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Opinion | How popular culture pushed our teenagers to confused, militant wokeness
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  • Opinion | How popular culture pushed our teenagers to confused, militant wokeness

Opinion | How popular culture pushed our teenagers to confused, militant wokeness

Abhijit Majumder • September 25, 2021, 17:27:57 IST
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What brings the show back from the precipice of unbearable wokeness is that it stops short of cancel culture. It portrays heterosexuality without sneering at it.

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Opinion | How popular culture pushed our teenagers to confused, militant wokeness

In the popular OTT series Sex Education, British schoolchildren are falling in non-heteronormative love all over the place. Homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality, gender fluidity, alien fetish, outercourse for the disabled, pansexuality…it is all there, exploding like popcorn at every corner of the fictional Moordale Secondary School. What brings the show back from the precipice of unbearable wokeness is that it stops short of cancel culture. It portrays heterosexuality without sneering at it. And it depicts all kinds of love with all its charming vulnerabilities and nuance instead of scooping it into coldly conceptual, politically correct gendered buckets. In real life, the numbers do not look so overwhelmingly diverse. In the same UK, for instance, the proportion of those aged 16 years and over-identifying as heterosexual was 93.7 percent in 2019, according to the Annual Population Survey. About 2.7 percent identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) in 2019. An increase of 0.5 percentage points from the previous year, but still modest. The ideological Left, which has driven a prescient social justice cause into the militant, unforgiving and characteristically authoritarian ‘wokeness’ we now mock, is a masterclass in propaganda. Over decades, it has perfected the art of making the marginal look mainstream. But we cannot deny that the movement, however flawed, has given voice to those who do not fit into two gender categories and whose longings are unlike most others. While conservatives and liberals alike have hit back at the wokes’ vicious cancelling streak and blind moral certitude, it would be wrong to overlook centuries of bullying, discrimination and violence the outliers have faced. Social change does not always come from polite arguments. It often takes an over-the-top shocker like Draupadi washing her hair with brother-in-law Dushashan’s blood, overworked guillotines of the French Revolution, bra-burning feminists of ’60s America, or Gandhi’s loincloth. But there is a bigger and silent dynamic at play. The global marketing machinery has sold a kind of hyper-heterosexuality to billions of youngsters. From Hollywood movies showcasing the ‘cool’ teenager who gets laid after the prom and the ‘loser’ who doesn’t, to ads that promote a particular kind of sexual ideal, popular culture has driven many young people into an under-confident, self-loathing shell. In teenagers, the pressure to excel at this sex ritual can be wrecking. For every one teenager who finds a date, there are ten experiencing various levels of self-doubt and sadness of not being able to find one. This is the ripe catchment area for wokeness. You can now hope to escape the shame of not being stereotypically ‘cool’ and accepted by picking or inventing for yourself any gender, real or imagined, and making a TikTok video in the spirited defence of it. Even ‘pizzasexual’ is going down in recorded human history. Much of wokeness is nonsensical and there is justifiably growing backlash. But those of us who loathe it have created it by facilitating and not speaking out against the absurd expectations of hyper-heterosexuality that society has subjected our children to. That is why a series like Sex Education is important. Beneath the celebrity posturing and performative outrage on social media lies the real, silent pain of many youngsters. That ought to be acknowledged and healed.

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