The Pearl-Clutching Podium

Curmie finds great amusement in the meme you see reproduced on the left.  He knew he’d seen the two women whose greatly magnified faces appeared above the water-line as boats carrying athletes to the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics passed by.  He got as far as presuming the images to have been from a painting in the Louvre, but he confesses that he couldn’t quite place them, and had given up the search through the memory bank until a friend from high school posted the meme.

Of course!  Curmie remembers seeing the painting in person over a half-century ago, possibly in the company of that friend; we were roommates on a spring break trip to London and Paris sponsored by the school’s French club.  Curmie saw it again a couple years later while on a college Language Study Abroad program, and photos have crossed his path a few times in the ensuing decades.  He’s mildly embarrassed that he didn’t immediately see the tweak (if you’ll pardon the expression, Gentle Reader) to the spectators, but mostly he’s still giggling over the pearl-clutchers’ inability to partake of the low-hanging fruit: the part of the portrait that is suggested but not seen is indeed a little risqué by American television standards.  The resounding silence from the American right is indeed ironic, especially in the context of what did get their collective skivvies in a twist.  

Most of the controversies arising out of this year’s Olympics had to do with actions, past or present, of the athletes: were the Chinese swimmers (still) doping, what should be done about the convicted child rapist, what the hell was that Australian woman doing, stuff like that.  A couple of stories were about how members of the media behaved.  And, of course, there was the Great Floor Exercise Debacle, in which most Americans thought Jordan Chiles was much abused based primarily on the fact that she is American and the other contenders for the bronze medal are not.

But none of these stories make it to the podium in the Olympic Pearl-Clutching finals.  To reach those lofty heights, a contender must claim victimization on the basis of something other than nationality, and the top scorers are not the athletes themselves, but television viewers, who must claim to have suffered mightily themselves.  The outrageousness of the outrage, not its reach, is what determines the winner.

We begin, then, with the bronze medalist, the furor over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif.  Yes, it was a bit ridiculous to make a big deal out of the fact that an athlete who competed as a woman in the Tokyo Olympics was allowed to do so again in Paris.  And yes, the Italian woman who initially accused her of being male recanted after the “agony of defeat” wore off. 

But we can’t rank this any higher than third place because there’s some very real mitigation.  Transgender women, those who went through puberty as males, are in fact likely to have better upper-body strength than women who were born female.  As Lia Thomas has amply demonstrated, mediocre or merely good male athletes can become stars by doing little more than declaring themselves female.  There was, of course, a fair amount of internet chatter (without evidence, of course) that Khelif is transgender.  Some of this came from despicable but somehow trusted folks like Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling, both of whom Khelif has sued for cyberbullying.

Curmie, an advocate for both free speech and victims’ rights, hasn’t completely wrapped his head around the legal issues.  What is definitely true is that Khelif is intersex, not trans.  A lot of the people who expressed outrage believed the false reports; we can raise an eyebrow at their willingness to think the likes of Musk are even capable of truth-telling, but we can’t blame them too much.  And the fact that she’s been beaten before doesn’t automatically mean she doesn’t have an advantage. 

Moreover, there is no standard means of dealing with such issues: should we be considering testosterone levels? the presence or absence of XY chromosomes? visible male dangly bits?  The Olympics apparently make their decisions based on what it says on a passport. 

Curmie has a friend whose passport says “male” even though it was issued to someone who was born female and had only just begun the transitioning process: I can’t speak to the details with confidence, but I’d bet that surgery hadn’t happened, and testosterone boosters had only just begun if in fact they’d begun at all.  If that’s what the process looked like in that direction, it’s doubtful that going the other direction would be much different.  And there are certainly countries which would be willing to (ahem) bend the rules if there were no criteria other than passports.

Moreover, Khelif was indeed disqualified from the 2023 World Championships after the fact by the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association for unspecified offenses totally unrelated to the fact that she had the audacity to beat a Russian boxer.  (Ahem.)  The IOC cut ties with the IBA and criticized that judgment, which they claimed was “sudden and arbitrary” and devoid of due process.  When you’re too corrupt for the IOC, you are definitely not the good guys in the story.

Still, we can understand those who are hesitant to advocate for Khelif in the absence of further evidence.  So these pearl-clutchers aren’t the champions of their event.  But the mere fact that the same people who insist that everyone should be permanently classified according to the sex they were assigned at birth are the ones howling that Khelif should not be allowed to compete… erm… according to the sex she was assigned at birth is enough to earn them a spot on the podium.

In the silver medal position is the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that accompanied the perception that there was a brief moment in the opening ceremony that someone decided had parodied the Last Supper… not the event, to be sure, but the painting.  Every pseudo-Christian yahoo with access to an X account or a Fox station was sore aggrieved, although it’s unclear whether people were actually offended or whether they dutifully pretended to be so when instructed by right-wing media.  And no, the fact that a lot of people purported to be offended does not mean there’s legitimacy to their claim.

The facts that there were a lot more people in the image than there were at the Last Supper, that there was no table, that the artist who created that particular vignette insisted it was intended to reference both the Greek origins of the Olympics and the notion of Dionysian (or, to use the Roman term, Bacchanalian) revelry: all this is to be ignored, apparently.  Even the Vatican got into the act, albeit belatedly, with this bizarre statement: “The Holy See was saddened by certain scenes at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games and cannot but join the voices raised in recent days to deplore the offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions [?!?]”  (emphasis added).

Curmie confesses that he didn’t know what the hell that moment was all about.  He didn’t think of Dionysus, although in retrospect that identification makes sense, but he fancies himself reasonably adept at understanding both cultural references and symbology, and never thought of the Last Supper, either.  It was just another in a series of rather strange vignettes that bespoke the avant-garde or, perhaps more specifically and relevantly, Frenchness. 

But let’s assume for the moment that Curmie was just asleep at the proverbial wheel on this one, and that the MAGA hordes were correct that DaVinci’s Last Supper was being referenced.  At the risk of rendering further offense, Curmie wonders, “So what?”  The Christian religion is not being parodied. 

First off, that would be a remarkably silly thing to do in a city whose principal tourist attractions include the cathedral of Notre Dame (it is an amazing space, and Curmie is very happy it will soon re-open), the chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, and the basilica of Sacré-Cœur.  But more to the point, there is nothing sacred about that painting.  A painting of a bunch of white guys all sitting on the same side of a long table isn’t likely to represent, even to believers, an accurate portrayal of a meal served a couple of millennia ago.  It’s on a religious theme; that’s it.  It would be only marginally sillier to have forbidden Curmie to cheer for his alma mater’s football team when we played the Holy Cross Crusaders.

There are, in fact, sacred relics in Paris.  When Curmie was last in that city, Sainte-Chapelle housed what they proclaimed to be the crown of thorns, a piece of the true cross, and so on.  (Those relics are now apparently housed in the Louvre.)  Make fun of those—or of items of similar significance to another religion—and you’re a first-class jackass, even if you’re “right” to doubt their authenticity.  But to suggest a pastiche of a painting obliquely and perhaps even unintentionally?  Seriously?  Your God is pretty much a wimp if he can’t handle that level of presumed disrespect.  And so, O Much-Abused Faux Christian, are you.

There’s no question that these folks deserve their silver medal.  But the fact that few observers immediately caught on to what was being represented, and that it’s merely a stretch as opposed to a fabrication to see the Last Supper referenced lends a pinch of legitimacy to the hand-wringers.  Despite their over-enthusiastic clamor, therefore, they don’t get the gold medal.

Remember, it’s the outrageousness of the paranoia, not the extent to which it gained traction, that earns points in the battle for the pearl-clutching gold.  The top of the podium is therefore reserved for those who gasped at the demonic figure in the closing ceremony.  

It is, as Curmie recognized immediately, and suspects you did, as well, Gentle Reader, a replica of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.  You can see the original here, to the right.  It strikes me as a particularly apt usage, combining the notion of victory, certainly relevant to the competitions of the previous couple of weeks, with the Olympics’ origins in Greece (Samothrace is a Greek island), with the host city (the statue has been on display in the Louvre for about a century and a half). 

It is certainly one of the most famous statues in the world.  What’s better known?  Well, the Venus de Milo, Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David, Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio de Janeiro, the Statue of Liberty… and maybe something else that’s slipping Curmie’s mind right now.  But it’s certainly in the top ten in the world. 

Ah, but not to the proudly ignorant X user Carolann, who asserts that it is a “headless, and armless Angel with what appears to be an effigy of Lucifer (The Golden Voyager) standing in gold. Certainly a fitting close to the MOST demonic & satanic Olympics in history.”  Needless to say, there are followers who say that it is “a slap in the face to all Christians” and similar hogwash. 

Someone points out what virtually anyone with a modicum of cultural literacy knows (or at the very least suspects), but our gal Carolann responds with the classic “we can see what it is from here.”  It is impossible to argue with such idiots.  Evidence means nothing to them.  Only two things enter their minds: chauvinistic hatred and the quest for victimhood.

The latter used to be the sole preserve (or nearly so) of the so-called underprivileged or disenfranchised, whose failures are to be excused because of their demographic profile: hence, for example, criticisms of Kamala Harris’s politics or performance, even if deserved, are dismissed as racist or sexist or both.  But now the (pseudo-) Christian right is demanding their place in the Victimhood Hall of Fame, despite the lack of anyone actually doing anything to even inconvenience them.

The good news is that this particular hallucination doesn’t seem to have generated much of a following, but the mere fact that someone could go on the record with such paranoid ramblings about imaginary threats to an already privileged position is somewhere between chilling and terrifying.  Yes, the MAGA cultists are weird.

La la, how the life goes on.