Robot Cultist Thinks There's Something Revolutionary About A Skeletally Thin "Androgynous" White Guy Being A Successful Model

Sure, he's pretty, I guess. I prefer eyes with experience in them and bones with meat on them myself, but, you know, let a bazillion flowers bloom and so on. Nevertheless, calling Andrej Pejic's highly-profitable self-promotional mildly-outside-the-lines but fully mainstream-legible performance of sex-gender norms "post-gender" is utter nonsense. Even David Bowie and Tilda Swinton, say, who have managed much more interesting variations on this schtick for incomparably wider audiences for years and years couldn't really be said ever to have been truly subversive or threatening or even deeply critical to patriarchy or consumerism or much of anything else in my view. Mistaking this runway re-run of stale supremely consumable fashion-pop genderfuck as some kind of radical intervention is very much par for the course for the straight white guy techno-sexist versions of "feminism" and so-called "post-feminism" one expects from Robot Cultists. Compare, for instance, the still quite consumably mainstream-legible, but far more fabulous injunction of John Waters to "be your own filth god or goddess" in this truly marvelous I Am Divine Foundation affirmation:



Definitely before one leaps off into the usual facile ecstasies Robot Cultists are forever trying to whomp up to get more eyeballs on their screens and more asses in their pews -- it's a post-gender cyborg singularity, dood! time to buy buy buy buy buy! -- it is important to grasp that if it is true that Andrej Pejic is riding a wave of at least slightly more capacious performances of sex-gender norms in some North Atlantic societies (which is obviously all to the good since what is wanted is a world in which an ever greater diversity of wanted lifeways are actually liveable and not abject or lethal) it is also true that this is a wave with a very real and violent undertow, as The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects 2011 report informs us of

a number of disturbing trends concerning the severity of violence experienced by LGBTQH people. This year’s report shows that LGBTQH youth and young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 years old were 2.41 times as likely to experience physical violence compared to LGBTQH people age 30 and older. As in the case of the murder statistics, transgender people and people of color were more likely to experience physical injury in a hate violence incident. The report found that transgender people were 28% as likely to experience physical violence compared to non-transgender people, and that LGBTQ people of color were two times as likely to experience physical violence compared to those who were not LGBTQ people of color.

UPDATE: One of the folks quoted in the article I'm talking about is directing readers to my critique of it.