June 10, 2014
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Scientific advances spur social mutations as surely as ergo prompters hoc.
Sometimes the connection is irrefutable, however, if slightly askew. Air conditioning, for example, killed the Catskills. Why decamp to the mountains upstate to escape those sweltering New York City summers when you could see the same stand-up comedians and animal acts on your own TV, in cool, familiar comfort?
And it’s generally agreed, for instance, that the sexual revolution couldn”t have spread so widely and rapidly without the invention of the pill in 1960. Generally, but not universally: this economist says an earlier medical breakthrough”penicillin”was the real chemical agent of free love. So did the pill need the 60s, or did the 60s need the pill?
Fast-forward to last week, when a magazine nobody reads anymore stuck a “famous” person nobody”d ever heard of on its cover and trumpeted the triumph of the latest revolution, the one Steve Sailer calls “World War T,” and TIME has dubbed “America’s next civil rights movement””that is, the “transgender tipping point.”
I”m so old, I remember when transvestites were mostly colorful characters in midnight cult movies, not the seemingly ubiquitous “new blacks” of real life. Two things have changed.
First, I”d guess that in the aggregate, far more individuals have seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show than Orange Is the New Black. As I”ve said before, though, 1975’s Rocky Horror concludes with the once-glorious “sweet transvestite’s” humiliating arrest because his “lifestyle’s too extreme.” These days, however, the pop-cult tranny always wins out. “She” is a “You go, girl!” role model, embodying “fierce” courage.
Second, medical science has “evolved” to the point where sex-change operations are safe, legal, and less rare than ever. Were there always this many “women trapped in men’s bodies,” or is state-of-the-art plastic surgery (and pop culture) inspiring the creation of all these Frank-N-Furter monstrosities? “Don”t dream it, be it,” indeed.
The Left has embraced transsexualism, but what will they do with transracialism? For now (as it was my sad duty to inform you just over a year ago) this phenomenon is still confined to the fringes”but aren”t they all, at first?
Meet Xiahn Nishi. After studying in South Korea for a year, this 25-year-old, formerly blond, blue-eyed Brazilian underwent 10 operations to look more like the locals. Three thousand dollars later (that’s a plastic surgery bargain by American standards) the young man formerly known as “Max” now has the same “Asian” facial features that, hilariously, those locals spend about the same amount of money trying to get rid of.
South Koreans, you see, undergo more cosmetic procedures than, well, Brazilians”or anyone else. One in five women in Seoul has gone under the knife, compared to America’s one-in-20 figure. Frankly, it’s easy to see why. Korean surgeons have somehow managed to fracture the Project Management Triangle: their lucky clients can get it cheap, fast, and good.
