The Internet Is Making You Gay
Posted on | December 17, 2016 | 3 Comments
OK, maybe the headline slightly overstates the case — I’ve been on the Internet more than 20 years and am still staunchly heterosexual — but some young people are clearly being influenced in the wrong direction. Having previously reported on “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” yesterday I took a long look at the YouTube “coming out” video genre:
Believe it or not, kids, sex actually did happen before we had YouTube or Facebook. I’m old enough to remember sex before there was even email! Those were the days of primitive analog sex, not like the high-tech stuff you kids are having with your iPhones and Tinder apps. We couldn’t just post a selfie on the Internet and wait for somebody to like it. No, we had to go out into what used to be called “the real world” and meet actual human beings.
The great thing about pre-Internet sex was, it was mostly private. You had to be a real celebrity before anybody cared if you were gay, and it was actually possible to avoid such questions. Instead of having an identity posted on your Internet profile — “demisexual genderqueer, Taurus, INFP, they/them” — you were just a flesh-and-blood human being, and most people you interacted with in your daily life knew almost nothing about you. If you were smart, you tried to keep it that way. This 21st-century confessional culture, where everybody seems to feel a need to publicize everything about themselves — post all the details of your life to Facebook — probably isn’t too smart.
Young people don’t seem to understand that the Internet is forever. Thirty or 40 years from now, their grandkids will be like, “Hey, Grandma, tell us the story about that time you were bisexual on YouTube!” . . .
Read the whole thing at The Patriarch Tree. The problem with many young people is that they have no sense of history, and therefore cannot evaluate their own personal problems in any kind of objective way. Growing up, my study of history gave me a sense of myself as the descendant of pioneers and patriots, who had overcome hardships far more difficult than anything I was likely to face in my own life. Although I had my own poignant adolescent woes — who doesn’t? — it was from knowing history that I obtained an understanding of myself as being situated in a brief window of the great span of time.
“The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”
— Robert E. Lee, 1870
“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. . . .
“Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future.”
— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)
The astute reader instantly intuits the connection here between a loss of historical sensibility, an intensification of narcissism, and the embrace of homosexuality, which usually carries with it the abandonment of hope for posterity. Decadence and despair always go hand-in-hand.
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3 Responses to “The Internet Is Making You Gay”
December 18th, 2016 @ 9:10 am
[…] The Other McCain notes the theory that the Internet makes you gay […]
December 20th, 2016 @ 3:00 pm
[…] The Internet Is Making You Gay […]
December 24th, 2016 @ 4:40 pm
[…] The Internet Is Making You Gay OK, maybe the headline slightly overstates the case – I’ve been on the Internet more than 20 years and am still staunchly heterosexual – but some young people are clearly being influenced in the wrong direction. […]