“Crazy Jane Talks With The Gospel Coalition”
I met Thabiti Anyabwile
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
Apart from the first line, that’s actually “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop,” by W.B. Yeats.
“The bishop” in Yeats’ poem felt an almost physical revulsion at the idea of sex or of women or of bodies. He finds all those things icky. And he assumes that anything he finds icky must be wicked.
That same puckered revulsion is the basis of Thabiti Anyabwile’s entire argument against gay people. He imagines what gays and lesbians may do together in private, savoring every lurid detail. And then he suggests that other people’s private acts are somehow more shameful than his public fascination with other people’s private acts.
Reciprocity calls for a response to Anyabwile’s post in which someone describes his sex life in the same kind of detached, contextless graphic detail he attempts in his description of gay sex. Such a description would, of course, prompt an ick-response from anyone who read it (probably including Anyabwile himself, and certainly including Mrs. Anyabwile). It would, at least, if it were as clumsily body-phobic as Anyabwile’s own attempt to write about other people’s sex — which reads like excerpts from the World’s Most Awkward Sexter.
Anyabwile’s third-rate attempt at writing porn isn’t repulsive because of the acts he attempts — and fails — to describe (or to spell).
It’s repulsive because he’s a creepy, creepy, creepy voyeur. Thabiti Anyabwile is a peeper, a trench-coated figure lurking in the hedges outside other people’s windows.
His insistence that he staunchly disapproves of the private behavior he can’t keep himself from ogling only makes him more creepy, not less.
“What they’re doing in there is just wrong,” he mutters, straining to peek between the blinds. “I’ve been watching them from right here in the bushes for months now, and what they’re doing with one another is just disgusting.”
The man needs help. Until he gets it, warn the children to avoid this creepy, creepy man.
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