In fact, the statement appeared just over 50 years ago, in a polemical analysis of Disney cartoons written by two Marxist militants, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was published in Chile during the brief rule of Salvador Allende as part of an attempt by Allende’s leftist allies to push back against American cultural influence. The book became a bestseller, but after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, it was banned and publicly burned.

The Right’s current lament for the betrayal of “traditional families who want to hold onto innocent entertainment for their kids” proceeds from the premise that this “woke Disney” is a deviation from the company’s benevolent past. But Dorfman and Mattelart, all the way back in 1971, contested this assumption of innocence. Although their methodology is Marxian and their aims overtly anti-capitalist, their allegations foreshadow the American Right’s current concerns in surprising ways.

Much of the analysis from the two socialist radicals concerns the printed comic strips that circulated widely in Latin America, where movies and TV were less accessible to the impoverished majority. In particular, they focus on Donald Duck and his extended family. As they note, this is an odd family: Donald Duck, along with Mickey Mouse and much of the rest of the Disney pantheon, exists in a “universe of uncles and grand-uncles, nephews and cousins”. Indeed, “there is one basic product that is never stocked in the Disney store: parents”. The “innocence” of this world, it turns out, required even the exclusion of normative heterosexual coupling.

But the consequences of this exclusion are by no means innocent. “One is forced to the paradoxical conclusion,” they argue, “that in order to conceal normal sexuality from children, it is necessary to construct an aberrant world” — an “asexual sexuated world” that is nevertheless “suggestive of sexual games and innuendo”. The real significance of the disappearance of parental relationships is to universalise the capitalist “law of the jungle”.

In other words, the elimination of the nuclear family unit reduces all Disney characters to “island-individuals”, strivers for whom “all that is left . . . is to compete”. The patriarch of Duckburg, after all, is none other than Uncle Scrooge, who takes his name from the Victorian icon of cruel rapacity and avarice; the adventures of his nephews tend to concern the acquisition of even more treasures for his horde.

The point of all this, according to Dorfman and Mattelart, is to “lend innocence to the adult world”. In the dominion of Uncle Scrooge, “[g]old, criticized ever since the beginning of a monetary economy as a contamination of human relations and the corruption of human nature, mingle[s] with the innocence of the [child].” The riches he and his nephews acquire always lack a material origin: gold simply appears, with no source or origin, just as the children are parentless. This “simultaneous lack of biological reproduction and direct economic production is not coincidental”: Disney’s “innocence” requires eradication of “all reference to the real world”.

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Joe Biden's gender agenda

By Park MacDougald

How to Read Donald Duck contains many of the expected Left-wing criticisms of patriarchy and gender roles, but it also includes observations that might be surprising to ideologues today. Notably, as one illustration of the propaganda functions taken on by Disney in the Global South, the authors remark that the US Agency for International Development has circulated films featuring Disney characters promoting contraception. They reinforce this association with the title of their chapter on Disney family dynamics: “Uncle, buy me a contraceptive…”

Like many radicals at the time, Dorfman and Mattelart saw the US state’s growing interest in controlling fertility in the developing world as consistent with a broader campaign to suppress the value placed on family in the subject nations of its economic empire; this was deemed to be in tension with values such as efficiency, productivity, individualism, and competition. Disney’s exclusion of references to reproductive sexuality, in this light, looks less like an attempt to protect childhood innocence, than part and parcel of the larger modern decoupling of sex from reproduction.

It all suggests that the supposed sexual innocence of Disney’s dreamscapes was never aligned with “family values” in the first place and the Right’s current war on Disney isn’t about family — it is simply the latest phase of its realisation that corporate America has now largely aligned itself with the values of the cultural Left.

For, in fact, Disney’s vast influence on the imaginations of children has been enabled by market society’s weakening of the authority of the family. With parents overburdened by the demands of work, important aspects of child-rearing are entrusted to the entertainment industry. Disney has capitalised on this exploding demand more than any other company. If we take “grooming” to simply mean instilling values alien to the family into children, Dorfman and Mattelart would suggest that Disney has never been innocent of this charge.

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Woke GQ reeks of fear

By Douglas Murray

One might ask how much distance there really is between the de-sexualised world of the classic Disney cartoons and the ideals animating the newfangled “woke Disney” — which have lately exercised the Right. Notoriously, one of the core elements of contemporary “gender ideology” is to erase biology. The reigning orthodoxy now holds that to be a boy, girl, man, or woman is no longer a question of physiological features but of internally felt identity linked to stereotypes. This is not unlike the “asexual sexuated world” Dorfman and Mattelart found in Disney’s comic strips, in which gender stereotypes prevailed but the material reality of sex had been occluded.

The latest permutations of the Disney universe may be the result of “ideological capture” by woke employees, but they also reveal a continuity with the company’s past. Just as it was back in 1971, Disney today is a propaganda organ disseminating ideological narratives that legitimise the global economic order. At the postwar height of industrial capitalism, tales of deracinated treasure-hunting ducks instilled acquisitive individualism in children at the expense of older communal and familial values. In the new era of global, dematerialised speculative capital, Disney is simply purveying new dreams, where what is to be acquired is a commodified form of identity.

The Left has, unsurprisingly, come to Disney’s defence in recent weeks, and even Dorfman, who had a prominent career in US academia after his forced exile from Chile, has softened his views on his old antagonist. Commenting on the appearance of a new English edition of How to Read Donald Duck, he remarked: “The Disney Corporation itself has evolved under pressure from minorities and feminists, and has distinguished itself by defending LGBTQ rights.” The Right, convinced of Disney’s original innocence, has no critique of its propaganda function, only the uses it is currently being put to. The company’s imperial power over the global imagination, vaster today than ever before, faces no credible challenge today from either side.

Not that I really have to search. In the homepage thumbnails, everyone is white, unless their race can be sold as a kink. Japanese wife. Chocolate. In the sidebar, I can click on the category “interracial”, because this is 2020 and apparently two people of different skin tones getting down is still as niche an interest as “babysitter” or “smoking”. “Female orgasm” is also a category, for that subset of men who are interested in whether a woman actually enjoys it. Have I mentioned, I hate PornHub.

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There's nothing woke about the sex trade

By Julie Bindel

But I am a brave journalist, so I press on. (Is this sex? Do people like this? Are women people? No, we are sluts and milfs and bitches, according to PornHub.) Will PornHub let me search for racist porn? Spoiler: it will. I put the word “racist” in the search bar, and am served multiple videos, all of which are definitely racist.

Some of them, though, have a veneer of woke, which is very heartwarming. I search for Black Lives Matter: I get a video tagged “black cocks matter”, and one “ebony slut”. All this should be a surprise, because PornHub was recently vaunting its progressive credentials. “Pornhub stands in solidarity against racism and social injustice”, the company tweeted, along with links to Black Lives Matter-adjacent campaigns that followers could support. It’s not a surprise, though, because PornHub is horrible.

If I wanted to be chippy, I would call this a perfect example of the indulgence model of modern liberal mores. Pay your tithe to the bail fund as directed, get back to whacking off over racism with your conscience salved. But actually, I would probably be being both chippy and incorrect, because does anyone really feel bad about their porn? The generally agreed position is that porn exists somewhere outside morality. Things which, at a tenth of the strength, would be instant cancellation offences in any other medium are granted licence in porn because someone, somewhere got an erection from them.

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Why is the Left so hypocritical about sex?

By Sarah Ditum

The porn industry’s success in positioning itself beyond petty questions of good and bad is one of the great marketing triumphs of modern times. If it feels good, watch it. Heck, watch it at work if you want to. Here, I run into some tricky terrain, because what happens in the dark between our own heads and hands is really no one’s concern but our own, and if you want to think about that particular woman bent OTK in a lace chemise then what does it have at all to do with me. Hectoring our fantasies seems a spectacularly fruitless endeavour.

But porn is not fantasy. Porn is business, and a profoundly exploitative one. I don’t mean that in the no-doubt tiresome feminist sense that it exploits women, although it does. I mean it in the sense that, in its modern form, pornography is an industry where the capitalist rinses out the worker, then puts up a blogpost to mark International Sex Workers’ Day, which aims to “honor sex workers” and “push for better working conditions”. The fact that PornHub is a major driver of those working conditions is, well, wouldn’t you like to look at some tits instead of thinking about it?

PornHub belongs to the conglomerate MindGeek, which also owns multiple other “tube” sites for watching free porn. Where does this porn come from? From production companies, many of which are also owned by MindGeek. In many cases, if a performer wants to defend their royalties on a clip, they’ll need the help of the copyright holder, which just happens to also be the company drawing down a profit by serving it for free, so good luck with that. Another group of people have also struggled to get PornHub to remove content that violates their rights: victims of “revenge porn”, whose abusers upload their images to the “amateur” category.

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Just how harmful is porn?

By Tom Chivers

At this point in the argument, people like to say: but what about ethical porn? Here’s what’s about ethical porn: it doesn’t matter. It makes up such a tiny proportion of the industry, it’s like putting a chicken in your back garden and claiming you’ve fixed factory farming. Apologies to those who twist themselves into astonishing shapes to produce the kind of porn they think should exist, but at best all they’re doing is providing a talking point for people who want to stall the discussion by saying “what about ethical porn?” so they can get back to their vertically integrated faux-incest.

If you want to talk about ethics in porn, let’s discuss why the industry has yet to have its #metoo moment. There was a possibility of one in 2015, when the performer James Deen was accused of on-set assault by multiple female costars; but the reckoning failed to come. (Deen denies any wrongdoing.) Journalists with an interest in the porn industry proved surprisingly incurious about following these allegations up. For example, writer Emily Witt met Deen during a set visit for an article published in n+1. The abuse claims emerged while she was revising that piece for inclusion in her 2016 book Future Sex: rather than address them, Witt cut him from the copy.

Now another porn celebrity has been not just accused, but charged: the performer Ron Jeremy faces three counts of rape and one of sexual assault. And perhaps this will, finally, be the occasion for a conversation about the attitudes inculcated by an industry which makes a show of brutality against women. Probably not, though. The porn industry could hardly survive if it went in for any self-reflection at all. But, then the hollowness of PornHub’s ethical credentials is obvious. It’s the credulousness of porn’s defenders that’s the really shocking thing.

Time and again multinationals and public companies turn out to be as happy as junior members of the Royal Family to sign up to an ideology which will come to eat them next. If anyone is in any doubt about this trend, they should look to the men’s magazine GQ – or what we should more properly describe as the former men’s magazine, GQ.

Firstly, I should declare my prejudices at the outset. Though I have never bought a copy of GQ, I have often flicked through it at the barbers as a way to avoid conversation, and have always found it aggravating in the way that aspirational lifestyle magazines generally are.

By necessity these magazines are pornography for people who don’t have much sex, who feel that looking is the second-best thing to touching. How many of GQ’s readers could ever afford the vast price-tags on the sort of clothes the magazine made it look as though every man wore? How many went to the luxury resorts that were flagged in each issue? Or owned the cars, or generally lived the sort of James Bond-wannabe lifestyle that GQ presented as the achievable ambition of any man? If these flaws were aggravating then they were also embedded. You cannot have an aspirational lifestyle magazine which does not aspire.

Then there was the “Man of the Year” nonsense, the annual jamboree in which GQ got to display its own latest version of the modern aristocracy; a catwalk of public figures who were in turn flattered to be regarded as being in the cool club. GQ was always adept at this, hiring Alastair Campbell to give it alleged gravitas, or handing an award to Russell Brand in order to look like they were on top of each pseudo-serious trend.

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Will maths succumb to the woke wave?

By Douglas Murray

In reality, of course, such episodes showed the vulnerability of these very modern day snobs, the pretence that they were style arbiters and trend-setters rather than deeply unimaginative trend-followers. The inability to take a stand on anything until the precise moment that GQ sensed that the stand was being taken by everybody else. The sucking-up to power wherever it came from. It is an editorial talent of a kind, to be so craven that you will jump on any trend as soon as you think it no longer worth resisting.

With complete inevitability, in recent times GQ has been all too happy to join the woke bandwagon. As the Western world has gone through a set of values-alterations, so GQ has had to keep its antennae exceptionally attuned so as to know where it should follow next.

And one must pity them in some ways, for a men’s magazine like GQ really has only one objective in mind: to trick men into believing that it has the secret (or at least some of the secrets) of how men can attract women. Of course the usual pretence intermittently occurs – as it does throughout GQ’s opposite numbers in the world of women’s magazines – that all of this is only for the personal self-esteem of the readers and to make them feel better inside.

In reality the business model is to pretend that the magazine has knowledge its readers need. And the pity for GQ is that its core business – the whole business of relations between the sexes – has become exceptionally fraught in recent years.

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Meghan and Harry are playing a dangerous game

By Douglas Murray

Inevitably, GQ found a way to roll with that tide. In the year after the “MeToo” movement broke out it was necessary for them to demonstrate not only that they were totally on board with whatever the new consensus was, but that they were – if anything – positively ahead of the curve. That is why the magazine’s UK editor, Dylan Jones, last year editorialised that “For the first time in history, we’ve all been called to account for the sins of the patriarchy.” What does this surrender flag even mean? What is “the patriarchy”? What are its “sins”? Why do all men have to be called to account for them? Have I been called to account? Have you?

That increasingly beseeching, begging tone began to infuse the magazine. When Lewis Hamilton was accused of transphobia in the closing days of 2017 it was GQ which came to his rescue with a reputational repair job. As the cover star a few months later, in August 2018, Hamilton was photographed in a hideous tartan skirt. Though not forgetting to show some carefully rippled abs (for it is important for a man to still have some self-esteem while being forcibly feminised in the name of the new tolerance), the headline read “Lewis Hamilton refuses to skirt the issue”.

And now, a year later, GQ have found their latest surrender-hole. A magazine that solely exists because it pretends that it knows what masculinity is, and what women like about it, has decided instead that masculinity is a problem and that a “new masculinity” is needed.

The cover star this time is Pharrell, wearing a hideous outfit that looks like a cross between a cassock, a tent, a poncho and a dinghy – perhaps in due course it will be known as the life-raft outfit. For its aim, as with the whole pathetic mess that is this GQ issue, is to try to save men from the accusations being made about them: by promising that they have surrendered already.

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Is woke culture totalitarian?

By Eric Kaufmann

A beseeching, begging editorial by Will Welch (the new editor-in-chief) pays its indulgences straight away. He talks about the “pervasive culture of sexual intimidation and violence and blatant gender inequality”, of “victims” and the “discriminatory culture”. How should these things be addressed? Welch writes: “We see every day at GQ as an opportunity to answer that question,” continuing “one way we’ve addressed it is by making a magazine that isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all.” Which is one hell of a change of mission statement for a men’s magazine.

Inside, readers of this former men’s magazine can find advice from, for instance, someone called Hannah Gadsby, telling men why they “should be more ladylike”, and “interrogate” themselves as to why they might not want to be. Of course the ideal would be if everybody could be allowed to be themselves, whatever that self may be. But just as it is tedious and restrictive to assume that all men should behave one way and all women another, so it is equally – in fact more – ridiculous to insist that men should act more like women and all women perhaps more like men.

Sensible people will simply ignore GQ’s advice, realising that although women want many things, what they want least of all are the ex-men that GQ has now dedicated itself to creating. The magazine always relied on stereotypes, but at least they used to be amusingly aspirational. Nobody will aspire to the its ideals now, and soon perhaps GQ will learn the mantra that Gillette and others learned before them: get woke, go broke.

The critique of this position is easy to make. It is true that in the period since the 19th century, Western societies in particular have seen a steady increase in standards of living and an increase in the accumulation of personal freedoms. Of course there were at least two very serious interregnums in that steady march – namely World Wars One and Two. And in many non-Western societies (not least central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century), the idea that history moves in one direction might look especially fanciful.

Still, a version of the progressive fallacy seems almost embedded in the modern Western mind. For such people when a piece of territory is conquered and occupied by liberal attitudes it is then held for all time. It is not hard to see the idea’s attraction. What is hard to see is why it is so little refuted. Or rather, why when evidence emerges for its possible refutation, it is reacted to as though it is no evidence at all.

Further reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

Take the example of gay rights. In the last half a century the situation for gay people in western democracies improved immeasurably. From relations between people of the same sex being illegal in countries such as Britain, we have arrived at a position where gay people are able to marry, where the visibility of gay people in public life has never been greater and where corporations and arms of government positively fall over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to gay rights.

This last element – a positive bragging about a commitment to gay rights (sometimes described as ‘woke capitalism’) – is one that disturbs some of us who do not share the presumptions of inevitable progress. As Pride day has moved into Pride week and now Pride month there has (in the UK at least) emerged a sense of over-reach. This is a personal feeling, obviously, and not one that everybody will share. But I might as well express how it prickles in me.

I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.

Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym.

The sense of slight over-reach, or over-protesting, in part comes from the sense that some bigger picture may be being missed. And sure enough this year’s newly-released British Social Attitudes Survey gives a good jolt to this instinct.

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The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

For the new BSA report includes an interesting statistic. Over the last 30 years there has been a steady change in attitudes towards gay sex among the majority of the population. In 1987, (when the AIDS crisis was at its height) nine out of 10 people thought that there was something wrong with sexual activity between adults of the same sex. Each year since then the figures have shown an increasing tolerance of same-sex relations.

Until now. At the end of this 30 year movement in one direction, there has been a change. The data suggests acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships.

There might be many reasons for this shift. Not all will be caused by an objection to the M+S sandwich counter. But it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes.

For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.

In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic).

Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?

Further reading

Bigotry dressed as victimhood

By James Bloodworth

Again the press coverage is of little help. But there’s one reason that does spring to mind, which is that the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one.

Lest this be thought to be the observation of some terrible hater, it is worth mentioning the facts. A poll carried out in the UK 10 years ago found that exactly 0% of British Muslims had ‘tolerance’ for homosexuality. Some research shows that this figure may be shifting. But a survey carried out three years ago for Channel 4 found that a majority of British Muslims wanted being gay to be made illegal in Britain now.

Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.

But here we return to that liberal presumption about ground occupied being ground held. Amid the Pride Month celebrations and the woke capitalism and much more, I see no special reason to regard the accumulation of further rights by gay people or any other group in society as being inevitable, even where it is desirable.

Indeed, I can see plenty of reasons to reflect that in the lifetimes of many of us now living, we could see a significant deterioration in public (and eventually political) support for the rights in question. But over the years, I have always been struck by how unnecessarily hard and painful it has been to make this point.