Bruce Jenner and the American Prospect

by Sha’i ben-Tekoa (September 2015)

Is it just me or have others shuddered at the tragedy of this erstwhile apotheosis of American male physicality? In 1976, Bruce Jenner took home the gold at the Montreal Olympics as not only Decathlon champion but the new world record holder. Today he has disfigured his face and mutilated his body. He ingests female hormones, lets his hair grow, wears women’s clothes and make-up and suffers from the delusion that he has “transitioned” into being a woman.  

A biblical generation of forty years ago, Bruce was the finest all-around athlete on the planet and a credit to his country. In taking his jubilant victory lap, he even waved an American flag. All sport is symbolic warfare and the Decathlete is the one who can run, jump and throw better than anyone, the requirements of a warrior.

But the 1970s was also the decade of “Pumping Iron,” a documentary film released as a commercial feature about body builders, in particular one unknown Austrian named Arnold Schwarzenegger for whom physicality was standing in front a mirror and gazing at one’s pumped up muscles — if never actually using them for what they are intended, e.g. physical effort, warfare or sports. Unlike the lumberjack, soldier or even athlete, the body-builder does not use his muscles. Most of these men are too muscle-bound for athletics.

Today, though, the two realms, sport and the narcissistic pumping up of muscles, have collided in the case of the delusional Mr. Jenner. It is simply not true that he has become a woman, for a woman is a womb-man, and he does not have one. Neither has he had himself castrated. He still is Bruce, not “Caitlin.”

In fact, never in the history of medical science as any man ever “transitioned” and been provided with a working womb, Fallopian tubes, ovaries, experienced a monthly flow, gotten pregnant, given birth, etc. Surgeons have never transplanted a working mammary gland from a real female into a male. Jenner and others like him hire plastic surgeons to implant sacks of gel or saline solution in their chests that create the illusion of being real breasts, but they are not.

The Nazis were reported to have been the first in the early 1930s to have attempted turning a man into a woman, which failure adumbrated the medical “experiments” a.k.a. tortures they later inflicted on the Jews.

Post-war World War II, a sensational news story concerned an American soldier in Denmark named George Jorgensen who — it was reported — had changed his sex from male to female and re-emerged as Christine Jorgensen. That too was untrue. No human being has ever had a “sex-change.”

A typical, self-diagnosed “transgender” male commonly presents his problem to a psychiatrist as a “feeling” that he really is a “woman underneath” and that he wants to live “as a woman.”

However, tellingly absent from the clinical record are those whose presenting complaint is, “I want to become a woman so that I can get pregnant and have a baby. Because I want to nurse a baby; cuddle a baby, play with the baby, bathe the baby, feed the baby, love the baby and raise the baby to be a healthy and happy human being.” In truth, the classic transgender man doesn’t have a clue as to what it really means to be a woman.

“Feeling like a woman underneath” is nothing but a form of closed circuit, sexual arousal. A diagnosis more accurate than “transgender” might be “delusional hermaphrodite” and thus a subcategory in the larger psychiatric list of disorders known as “pathological narcissism.” The so-called transgender lives in the fantasy that he is both sexes at the same time and, as such, is locked 24/7 in conjugal embrace with himself.

The word “narcissism” comes from the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and pined away childless for being unable to mate with the object of his desire. An even older text, the Bible, contains prohibitions on sodomy – an imitative perversion of normal sexual activity — and even the wearing of the clothes of the opposite sex.

Thus Jenner and his type are addicted to gazing into their mirrors, seeing a “woman” gazing back and swooning.

A PBS documentary of some years ago reported that only 5% of self-diagnosed male transgenders who begin living as if they were real females go all the way to castration and the surgical construction of an imitation vagina — which fact speaks volumes about the condition. It is not really about “becoming a woman” but something else.

What Jenner, former American champion of masculine physical health, has done to himself also makes a statement about the larger society and the millions in it who join him in his publically acted-out fantasy by calling him “Caitlin.”

Jenner’s “transition” is a lie and so are other expressions that entered the public square since the late 1960s e.g., “gay sex,” “oral sex,” “anal sex.” Sex activity is procreating via the reproductive organs used in their normal manner, and in none of the above behaviors is procreation even a possibility; so those engaged in them are not procreating but literally spilling their seed not into a female womb but the orifices of another man. As Jenner is not really a woman, so “gay sex” is not really sex.

For sure, procreation as an activity is immensely pleasurable. Someone once said, “There may be some things better than sex but nothing quite like it.” And clearly, undeniably and not coincidentally, when the activity reaches its climactic peak, there is an involuntary transfer from male to female of seed in search of an egg to mate with. It’s a package deal; pleasure and procreation go together, dare we say, like a marriage made in heaven.  

But not in the above deviant behaviors. All of them exploit the reproductive organs for pleasure alone, which also results in, not surprisingly, a population smaller than it might be. In this, homosexual behavior and abortion are variations on the same theme: pleasure divorced from procreation and the generation of new life. And because of this, sodomites were traditionally rejected as hedonists a.k.a. non-generating de-generates.

It is a well-known fact today that in Europe its peoples — as they have been known for a millennium — are dying off. Not one of them is producing 2.11 children per couple. They are all below that figure and thus shrinking toward the vanishing point.

It has also been estimated that the founding communities of the United States who were overwhelmingly northern European, principally Christians with a sprinkling of Jews, are also not reproducing (except for Orthodox Jews).

Jenner won the gold in 1976 in a decade dubbed the “Me Decade” by journalist-novelist Tom Wolfe in a famous New York Magazine article published a few weeks after Jenner’s triumph in Montreal. In addition, a major book of popular social criticism at the time was The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch, while from the insular, professional world of psychiatry and clinical psychology came a much-admired, highly technical volume by psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Kernberg, M.D. called Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. That is what he and other therapists were seeing in their clinical practice – and still do.

The grandfather of all psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud called for tolerance and sympathy for the homosexual and other sexually disordered people but without ever approving the behavior. Compassion, yes; approval, no. It was still for him psychopathology.

Freud, though, is out of fashion and his Victorian morality long since been trashed. Since the 1970s, sodomy has lost its taboo. “Gay sex” entered the language and the rest is history.

Now, a generation later, the once magisterial United States Supreme Court has even blessed “gay marriage” and claimed there is a Constitutional right to it.

The five Supreme Court justices who voted this way seemed to be saying that the fifty-five remarkable American gentlemen, the Framers in 1787 who drafted the Constitution — the farmers, merchants, doctors, lawyers and scientists who had fought the American Revolution — would agree. But if so, our contemporary justices are as delusional as Bruce Jenner and as mentally unbalanced as the millions who cheer him on. The idea that those men at that time would approve of “same-sex marriage” is absurd.

By contrast, American culture in the 21^st century is awash in narcissistic pursuits and addictions. Tens of millions have tattooed themselves like, in language used by the Framers, heathen savages.

Not surprisingly, the current electorate also not once but twice voted for a narcissistic, empty suit of a man lacking all accomplishments in life to be their president. Barack Obama, Jr., who takes selfies of himself in the White House, was elected because he looked good, sounded good and spoke bromides that people mistook for good values and intentions. In his physical mixed-race body, he symbolized the overcoming of racism but in truth remained a man of no qualifications to be commander-in-chief. In the words of some youthful supporters, he was “cool” and that is why they voted for him.

These are the same Americans who today want to vote for Hillary Clinton as president, not for any of her accomplishments, but her reproductive organs.

The descent by Bruce Jenner into the 24-7 addiction of psychically melding his male self with an imaginary feminizing of his body is his personal tragedy and that of the country, for it signifies much about what has happened to America since the 1960s. In that frazzled decade, the miniskirt made its appearance so that today hemlines are where they were on streetwalkers in the 1950s.

The country is wallowing in pornography. MTV 24-7 features scantily clad women singers writhing and pouting in videos which would have been classified as pornographic a generation ago, if not today. On live, national television Miley Cyrus twerks. Mainstream films for the silver screen and cable TV likewise contain sex scenes once judged pornographic, with dialogue spiced by the constant use of the “f-word” and even the “m-f” word – ironically, Sigmund Freud’s ultimate sex crime.

The Jenner story is also eerily related to the simultaneous scandal of the ghoulish killing and dismembering of babies in the womb for profit conducted by the ironically misnamed Planned Parenthood; the name should be Planned Infanticide. Since the blessing of abortion by the Supreme Court in the early 1970s, tens of millions of babies have been exterminated in the womb.

Mr. Jenner is a symbol of sexual madness and a society no longer generating the next generation. It is therefore a de-generate society.

The next president will do the USA a great favor by using his office as Teddy Roosevelt saw it: a bully pulpit to preach the virtues of a healthy, manly, chaste and womanly, not feminist, America.

The emergence in the 1960s of the unisex barbershop and the feminism that invented the dubious category of “gender” to begin with are related symptoms of a society sexually off the rails. Bruce Jenner, in being the most famous “transgender” of the day, has gone from symbol of a healthy nation to unisex symptom of its decadence.
 

_________________________________
 

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com and www.deprogramprogram.com. Formerly the lead commentator in English for Israel National News, he is a graduate of Columbia University in Comparative Religion who continued his studies at the University of Chicago and Hebrew University. A traveler in Arab lands, he served in the Yom Kippur War effort of 1973. In 1991, in preparation for the Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, he worked on assignment for the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir. Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Midstream, Congress Monthly and other publications. He has also appeared on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

 

To comment on this article, please click here.

To help New English Review continue to publish interesting and informative articles such as this, please click here.

If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Sha’i ben-Tekoa, please click here.