June 19, 2018

Is Jared Ivanka's gay BFF? And elite degeneracy in marriage generally

Although the 2016 election has spurred widespread interest in the anthropology of the working class in Flyover Country, that's only one half of the story -- the immiseration of the lower 90% of the population. The other half of where we are, and why we're here, is the over-production of elites (or at least aspiring elites) in the power centers of the nation, and their striving, hyper-competitiveness, decadence, and degeneracy.

Where are all the longform field studies of that group of people? Nowhere, since that would hurt the same elite that controls and produces content for the media sector. You would never even see that in a lowbrow Fox News feature, given that the conservative GOP elites are just as degenerate as the liberal Democrat elites.

Reality shows like the Real Housewives series give a little glimpse of elite decadence, but you can tell they leave out the really good stuff. In particular, they don't focus on the transactional nature of all their relationships, and how that poisons both the material and social domains of life. We only occasionally see their domestic staff, who are entirely foreigners being exploited as cheap labor, and never see the Americans who are left out of work by greedy elites. And they avoid the multiple lies that these people are living to pursue greater wealth and status.

One of those lies is the sham marriage, debasing one of the most sacred relationships into an utterly transactional one -- whoever can most optimally enhance my current and future wealth and status. This is the now ubiquitous "power couple" phenomenon whose initial explosion accompanied the neoliberal transition of the 1980s.

OK, so few of these people care for each other, and are sticking together purely to pool their resources and rise a few orders of magnitude in status, which they could not reach on their own. Big deal. But there are sham marriages, and then there are sham marriages. After a point, it becomes insulting and sacrilegious toward marriage and the family.

One of the most common, yet least discussed, forms of the power couple sham marriage is the closeted homosexual whose overweening ambition prevents him (or sometimes her) from coming out, lest it damage the value of his brand even slightly, and the beard-wife he chooses to publicly disguise his deviant sexual nature.

The beard is happy to go along with this because she is more driven by material ambition than by maternal or wifely goals -- and if some high-status guy is going to pool his resources with hers, to level up their joint wealth, then who cares if he never wants sex. In fact, maybe that's a selling point! A hypothetical hour of physical intimacy would be one less hour devoted to social climbing, wealth accumulation, and conspicuous consumption. No potential for intimacy means no checks on her ambition -- or his.

If one of the two does happen to have a sex drive, then they will satisfy it outside of their marriage, again making relationships transactional. Their paramour would just serve to get them off, since their chosen spouse cannot, in principle.

The media did no investigation into whether Obama was gay, as he seemed and as he later semi-admitted when he left office. The conservatives didn't go there either, not just the liberal part of the media. Conservatives were more interested in whether he was born in America, touching on the theme of nationalism. But we are not being infiltrated by devious foreigners against the will of our own elites -- the main source of societal rot these days is elite callousness and degeneracy, from within our own nation.

It would not be the homosexual behavior per se that marked Obama's elite degeneracy, but the corruption of timeless and crucial institutions like marriage and the family, in the service of overweening ambition. It would be hard enough to get elected president while half-black -- imagine if he were also known to be on the down-low. Welp, gotta get a wifey then.

If it were just to blend in with normal people, that would be one thing. But the elite homo-beard power couple is a case of the elites cynically co-opting institutions for their own crass material benefit, not to restrain their own deviance and deliver that social benefit to others.

Now, though, that there's a Republican-controlled White House, wouldn't the liberal media be interested in pursuing similar storylines, without having to worry about damaging their own party? Not about Trump, of course -- while he and Melania obviously have no real relationship, he's not living a second lie on top of that by being homosexual.

Rather, the question is why the media have never asked about Jared Kushner and Ivanka? I first thought something was off about him when they were photographed on vacation in Hawaii in December 2016, and he either shaves his body or has no natural body hair. Plus the babyface, and the fact that he weighs 100 lbs, signaled pedomorphy, or resembling a pre-adolescent child, which is the defining trait of ewww-girls-are-yucky syndrome (see my posts from 2012 and '13). Then when he spoke on camera, I really thought something was up -- he has the voice of a 9 year-old boy. Talk about pedomorphy, yikes.

But I've been laying off that topic until something more substantial came out from all the leakers and sources -- yet, nothing so far. That is, until this post at Blind Gossip, which has a solid track record with inside sources in the entertainment sector. In it, someone who went to college with both Kushner and Natalie Portman (both unnamed but easily inferred by the commenters), floats the idea that Jared is gay to explain why he never showed any interest in Portman, who had a big crush on him when they were friends, at a time when every guy wanted her:

It is very disconcerting to hear her going after him like that [calling him a "supervillain"] because when we were in college, she totally had a crush on him! He never really reciprocated, which I thought was weird because every guy in school wanted to date her. I thought he might be gay because she had dated a gay guy before and seemed to be attracted to that type, but that is not something that I would just come out and ask him.

Even if he didn't want to date her, at least he should have wanted to bang her -- every other guy did back then, especially if she was more or less offering herself. What early 2000s college dude would have turned that down? And did he not date or bang any other girls in college? This source says she's uncertain whether or not he's gay, which sounds like she can't point to exculpatory evidence like the other girls he was with, or who he even expressed a desire for.

Sidenote: it may run in the family. Some of the BG commenters say they've always thought Jared was gay, and add that his brother Joshua must be gay as well, as suggested by his own sham relationship with beard Karlie Kloss. Why did that raise their suspicions? Because according to a history of not-so-blind items at BG -- most recently this post -- Karlie Kloss and Taylor Swift have been a secret couple for several years. Kloss would then be using Joshua Kushner as a beard just as much as he would be using her as a beard. Taylor Swift has her own long list of closeted homosexual celebrities with whom she has had mutual bearding relationships, such as Harry Styles of One Direction.

If Ivanka is in fact Jared's beard, I can totally see Trump being not just OK with it, but breathing a sigh of relief. He has spontaneously and repeatedly expressed sexual jealousy over Ivanka since at least the 2000s. And he told Stormy Daniels "you look like my daughter" before banging her. This fits into a broader pattern with Trump, as reviewed in the third section of this post, that he is sexually attracted to people he is supposed to be forbidden from having, based on their social relationship to him. That includes prostitutes, other men's wives, workplace subordinates, and yes even his own flesh and blood daughter.

Who could she possibly bring home to that kind of daddy without sending him into a fit of jealous rage over some other guy getting to bang his daughter? The only solution would be a homosexual -- no potential trespass on what Trump sees as his own sexual property. Since his own marriage is transactional, he would see no problem if his daughter's were as well -- beyond the standard power couple, to the point of being a beard.

Hell, maybe Trump even suggested or demanded it of her in the first place! "No daughter of mine is gonna have sex with some guy who isn't her father." Or maybe it was more roundabout and what's-in-it-for-you, about how she could not just avoid her father's constant interference, but how it would free up more of her time for career and social ambitions, not to mention being a more progressive and modern way to do the whole marriage thingie. She's not a staunch traditionalist, so she would have gone for that appeal.

Who knows for sure what the deal is with their particular relationship. But it's striking how there's zero interest from the media. And not because they have some kind of code against outing homosexuals, or raising the possibility -- they would do that in a heartbeat if it hit a sub-elite figure like a regionally popular Christian pastor. But they circle the wagons around fellow members of the elite class, whether left or right, if knowledge of widespread elite degeneracy would break out from an honest investigation and portrayal of how our elites live these days.

10 comments:

  1. Over-production of elites is enabled by these sham beard marriages, since marriage is supposed to be a filter on who gets into the top levels of society, and who gets to stay there.

    In a society with less upward mobility, like during the Great Compression, someone like Jared Kushner would either be prevented from joining the top ranks if he were a striver -- no way to leverage a marriage into higher wealth, by pooling resources of the separate family's fortunes.

    Or if he were already part of the top, he would resign himself to being a "confirmed bachelor" -- still propped up by his family's wealth, but destined not to be the clan's leader.

    That is marriage as a regulator of social mobility.

    But during a period of hyper-competitiveness, why would any striver accept that regulation on their ambition? Or within the already-elite, why would a scion accept lower status in the clan due to this regulation?

    As with regulations generally, so in the domain of kinship will the elites and strivers work to undo them, circumvent them, or co-opt them. Hence, the sham beard marriage to help gays achieve and maintain as much wealth and status as heterosexuals.

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  2. If she is a beard, Ivanka's sub-type would be the abused child who grows up with an unshakable distrust of men, especially in the context of physical intimacy.

    As early as her appearance in the documentary Born Rich, circa 2000, she gives off a numb, dissociative vibe. Everybody reduces cognitive dissonance by compartmentalizing, but not everybody does this via numbness -- which signals some kind of chronic pain as the cause of their cognitive dissonance, rather than some other cause.

    Again, we don't know exactly what Trump did or said to her once she started blossoming, but it's clear that it was creepy over-the-line stuff. And he keeps saying and doing those things, well into her 20s and 30s.

    Your own father is supposed to be the one male figure in the world who you can trust unconditionally -- especially in the context of physical intimacy. If he violates that, to any degree, it leaves a lasting wound. She won't trust men in general after that.

    Ditto if she were abused by any man she was supposed to be able to trust, but more than anything if it were her own father.

    Some of those women become lesbians -- who aren't really attracted to the same sex, but just shack up together and sustain each other emotionally, since they can't trust being physically intimate with a man.

    Others have a checked-out relationship with a non-threatening man.

    And now in this climate of norm subversion to fuel elite hyper-competitiveness, some of those women will sham-marry a closeted homosexual. They rationalize this sacrilege against marriage as the one certain way they can cohabit with a man without having to worry about whether he's going to physically violate her trust and open up all those old wounds.

    During a period of social harmony and egalitarianism, like the Great Compression, these women would just become the spinster librarians and teachers of their town, akin to the confirmed bachelor.

    But in our hyper-competitive period, they aren't about to let these marriage regulations put a check on their ambition for ever-greater wealth, status, and power.

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  3. She fits the profile of a lot of beards: wealthy, only moderately attractive (though before the surgery she was just gross), boring personality, etc. As groace as she is, I can't imagine her being compared to an absolute dog like Stormy.

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  4. This also touches on the hyper-defensiveness applied to gay issues by more and more sectors of society since the late 80's (when something that should've "done in" gays PR-wise was used to elevate them, e.g. AIDS)."

    It's now well known among elites that the many gays among them are either open gays or are barely hiding in the closet. Also, as you suggest the sham marriage meme is more common and accepted now than it used to be.

    The number and power of gays/lesbos in elite circles is much greater than it used to be, thus why stuff like WWG happens. Nixon has some "money" quotes about homos being shock troops for cultural decay.

    Trump's buddy Vince McMahon has himself had various "gay" things swirling around him over the years. Several WWE officials got busted for a "ring boy" scandal in the early 90's (though McMahon himself was not directly implicated). Several wrestlers have suggested that McMahon and/or his associates have had a casting couch for male "talent", with Shawn Micheals (who posed for Playgirl and gives off some gay vibes) said to be McMahon's biggest lover. McMahon did steroids and is a body building fan, and in the 80's he encouraged wrestlers to do steroids and usually promoted the "best bodies" he could find. In the 80's and before, a lot of wrestling promotions still tried to make wrestling seem "real", and promoted guys with a tough image. McMahon threw away the "credibility" of wrestling and turned the camp way up (seriously, believe it or not before the late 80's a fair number of working class (adult) people would show up to wrestling events and enthusiastically cheer on the "hero" wrestler, and matches could be bloody and brutal in the name of making it look "real").

    Examples of recent pop culture associating sexual transgressiveness with corruption and decay:

    - Buffalo Bill in Silence of the the Lambs. Note also that author Thomas Harris in Red Dragon (1981) makes the killer act hyper-defensive about suggestions that he's gay
    - Eyes Wide Shut (the movie '99, the book from the 1920's) deals with sexuality and social decay WRT elite social networks, something rarely seen in movies. Kubrick wanted to do an adaptation as early as the 60's, interesting that it took until the late 90's for everything to "fall into place". The masks worn by the sex "society" not only hide ID for story-telling reasons, but also demonstrate in understanding of the "dehumanizing" element seen in sexual excess, where various means are used to obscure the humanity of the participants lest anyone be reminded that they are dealing with people, not props.
    - Rambo (2008), the villain is a pedophile rapist
    - Society (1989), the Beverly Hills elite are incestuous orgy throwers who kill anyone deemed to be a threat to their power

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  5. "As early as her appearance in the documentary Born Rich, circa 2000, she gives off a numb, dissociative vibe. Everybody reduces cognitive dissonance by compartmentalizing, but not everybody does this via numbness -- which signals some kind of chronic pain as the cause of their cognitive dissonance, rather than some other cause."

    And this also is indicative of a demeanor "generation gap" that gets really strong with people born in the late 70's and early 80's, who saw (or felt) a lot of "shit" at an early age, which is why they aren't as relaxed or trusting as Boomers (with early Gen X-ers obviously serving as a cross between Boomers and late Gen X-ers).

    Older people don't understand why we can be withdrawn and have our guard up, and there's a touch of aggro defensiveness too (Later Millennials and Gen Z are aloof in a mousy way because of cocooning and high striving, not because they emotionally "shut down" at an earlier age to deal with adults who hurt or at least intimidated them.

    Among all the later generations, you get a sense of anxiety because they were born into a fast paced world that they didn't build or ask for. Silents, Boomers, and to some extent early Gen X-ers got to spend a good chunk of their early lives in an egalitarian society, which by the early-mid 90's basically didn't exist anymore. And that was by (Silent and Boomers) design, no matter it's effect on anyone of any generation, let alone kids and teenagers who didn't want to be Gordon Gekko when they grew up.

    I've always had a wry judgement of the "fast paced work environment" cliche that Boomers pass of as being a good thing. We get it: you thought the old timers were "square" and too committed to "WASP" values. So lets torch it all and make everything in our own image: big, loud, flashy, etc.

    Where did "speeding things up" get us? An epidemic of mass murders since the late 80's, open borders, a thinner and thinner safety net, mass abuse of legal drugs, growing mental health problems yet fewer and fewer resources dedicated to them (meanwhile, the 1930's-1960's saw improving mental health, with the exception of some Silents and Boomers by the late 60's, and a lot was invested in dealing with the mentally ill).

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  6. *born in the late 70's/early 80's=most likely to have had two bull in a China shop Boomer parents, and you didn't have the childhood protective barrier provided by cocooning in the mid-90's+beyond, when people mellowed out to some degree.

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  7. Albionic American6/20/18, 12:19 AM

    Agnostic, what do you make of Elon Musk's marriages and girlfriends?

    Reportedly his children with his wife Justine Wilson were conceived in vitro, like he finds the natural process of making babies distasteful or something.

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  8. I've got to strenuously disagree with you on one thing, that Obama was gay. And I have to because, at least if David Garrow's biography of Obama is correct, it proves your overall point entirely. According to Garrow, before Obama met Michelle, he was in a fairly serious relationship with a woman named Shelia Jager. It got to the point where Obama was seriously debating whether to marry her or not, but ultimately he could never bring himself to truly commit for a simple reason once he became aware of his purpose in life. Jager was white and Obama, born to a Kenyan father and a white mother, was already going to have a hard enough time being accepted as black by the black community in Chicago. Having a white wife would make that task even more difficult (for example, there was a black state legislator who had been married to a white woman who it was said 'talks black but sleeps white'). So ultimately, Obama and Jager fell away from each other and Obama ultimately ended up marrying Michelle Obama. Another tid bit for you, the day that his daughter Sasha was born, Obama was at a meeting in downtown Chicago. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/05/02/before-michelle-barack-obama-asked-another-woman-to-marry-him-then-politics-got-in-the-way/?noredirect=on) So yeah, as Garrow puts it with Obama, and can be easily extended to most of our Ivy League fuckup elites, “While the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.”

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  9. Da fuq, Agnostic?!?
    The Silence of Ricky Vaughn has gone on long enough and he needs to come kick your ass now!
    You just took my black tar MAGA heroin and contaminated it... How could a nigga do such a thing?
    Damn you to hell!

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  10. Examining the cultural differences between status-strivers and egalitarians is an interesting new track. You can divide the world's cultures between these two basic templates

    The anthropologist Rayna Rapp, in the 80s, compared the American working-class with the upper middle-class, and one thing she found was, as you pointed out, the more contractual nature of upper class relationships(relative to the lower classes, who were more likely to marry based on love).

    "Working-class families are normatively nuclear. They are formed via marriage, which links men and women "for love" and not "for money". This distinction is, of course, both real and a socially necessary illusion. As such, it is central to the ideology of the family. The cultural distinction between love and money corresponds to the distinction between private family life in the home and work life outside the home. The two are experienced as opposite; in fact they are interpenetrating. The seeming autonomy to exchange love at home expresses something ideological about the relationship between love and work: one must work for the sake of family, and having a family is the "payoff" for leading a good life. Founding a family is what people do for personal gratification, for love, and for autonomy. The working-class family literature is full of life histories in which young women saw "love" as a way to get out of their own often difficult families. Rubin's interviews, for instance, are full of teenaged girls who said, "When I grow up, I'll marry for love, and it'll be better than my parent's marriage".

    Another pattern was the tendency of the working-class to spread money around throughout their extended family and community, whereas upper classes focused the money on their own children. Rapp actually postulated this was why working-class people have problems achieving social mobility.

    "No one gets ahead because individual upward mobility can be bought only at the price of cutting off the very people who have contributed to one's survival. Upward mobility becomes a terribly scarring experience under these circumstances. To get out, a person must stop sharing, which is unfamilial, unfriendly, and quite dangerous."

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