If there is one place on earth still running something analogous to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany it is North Korea. Satellite images and a tiny number of surviving defectors have proven the existence of these camps. Yet consider two recent, randomly selected examples of the day-to-day coverage of North Korea. The Daily Mail headlines a piece: “Summer’s here . . . and the Un has got his hat on! North Korean dictator dons jaunty headgear for farm visit.” The next day’s Telegraph showed more new photographs of the leader with the headline insight that “Kim Jong-un appears to be losing his personal battle of the bulge, with new photos released by state media showing the North Korean dictator straining the seams of a pinstripe suit.”
North Korea is not an easy problem to solve. But is the transformation of Kim Jong-un into an ugly minor celebrity, whom everyone can laugh at, our way of coping with this fact — or a demonstration of an absolutely barbarous flippancy?
***
Speaking of flippancy, if there is one thing we must now never be flippant about it is transsexualism. The transformation of a reality show celebrity and former Olympic gold medallist called Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn Jenner seems to have brought the issue of “T”s to the fore. Anyone who has read Jan (formerly James) Morris’s description of his sex-change operation in Morocco in the 1970s will know that these are not things people go through lightly. But as so often, in an effort to “catch up” public opinion goes too far and the opinion-enforcers become impossibly demanding. It currently seems to have become wrong not just to question anything about Jenner’s decision, but to refer to his previous name or put “her” in quotation marks even for when “she” was a “he”. One Guardian writer put Jenner’s “fathering” of children in scare-quotes as though it was fictional. Strangest of all is that everybody, from the US President down, is meant to find the new Caitlyn Jenner beautiful.
But what about those people who have neither the money nor the bone structure to be transformed in this way? What about people who transform into rather plain or even dowdy women instead of these Annie Leibovitz-airbrushed beauty pageant queens? Will we celebrate them? Must it be forbidden to joke about them? Ought it to be considered bad form not to find them attractive? I see minefields ahead.
North Korea is not an easy problem to solve. But is the transformation of Kim Jong-un into an ugly minor celebrity, whom everyone can laugh at, our way of coping with this fact — or a demonstration of an absolutely barbarous flippancy?
***
Speaking of flippancy, if there is one thing we must now never be flippant about it is transsexualism. The transformation of a reality show celebrity and former Olympic gold medallist called Bruce Jenner into Caitlyn Jenner seems to have brought the issue of “T”s to the fore. Anyone who has read Jan (formerly James) Morris’s description of his sex-change operation in Morocco in the 1970s will know that these are not things people go through lightly. But as so often, in an effort to “catch up” public opinion goes too far and the opinion-enforcers become impossibly demanding. It currently seems to have become wrong not just to question anything about Jenner’s decision, but to refer to his previous name or put “her” in quotation marks even for when “she” was a “he”. One Guardian writer put Jenner’s “fathering” of children in scare-quotes as though it was fictional. Strangest of all is that everybody, from the US President down, is meant to find the new Caitlyn Jenner beautiful.
But what about those people who have neither the money nor the bone structure to be transformed in this way? What about people who transform into rather plain or even dowdy women instead of these Annie Leibovitz-airbrushed beauty pageant queens? Will we celebrate them? Must it be forbidden to joke about them? Ought it to be considered bad form not to find them attractive? I see minefields ahead.
Like this article? Share, save or print using the icons below:
4:08 AM