Every now and then, I hear people complaining that problems in Ireland can’t get solved, and that when they do get solved, it takes forever.
But that’s not always the case. This weekend, Dublin City moved quickly to address the problem that was caused when some bright spark decided to give all the bikes in the City Council’s bike scheme female names. Nobody, apparently, realised that “you are now riding Maeve” might cause some offence:
V few bike rental licenses given by @DubCityCouncil so how’d these gobs get one? All bikes now have female names, the app tells you how long “you’re riding Mary” & how much she costs.
I complained. They see nothing wrong w/ buying women for a ride. 🤷♀️ #EverydaySexism #IrishSlang pic.twitter.com/hKEuQM5pMj— Dr Eemer Eivers (@EemerEivers) August 6, 2022
The problem has now been solved, and the bikes have reverted to being identified by numbers, rather than female names. We can all sleep easily in our beds.
Which is a pity, because – and I don’t care what other people think here, really – the original names were pretty funny, at a time when we could all use a laugh. Perhaps they should have thrown in some male names, too, to give the women amongst us a giggle.
But that’s not how society works, these days. We live in a time when even the slightest hint of edginess, or humour, must be eradicated lest if offend or traumatize somebody. We’ve come a long way from my youth, which wasn’t that long ago, when there was a “Carry On” movie being repeated on the television every other week.
Of course, the “Carry On” movies offended people too: In their day, there were always those willing to (accurately) denounce them as cheap, low-class smut dressed up as humour. In fact, part of the appeal of those movies was precisely that tingle of illicit joy some people took in offending the prigs and the prudes. But these days, the identity of the prigs and the prudes has changed.
All religions are hostile to humour, in their own way: There are some faiths in this world where the penalty for making the wrong joke is beheading. And modern progressivism has many of the hallmarks of religion, for its most committed adherents.
There is original sin: Being male, for example, or white, or well off, or some combination of all three. There is mankind in a fallen state, and in need of redemption: Think Climate Change here, and the need, almost literally, for us to wear sackcloth and ashes. There are prophets: In my lifetime these have ranged from Caroline Criado Perez, the onetime BBC journalist who led a crusade against sexism in the early 2010s, to Greta Thunberg more recently, to Bill Gates. There are religious festivals: What is “Pride Month”, after all, if not Christmas for progressives? There are dogmas which will not, and must not be questioned: Witness RTE’s silence on the Tavistock scandal.
And there are priests and nuns: You don’t find them in churches, but you do find them on social media, providing guidance and moral fiber to the masses. They denounce the sinners, and the sins, and occasionally post twenty tweet threads about how we can all be better allies to other activists.
Naming Dublin City bikes after women does not fall into the category of “mortal” sin, in the Progressive religion, but it certainly is an undesirable and immoral act, because it is perceived as being likely to lead the masses down the road of wrongthink and impurity, just like the Carry On movies before it. It starts with somebody giggling at the thought of “riding Maeve”, and who knows where it might end up? Possibly the thought of a straight white man finding it funny is enough to trigger some people.
But the weakness of modern progressivism is ultimately the weakness of all religions: When they become too dominant, they stop being revolutionary, and instead end up as killjoys. People end up having more fun joking about the religion behind its back than they do in church.
And of course they do: Because people don’t change, even as the dominant ideas in society do. And that’s how we went from the early 2000’s, when Father Ted’s “and now to ride Mrs O’Reilly” joke was revelatory and hilarious, to the early 2020’s, when “you are now riding Maeve” is yet another sign of how society just isn’t pure enough for the modern progressive.