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OK, this post requires some background. You have to watch at least part of the video, and I’m not going to explain it. There is something very important coming to light in this discussion. The bit about refusing development into some conception of maturity is a key point, and I want to discuss it.
There is a deep desire in us to refuse the demands of society and of the world and life itself, because development into a particular matured identity seems like a kind of violent imposition on us and on our creativity and freedom. And that complaint is not entirely untrue or unjustified.
You are tyrannized by the demands of world/nature and the demands of society, the demands of maturity and adulthood especially, to grow up, work, take on certain roles and obligations, produce the next generation, etc. They are an imposition. They are often distasteful to us, especially to the young.
J. M Barrie captured that feeling especially well in Peter Pan. Life is like a father shouting at us, a stuffy and pedantic figure seeking to trap us and abuse us into becoming a formulaic repetition of himself. He resents our youth and freedom. He wants to enslave us and send us to work in an office and saddle us with wives or husbands and steal away our individuality and magic and bravery and adventure. Most of us, quite naturally, feel repelled by that assault, and wish to escape to Neverland to escape our sentence. You won’t catch me and make me into a man.
That’s why Peter Pan is such an enduring story. It correctly captures the oppressive nature of the demands of nature and society.
So I grant that there is a kind of cruelty and violence to the demands of maturity and the confinement it forces on us, both socially and biologically. But it’s untrue that these demands are merely arbitrary, or that society does it only to be cruel or to somehow benefit some people and harm others.
In a purely constructivist world where all such advantages are arbitrary and possess no grounding in the nature of reality or in human nature, it’s not clear how such a trick would even be accomplished. How do you generate benefits from conformity to some arbitrary developmental path if there is no innate basis from which such benefits arise and nothing real to be conformed to by which to accrue them? Also, what idiot thinks there are no benefits or even necessary costs to development and maturity?
All species mature, and all pay the price of following their developmental pathway. And although nature is quite indifferent to their complaints, it wouldn’t drive every species that exists along and exact such costs if there was no benefit. It would have been selected out of existence long ago, instead of becoming the dominant pattern of all complex life. What idiot thinks that humans are the one species in the entire universe that can escape their fate, or that it has no value?
This is a Peter Pan attitude. And it helps us make sense of the lingering resentment and antagonism toward puberty we often see in trans activism, as a kind of imposed violence, as something we need to free children from so they can live free and creatively. Maturity itself is an enemy, under this kind of worldview. The desire of the lost boys is to stay in Neverland, where we can construct our own identities with no constraints and be whatever we wish to be (and change the game as we desire) forever.
That’s a wonderfully tempting idea.
Maturity is a tyranny many of us would happily wish to be free from. Neverland is a lovely place, next to the ugly, smoky, narrow-laned affair of the real world London. And it would seem like a kindness to grant it to people. Neverland is a kind of utopia of perpetual childishness and creative play. But what or who maintains Neverland and gives us the power to reach it or stay in it? Who are the keepers of the fairy dust? And to what degree do we become dependent on them to stay in Neverland?
Understanding Neverland as the flight from maturity into creative fantasy also explains why its residents must always be seeking to chase the adults out: the villains, the pillagers, the pirates. They’re resentful spoilsports, full of bitterness, trying to spoil the game. They’re a personification of resentful age and maturity gone pathological, trying to live in a world they don’t belong in and can’t return to, with nothing left but hate and vengeance for those who can. They’re an avatar of villainous reality, twirling a mustache like the character of that name from South Park. And it’s fun, when you’re young and free, to screw them over.
This close association between Neverland and the flight from maturity also explains why so much of the rhetoric around these issues of creative identity seem to treat the “victims” of identity violence as children. They are children, in a way, conceptual children, and the goal is to protect their play and their freedom from the codification of normative development. That means you can get people’s maternal instincts on board to defend them, if you play your cards right.
It also explains the patriarchal disagreeability of much of the opposition. There is something inherently challenging in the father figure. Fathers play a strong role in attachment seperation, in pushing children out of the role of the dependent, creative freedom of childhood. They’re the ones who tend to push you away from the breast and out of the nursery. That’s why the patriarchy is so powerfully symbolic as the enemy for this movement. The patriarchy is like the father in Peter Pan, the enemy that drives the children to seek safety in Neverland, and is often played in plays and movies by the same actor as Hook, the enemy within Neverland. Hook is the father as the children imagine him, driven entirely by resentment and tyranny, a despoiler of the treasures of childhood.
The goal of modern ideologies, the Lost Boy mentality is, ultimately, to make the real world stop being the dominant reality and to relocate reality to Neverland, where everyone will be happy all the time, because they can be whatever they want to be, whenever they want to be, however they want to be. And the first step to doing that is to assign, by whatever means necessary, equal, and in fact equivalent value to Neverland as the “real world”. The roles inhabited there, the games played, the lives lived, the identities assumed and cast off, must be ascribed equal value, equal status, equal validity, to those of the dreary and colorless “ordinary” world.
That’s the first step. But the ordinary world will always remain antagonistic to Neverland. So ultimately its agents must be ejected from Neverland, and the ordinary world must be forgotten, or abolished. In the end, by any and all means necessary. As long as it is there it stands in defiance of the creative world. So the first aim is for Neverland to stand beside the real world as a valid alternative. And the second stage is to stand above it, as a better, more free and creative and healthy reality. The final goal is to stand alone.
If the fixed world of the ordinary can be eliminated, then everyone can relocate to Neverland, and the creative world will be the only world. And that will be the best world, the perfect world. The world of our own design, created moment to moment for our own pleasure and according to our subjective needs and desires. That is the dream of queer theory, an identity without as essence. To be anything it wants, and not have to go to office and have a man made out of you. To not be bound by the enforced identity of the demands of the species. To reject the patriarchal tyranny of accepted developmental pathways.
But we must all worry as we set off into this paradise and lay our course in for the second star whether it’s true what JM Barrie said. What if it’s true that all children, except one, grow up?
The last chapter of Peter Pan is one of the most heartbreaking in all literature, for a parent. Captain Hook is dead and forgotten, Tinker Bell is dead and forgotten, Nana is dead and gone, even Mrs. Darling is dead and forgotten. Peter only tells stories about himself and forgets what passes in the real world. Wendy’s body grows large and guilty. Her hair turns white, and Peter hides from the light that would reveal her. Even Jane, Wendy’s daughter, fresh to her own adventure, is soon just another common grown-up, replaced in turn by Margaret. They all love Peter and what he represents, for he so needs a mother. But one by one they age and are forgotten, as all children grow up. And so it must be, as long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.
The hidden wisdom of Peter Pan isn’t to cling forever to Neverland, to Captain Hook or Tinker Bell or the Lost Boys. All pass, all the games end, to be replaced by new ones . The wisdom of Peter Pan is learn to treasure it for the brief and wonderful thing that childhood is, to honor it and to cherish it by taking our place in the succession that gives it as a new gift to each generation. And we in turn are reminded of our adventures and are able to glimpse Neverland again through the eyes of our children, and their children. The real lesson of Peter Pan isn’t childhishness, it’s maturity and parenthood.
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