by Stu Smith
On October 4th 2023, Adrienne Maree Brown presented her work on Pleasure Activism at JMU as part of a Queer Teach-in. This Teach-in was hosted by JMU’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department. As you will soon hear from JMU’s Coordinator for Cultural and Affinity Spaces, Kwyn Riley, “This conversation serves as the nucleus of the Queer resistance teach-in.” But first, how about we hear from the keynote speaker, Adrienne Maree Brown?
I’m sure most of y’all are at a total loss for words. This is who James Madison University parades out to speak to young and impressionable minds. I think the footage speaks for itself and I frankly don’t have too much to say. To me it is clear that Pleasure Activism is just Hedonism under a Social Justice lens. As a history lover, I always wonder what the namesakes and founders of these universities would think of situations like this. I can’t recall any of Madison’s thoughts on pleasure, but his ol’ pal, Thomas Jefferson said this…
“Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.”
Telling young minds to say yes to every pleasure in life is surely a path to ruin. I had plenty of friends who went to JMU who flunked out because they spent all their time partying and never went to class. What I find so insidious about Brown’s philosophy is that it plays so wonderfully into stereotypical images of conservatives being prudes. Living a life full of “Orgasmic Yes” in the face of modern day conventions sticks it to the regressive attitudes of the age. If anyone finds fault with her work, they are simply regressive and hostile to her idea of “progress.” Yet we all know that if someone followed her philosophy to a tee, eventually the hook of consequences would rear its ugly head.
Critics of my exposing this will just say this is knee-jerk reactionary conservative journalism afraid of any sort of LGBTQ curriculum. I’m completely open to all kinds of new academic departments. Academia should be dynamic and cutting- edge. But make no mistake, despite its name, this isn’t remotely LGBTQ. Let’s look at one of the slides from this teach-in which features bell hooks, who doesn’t capitalize her name to stick it to the man.
“Queer” to them just means being different and at odds with society. As hooks states, queer is not necessarily “about who you’re having sex with.” In a bizarre kind of way they have returned to the original meaning of the word. Honestly, I’m sure there are plenty of people who are liberal, moderate, conservative, and even apolitical who feel at odds with everything in modern-day society. I’m in my thirties and I feel most people are so consumed by their phones that we live in a world completely devoid of goodwill towards our neighbors. I can’t imagine how this feels for people older than I am. This over-intellectualized definition of queer is effectively meaningless because it is nearly universal. It is purposefully so broad to grow their activist pool with useful idiots.
Yet “queer” to them is part of an ongoing project to radically transform our society and destroy the norms of the current order of things. Some see this as an attack on America, others on the Western world. I think it is much larger; this is an attack on humanity. The norms these activists want to tear down I consider universal across all world cultures: family, biological sex, health, and classical virtues. To avoid scrutiny, they hide under the banner of LGBTQ, but in my opinion, it is not remotely related. This is a subjective post-modern philosophy that just wants to reset the gameboard.
In the spirit of transparency, I have uploaded the full lecture and the PowerPoints. This is everything I obtained from JMU. I imagine there are many in the LGBTQ Community who are just as horrified by this as the average JMU parent. Remember, the real enemy here is the toxic subjectivity of the woke ideology. It is that ideology that sees being on time as a white supremacist colonial construct and considers you an oppressor for suggesting maybe not taking “a lot of drugs” in a world where over 100,000 people die a year in America from fentanyl overdose.
Stu Smith writes about left-wing activists on his Substack account, Stu Stu Studios. This column has been republished with permission.
