[Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us: HERE.]

Demonstrations have recently erupted at Priory School in Lewes, East Sussex (U.K.), where parents and pupils are protesting a new school policy that mandates gender neutral uniforms for students. Girls who now show up to school in skirts are sent home to change into trousers. If they refuse to change and try to enter the school, police are called. The new rules are, of course, a product of the Left’s agenda — especially in regards to its totalitarian “transgender” movement.

The new policy at Priory School is, naturally, being camouflaged with the excuse that the objective is to make transgender students feel more comfortable — and to also have an environment more conducive to “learning and teaching.” But it’s obvious what’s really going on: the Left is waging its traditional war on gender differences, which it believes are socially constructed by the evil white-supremacist capitalist power structures.  

As we watch young girls in East Sussex being sent home from school if they commit the crime of wearing a skirt, it would do well for us to reflect on the foundations that serve as the impetus for this new utopian crackdown. The way that the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China imposed desexualized dress serves as a perfect example. Indeed, Maoist China imposed a unisex form of dress on its citizens, and it did so not only as a ruthless war on gender differences and individuality, but also as a calculated assault on the possibilities of private attractions, affections, and desires.

The central reality to gauge here is that desexualized dress satisfies in leftists their morbid pining for enforced sameness. It is crucial, in their world, to erase physical and emotional differences and attractions between people. In the utopian endgame, humans must all be replicas of each other and be completely devoted to the state — and to its all-knowing administering of “equality” and “social justice”.

It is no surprise, therefore, that western leftists were enthralled with the Maoist social engineering experiment. As I document in United in Hate, fellow travelers who journeyed to worship at the altar of the Maoist killing fields flew into ecstasy upon witnessing the unisex clothing.

Let’s recall a few examples:

American leftist academic Orville Schell adored China’s enforced mode of dress the moment he witnessed it. In his book, In the People’s Republic, he praised the “baggy uniformlike tunics” and wrote admiringly how, “The question of the shape of a person’s body is a moot one in China.”

Schell was very excited that physical attributes were subordinated in intimate relationships. He wrote that the Chinese had:

succeeded in fundamentally altering the notion of attractiveness by simply substituting some of these revolutionary attributes for the physical ones which play such an important role in Western courtship.

Schell also noted approvingly that, “The notion of ‘playing hard to get’ or exacerbating jealousies in order to win someone’s love does not appear to assume such a prominent role.”

America’s Shirley MacLaine joined Schell in being deeply enamored with China’s totalitarian puritanism. Like all leftists, she would have surely viewed any restriction on women’s attire or sexual impulses in her own society as “capitalist oppression,” but for the Chinese people, the suffocation of unregulated love and sex was a magnificent thing in her eyes. In her book, You Can Get There, she wrote:

I could see for myself that in China you were able to forget about sex. There was no commercial exploitation of sex in order to sell soap, perfume, soft drinks, soda pop, or cars. The unisex uniforms also de-emphasized sexuality, and in an interesting way made you concentrate more on the individual character of the Chinese, regardless of his or her physical assets, or lack of them. . . . women had little need or even desire for such superficial things as frilly clothes and make-up, children loved work and were self-reliant. Relationships seemed free of jealousy and infidelity because monogamy was the law of the land and hardly anyone strayed. . . . It was a quantum leap into the future.

For French leftist Claudie Broyelle, meanwhile, one of the key accomplishments of the Maoist revolution was the cancelation of the “privatization of love.” In her book, Women’s Liberation in China, she gleefully stressed how love in China was now to be expressed not through personal and selfish capitalist avenues, but only through “revolutionary commitment.”

Broyelle noted with profound satisfaction that good looks were no longer important for Chinese women. Unlike the sexualized image of women in Western advertising, she boasted how, in China, there was a different image:

on wall posters, in newspapers, on the stage, everywhere. It is the picture of a worker or a peasant, with a determined expression and dressed very simply. . . . You can see her working, studying, taking part in a demonstration.

Schell, MacLaine, and Broyelle never, of course, spoke of the brutal truths that stared them right in the face. They didn’t dare to ask: How could jealousy possibly arise, or infidelity be practiced, in a society where privacy did not exist and infidelity would land you in a concentration camp at best, and get you executed at worst? What if a Chinese citizen chose not to forget about sex and made his lack of forgetfulness evident? And what if a man or a woman wore clothes that did not de-emphasize his or her sexuality? What would happen to them? It is clear, of course, why these leftists never asked these questions — and why they also never visited a Chinese concentration camp to investigate who was imprisoned there, how they were suffering, and why.

The yearning for totalitarian puritanism that was witnessed among leftists in Maoist China does not mean, of course, that leftists are non-sexual. To the contrary, many of them are highly sexually promiscuous and also passionately active in promoting promiscuity. The issue here is what cause is being served. Women’s “sexual self-determination” is, for instance, adamantly supported by leftists if it enables their war against their own host democratic-capitalist societies — and if it can hurt the Judeo-Christian tradition. But if a totalitarian adversarial society is stifling women’s rights in this context, then leftists vehemently support that oppression, since they typically worship the particular tyranny in question and gleefully welcome the threat it poses to their own host society — which they hate and want to destroy.

It is important to remember how, some fifty years ago, the terrorist group Weather Underground not only waged war against American society through violence and mayhem, but also encouraged promiscuity — while forbidding private love — within its own ranks. This constituted an eerie replay of the sexual promiscuity that was enforced (while private love was outlawed) in dystopian novels such as We, 1984, and Brave New World.  All of this is precisely why the radical Left and Sharia supporters detest Valentine’s Day – since it is a day devoted to the love between a man and a woman, a bond that dangerously threatens the totality.

And so, we begin to understand why, just as the devotion to totalitarian puritanism played a central role in the Left’s solidarity with Maoist China — and with other vicious Communist regimes — so too it serves as a core component of the Left’s current romance with Islam. Indeed, Maoists’ unisex clothing rules find their parallel in Islam’s mandate for shapeless coverings — to be worn by both males and females. The collective “uniform” symbolizes submission to a “higher entity” and cancels out individual expression, mutual physical attraction, and private connection and affection.

Just as Orville Schell, Claudie Broyelle, and Shirley MacLaine were enchanted with the enforced Maoist dress that attempted to desexualize Chinese citizens, so too the new generation of leftists solemnly genuflect before the Islamic Hijab. The Hijab, like the Maoist uniform, attracts leftists by virtue of not only how it negates individuality and personal connection, but also how it reflects women being mandated to wear it under an adversary culture. Longing to submerge themselves into a totality where their own choices will be negated, leftists are always drawn to a totalitarian entity within which they can shed themselves of their own unwanted selves.

As I document in United in Hate and Jihadist Psychopath, all of this is precisely why leftists are today on the side of the Sharia-enforcers who persecute women who dare to not wear Hijab. To be sure, it is transparently evident why leftist feminists in particular callously turn their backs on murdered Muslim girls like Aqsa Parvez and heartlessly ignore the suffering Iranian women and girls who are today imprisoned, raped and killed for daring not to wear the Hijab.

And so, there is no mystery about what is currently transpiring at Priory School in Lewes, East Sussex, UK. The Left is simply continuing its Maoist Cultural revolution — just as it is faithfully emulating the ingredients of Sharia that it treasures most. In its hatred for humans, and in its unquenchable lust to control who and what they are, the self-appointed social redeemers of our time are now waging war on the femininity and freedom of young girls in the United Kingdom.

And in that evolving and accelerating utopian enterprise, they are succeeding frighteningly well.

*

Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the editor of Frontpagemag.com, the author of the critically-acclaimed, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, and the host of the web-tv show, The Glazov Gang. His new book is Jihadist Psychopath: How He is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us. Visit his site at JamieGlazov.com, follow him on Twitter: @JamieGlazov, and reach him at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.