I was originally going to quote-post Parker Molloy’s Bluesky post, but it turned into something more while I was drafting. I’m still working out some of the thoughts here.
When you spend generations asserting that white cis hetero masculinity is the default, you remove the need for definition. It shouldn’t need definition because it’s normal.
But in reality, it is defined not by what it is, but by what it is not and those boundaries have to be continually reinforced.
During that process, we all develop a consciousness of what it means to be not default because we’re continually reminded of the shape of those boundaries.
The definition of the not-default then carries weight and meaning because we either 1) find ourselves within the not-default or, 2) are constantly policing that boundary. The default, by its own nature, never has to look inward, because there’s nothing to see.
But, as the areas of not default create their own community and refuse to define the default in return, the default soon fades.
Yet, because of the structures its created in defining what it is not, that slip into oblivion comes with ultra-violence.
And that always slips its boundaries.
But the default is a lie, just as the boundaries are lies. Those policing the boundary as part of the default have assigned so much to the not-default that they are the destroyers of their own humanity.
(Fuck your feelings, amirite?)
And I think that, in a roundabout way, that’s been the point all along: to excise the humanity out of the white cis hetero masculine mindscape. To turn the fiction of the superior rational and unemotional mind into a form that could never interface with the nuances of nature, let alone humanity.
The pursuit of the white cis hetero masculine ideal isn’t a race to the ubermensch, but a death dive into becoming one with some perpetual mainframe.
Perhaps, then, Generative AI is the wet dream of the man denied emotional depth due to the constraints of his own prison; the prison in which he is guard and inmate.
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