The 'Trash Can' of Late Capitalism

There was this recent trend for #menaretrash on Twitter and many were tweeting the same. Mostly, men (more than women) were tweeting the hashtag. Honestly, there is no way to sugarcoat this but the truth is that the #menaretrash is remarkably stupid and is just another tool in the box of the Politically Correct.

Men are Trash! I mean what do they mean by this statement? Is it the ultimate excuse for men to do violent crimes or is this some justification! What motive does it serve? If you look close, you can see how men would happily call themselves trash because of course they wouldn't want to do anything about it. If they identify themselves as trash and ask women to not complain because they cant expect any more decency from trash, this ironically becomes the perfect game for men. Moreover, this is extended political correctness in action. Like everything else from political correctness, this here also is part of a series of pretensions. 

#metoo and feminism

#menaretrash obviously takes us to both these movements. There is no doubt that feminists of our time can sometime act as pawns in the game of the imperialist patriarchal regime. Remember when they spoke against Assange or when they supported the Iraq invasion saying it will liberate Iraqi women. #metoo is also just a similar instance if you watch closely. #metoo started as a mass movement of women - mostly, underprivileged women (a black women started it) - to expose the exploitations they faced in their lives. This was later appropriated by the bourgeois middle class and other elite women feminists who made it into a game of their own. Like Slavoj Žižek says, #metoo is not radical enough! It just wants to symbolically question the system that is promoting inequality. It doesn't want to go face to face with the underbelly of the system. And being the perpetrators, where does men come in? How do the pioneers of the movement see men being part of their plan for an egalitarian future? 

Here we come to understand how myopic this movement has turned out to be. Men suffer in their private spaces and it is often the same system that makes men pay the prices too. So to change men, the basic system of oppression has to change. but instead, what we have here with these movements are nothing more than symbolic performances. There is no plan for the reformation of the system, just a way to get back at men for all those unjustifiable acts done by them (by also building a victimhood culture in the process). So, just calling men trash is the easiest and the most cowardly way out of the quagmire. 

Sex

American cultural critics like Laura Kipnis talk about how women are stripped of their agency in the act of sex but in turn are asked to be bothered about sex in terms of power, consent and so on. Of course these are all important but reducing sex to basic power play is absurd and is a hole in their thesis. In turn, women should, according to Kipnis, take control of the discourse around sex. This is where we go back to the PC culture of tying down people around petty agendas of momentary solutions, with the underlying problem of the issue unaddressed.

Trauma

We see these days, people talking openly about panic attacks and other traumatic experiences. The problem with this is that the idea to slowly normalize panic attacks or trauma in society has now finally become an effort to essentialize trauma or panic attacks. People who do not have panic attacks are seen not human enough. They are dubbed machines or people without feelings and sympathies are showered upon them by the politically correct. The irony here is that even when they say that they are trying to respect differences, they respect differences only on their terms. By all means, people are different. People go through repression 'proper' and they deal with this repression in different ways.

This is where we should return to Slavoj Žižek's opinion that the ways of SJWs and cultural warriors are not radical enough. They are just trying to be part of this moral attempt at pretending to be nice to the other and they honestly believe that with this pretentious attitude they could engender real change (some radical practice, they believe). Anyway, as many marxists opined, this culture of narcissistic and individualistic tendencies emanates from late capitalism. There is no grand plan for change or reformation here. It is about policing and building moral superiority over the other. Just another game to sustain and further the oppressive system.

Back to #menaretrash, if you read into it, this hashtag is nevertheless incomplete. The lack in the statement only becomes clear if we tend to ask, "if men are trash, what about women and all the other identities?". If one were to ask this question, the whole premise becomes rather patronizing. The trash in its complete sense, of course should mean, "men are trash, so are women and so are the others". As the concluding part, I think the epic Slavoj Žižek explanation of ideology is perfect here - "I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating."