A Tale of Two Krakens

"Fry: Incredible. This place is just like the Ancient Egypt of my day.
Osiran Slavemaster: That is no coincidence, for our people visited your Egypt thousands of years ago.
Fry: I knew it! Insane theories, one; regular theories, a billion."

Futurama: A Pharaoh to Remember


At about ten to twelve years old, I outgrew religion. There was no single traumatic event involved, no easily identifiable dark night of the soul. I wasn't felt up by a priest nor contracted some incurable disease to make me decry "there is no God!" I just gradually discerned the proposition of the universe being run by some omniscient Daddy Warbucks up in the clouds is utter bullshit, and the scriptures no holier than Aesop's fables. Somehow, a few of the fairy tales I'd been told as a child had been mistakenly presented to me as Super Serious Grownup Stuff instead of the kid stories they really were. They'd been misfiled, one might say. Oops.

As many others have observed, such a break with the religion of our childhoods rarely transitions directly into skepticism. At first it prompts a search for a replacement faith of some kind, any kind, for some intangible influence or unfalsifiable Truth Out There somewhere. Something on which to blame all one's troubles, something we can feel is watching our back in this big bad scary world, or at the very least some knowledge we can claim to possess, inaccessible to others, a secret to share to make us feel speshul. In my case I skimmed over a few Oriental myths about reincarnation and flying monks which led me into E.S.P. (which mostly led to eye strain from squinting after auras) then I hit upon the notion of alternate realities, which kept me busy for a bit examining the assumption that anything might be possible in the multiverse. That kind of jumped the shark when I found myself wondering whether there must necessarily exist a Mickey Mouse universe. Then I bought a couple of books on UFO sightings, alien abductions and ancient astronauts (they, like, totally built the pyramids, didjaknowthat? 'strue!) This segued conveniently enough into cryptozoology.

Those books were a-may-zing! They laid out all the big superstar cryptids, a veritable "who's who" of who's not. There was Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, and the Jersey Devil and the Chupacabra and thunderbirds and jackalopes and mothmen and half-chimp human hybrids and half-chimp human hybrids from space and Hans the wonder-horse and sirens and subterranean lizard-people and...
Hmm.
Well, this is embarrassing.
They also featured, rather prominently, the Kraken. Turns out that one's real. Oops.

Twenty years later, a Japanese submersible crew actually filmed it. Does that vindicate the entire roster of batshit conspiracy theories that is cryptozoology? Does the existence of the giant squid make Ariel the Mermaid any more real? Does it imply there really is a lone immortal 65m.y.o. plesiosaur paddling around the Scottish Highlands, visible only to the pure of heart? Bullshit. Minotaurshit, even. It only means the giant squid had been misfiled as a cryptid in the books I'd bought back in 1994. Based on the amount of extant physical evidence from the 19th century onwards, it really should never have been included in the same category as Bigfoot.

Not everything is as advertised. Not everything we've been sold as Super Serious Grownup Stuff truly qualifies. Not all cryptids are equally cryptic, and it's much more true in politics than in science. Social clubs and social movements will predictably try to legitimize themselves by claiming membership in some broader, more respectable category. They'll try to attack their favorite targets of abuse by pigeonholing them as some broader, more despicable category. Everyone I hate must automatically be a Nazi child molester, by the power of 'cuz I said so. So there. Quite often you find the strangest political bedfellows. For instance, the broader category we call the Left Wing of politics has its own Krakens.

On one hand you've got environmentalism. The first natural preserves, the first areas walled off from human development, were anything but socialist or left wing or populist. They were the hunting grounds of fat cats. Almost literally. Long before national parks or World Heritage Sites there were game preserves, where the lords of various realms hunted their deer and boars and pheasants and stalked the wily caviar to the best of their inbred aristocratic abilities. You could afford to leave some land unspoilt by civilization when your family owned half a county. The left wing on the other hand is by its basic definition about representing the interests of the (human) working class. Improving the material comforts of 75-95% of society necessarily requires acquiring more of those comfortable materials, by hook or by crook. Historical examples from the industrial era onwards are enough to make Mother Nature shit herself. In fact the various self-declared socialist states of the Second World have carried out their forced, accelerated industrialization in the 20th century with an almost ecstatic dismissal of natural disasters. A quick Google search of Soviet depredations yields story after story after story after story after story after story after story filled with such heart-warming phrases as "life expectancy of 42 years" or "accidental release of weaponized smallpox" to prove that Chernobyl's barely the tip of the iceberg. And if you think the Soviets were bad, best not even mention the "People's Republic" of China.

In the U.S., hippies managed to claim a love of nature as their own. After all, "flower children" sounds flaky but still a lot more respectable than "draft-dodging stoners." Since then, the right wing has learned to hate environmentalism as part and parcel of everything they hate about left-wing politics, like education, open-mindedness, freedom and listening to Jesus instead of just having faith in him. With so much of science actually backing up the hippies' points, we've reached the odd stage of widespread knee-jerk conservative antiscientific rhetoric: a denial of vaccination, denial of global warming, denial of evolution even. Understanding and conserving nature has become conflated, in American conservatives' view, with the evils of socialism. Khrushchev and Brezhnev would probably laugh their asses off about it.

But if that's largely projection by the right wing, the left wing imposes its own Krakens on its self-classification, not least of them feminism. I was prompted to write this post by hearing, for the ten-thousandth time in my life, yet another feminist declare that abortion rights are by definition women's rights and proceed to wail and moan about the reactionary fight against abortion as a gendered issue, some implicit crime of men against women. Well, you know who might disagree with her? All the women who routinely declare themselves "pro-life" in polls, and who join anti-abortion organizations and who make up over half of the anti-abortion movement. At which point we can all pretty much face-palm at remembering the basic biological truism that women love babies! If they didn't we wouldn't be here.

Personal freedom is a more masculine than a feminine value. Personal safety and stability are more feminine than masculine values. These tendencies are by no means absolute but have been verified trends throughout recorded history. Liberalism, libertinism, libertarianism and most things with "liber" in them tend to be more male than female. Comfortable self-delusions are more feminine than masculine, which may both bring into question and explain the desire of feminists to paint religion as some anti-female boys' club despite women at large being more religious than men. As convenient as it is to scapegoat the nearest male for all your troubles, Mrs. Grundy remains doggedly female.* These 55-45% or 60-40% splits in gender politics may not sound very decisive, but let's remember most presidential elections are won with less than a 10% spread. (Some are won with a -2.09% spread.)

Aside from being pro-abortion and anti-theocratic, the left wing is supposed to be, let's remember, at its root about social class inequality. Hell, the term itself started with the French Revolution. This cuts to the core reason why feminism never belonged in the bestiary of left-wing politics to begin with. Women are not a socioeconomic class. While gender roles have certainly limited women's sphere of activity, it has not limited their access to the fruits of that activity. Rich women lived rich lives and poor women lived poor lives, and lived and died within their homestead's tax bracket just like the men getting taxed did. They had their babies and said their prayers, and it was safe and stable and feminine and though life was hard you could always blame your husband for failing to bring home more bacon. Women have always been as oppressed as the majority of women have wanted to be. When, after several millennia of aristocracy, men finally gained the right to vote, women demanded it as well and got it in a couple of generations. When working outside the home became safe and personally rewarding instead of just climbing the same hill all your life to till the soil (instead of tilling your home garden) women demanded to work outside the home, and they got that too. When formal education became a point of pride instead of an oubliette for younger sons in lieu of a monastery or foreign legion, women demanded it and got it as they get anything they demand from men.

There is one thing women might lose in exchange for everything they've gotten, the safety and stability of a male provider, the most conservative value of all, and that is what modern feminism promises. It's not liberal. It's not left wing. It's a continuation of the promise of male service toward women. Feminism sells the idea of male guilt, of some unfathomable, inestimable male debt toward women, constantly fabricating infractions against femininity to justify treating men as criminals, to make men work toward redeeming themselves and allow women to believe themselves entitled to male labor. It's a Kraken of an ideology, an all too real outgrowth of conservatism's otherwise imaginary monster manual, coiling around and around, dragging us down, down, down into a suffocating obfuscation of real social issues.





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*That means she's a bitch. That was the joke.