Gay Frogs, Cosmic Horror, and the Eclipse of Antihumanism

'Man' may have a future, but fashionable academic antihumanism doesn't

Back in 2023, I wrote about one of the many controversies that arose around RFK Jr.’s quixotic independent bid for the presidency before he vassalized his agenda to MAGA in the form of “MAHA.” This was his statement, in an interview with Jordan Peterson, that “a lot of the problems we see in kids [are] coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing.” Children, he told Peterson, are “swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today and many of those are endocrine disruptors.” The main objection made to this statement was simply that it sounded crankish and weird, reminiscent of Alex Jones’s infamous “gay frogs” rant.

Even outlets on the right, which warmed to RFK’s paleo-environmentalist views over the course of the 2024 campaign, ridiculed the idea. This isn’t all that surprising: A great deal of right-wing media has as its raison d’être a jihad against gender ideology. If it turned out kids were becoming genderfluid because of endocrine disruptors in the environment rather than woke college courses, that might suggest Chris Rufo should turn his attention to chemical regulations—not a congenial idea for his donors.

As it happened, I had been commissioned the previous year to write about sperm count decline and the scientific and conspiratorial discourses that revolve around it. As a result of the reading I did for that article, I knew the idea RFK was proposing was, if unproven, less crazy than it sounded, and certainly less so than some of his other ideas; top reproductive epidemiologist Shanna Swan had devoted a chapter to it in her 2020 book Countdown, arguing that possible chemical influences on gender expression and identity deserved more study. (Alex Jones’s gay frogs also have a basis in reality—specifically, the effects of the hormone-altering pesticide Atrazine).

What interested me most when it came to RFK’s claims, though, was the politics of the left on the issue of chemical endocrine disruption, which was stranger than it might seem at first. Mainstream LGBTQ discourse, of course, reacted with shocked offense to RFK’s suggestion, calling it stigmatizing and harmful. But you didn’t have to dig that deeply into academic queer theory to find a very different response. As I summarized that discourse in 2023:

[T]he queer theorists who have written on this subject have no qualms about citing chemicals as a factor contributing to what New School professor Heather Davis calls “our increasingly nonreproductive future.” In her 2022 book, Plastic Matter, Davis states that “endocrine-disrupting chemicals and other chemicals can interfere with what is considered ‘normal’ gender expression.” Rather than responding with “anxiety about reproduction,” she says, we should “celebrate, socially and ecologically, the difference of these queer bodily formations.” On the basic facts, in other words, Davis goes considerably further than Swan or Kennedy, confidently affirming that chemicals are affecting gender—but she is equally confident this amounts to social progress. The “queering of the body by way of endocrine disruptors,” she argues, is “creating different models of the world that refuse eco(hetero)normativity”; the result is “an inadvertent allegiance between certain forms of queerness and the petrochemical industry.”

Davis isn’t alone in regarding pollutants as a force for liberation. Queer theorists Malin Ah-King and Eva Hayward have asserted that “the supremacy bestowed to sexual difference—its ontological force—is outpaced not only by social or political movements, but also by metabolizing pollutants, xenotransplanting toxicants, and intravenous banes.” The remarkable implication would seem to be that Dow Chemical and Monsanto, not the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal, are the true vanguard of the LGBTQIA+ revolution.

I continue to find it surprising that not one of the many anti-woke pundits who devote themselves to dredging up the bizarre excesses of the academic left has so far—to my knowledge—come across the fact that there are scholars at prominent institutions celebrating the infusion of microplastics and other petrochemicals into human and animal bodies as a means of liberation from oppressive gender norms. (One might think some of their green-oriented allies in the progressive omnicause might also look askance at this, but I haven’t come across any of them doing so.)

I was thinking about all this again lately because I was profiling Nick Land, the notorious prophet of techno-accelerationism, whose roots are in the radical academia of the 1980s and ’90s. This might seem like an odd connection to make: What does Land have to do with our pro-gay frog gender theorists? Well, consider the following passage from a famous 1985 text:

The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labor, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.” An origin story in the “Western,” humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history … The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense.

The text quoted above is Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” a watershed for a strain of posthuman feminist theory upon which current queer theorists draw. (Davis cites it.) Land’s early writings from the late 1980s and early 1990s are heavily inflected by the posthuman feminism Haraway helped inaugurate, full of appeals to the need for “new amazons” and “lesbian vampirism” as well as citations of highly radical feminists like Monique Wittig. Land’s thought is now right-coded, whereas our pro-plastic gender theorists still position themselves as revolutionaries. But they, Haraway, and Land welcome what the latter once called the “dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere.” They are all, in a word, antihumanists.

This isn’t an accidental or surprising convergence. An underrated insight on the nature of “Theory”—or “poststructuralism,” “postmodern neo-Marxism,” “cultural Marxism,” or what have you—can be found in Mark Greif’s 2015 book The Age of the Crisis of Man, which is primarily a study of the mid-20th century intellectual preoccupation with, as André Malraux called it, “Man’s Fate.” But Greif’s final chapter deals with how the driving concern with “Man” fell out of fashion. What succeeded it, he shows, was what we now call “Theory,” the basic agenda of which he defines as a repudiation of the humanism that prevailed previously. “The best name,” Grief writes, “for the unifying philosophical impulse behind theory is antihumanism.”

The paradox of antihumanism,” Greif notes, is that it “nearly always has a normative or therapeutic motive we would identify as humane. That motive may be liberation, emancipation, and opposition to tyranny in intellect or politics. It may be scholarly, in the improvement of explanation and the extension of thought.” Haraway’s manifesto offers ample illustration of this point. Resolutely dedicated to deconstructing “‘Western,’ humanist myth of original unity,” it carries out, in Greif’s phrase, a “principled removal of the level of explanation of phenomena from single rational human actors and their explicit self-understandings to sub-and superpersonal aggregations.” The emancipatory rhetoric of antihumanism, as Greif indicates, assumed that the deconstruction of “Man” would unleash an array of more liberating possibilities. Queer theorists like Davis still seem to adhere to this view.

Despite his early resemblance to figures like Haraway, Land was always channeling a different mode of imagining the posthuman: that of cosmic horror—for him, above all, the work of H.P. Lovecraft. In one of the foundational texts of the genre, a key influence on Lovecraft, Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” the narrator comes to believe he has been internally colonized by an invisible, immortal being he calls the Horla (the “out-there,” anticipating Land’s “Outside”). In a state of terror, he cries out:

Woe to us! Cursed is man! He is here⁠ ⁠… the⁠ ⁠… the⁠ ⁠… what is his name?⁠ ⁠… the⁠ ⁠… it seems as if he were shouting his name in my ear and I cannot hear it⁠ ⁠… the⁠ ⁠… yes⁠ ⁠… he is shouting it.⁠ ⁠… I am listening.⁠ ⁠… I can’t hear⁠ ⁠… again, tell me again⁠ ⁠… the⁠ ⁠… Horla.⁠ ⁠… I heard⁠ ⁠… the Horla⁠ ⁠… it is he⁠ ⁠… the Horla⁠ ⁠… he is here!

Oh, the vulture has been used to eat the dove, the wolf to eat the sheep; the lion to devour the sharp-horned buffalo; man to kill the lion with arrow, spear and gun; but the Horla is going to make of man what we have made of the horse and the cow: his thing, his servant and his food, by the mere force of his will. Woe to us!

Before committing suicide at the end of the story, Maupassant’s narrator declares: “After man, the Horla. After him who can die any day, any hour, any moment, by accidents of all kinds, comes he who can only die in his appointed day, hour and moment, when he has attained the limit of his existence.” This is Land’s view, and it is also that of many of those running some of the most valued technology companies in the world today. Whether the tech they are creating brings about “the End of Man” feared by midcentury intellectuals and welcomed by their predecessors, it certainly signals the end of antihumanism as a plausibly emancipatory project.

This week in Compact

In addition to my Land profile, we’ve published one banger after another this week:

• Indigo Olivier on why Trump should nationalize the defense industry

• Petr Drulák on why Czechia’s likely new “far-right” leader isn’t really that

• Helen Andrews’s already mega-viral “The Great Feminization”

• Jacob Eisler on the moral panic around gerrymandering

• Juan Rojas on the no good, very bad plan for Venezuela regime change