| It’s
not hard to publish material on gender these days. The subject is
undoubtedly trendy. Mainstream audiences enjoy a steady diet of pseudo-science
designed to justify what everyone already knows about the subject,
a constant refrain of Mars and Venus mythologies. The allegedly more
radical front also depends on puff-pieces for its own sense of identity.
Nothing is more exciting than the written-embodiment of a drag show,
exhuming supposed curiosities like a Leftist equivalent of a PT Barnum.
These sob stories trafficked by pimps of pain are less about transforming
sexual politics and more about imagining oneself outside the realm
of bourgeois sensibility; or more importantly, responsibility.
So long as one sticks to obvious critiques of obvious targets (Republicans,
religious fundamentalists, et al.) on the political level, and remains
cute and coy about it on the personal, gender certainly is a popular
subject in progressive circles, provided certain loyalties are paid
to it. Gender as a concept begins to matter for its own sake, as
if it has some sort of intrinsic value in and of itself that is
worthy of interest—not because of what is done to people on
a pandemic level because of its continued construction by patriarchy.
“Gender Oppression” has thus become subordinate in importance
to “Gender Expression,” shifting political focus from
the voiceless to media exhibitionists.
Focus on that dynamic and things change. Literally. But because
too much change is a bad thing, publishing opportunities quickly
begin to dry up. The truth doesn’t please advertisers trying
to sell everything from gun-shaped vibrators in feminist magazines
to the permanent enslavement of girls and women; sex tourism commercials
that are still allowed or even encouraged by some of the most powerful
and influential of liberal-male publications, all under the aegis
of “free speech.” The truth doesn’t please editors
who often feel that they’ve outgrown their own progressive-minded
journals, which they begin to see as merely a stepping stone to
lucrative mainstream markets, and being able to annually resell
the same article on pornography, the wage-gap, or whatever issue
is made momentarily relevant by some bigger-league pundit isn’t
conducive to moving the debate forward. And the truth certainly
doesn’t please readers who are desperate to believe that their
own lives, thoughts, and actions are generally on the level: from
us males (whether we personally believe ourselves to be men or women)
who are given every entitlement to focus on our own pain, to females
whose mental and physical survival often requires them to put others
first, necessitating the imagining of some other body being more
marginal or peripheral than their own.
Adonis Mirror is envisioned as an antidote to liberal
vanity, a journal devoted to pro-feminist activism, that endeavors
to talk about the hard truths and above all, to name names—especially
when doing otherwise would be easier.
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