Critique of Academia
I have a lot to say against the current workings and operation of the academic institution, let alone the toxic culture that it is fostering. I have been a university student for many years sharing my time on campus with three different generations of students. The institution has changed in the last twenty years - and not for the better at all. For this page I will be including my thoughts on Leftism (socialism: marxism and feminism) on campus, and how it has affected me personally.
Never forget that dogmatic leftist collectivism is driven by hate, not love, and it is characterized by malice, not compassion. Its followers are losers of the current system trying to force in their system to impose an identical power structure but with them on top. This is something that I am aware of because of my vast exposure to leftists and the fact that I am not actually of their despised "Patriarchy" or "privileged" class, but that they see me as such and treat me accordingly.
I am an intellectual and a true socialist which means free-thinking and individualism, and not collectivism. It is revelatory to see the worst aspect of an ideology through being treated as if part of its symbolic enemy and its demonized "other". I simply don't have the prejudice of their "Patriarchy" and so I can see their ideology for what it is - tommyrot.
Never forget that dogmatic leftist collectivism is driven by hate, not love, and it is characterized by malice, not compassion. Its followers are losers of the current system trying to force in their system to impose an identical power structure but with them on top. This is something that I am aware of because of my vast exposure to leftists and the fact that I am not actually of their despised "Patriarchy" or "privileged" class, but that they see me as such and treat me accordingly.
I am an intellectual and a true socialist which means free-thinking and individualism, and not collectivism. It is revelatory to see the worst aspect of an ideology through being treated as if part of its symbolic enemy and its demonized "other". I simply don't have the prejudice of their "Patriarchy" and so I can see their ideology for what it is - tommyrot.
The Horror Show
The Horror Show is a personal account of my experiences with feminism and leftism over two decades of being a university student, on-and-off. This document was prepared for Janice Fiamengo, who is a personal mentor, and is someone who also deals with the violent toxicity of leftist ideology on university campus. She is a tenured professor at the University of Ottawa.
THE HORROR SHOW
I finished up high school in Toronto, back in 1999, and immediately jumped into university despite having an appreciation for the European way of doing things from having lived in England for five years on-and-off throughout my childhood. In Europe, high school graduates are often encouraged to get out and see the world for a few years before pursuing post-secondary education. My father has been a university professor for almost five decades and there was some degree of pressure for me to get on with it, so to speak. He teaches engineers and believes that if you have an aptitude for math and science (which I do) then it is foolish to fritter away your time in the arts. There are career opportunities in the hard sciences and engineering waiting to open up for anyone who can keep up, whereas, the arts are all-too often intellectual masturbation with respect to useful production. That is his view, but not my own.
I have always been creative and love writing fiction and fantasy. In fact, I love writing creatively in any form. I soak up entertainment media of all kinds. So, in 1999, when it was time to apply for university programs, I agreed with my father to put in applications with all the first-string engineering programs in Canadian universities. I was accepted into all of them as well. However, I did manage to sneak in an application for Arts & Science at the University of Toronto. When I received acceptance from them, it was a no-brainer for me – a kind of Shakespearean wager: to be me, or not to be me. This seems to be an eternal concern as the new generation of "Millennial" youth hail the credo, “Just Do You” – ironically, almost an asexual corporate slogan for coming-of-age mentality.
I was “doing me” either way and I guess that meant that I wasn’t a phony or that I was being true to myself, however, a compromise was made because I chose a field of study that seemed to be a hybrid of my interest in arts, narrative, and history with my aptitude in the sciences: Archaeological Science. It has been said, that you have been hit over the head with a rock when you finally come to realize that you’ve been doing the wrong thing. It was the first few weeks in Geology 101 class that had me realizing the truth of the proverb in a very literal sense. I dropped out of university, was cut off from financial aid by my family, had to quickly lock down a meager full-time job in retail, and for the first time in my life, I started to have suicidal thoughts. It happens to the best of us and suicidal thoughts do not mean that you have intent for self-destruction but more that you are looking to have a conversation with yourself about the meaning of life (or at least we should hope this is the case). The year was dismal but I got through it and when the next fall term came along, I was enrolled in full time courses once more. This time I chose an array of courses from the arts, humanities, and social sciences programs – courses that I felt suited the dynamic and creative quality of my personality.
I met a young woman in my Philosophy 101 course and I became smitten with her. We started a refrained - almost frigid - romantic relationship. She had many demons and I was too naïve to appreciate all that, and too inexperienced to be supportive in even the obvious ways. It wasn’t to be. But, while things were heating up (more like, thawing), she suggested that we work together on getting undergraduate degrees in Criminology. In my childhood, many had noted that I would make a good lawyer – to them it was likely my enjoyment for oration and argumentation, but I believe that there was also my sense of sound logic to support such a career pursuit. I worked hard to please her and got through a few years of the “crim” degree. When she dumped me, school lost its sense of purpose for me. Law School became impossibility. I had become dependent on my feelings for her with respect to everything in life. So, I dropped out.
Those years have left no strong impression for me of female professors, female teaching assistants, or female students (apart from her and likely because of her). I certainly had no sense of the role of feminism on campus, even if it was thriving in its designated place at the time. Worth noting, is that this was a very different culture in the academic institution at the turn of the millennium from what exists in 2017. One thing I do remember was that many of my criminology courses that looked specifically at pathology were overloaded with female students. As a male, I was in the vast minority. One day, the professor did a raffle for a free textbook and it was a “C. Starling” who won. I took note of this because of the Clarice Starling character from The Silence of the Lambs movie. It dawned on me that day – these young women were titillated by the criminal justice system. Being sycophants to the system would mean that they might get protection from it. It was a reasoning that recalls in my mind how many young Westerners travel to the East and play with sedated wild cats – a perverse form of Orientalism. Arguably, these women fetishized the victimization of women, then seeking vantage in such a way that they could control their own fate when confronted with a violent, uncontrolled, sexual male (imagined, or not). In fact, that was the story for the girl I dated as well. Boy, did she love her Law & Order episodes. But, that is a traditional approach for women and antithetical to the current feminist programme despite being a real phenomenon to this day, and arguably it will be long lasting in the future.
The traditional pitfalls of womanhood are scoffed at by feminism. The woman who hides for protection or who fills herself with useless things is deemed a product of the “Patriarchy”. Spending hours going through memes on social media feeds, shoe shopping, “pinteresting”, scrapbooking, and so forth – these are just women who are in a conscious slumber according to the feminists (this is the Marxist materialist root in feminism). The feminists claim that these “traditional” women are left with no “real” work to do and substitute this with pointless endeavors. A controversial offering by me now – as a man I have no concept of what it is like to have a womb and to have a psychological realization that my body has the potential to be shared with a new life. I can only imagine a profound anxiety about the potential for that new life to be rotten toward me. Arguably, I would disavow this trauma and in turn fetishize the collection and possession of endless useless things – non-threatening things – photos, shoes, “pins”, and the like. It is a psychoanalytic understanding of it, but is just offered to the feminists as an intervention on their claims that a woman’s useless toil is the result of male exploitation or a man denying real opportunities for women (rhetoric of wage gaps, glass ceilings, etc.).
It may just be how women have dealt with trauma so often. She says to herself, “I could have a rotten thing inside me!” and that is a trauma. She refuses to face the trauma because it is too horrific to articulate ideas around the issue and so she disavows the trauma (denies it). The disavowal is reinforced and supported through a fetish – chasing after something related to the trauma but only in part (and a fully controllable part that can be articulated consciously). In this case, the fetish is to be filled, but with useless little things - non-threatening things. This process of trauma-disavowal-fetish is how humans exist psychologically and we need not interrogate Sigmund Freud to appreciate the reality of psychodynamics. Trauma-Disavowal-Fetish is what we do and it is the source of our woes in life. The feminists often like psychoanalysis anyway (male gaze, castration anxiety, sexual fetish, sexual neurosis) but only when it confirms the tenets of their ideology – namely, only when it serves their cause to see men as responsible for female suffering and anguish. In fact, that is a pat yet wholly accurate way to describe the crux of postmodern feminism: She’s ok; He’s not ok.
As I have already mentioned, I have no strong recollection of feminism pronounced in my university experience the first go around. However, I returned to university in 2011 and let me tell you – it was culture shock! I had a clearer direction for my academic interests and pursued a double-major undergraduate degree in Cinema Studies with the credits I had already earned in Criminology. I went on to a Masters program in Cinema Studies, in 2013. The environment was hostile at times and political correctness had its enforcers in the program. "Calling-in" or "calling-out" is part of the leftist agenda for “educating the wayward” however, the actual happenings involve ostracism, backstabbing, rumour-mongering, and trolling. I learned this the hard way when my Masters cohort elected me to be the head of marketing for their graduate symposium but then produced all of the material themselves without letting me know. My work was rejected wholesale as they had come to discover that they didn’t appreciate my personal values or aesthetic judgments. I was hornswoggled and that is what it feels like to be an independent thinker in the academic institution at the moment.
The collective of leftism (communism, feminism, anarchism - to name the primary manifestations) has zero tolerance for dissenting views in exactly the same way that religions operate. The only difference is that we attribute negative connotations to religious zealots based on their physically violent and coercive crimes of the past and its pervasive perpetuation in the present. Collective leftism doesn’t have a long enough lineage at the moment and this grants them the opportunity to deny their psychologically violent and coercive crimes as significant. Today in the West, religions partake in the psychological warfare – so yes, it’s a thing, it matters and it’s awful. And I might add that we can now see leftist collectivism renewing a faith in physically violent and coercive means of achieving their mandate (Trump hysteria with Antifa, for example).
In the return to university, my relationship with students was marred through the zealotry of leftists. However, not every leftist is a zealot and some of my most cherished mentors are staunch advocates of certain communist-based and feminist-based social initiatives. My head spins and my mind is boggled when I try to remedy the fact that some of the most violent and vile individuals I have dealt with share an ideology with some of the most compassionate and fair individuals that I know. I had many great professors in my recent years in the Cinema program – fair men and women that looked past personal politics and evaluated work based on its true intellectual merits. For that I am forever grateful. This also underscores that leftism has some degree of hope, but it certainly must shed the dead weight – it must “drain the swamp” and expose the parasites and other nasty creatures that lurk within its roots. This is exceedingly hard for “moderate” leftists to come to grips with because leftism is collectivization socially and it seems antithetical to remove any individual (toxic, or otherwise) who subscribes to the values of secular collectivism. Perhaps, the only true solution is to throw collectivism out the window with the baby’s bathwater – the baby is just you and it’s perfectly fine and good to be an individual. As much as I had many great professors, there was a pair that caused some personal discomfort.
There were two female professors that I came to realize just didn’t like me all that much. By the end of the term, I knew something about their “approach” – one was a feminist and the other was not. It made a huge difference to my experience and I will take this opportunity to explain why. The feminist had their position made available and then secured at the university through being a proponent of feminism more than anything else (it was a hot topic when she arrived). And I mark this exception because I have not found her work impressive or up to the standard of the other professors in the department. The non-feminist is not so different in how they got the job and secured it – it was their hyper-specialization in the broader disciple of Media Studies (again, a hot topic in the current academic landscape – to be a “neo”-this or a “radical”-that of media scholarship).
The feminist had confidence in feminism such that it was like a religion to her whereas the non-feminist treated their hyper-specialized field much like a cult. For the feminist, the religion of feminism means that you are either “feeling” it or you’re not. There is no need for feminism to have a missionary purpose because it is a question of faith. Those who are non-believers are surely considered lesser by feminists but are also a necessary part of the social context. And in that way it is the presence of non-believers that legitimates the religion of feminism. The non-feminist, on the other hand, was more of a cult leader and there is an active interest in recruiting new members. You are hailed to the cult but if you don’t answer the call then you are treated as an enemy. As a result of their dogmatism, I got an unfair grade from both professors, but the feminist actually recognized that an artificially low grade was simply challenging the validity of her feminist ideology. I should not be construed as a threat when she has “power” to determine my fate. The female cultist felt threatened – my being male mattered significantly less than my will to defy her “approach”. This allowed me to realize that feminism is already entrenched in the arts, humanities, and social sciences in the academic institution. Feminists hold powerful positions and exert influence on how departments are run, courses are organized and selected, and who is admitted to the program (faculty, graduate students and undergrads). If you are not “feeling” feminism then you will undoubtedly lack a significant measure of support.
We could argue all day about whether I was graded fairly and it really doesn’t matter. I claim that it was unfair because those two grades were significantly lower than all of my other grades in three years of university, including graduate courses. Yet, I have no reason to believe that I put in less effort with respect to the work I produced. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, but grades aren’t all that and they certainly didn’t stop me from gaining admission to a Ph.D program in a first-rate Canadian university. That is where I am currently at as we catch up in this little historical account. But, now for the horror show!
I arrived in a new city with hopes of emphasizing the best parts of my personality and concealing the aspects that had rubbed people the wrong way at university in previous years. I resolved to not speak with others about politics and to generally not carry on about things with a negative tone or pessimistic outlook. For the program that I was going to be entering to work on my doctorate, there would be two “labs” that I would be affiliated with. These are not hard science labs – with labcoats, flasks or burners. These are social sciences media labs with comfy couches, computers for gaming and televisions for movie nights. Prior to the start of classes, I took a trip to one of the labs and met the director. I feel that our conversation was pleasant and I even handed-over some old games of mine that could be added to the lab’s collection. The director let me know that there was going to be an orientation at some point in the term for new students to the lab so that they could understand the ideology of the lab. It didn’t sound great with how it was presented, but following my overall plan, I maintained a positive outlook. The director volunteered that she felt the orientation wasn’t about ostracizing anyone or making them feel unwelcome. All in all, it was a perfectly normal experience to be in that lab and meet some of the people who frequent it. This lab, however, was a secondary one for myself and there was a lab that I would be associated with which had a closer relationship to my own research. I met with those people next.
I got to know the people from “my” lab over the next two weeks and one female student decided to take me under their wing and show me the ropes. One of the first things she did was to warn me about the other lab’s policies and that they had been quite draconian in the past with some students being “removed” for a difference of opinion about ideological goals. You see, these labs are entrenched in the hot topics of leftist ideology pervading the academic institution today – safe space, triggering, micro-aggressions, calling-out, calling-in, and unfortunately the list goes on to read somewhat like the book of Genesis, with one irrational thing begetting the next. When I asked about why students had been removed from the lab, I was told that things certain students had done in their private life (said or published online), and completely away from school, had then been witnessed by other students in the lab. Those witnesses reported back to the director and action was taken.
For me, this was terrifying. I work hard to keep myself happy in life by exploring my private interests and I am fully aware that this is at odds with the leftism that creeps into every crevice of university campuses. I enjoy visual art and especially pin-up art in its full historical tradition. Robert McGinnis and Alberto Vargas are phenomenally talented illustrators and painters who share their ideal vision of traditional female beauty. Stanley Lau and Bruce Timm take the theme in separate directions in the contemporary moment. Then there are the fantasy artists, inspired by Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Blake. My favourite painter of all time is the father of modern fantasy art – Frank Frazetta. I am a heteronormative male with heteronormative interests and values, but this is a direct threat to leftism and feminism. Leftism has an abhorrent disorder where they enthusiastically embrace “corporeality” and they froth over “sexuality”, but cannot marry the two to appreciate physical beauty. One could say that their ideology is ugly and for them the only representations of traditional physical beauty should be rendered through perverse abstract lenses, such as, surrealism or the grotesque.
I am of a different mind. I have different values. For me, the idealization of human physique is inspiring. Marvel comics superheroes and supervillains are inspiring – their bodies reflect a work ethic rarely realized in real life. But, leftism rejects this wholesale, claiming that representations of ideal bodies are used for exploitation and denigration. I can’t help but feel that leftism is a loser’s ideology and losers by definition don’t work hard enough. I have rarely met students in my program that take pride in fitness and healthy diet. Most of them are physically unhealthy looking – either portly and obese, or emaciated and anemic-looking. That doesn’t inspire me and it shouldn’t have to. I go to the gym five days a week and it feels great. There is soreness and pain, but this is the sign of progress. One must not forget that leftists seem to have a distinct pain aversion reflex both at the physical and psychological level. Well, this female student at my lab who decided to teach me the ropes – she actually did take pride in physical fitness. To be frank, I found it quite shocking. We saw each other at the gym a few times and I felt like I could trust her.
One day – within those first few weeks of the term – I was in the lab with her and another male student. I asked a question that is quite innocuous for graduate students in media studies: have you ever watched atrocity media content, such as terrorist execution videos? I added no details or specific examples. It was just a straight-up question and to the point. I had been editing an old editorial piece on the execution of American journalist, James Foley, who was beheaded by ISIL. I was coming to question my thesis from that piece and hoping for some feedback from fellow media scholars. Well, she took the opportunity to open a can of worms. Within a few minutes the conversation had turned into a most unpleasant confession. She was unloading on me all of the “crimes” that men had committed against her. The other student chimed-in with his own tale of woe about victimization by the “Patriarchy” in his family life. That was how it was framed – men are evil, violent, and selfish patriarchs. I was aghast and assaulted. There was the option to get up and leave politely but I feared that this would be considered dismissive and I would be deemed an insidious agent of the “Patriarchy”, inevitably reporting back to Papa. Their paranoia was re-producing in me. I stayed and tried to mediate the conversation as best I could. With some measure of objectivity, I offered knowledge from my criminology studies. It wasn’t well received. I shut my mouth and excused myself politely, but it was too late.
A few days later, I discovered that these students had officially complained to my supervisor about me. They conveniently left out that they had assaulted me with personal confessions that included extremely unpleasant details that rightfully would be construed as violating my “safe space”. What I discovered is that as a hetero-white-male, I don’t get a safe space because I am the symbolic violator of the safe space of the “marginalized” and “oppressed”. Well, apparently my offering of advice based in theories of criminology had “triggered” these students. We have to become extremely alert to this leftist rhetoric of safe space and triggering (and the like). If you ask a leftist what it is all about, they will tell you unabashed: triggering is when someone says something that reminds another person of a trauma from their past and a trauma unresolved (or not yet mended) in their psychology. Once triggered, a person (who believes in this poppycock) will no longer have proper control of their thoughts. People who trigger others are violating safe space. Safe space is a place where difficult thoughts and feelings are never challenged.
Well, this might sound familiar to you if you were a psychiatrist or psychologist. In effect, the result of triggering at the psychological level is a fair description of paranoid schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder. To lack control over your own thoughts is a personal issue that likely requires anti-psychotic medication and/or counseling, however, leftism has coopted the concept as a justification for taking aggressive action against symbolic offenders – people like me for my superficial markers of being “privileged” or being part of the “Patriarchy”. We can see how this has spun out of control in the academic institution. Individuals who simply express a personal opinion are brought before human rights tribunals because a leftist found this opinion to challenge them – it triggered them and they lost control of their thoughts.
Imagine for a moment a world where you can’t talk about what you did on the weekend if it involved going out drinking, all because a person in the room listening had an alcoholic father and speaking about getting drunk, “triggers” them. This is what George Orwell warned us against in many of his works, but especially, 1984. Winston Smith, lived in a totalitarian leftist society where people embraced the socialist propaganda because it was the surest way to avoid thinking “wrong”, ergo, the novel’s presentation of Thought Police. This is the mandate of leftism – to strike profound fear into those who think as individuals where the only assured way for the individual to censor words and actions is to radically alter actual thoughts and bury all the impulses toward expressing individuality. Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong when claiming, “Hell is other people” because we can see through leftism that, “Hell is those people”. To leftists, “those” people are the people who value individuality and resist collectivism, while to free-thinking individuals, “those” people are the collective that seek to assimilate or oppress.
Individuals are at a disadvantage by definition – we value individuality so we don’t gang up… we can’t gang up. But, it seems that today we also can no longer say, “please, just leave me alone.” We are invoked into the Schizophrenic Collectivity Disorder that defines leftist and feminist mentality – we are their “other” and they will not leave us alone.
I had to stand on my own against the accusations and when the second lab caught wind of what had transpired and that I was against the ropes, they then rushed-in for a knockout punch. I have several websites online where I publish my writing or links to artwork and other media that I find interesting or that I study– the kind of content that challenges and thus triggers, leftists. My interest in pin-up art is especially transgressive for the feminist values in leftism. I have realized this over the years and so I published a statement explaining my interest in pin-up art. I shouldn’t have to do this, but it serves as a friendly warning to those who object and it provides them some food for thought about the value of traditional representations of physical beauty. A “moderate” leftist might actually see the sound reason in my statement as I explain that pin-up art collections have good pedagogical, aesthetic and psychodynamic value for all kinds of people. However, the academic institution is riddled with unsophisticated thinkers that will inevitably run to leftist ideology for support and guidance. They likely cannot engage with the ideas of my statement because leftist ideology is too powerfully debilitating for free-thinking. Leftism is a kind of “zombieism” psychologically – the individual is living dead within the body and the purpose is to follow the herd. And leftism certainly can be said to devour brains, voraciously.
As I mentioned, the students of the other lab decided to “troll” me online. I learned this quite clearly through back-end analytics and tracking at my websites. My websites tell me what cities visitors are from based on IP addresses. There was a spike in my traffic and all of the newcomers were from the city where I am currently living (a city that I had no associations with prior to starting my doctoral studies). A week after this traffic spike at my websites, I was asked by the directors of both labs (one being my supervisor) to attend an “urgent” meeting. The meeting outlined complaints against me at both labs. Given that I had had virtually no interaction with the second lab, I questioned the accusation. I was provided no details but the directors felt it necessary to say that there had also been a complaint about unwanted contact online and that it was not a female complainant. I found this interesting because it implied that at the heart of the issues with me at the labs was a feminist objection. It was as if females complaining about me were a fact to be taken for granted but that this other student amazingly happened to not be a female.
The problems abound, but one in particular was that I had had no contact with students online. I mentioned this and the directors got defensive claiming that they would only mark out the transgression with good evidence. This frightened me the most because it implied that the students had doctored documents with respect to my name and character. They had fabricated a conversation for facebook or the like, photoshopping my profile pic and name into the document. One can only imagine the lengths that such dishonest cretins would go to in a frame-up job like this. It was Orwellian terror – the rat cage was attached to my face and I was indeed squirming. I managed to maintain my composure and decided to claim that if I had done anything wrong it was unintentional and simply a result of not yet knowing the “cultural language” of the labs. What a swindle – to live dishonestly out of fear for one’s safety. No one should have to experience that. There is no dignity in it.
It was obvious to me what had happened. The students who wanted me removed from the labs had decided this based on my activities at websites like DeviantArt where I curate an archive for pin-up art. They couldn’t make that the official complaint because it would reveal their harassment and trolling of me outside of school. As a result, they doctored documents and made claims about things that I had said on campus. Supposedly, I had been scoffing at the safe space policy of the labs and this had triggered some students. I threw up my arms in this urgent meeting and accepted my fate. I was removed from the labs and it has had an incredible impact on my time at the university. I used to attend conferences and talks all the time - meeting fellow students and professors that could be very valuable to my research and future scholarship. Networking is integral to being a successful scholar. Now, it is unpleasant to partake in such activities – traumatic, in fact. Additionally, the students of the second lab have been actively letting students in my current classes know about me thus poisoning them to me. I was starting some friendships this term that I sorely needed and within a twenty-four hour period people who had been very positive toward me did a one-eighty turn.
I am treated like a pariah. But, I’m not the only one. Classes are uncomfortable for many of us. Feminists and leftists are encouraged to bash in unqualified terms their symbolic enemies and the rest of us have to shut up and listen. Because of this, I wouldn’t even characterize many of my seminar classes as being learning environments. One “trans” student is able to make unqualified statements like “you know when white people tell racist jokes because there are no coloured people present…” and another student has prefaced their comments in class by raising their fist in the air and exclaiming, “first of all, smash the Patriarchy…”. What a dismal state of affairs for the academic institution. Arguably, in fifty years it has gone from being guided by pedagogy, then to economics, and now to politics. Hyper-specialization feeds into this and entrenched leftism/feminism among faculties mediates the growth of anti-pedagogical leftist ideology as being the supportive base of the political character for the academic institution. In a word, I hate it. It is the Horror Show.
There is more to say about my troubles in university since 2011, but I will refrain for the purposes of not drawing too much unwanted attention from my legion of trolls. I will say this however, if you are a university student or researcher that fears for your freedom because of potential false accusations of harassment – be proactive and visit the Ombudsman Office at your institution. Likely, they already know about such goings-on and are in the process of building a case. Your evidence could be exactly what they need to break up the psychologically-violent leftist and feminist mobs. You have a right to be protected from collectivist ideology so that the academic institution can be a place for learning and discourse. But, be careful because the followers of leftism and feminism are most certainly religious zealots and are prone to hysterical witch-hunting.
I finished up high school in Toronto, back in 1999, and immediately jumped into university despite having an appreciation for the European way of doing things from having lived in England for five years on-and-off throughout my childhood. In Europe, high school graduates are often encouraged to get out and see the world for a few years before pursuing post-secondary education. My father has been a university professor for almost five decades and there was some degree of pressure for me to get on with it, so to speak. He teaches engineers and believes that if you have an aptitude for math and science (which I do) then it is foolish to fritter away your time in the arts. There are career opportunities in the hard sciences and engineering waiting to open up for anyone who can keep up, whereas, the arts are all-too often intellectual masturbation with respect to useful production. That is his view, but not my own.
I have always been creative and love writing fiction and fantasy. In fact, I love writing creatively in any form. I soak up entertainment media of all kinds. So, in 1999, when it was time to apply for university programs, I agreed with my father to put in applications with all the first-string engineering programs in Canadian universities. I was accepted into all of them as well. However, I did manage to sneak in an application for Arts & Science at the University of Toronto. When I received acceptance from them, it was a no-brainer for me – a kind of Shakespearean wager: to be me, or not to be me. This seems to be an eternal concern as the new generation of "Millennial" youth hail the credo, “Just Do You” – ironically, almost an asexual corporate slogan for coming-of-age mentality.
I was “doing me” either way and I guess that meant that I wasn’t a phony or that I was being true to myself, however, a compromise was made because I chose a field of study that seemed to be a hybrid of my interest in arts, narrative, and history with my aptitude in the sciences: Archaeological Science. It has been said, that you have been hit over the head with a rock when you finally come to realize that you’ve been doing the wrong thing. It was the first few weeks in Geology 101 class that had me realizing the truth of the proverb in a very literal sense. I dropped out of university, was cut off from financial aid by my family, had to quickly lock down a meager full-time job in retail, and for the first time in my life, I started to have suicidal thoughts. It happens to the best of us and suicidal thoughts do not mean that you have intent for self-destruction but more that you are looking to have a conversation with yourself about the meaning of life (or at least we should hope this is the case). The year was dismal but I got through it and when the next fall term came along, I was enrolled in full time courses once more. This time I chose an array of courses from the arts, humanities, and social sciences programs – courses that I felt suited the dynamic and creative quality of my personality.
I met a young woman in my Philosophy 101 course and I became smitten with her. We started a refrained - almost frigid - romantic relationship. She had many demons and I was too naïve to appreciate all that, and too inexperienced to be supportive in even the obvious ways. It wasn’t to be. But, while things were heating up (more like, thawing), she suggested that we work together on getting undergraduate degrees in Criminology. In my childhood, many had noted that I would make a good lawyer – to them it was likely my enjoyment for oration and argumentation, but I believe that there was also my sense of sound logic to support such a career pursuit. I worked hard to please her and got through a few years of the “crim” degree. When she dumped me, school lost its sense of purpose for me. Law School became impossibility. I had become dependent on my feelings for her with respect to everything in life. So, I dropped out.
Those years have left no strong impression for me of female professors, female teaching assistants, or female students (apart from her and likely because of her). I certainly had no sense of the role of feminism on campus, even if it was thriving in its designated place at the time. Worth noting, is that this was a very different culture in the academic institution at the turn of the millennium from what exists in 2017. One thing I do remember was that many of my criminology courses that looked specifically at pathology were overloaded with female students. As a male, I was in the vast minority. One day, the professor did a raffle for a free textbook and it was a “C. Starling” who won. I took note of this because of the Clarice Starling character from The Silence of the Lambs movie. It dawned on me that day – these young women were titillated by the criminal justice system. Being sycophants to the system would mean that they might get protection from it. It was a reasoning that recalls in my mind how many young Westerners travel to the East and play with sedated wild cats – a perverse form of Orientalism. Arguably, these women fetishized the victimization of women, then seeking vantage in such a way that they could control their own fate when confronted with a violent, uncontrolled, sexual male (imagined, or not). In fact, that was the story for the girl I dated as well. Boy, did she love her Law & Order episodes. But, that is a traditional approach for women and antithetical to the current feminist programme despite being a real phenomenon to this day, and arguably it will be long lasting in the future.
The traditional pitfalls of womanhood are scoffed at by feminism. The woman who hides for protection or who fills herself with useless things is deemed a product of the “Patriarchy”. Spending hours going through memes on social media feeds, shoe shopping, “pinteresting”, scrapbooking, and so forth – these are just women who are in a conscious slumber according to the feminists (this is the Marxist materialist root in feminism). The feminists claim that these “traditional” women are left with no “real” work to do and substitute this with pointless endeavors. A controversial offering by me now – as a man I have no concept of what it is like to have a womb and to have a psychological realization that my body has the potential to be shared with a new life. I can only imagine a profound anxiety about the potential for that new life to be rotten toward me. Arguably, I would disavow this trauma and in turn fetishize the collection and possession of endless useless things – non-threatening things – photos, shoes, “pins”, and the like. It is a psychoanalytic understanding of it, but is just offered to the feminists as an intervention on their claims that a woman’s useless toil is the result of male exploitation or a man denying real opportunities for women (rhetoric of wage gaps, glass ceilings, etc.).
It may just be how women have dealt with trauma so often. She says to herself, “I could have a rotten thing inside me!” and that is a trauma. She refuses to face the trauma because it is too horrific to articulate ideas around the issue and so she disavows the trauma (denies it). The disavowal is reinforced and supported through a fetish – chasing after something related to the trauma but only in part (and a fully controllable part that can be articulated consciously). In this case, the fetish is to be filled, but with useless little things - non-threatening things. This process of trauma-disavowal-fetish is how humans exist psychologically and we need not interrogate Sigmund Freud to appreciate the reality of psychodynamics. Trauma-Disavowal-Fetish is what we do and it is the source of our woes in life. The feminists often like psychoanalysis anyway (male gaze, castration anxiety, sexual fetish, sexual neurosis) but only when it confirms the tenets of their ideology – namely, only when it serves their cause to see men as responsible for female suffering and anguish. In fact, that is a pat yet wholly accurate way to describe the crux of postmodern feminism: She’s ok; He’s not ok.
As I have already mentioned, I have no strong recollection of feminism pronounced in my university experience the first go around. However, I returned to university in 2011 and let me tell you – it was culture shock! I had a clearer direction for my academic interests and pursued a double-major undergraduate degree in Cinema Studies with the credits I had already earned in Criminology. I went on to a Masters program in Cinema Studies, in 2013. The environment was hostile at times and political correctness had its enforcers in the program. "Calling-in" or "calling-out" is part of the leftist agenda for “educating the wayward” however, the actual happenings involve ostracism, backstabbing, rumour-mongering, and trolling. I learned this the hard way when my Masters cohort elected me to be the head of marketing for their graduate symposium but then produced all of the material themselves without letting me know. My work was rejected wholesale as they had come to discover that they didn’t appreciate my personal values or aesthetic judgments. I was hornswoggled and that is what it feels like to be an independent thinker in the academic institution at the moment.
The collective of leftism (communism, feminism, anarchism - to name the primary manifestations) has zero tolerance for dissenting views in exactly the same way that religions operate. The only difference is that we attribute negative connotations to religious zealots based on their physically violent and coercive crimes of the past and its pervasive perpetuation in the present. Collective leftism doesn’t have a long enough lineage at the moment and this grants them the opportunity to deny their psychologically violent and coercive crimes as significant. Today in the West, religions partake in the psychological warfare – so yes, it’s a thing, it matters and it’s awful. And I might add that we can now see leftist collectivism renewing a faith in physically violent and coercive means of achieving their mandate (Trump hysteria with Antifa, for example).
In the return to university, my relationship with students was marred through the zealotry of leftists. However, not every leftist is a zealot and some of my most cherished mentors are staunch advocates of certain communist-based and feminist-based social initiatives. My head spins and my mind is boggled when I try to remedy the fact that some of the most violent and vile individuals I have dealt with share an ideology with some of the most compassionate and fair individuals that I know. I had many great professors in my recent years in the Cinema program – fair men and women that looked past personal politics and evaluated work based on its true intellectual merits. For that I am forever grateful. This also underscores that leftism has some degree of hope, but it certainly must shed the dead weight – it must “drain the swamp” and expose the parasites and other nasty creatures that lurk within its roots. This is exceedingly hard for “moderate” leftists to come to grips with because leftism is collectivization socially and it seems antithetical to remove any individual (toxic, or otherwise) who subscribes to the values of secular collectivism. Perhaps, the only true solution is to throw collectivism out the window with the baby’s bathwater – the baby is just you and it’s perfectly fine and good to be an individual. As much as I had many great professors, there was a pair that caused some personal discomfort.
There were two female professors that I came to realize just didn’t like me all that much. By the end of the term, I knew something about their “approach” – one was a feminist and the other was not. It made a huge difference to my experience and I will take this opportunity to explain why. The feminist had their position made available and then secured at the university through being a proponent of feminism more than anything else (it was a hot topic when she arrived). And I mark this exception because I have not found her work impressive or up to the standard of the other professors in the department. The non-feminist is not so different in how they got the job and secured it – it was their hyper-specialization in the broader disciple of Media Studies (again, a hot topic in the current academic landscape – to be a “neo”-this or a “radical”-that of media scholarship).
The feminist had confidence in feminism such that it was like a religion to her whereas the non-feminist treated their hyper-specialized field much like a cult. For the feminist, the religion of feminism means that you are either “feeling” it or you’re not. There is no need for feminism to have a missionary purpose because it is a question of faith. Those who are non-believers are surely considered lesser by feminists but are also a necessary part of the social context. And in that way it is the presence of non-believers that legitimates the religion of feminism. The non-feminist, on the other hand, was more of a cult leader and there is an active interest in recruiting new members. You are hailed to the cult but if you don’t answer the call then you are treated as an enemy. As a result of their dogmatism, I got an unfair grade from both professors, but the feminist actually recognized that an artificially low grade was simply challenging the validity of her feminist ideology. I should not be construed as a threat when she has “power” to determine my fate. The female cultist felt threatened – my being male mattered significantly less than my will to defy her “approach”. This allowed me to realize that feminism is already entrenched in the arts, humanities, and social sciences in the academic institution. Feminists hold powerful positions and exert influence on how departments are run, courses are organized and selected, and who is admitted to the program (faculty, graduate students and undergrads). If you are not “feeling” feminism then you will undoubtedly lack a significant measure of support.
We could argue all day about whether I was graded fairly and it really doesn’t matter. I claim that it was unfair because those two grades were significantly lower than all of my other grades in three years of university, including graduate courses. Yet, I have no reason to believe that I put in less effort with respect to the work I produced. The experience left a bad taste in my mouth, but grades aren’t all that and they certainly didn’t stop me from gaining admission to a Ph.D program in a first-rate Canadian university. That is where I am currently at as we catch up in this little historical account. But, now for the horror show!
I arrived in a new city with hopes of emphasizing the best parts of my personality and concealing the aspects that had rubbed people the wrong way at university in previous years. I resolved to not speak with others about politics and to generally not carry on about things with a negative tone or pessimistic outlook. For the program that I was going to be entering to work on my doctorate, there would be two “labs” that I would be affiliated with. These are not hard science labs – with labcoats, flasks or burners. These are social sciences media labs with comfy couches, computers for gaming and televisions for movie nights. Prior to the start of classes, I took a trip to one of the labs and met the director. I feel that our conversation was pleasant and I even handed-over some old games of mine that could be added to the lab’s collection. The director let me know that there was going to be an orientation at some point in the term for new students to the lab so that they could understand the ideology of the lab. It didn’t sound great with how it was presented, but following my overall plan, I maintained a positive outlook. The director volunteered that she felt the orientation wasn’t about ostracizing anyone or making them feel unwelcome. All in all, it was a perfectly normal experience to be in that lab and meet some of the people who frequent it. This lab, however, was a secondary one for myself and there was a lab that I would be associated with which had a closer relationship to my own research. I met with those people next.
I got to know the people from “my” lab over the next two weeks and one female student decided to take me under their wing and show me the ropes. One of the first things she did was to warn me about the other lab’s policies and that they had been quite draconian in the past with some students being “removed” for a difference of opinion about ideological goals. You see, these labs are entrenched in the hot topics of leftist ideology pervading the academic institution today – safe space, triggering, micro-aggressions, calling-out, calling-in, and unfortunately the list goes on to read somewhat like the book of Genesis, with one irrational thing begetting the next. When I asked about why students had been removed from the lab, I was told that things certain students had done in their private life (said or published online), and completely away from school, had then been witnessed by other students in the lab. Those witnesses reported back to the director and action was taken.
For me, this was terrifying. I work hard to keep myself happy in life by exploring my private interests and I am fully aware that this is at odds with the leftism that creeps into every crevice of university campuses. I enjoy visual art and especially pin-up art in its full historical tradition. Robert McGinnis and Alberto Vargas are phenomenally talented illustrators and painters who share their ideal vision of traditional female beauty. Stanley Lau and Bruce Timm take the theme in separate directions in the contemporary moment. Then there are the fantasy artists, inspired by Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Blake. My favourite painter of all time is the father of modern fantasy art – Frank Frazetta. I am a heteronormative male with heteronormative interests and values, but this is a direct threat to leftism and feminism. Leftism has an abhorrent disorder where they enthusiastically embrace “corporeality” and they froth over “sexuality”, but cannot marry the two to appreciate physical beauty. One could say that their ideology is ugly and for them the only representations of traditional physical beauty should be rendered through perverse abstract lenses, such as, surrealism or the grotesque.
I am of a different mind. I have different values. For me, the idealization of human physique is inspiring. Marvel comics superheroes and supervillains are inspiring – their bodies reflect a work ethic rarely realized in real life. But, leftism rejects this wholesale, claiming that representations of ideal bodies are used for exploitation and denigration. I can’t help but feel that leftism is a loser’s ideology and losers by definition don’t work hard enough. I have rarely met students in my program that take pride in fitness and healthy diet. Most of them are physically unhealthy looking – either portly and obese, or emaciated and anemic-looking. That doesn’t inspire me and it shouldn’t have to. I go to the gym five days a week and it feels great. There is soreness and pain, but this is the sign of progress. One must not forget that leftists seem to have a distinct pain aversion reflex both at the physical and psychological level. Well, this female student at my lab who decided to teach me the ropes – she actually did take pride in physical fitness. To be frank, I found it quite shocking. We saw each other at the gym a few times and I felt like I could trust her.
One day – within those first few weeks of the term – I was in the lab with her and another male student. I asked a question that is quite innocuous for graduate students in media studies: have you ever watched atrocity media content, such as terrorist execution videos? I added no details or specific examples. It was just a straight-up question and to the point. I had been editing an old editorial piece on the execution of American journalist, James Foley, who was beheaded by ISIL. I was coming to question my thesis from that piece and hoping for some feedback from fellow media scholars. Well, she took the opportunity to open a can of worms. Within a few minutes the conversation had turned into a most unpleasant confession. She was unloading on me all of the “crimes” that men had committed against her. The other student chimed-in with his own tale of woe about victimization by the “Patriarchy” in his family life. That was how it was framed – men are evil, violent, and selfish patriarchs. I was aghast and assaulted. There was the option to get up and leave politely but I feared that this would be considered dismissive and I would be deemed an insidious agent of the “Patriarchy”, inevitably reporting back to Papa. Their paranoia was re-producing in me. I stayed and tried to mediate the conversation as best I could. With some measure of objectivity, I offered knowledge from my criminology studies. It wasn’t well received. I shut my mouth and excused myself politely, but it was too late.
A few days later, I discovered that these students had officially complained to my supervisor about me. They conveniently left out that they had assaulted me with personal confessions that included extremely unpleasant details that rightfully would be construed as violating my “safe space”. What I discovered is that as a hetero-white-male, I don’t get a safe space because I am the symbolic violator of the safe space of the “marginalized” and “oppressed”. Well, apparently my offering of advice based in theories of criminology had “triggered” these students. We have to become extremely alert to this leftist rhetoric of safe space and triggering (and the like). If you ask a leftist what it is all about, they will tell you unabashed: triggering is when someone says something that reminds another person of a trauma from their past and a trauma unresolved (or not yet mended) in their psychology. Once triggered, a person (who believes in this poppycock) will no longer have proper control of their thoughts. People who trigger others are violating safe space. Safe space is a place where difficult thoughts and feelings are never challenged.
Well, this might sound familiar to you if you were a psychiatrist or psychologist. In effect, the result of triggering at the psychological level is a fair description of paranoid schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder. To lack control over your own thoughts is a personal issue that likely requires anti-psychotic medication and/or counseling, however, leftism has coopted the concept as a justification for taking aggressive action against symbolic offenders – people like me for my superficial markers of being “privileged” or being part of the “Patriarchy”. We can see how this has spun out of control in the academic institution. Individuals who simply express a personal opinion are brought before human rights tribunals because a leftist found this opinion to challenge them – it triggered them and they lost control of their thoughts.
Imagine for a moment a world where you can’t talk about what you did on the weekend if it involved going out drinking, all because a person in the room listening had an alcoholic father and speaking about getting drunk, “triggers” them. This is what George Orwell warned us against in many of his works, but especially, 1984. Winston Smith, lived in a totalitarian leftist society where people embraced the socialist propaganda because it was the surest way to avoid thinking “wrong”, ergo, the novel’s presentation of Thought Police. This is the mandate of leftism – to strike profound fear into those who think as individuals where the only assured way for the individual to censor words and actions is to radically alter actual thoughts and bury all the impulses toward expressing individuality. Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong when claiming, “Hell is other people” because we can see through leftism that, “Hell is those people”. To leftists, “those” people are the people who value individuality and resist collectivism, while to free-thinking individuals, “those” people are the collective that seek to assimilate or oppress.
Individuals are at a disadvantage by definition – we value individuality so we don’t gang up… we can’t gang up. But, it seems that today we also can no longer say, “please, just leave me alone.” We are invoked into the Schizophrenic Collectivity Disorder that defines leftist and feminist mentality – we are their “other” and they will not leave us alone.
I had to stand on my own against the accusations and when the second lab caught wind of what had transpired and that I was against the ropes, they then rushed-in for a knockout punch. I have several websites online where I publish my writing or links to artwork and other media that I find interesting or that I study– the kind of content that challenges and thus triggers, leftists. My interest in pin-up art is especially transgressive for the feminist values in leftism. I have realized this over the years and so I published a statement explaining my interest in pin-up art. I shouldn’t have to do this, but it serves as a friendly warning to those who object and it provides them some food for thought about the value of traditional representations of physical beauty. A “moderate” leftist might actually see the sound reason in my statement as I explain that pin-up art collections have good pedagogical, aesthetic and psychodynamic value for all kinds of people. However, the academic institution is riddled with unsophisticated thinkers that will inevitably run to leftist ideology for support and guidance. They likely cannot engage with the ideas of my statement because leftist ideology is too powerfully debilitating for free-thinking. Leftism is a kind of “zombieism” psychologically – the individual is living dead within the body and the purpose is to follow the herd. And leftism certainly can be said to devour brains, voraciously.
As I mentioned, the students of the other lab decided to “troll” me online. I learned this quite clearly through back-end analytics and tracking at my websites. My websites tell me what cities visitors are from based on IP addresses. There was a spike in my traffic and all of the newcomers were from the city where I am currently living (a city that I had no associations with prior to starting my doctoral studies). A week after this traffic spike at my websites, I was asked by the directors of both labs (one being my supervisor) to attend an “urgent” meeting. The meeting outlined complaints against me at both labs. Given that I had had virtually no interaction with the second lab, I questioned the accusation. I was provided no details but the directors felt it necessary to say that there had also been a complaint about unwanted contact online and that it was not a female complainant. I found this interesting because it implied that at the heart of the issues with me at the labs was a feminist objection. It was as if females complaining about me were a fact to be taken for granted but that this other student amazingly happened to not be a female.
The problems abound, but one in particular was that I had had no contact with students online. I mentioned this and the directors got defensive claiming that they would only mark out the transgression with good evidence. This frightened me the most because it implied that the students had doctored documents with respect to my name and character. They had fabricated a conversation for facebook or the like, photoshopping my profile pic and name into the document. One can only imagine the lengths that such dishonest cretins would go to in a frame-up job like this. It was Orwellian terror – the rat cage was attached to my face and I was indeed squirming. I managed to maintain my composure and decided to claim that if I had done anything wrong it was unintentional and simply a result of not yet knowing the “cultural language” of the labs. What a swindle – to live dishonestly out of fear for one’s safety. No one should have to experience that. There is no dignity in it.
It was obvious to me what had happened. The students who wanted me removed from the labs had decided this based on my activities at websites like DeviantArt where I curate an archive for pin-up art. They couldn’t make that the official complaint because it would reveal their harassment and trolling of me outside of school. As a result, they doctored documents and made claims about things that I had said on campus. Supposedly, I had been scoffing at the safe space policy of the labs and this had triggered some students. I threw up my arms in this urgent meeting and accepted my fate. I was removed from the labs and it has had an incredible impact on my time at the university. I used to attend conferences and talks all the time - meeting fellow students and professors that could be very valuable to my research and future scholarship. Networking is integral to being a successful scholar. Now, it is unpleasant to partake in such activities – traumatic, in fact. Additionally, the students of the second lab have been actively letting students in my current classes know about me thus poisoning them to me. I was starting some friendships this term that I sorely needed and within a twenty-four hour period people who had been very positive toward me did a one-eighty turn.
I am treated like a pariah. But, I’m not the only one. Classes are uncomfortable for many of us. Feminists and leftists are encouraged to bash in unqualified terms their symbolic enemies and the rest of us have to shut up and listen. Because of this, I wouldn’t even characterize many of my seminar classes as being learning environments. One “trans” student is able to make unqualified statements like “you know when white people tell racist jokes because there are no coloured people present…” and another student has prefaced their comments in class by raising their fist in the air and exclaiming, “first of all, smash the Patriarchy…”. What a dismal state of affairs for the academic institution. Arguably, in fifty years it has gone from being guided by pedagogy, then to economics, and now to politics. Hyper-specialization feeds into this and entrenched leftism/feminism among faculties mediates the growth of anti-pedagogical leftist ideology as being the supportive base of the political character for the academic institution. In a word, I hate it. It is the Horror Show.
There is more to say about my troubles in university since 2011, but I will refrain for the purposes of not drawing too much unwanted attention from my legion of trolls. I will say this however, if you are a university student or researcher that fears for your freedom because of potential false accusations of harassment – be proactive and visit the Ombudsman Office at your institution. Likely, they already know about such goings-on and are in the process of building a case. Your evidence could be exactly what they need to break up the psychologically-violent leftist and feminist mobs. You have a right to be protected from collectivist ideology so that the academic institution can be a place for learning and discourse. But, be careful because the followers of leftism and feminism are most certainly religious zealots and are prone to hysterical witch-hunting.
