I’m a single dude who lives in a city, so I can’t say for sure, but selling your soul for a life of suburban domesticity looks like a goddamn nightmare. Particularly when it comes to dealing with woke parents and public school teachers who have nothing better to do, but turn our nation’s children into a generation of censorship crazed pussies.
As the New York Post reports, the latest target of the cancel caball is William Shakespeare.
An increasing number of woke teachers are refusing to study the Bard — accusing his classic works of promoting “misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir.”
If any of this had been apparent when I was a teenager I might have paid attention during English class, as it was, the only thing keeping my eyes open for those 40 minutes were the thonged ass cheeks peeking up from the low-rise American Eagle jeans on the chick sitting in front of me.
When I was growing up, Shakespeare was for fags – I don’t mean that to be un-PC or otherwise insensitive to the LGBTQIAA community either. It was simply the case in the late 90s and early 2000s that if you were a dude who really liked theater class then a number of your male classmates would call you a homo (an offense for which I earned my first trip to Principal Dick Kesin’s office and a day of detention!). These days it’s the guy blowing a flute and prancing around like a wood nymph that’s the homophobe — it’s enough to make your head spin, but I’ll say this much; Romeo and Juliet would have been a lot more interesting if the Montagues showed up to fight the Capulets and called them a bunch of queers.
“Hey Benvolio, suck these nuts ya homo”
“Who you callin a homo?”
“You, ya homo!”
“Yeah, that’s big talk comin from a twink in a pair of tights”
“Oh you wanna go?”
“Yeah pussy, let’s go!”
Same goes for the claim that the Bard’s work was rooted in anti-Semitism by the way. If Juliet had been ranting about how the Jews were responsible for Bubonic plague we might have had decent story on our hands. Instead it was just two angsty teenagers killing themselves over a series of easily avoidable misunderstandings.
“Shakespeare was a tool used to ‘civilize’ Black and brown people in England’s empire,” insisted Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University.
Again, I didn’t really pay attention during English class so I can’t speak to the veracity of these claims. There was another guy named Mike who used to sit next to me, so if I heard the name ‘Mike’ called I’d pretty much just let him field the question unless otherwise directed. I do remember making considerable efforts to release my in-class farts in the quietest possible manner to avoid arousing suspicion when the scent finally surfaced, which I guess is kind of civilized. A silent-but-deadly gasser may be foul, but it lacks the overt boorishness of a well-cracked Bronx cheer.
Sarah Mulhern Gross, an English teacher at High Technology High School in Lincroft, NJ, said she was teaching “Romeo and Juliet” “with a side of toxic masculinity analysis.”
It pains me to see my home state of New Jersey dragged into this mess. There was a time not too long ago when we in the Garden State were quite proud of our toxic masculinity, so much so that HBO gave the Sopranos a 6 season run, because as it turns out guns, cocaine, and strippers — all elements of the toxically masculine lifestyle — are also a lot of fun. But that was 2007, and this is 2021 and in 2021 toxic masculinity presents itself in a codpiece and rouge. The times they are a changin.
“Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir,” Librarian Amanda MacGregor wrote, with the final word meaning misogyny aimed at black women.
It’s a good thing they explained that ‘misogynoir’ means misogyny aimed at black women. I honestly thought it was a term that described film noir about misogynists. Like an old black and white movie about a detective who only hires assistants with big tits and enforces a revealing office dress code. Frankly, I’d take that over Othello any day.
I’m usually the first person to push back against wokeness and cancel culture, but if a revamping of America’s English syllabi brings forth a more entertaining curriculum then I just may be on board. The teachers are doing their best, but the subject matter just sucks. It sucked to learn and I’m sure it was pretty soul sucking to teach James Joyce and a Prayer For Owen Meany to a bunch of bored teenagers year after year too. As the decades go by and teenage attention spans shrivel even further this task can’t be getting any easier. When I was 16 all I cared about was winning football games and getting home from school in time to whack off before my parents got off work. That was 20 years ago, before the invention of HD streaming porn. Nowadays if Lady Chatterley’s Lover doesn’t have a 10 inch cock and a penchant for going ass to mouth, you don’t stand a chance of holding anyone’s attention for more than a couple paragraphs. I say replace all of this boring old shit with Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk, and assign the American literary classic ‘The President Is Missing’ as summer reading, and let’s make English class worth staying awake for.
Meathead Media 