The World Wokists Want: Part 2

a review of the sequel

If you’ve been hanging around here long enough to have read my December 28th, 2023 post, The World Wokists Want, you almost certainly remember it.

It was a review of “Kink and ShowTunes” book 1, Their Troublesome Crush.

I’ve had people tell me exactly where they were, what they were wearing, and what they stopped doing to absorb that whole post. That my fairly recent college experience told me it was entirely plausible — this really is how the Woke think, act, emote, and relate — made it one of the most interesting and eye-opening book reviews many people had ever read.

My recent experience of running into a They/Them in the wild — complete with the unmistakable air of someone who thinks a conversation is an opportunity to recite their LinkedIn pronoun policy — made me finally take the time to read and review book 2.

Because President Trump 2.0 doesn’t mean this stuff has been exorcised. Wokeness isn’t gone; it’s like mold in a rent-controlled apartment — it’s just learned how to grow in the dark and rebrand itself as “community.”

If you read that post, you already know the “Kink and ShowTunes” series is less “fun romp through musical theater and erotic adventure” and more “if the safe word is stop, I’d like to use it on the entire subculture.”

That post was my deep dive into the first book — a work so marinated in Woke dogma and BDSM terminology that I felt like I was reading a cross between a Twitter thread and a ball-gag catalog.

For those who missed it — or who have successfully repressed the memory — book 1 followed Ernest (a woman identifying as a man), Nora (a woman aware she’s a woman), and Gideon (a woman identifying as a man) in a series of plot-adjacent scenes built around “negotiated” abuse, elaborate victimhood hierarchies, and power-dynamic labeling so obsessive it made 1950s Emily Post look like an anarchist.

The “story,” such as it was, involved Ernest and Nora slowly graduating from “mutual metamours” of Gideon to… something resembling a relationship, if your definition of “relationship” is “friendship except with caning.”

The actual arc could be summarized as:

1. Talk endlessly about feelings using micro-identity categories.

2. Physically injure Ernest with her consent.

3. Discuss baked goods as moral minefields — the return of the Cupcake Crisis, now a recurring plot device, like Chekhov’s gun if the gun were gluten-free and ethically sourced.

The book’s most unforgettable moments still haunt me:

• Ernest weighing the political implications of cupcake frosting like it was the Treaty of Versailles.

• Thirtysomething adults describing beatings and chest harnesses in the tone of a five-year-old showing off a lunchbox.

• An entire subplot about how serving tea to a friend is actually “submission.”

• Gideon’s depression “flare” birthday party, where the solution was not cancelling but barricading her from guests — like throwing yourself a party and then installing a moat.

It was competently written, yes, but in the way a cult brochure might be competently written — with no doubt about its worldview, no room for dissent, and plenty of instructions for how you should talk about it afterward.

And now, in Tenderness, we get to see what happens when the same people throw a pity party in the same ideological terrarium, only this time with new costumes and a fresh batch of trigger warnings.

Now we arrive at book 2, Tenderness. Same “Kink and ShowTunes” series, same ideological oxygen, new opportunities to watch the characters continue their slow descent into the most joyless performance of “liberation” I’ve ever seen put to paper.

If book 1 was the pilot episode of a reality show filmed entirely in a padded room, book 2 promises to be the season where they redecorate the padded room in gender-neutral pastels, host a seder in it, and remind you that the salt on the table isn’t just seasoning.

It’s a power dynamic.

---

What Those Woke Words Mean

Queer: this is a “reclaimed slur,” that once referred exclusively to homosexuals. Now it is used much more broadly, including by straight people who are desperate to gain some Woke street cred. It basically means “not heterosexual and/or cisgendered.” A normal straight couple that has missionary-position sex and makes babies can be “queer” if one of the members declares himself/herself non-binary.

Cisgender or “cis”: this means “not trans.” If you accept the reality that your genitalia and chromosomes determine your biological sex and you are not trying to force other people to pretend otherwise, you’re cisgender.

Non-binary: this is a self-identifier used by people who want to claim that they’re neither a man nor a woman. It is silly, stupid, shallow nonsense, and logically incoherent. Every non-binary person asserts the existence of two categories: the non-binary, like themselves, and the rest of us, who are binary — and thus both creates and participates in, a binary.

Polyamorous: from “many loves”, this term names a relationship structure that involves infidelity as a matter of course. Essentially cheating with permission, or at least awareness.

Metamour: your lover’s lover. The person that is sleeping with/involved with the person you are also sleeping with/involved with.

Demisexual: a person who does not experience sexual attraction or desire to have sexual relationships without first forming a close emotional bond. As my therapist said when I told him about this (it was taught as fact in one of my university courses), “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”

Demiromantic: the same as demisexual, only with “romantic attraction,” which Woke people seem to define as completely separate from sex — this “split track” notion is one we’ll return to.

Transman: a woman who identifies as a man and, if possible, has her breasts surgically removed and takes testosterone in order to mimic male secondary sex characteristics (beard, deepening of voice, redistribution of fat, etc.).

Submissive: someone who experiences sexual arousal/sexual pleasure from being dominated by another person, or physically hurt by another person.

Dominant: someone who experiences sexual arousal/sexual pleasure from dominating or physically hurting another person.

Switch: someone who engages in both submissive and dominant behaviors at different times.

Femme: roughly equivalent to “feminine,” essentially an adjective that asserts the person it’s applied to engages in stereotypical femininity, like makeup and girly clothing.

The rest of the review is after the paywall:

---

ORIGINAL WATERCOLOR PENCIL TEXAS BLUEBONNET FOR SALE

Information here.

---

Extra space to allow for the way the Substack app messes up displaying paywalls.

---