A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Talcum X versus Adult Human Females

Minsk, Беларусь. Photo credit: Jana Shnipelson

Here’s the thing—British writer, Owen Jones, is a neoliberal hack who poses as a leftist while very little in his armoury of words or ideas are even slight on the left of centre. Not even a bit. 

Take for instance the issue of rent before and during this pandemic. Jones has drafted a few good stories over the years about the housing crisis in London, but only a few as his attention has been massively focussed on non-material reality: identity politics. Where Jones once retweeted an initiative from the London Renters Union last May which at this moment only has 4,336 people who have signed up, he has spent zero time writing about this initiative, much less any other movements within Britain asking that rent be suspended during the pandemic or any profoundly ridiculous government “Guidance for landlords and tenants” which doesn’t even propose a rental freeze as had the land-owning class been privy in their mortgage holidays. Moreover, his articles about housing and the renter class over the past five years can be counted on one hand. And in the pieces where Jones deigns to mention the renter class, his usual go-to about rental hikes over the past two decades is invariably aimed at the Tories, never about the many neoliberals who traffic in high rent flats.

Where has Jones chosen to put his Twitter and journalistic energies? His focus is and has been on promoting the idea that men are injured parties in the war waged by evil feminists to destroy them. It’s David with his rock and sling versus Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Yes, it’s the misogyny of old with a new cast. Hint: the women are played by men with non-symmetric hairstyles and names that sound more like onomatopoeia. In short, Jones engages journalism and Twitter with the perspective that women as a class are inferior to his own but paradoxically sex and biology is like the Magic 8-Ball—a mishmash of random absurdity based on a lie that even Jones knows is untrue.

Jones’ latest foray into yet another front of the culture wars was that of surrogacy, a thorny issue on all sides because the oppressed white upper-middle-class male dare not be insulted by the suggestion that women’s bodies are not theirs for the purchase or rent. Picture it: 1 April and @CasparSalmon retweets his 2014 tweet announcing that he is “going to be a dad in six week’s time!!!” Jones responds, “I am very jealous Caspar, I wanna be a dad!!!” and Salmon responds “Get yourself a lesbian or two, and a bunch of these! You're going to smash it pal! X” Jones responds with “hunting for broody lesbian couples” attached to a GIF of a cartoon character scouring the floors. The brilliant political philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper responded to this with a well-deserved and laser-precise retort: “You aren’t entitled to a uterus to grow your baby in, Owen. I’m sorry if you think that’s an anti-gay (or anti-trans??) argument. But you aren’t entitled to female people’s bodies for your self-fulfilment. Get a dog.” 

Here is the back story Jones (a figure many feminists call Talcum X): Jones has dedicated much more time to the rights of men to rent women’s bodies than the class exploitation of those within Britains rental housing market! His Twitter feed is chock-full of misogynist jibes made in the name of “woke biology.” One such example was when Olympic medalist, Sharron Davies, discussed the truism that humans are sexually dimorphic to which Jones jumped right on this statement and twisted it as proof of Davies’ “homophobia.” Davies has simply pointed out that for humans to reproduce that there are two necessary prerequisites: a male and a female. Where Davies was chiming in on the gender debate stating that biology is real, that men are not women, Jones resorted to reductio ad absurdum. Again, I don’t believe for one second that Jones means it when he states that “Trans women are women” or when he retweets others who churn out this nonsense. Jones, a gay man, ponders and tweets so frequently about sic “trans women” that one must wonder if Jones is simply not another case of “The lady doth protest too much...”

Jones then goes on a follow-up rant to his previous one against women, writing, “I was going to ignore this, but actually it needs to be addressed. A gay father who co-parents children with a lesbian couple celebrated having kids, I expressed an interest in also similarly co-parenting, and our timelines are now full of anti-trans activists screaming at us.” This is in response to a tweet by @yatakalam that states, “Two sexist men briefly interrupt chanting the misogynistic cult slogan ‘Trans women are women’, as they suddenly remember they require actual women as reproductive workers for the human commodities they wish to acquire.” Jones obtusely refuses to understand his hypocrisy and instead turns the criticism of his misogyny into a misogynist’s claim. It’s the gender wars meets “I know you are, but what am I!?”

Given Jones’ obsession with mandating that women see men as women in his cherry-picked “socialism,” it is most definitely not the case that Reilly-Cooper is at fault for pointing to Jones’ serial misogyny. The assumption that women’s bodies are open season for “broody” gay men to test their luck on the blackjack table of their personal desires and the reproductive futures of women is as troubling as are his assertions that lesbians are a commodity to “hunt” or to “get.” If anything, Jones’ tweets this past week demonstrate the misogyny behind the window dressing of “gay men in search of a family,” while his buttressing of this narrative clearly demeans women and reduces them to mere tools that are expected to meet the psychological, reproductive, and emotional demands of men.

Jones has fully manifested all that anti-surrogate advocates have been long arguing regarding the belief that women’s bodies are not and should not be viewed as the objects of men’s needs or self-fulfilment. Why is this so shocking for Jones and other men who view women’s bodies as a “means to an end” to understand? It beggars belief that a writer like Jones not only fails to understand the words he throws into the social media ether, but he demonstrates an astonishing lack of basic neurology: The fact that his readers have—what is it called?—oh, right, memories. 

Talcum X is a social media vampire who works out how to posture his own ideas while blocking anyone who disagrees with his “progressive” notions of sex and gender. The problem is that many of us have all been following this man-child for years to include reading his plethora of tweets on the gender identity debate. It doesn’t take much to see the hypocrisy of Jones’ telling women—particularly lesbians—that biological sex is irrelevant while also framing lesbians as prospective breeding stock when he chooses to see biology as relevant. Gendered language for Jones only matters when referring to kangaroos or his research into “cunnilingus” while at university. All the rest can be thrown into his non-binary sex-gender-whatever sort box because you know, men are women and all that.

Women, we’ve won the battle of logic! It’s official: Owen Jones has shown his hand. He knows men are not women and has fully ceded that point through his tailspin hatred for women and lesbians. For all his complaints of the “utter obsessive poisonousness” that Jones witnesses, the poisonousness is purely his own. In a world where men are women and where not ceding this fiction results in punitive actions such as his having signed the neo-Stasi-esque letter of denunciation of fellow Guardian writer Suzanne Moore who has since left the paper, Jones is faced with two choices: to admit he was wrong in trying to no-platform people who know men are not women, or to continue the charade. Jones chooses the latter and like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the wizard was revealed by Toto to be a regular “humbug”, Jones replicates the wizard’s actions fumbling along repositioning the curtain as he pulls and pushes the backstage levers even more frantically, without having fully realised that the gig is up. 

Jones knows that men are not women and his “socialism” doesn’t even attempt to address the incoherencies of a narrative where the answer for material reality is another helping of linguistic salad. This entire paradigm parallels the “magic” of The Wizard of Oz where magic rests upon words being entirely the means of enchantment and travel to other spaces and times. So, to Owen Jones, I have only these words of advice: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”