought that “gender was culturally and biologically unchanging over history”.

More of that and some of the more interesting criticisms further down, but first to shits and giggles: an earnest young man suggested that my attitude was the reason for failings in my personal life, as judged by my extremely factual reports on my squalid life, from London (“idk: it’s sad sad sad”); the question as to why Crikey had not sacked me yet was asked by a scriptwriter whose credits include Holby City, possibly (in my opinion) the worst drama show on English-language TV. The serious bit was fuelled by some basic misunderstanding: that I had suggested that no one would be queer if they hadn’t encountered Safe Schools, that I did not recognise the sex/gender distinction, and that we should not even be criticising Safe Schools because it saved lives.

Dutiful readers will recall that I had made the basic point that Safe Schools’s notion of fluidity in sex and gender was a product of social constructionist queer theory that saw biological sex and the body as a tabula rasa onto which culture projects gender. The idea is, at its root, incoherent; the sex/gender relation is a dynamic and complex one, but without some notion that gender (which varies over history) transforms a sex difference that is given and embodied, any meaning it might contain collapses.

This approach — that gender is infinitely scripted, performative and encultured — is an ideology, a set of affirming prejudices that tends to be held only by those in the culture industries (whose work and life-world is scripted and performative). Recent events — Safe Schools, the emergence of Caitlyn/Bruce Jenner — made the ideology visible to the wider world, most of whom continue to believe that embodied sexual difference contributes a significant and specific content to lived gender. So yes, the sex/gender distinction matters — but it doesn’t mean that gender meaning and content is infinitely variable (in general); nor does it mean that sexual behaviour and orientation is fluid, and that if it weren’t for that darn nuclear family, heterosexuality would cease to be predominant.

[Safe Schools is not important, and the left needs to shut up about it]

The social constructionist view is never argued, only asserted. That’s the way it’s been for a couple of decades. Culture producers hold to it with exactly the same irrational determination that Christians hold to creationism, and old farmers deny climate change (“weather comes and goes”). Anti-scientific irrationalism is always specific to the exercise of cultural power. In recent years, the fairly shopworn social constructionist theories have come under theoretical attack from a “new materialism” approach to sex/gender, much of it arising from the Australian philosopher Liz Grosz’s critical reading of Darwin and Darwinism. The obvious ungroundedness of queer theory and social constructionism meant such a return to a genuine materialism was necessary — if theory was to maintain a critical and radical edge.

But such discussion is not to be had, according to Croggon, who believes that the Safe Schools program cannot be questioned, because such questioning would be unsafe. That would be repressive and repellent even if there were firm evidence it was effective. But currently, there is no strong evidence of such; the program is too new. We may find, after a few years, that it is ineffectual or ever counterproductive (most likely because its enforcement of specific social narratives would create a “backlash” effect). It’s a measure of the degree to which such programs can serve as a cause to affirm class power, rather than to create social improvement. It’s all for such people a — what’s the phrase? Blind spot. It’s a blind spot.

And goddammit, just as I finished reading, a more joined-up critique of the piece appeared on Overland — to which I will reply there.