Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

How Tucker Carlson is using literature classes as a wedge to promote his fascist ideas

Tucker Carlson is an absolute master at promoting white supremacist and fascist ideas without overtly sounding like a fascist. He cleverly dresses up fascist talking points in language that makes them sound appealing to people who have conservative political leanings, but who have not yet fully embraced fascism.

In fact, Carlson is so effective at promoting fascism that, in many cases, avowed fascists are actually taking their cues from him. The former Neo-Nazi Derek Black, whose father Don Black founded the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront, described in an interview on The Van Jones Show how his Neo-Nazi relatives watch Tucker Carlson’s show twice every time it airs in order to study his arguments:

“It’s really, really alarming that my family watches Tucker Carlson’s show once and then watches it on the replay, because they feel that he is making the white nationalist talking points better than they have and they’re trying to get some tips on how to advance it.”

One of the core ideas of modern fascist ideology is that, at some usually vague point in the past, there was a glorious “golden age” when things in the world were generally good. Fascists don’t necessarily believe that this was a perfect time, but they do believe that it was a better time than the one we are living in right now.

Fascists believe that, during this past “golden age,” men were generally brave, strong, and impeccably masculine, women were generally docile and submissive, the white race was unquestionably dominant, sex generally only existed within heterosexual marriage as a means for producing offspring, people generally respected tradition, people generally devoted themselves to the service of the nation-state, and immigration was either nonexistent or extremely limited.

According to fascists, however, the world is now degenerate and out of order. They believe that men have become cowardly, weak, and effeminate, women have become too stubborn and disobedient, the white race has lost or is losing control, sexual mores have disintegrated, people are ignoring traditions, the nation-state is crumbling, culture-destroying immigrants are coming in in droves, and “miscegenation” has become rampant. Fascists generally believe that the solution to these alleged problems is that we must find a strong man with a vision who can lead the nation-state back to greatness and restore order.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the statue Die Partei, created in 1939 by the German Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, representing what he regarded as the spirit of fascism, embodied as a young man with rippling muscles and “Nordic” features

Carlson deliberately promotes these core ideas of fascism throughout his entire segment on literature. He begins the segment by saying:

“Loudoun County, Virginia, right outside Washington D.C., was for a very long time—for generations—a reasonable place. It was orderly and calm. It was well maintained. Loudoun County famously worked—certainly in contrast to the city nearby.”

This is the first part of the standard fascist narrative: the previous “golden age.”

Carlson immediately goes on to claim that Loudoun County has been ruined by growing numbers of “white liberals” (whom he calls “brittle neurotics”) and “immigrants.” This is the second part of the standard fascist narrative: contemporary social decadence as a result of race traitors and immigrants.

The “I’m not xenophobic!” defense

Carlson attempts to dodge the charge of being xenophobic by insisting that immigrants are actually conservatives and that they are only ruining Loudoun County indirectly by giving more power to “white liberals.” He claims:

“Now, in general, most immigrants are not very liberal—at all, actually! In fact, many of them have what would now be described as extreme right-wing positions on social issues. If you ever have a chance, ask a Salvadoran what he thinks of transgenderism. It’ll make you laugh—probably nervously. You’ll look around to see if anyone heard it.”

“But, as a practical matter, it doesn’t matter at all what immigrants, what Salvadorans or Pakistanis, think of social issues or how they organize their own families. Immigrants vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party and those votes give more power not to them, but to those unhappy white liberals who want to blow everything up. And that’s why—mystery solved!—a lot of places with high levels of recent immigrants tend to be far more liberal than those immigrants themselves.”

First of all, what Carlson says here about immigrants being conservatives is not necessarily accurate. Immigrants in general come from diverse backgrounds and hold diverse political and social opinions. It can be deeply misleading to generalize about the political views of all immigrants collectively.

Carlson’s impression of what a hypothetical “Salvadoran” would think of “transgenderism” (by which he really means “transgender people”) is clearly based on a stereotype of the views of older, cisgender Hispanic men who are conservative Catholics. Immigrants who are relatively young, a gender other than male, and/or irreligious, however, are less likely to fit this stereotype. Some immigrants are actually transgender themselves.

Furthermore, what Carlson says here does not absolve him from the charge of xenophobia. Even though he says that immigrants are indirectly ruining the United States by giving more power to “white liberals,” he’s still saying that immigrants are ruining the country, which is an inherently xenophobic sentiment.

“Cancelling classic literature”?

Carlson moves on to describe how the combination of “white liberals” and “immigrants” is supposedly ruining Loudoun County’s public schools. First, he introduces a clip of Andrea Weiskopf, a Latin teacher at Riverbend Middle School in Loudoun County, talking about how the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee contains racially problematic elements. He says:

“Now, as you watch this, keep in mind that Andrea Weiskopf is actually a middle school teacher. She’s not a paid actor. We didn’t make her up to prove a point. She is entirely real—down to the ostentatiously displayed pronouns in her Twitter bio!”

Carlson has clearly deliberately selected Andrea Weiskopf as his victim in order to appeal to misogynist, anti-Semitic, and fatphobic sentiments among his viewers, since she is a woman, Weiskopf is a historically Jewish surname, and (as becomes evident when Carlson plays the clip) she is rather large-bodied. Carlson could just as easily have simply complained about “white liberals” in general like he often does, but he clearly chose to bully Weiskopf in particular at least partly because of her gender, name, and appearance.

Furthermore, Carlson has deliberately worded his introduction to make Weiskopf sound as much like a scary leftist ideologue as possible. This is clearly the reason why he mentions Weiskopf’s inclusion of her pronouns in her Twitter bio. Whenever a person states their pronouns, people on the far right consistently regard it as a sign that the person is a delusional left-wing extremist.

There are, however, entirely practical reasons why someone might want to state their pronouns that even the most stubborn conservative might be able to understand. This is especially the case on a platform like Twitter, where it may be difficult to accurately guess a person’s pronouns based on their name and profile picture alone.

Notably, in the English-speaking world, Andrea is most commonly used as a female name, but, in Italy, it is a male name equivalent to the English name Andrew. In one of my Latin classes last semester, we were assigned to read a paper written by the Italian archaeologist Andrea Carandini. I initially mistakenly assumed that he was a woman based on his name and only realized he was a man after I looked him up on Wikipedia. It’s easy to see how someone from an Italian-speaking background could mistakenly assume that a woman named Andrea was a man based on her name.

ABOVE: Photograph of Andrea Weiskopf speaking at a Loudoun County public school board meeting, from this article in the Loudoun Times-Mirror

If you actually check Andrea Weiskopf’s Twitter profile, she comes across less like the scary ideologue Carlson attempts to portray her as and far more like a sweet middle-aged schoolteacher who loves her students. She describes herself in her Twitter bio as an “educator, mother of a scientist, fighting the empire since 27 BC.” The date “27 BC” is, of course, an allusion to the year in which Octavian, who is traditionally considered to be the first emperor of the Roman Empire, adopted the titles Princeps, meaning “First Citizen,” and Augustus, meaning “August One.” This event is traditionally considered to mark the beginning of the Roman imperial era.

If you scroll down to look at Weiskopf’s tweets, they generally reflect the image of a caring and thoughtful teacher. For instance, in a tweet on 25 March 2021, she says:

“I was miserable in middle school. If I can make a middle schooler’s life a little less miserable while teaching them a little bit of Latin, it’s been a great day.”

In a tweet she made on 16 April 2021, she says:

“I teach 13 year old boys. They like fart jokes and are embarrassed when their voice cracks. Sometimes they smell. May they always feel loved in my classroom.”

So yeah. Maybe not so scary.

After introducing Andrea Weiskopf, Carlson proceeds to present a completely misrepresentative and ridiculous straw man of her argument, saying:

“Here is Miss Weiskopf explaining why the book To Kill a Mockingbird—a book the rest of us assumed was all about why racism is bad—is, in fact, itself racist, because it causes something called ‘racial trauma’ due to the fact there are white people in it!”

In the clip, however, Weiskopf does not argue that To Kill a Mockingbird is “racist” because it has “white people in it” at all. Instead, she quite sensibly points out that the novel can be traumatic for some Black students to read because it is a white savior narrative. Furthermore, she does not argue that To Kill a Mockingbird should be banned and all copies of it burned. On the contrary, she explicitly invites people at the meeting to read the book with her so that they can discuss the racially problematic elements in it. She says:

“If you want to talk about books that are assigned, let’s read To Kill a Mockingbird together. If you aren’t willing to consider the racial trauma this assigned book causes Black children with its white saviorism, then you have no business discussing any books.”

Weiskopf obviously is not trying to ban “classic literature” in general either. She literally teaches Latin for crying out loud. It’s hard to think of a subject taught in high school that has been traditionally considered more “classical.”

ABOVE: Illustration of the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro from the Vergilius Romanus, a fifth-century CE Roman illustrated manuscript copy of his works in Latin

The problem with To Kill a Mockingbird

Leaving Carlson’s egregious misrepresentations aside, let’s talk about why the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is racially problematic.

To Kill a Mockingbird has been a staple of high school literature classes in the United States for over half a century. As this video by Phil Edwards for Vox explains, a large part of the reason why this novel is so famous today is not because it is the best book ever written, but rather because it was published at a time when mass market paperback books were first becoming widely used in schools. It was therefore perfect for teachers in the 1960s who wanted a well-written book dealing with tough contemporary issues that they could buy in bulk in cheap paperback copies for their students to read.

To Kill a Mockingbird became widely used in American public schools and had a profound emotional impact on many white students who previously had not been especially aware of racism. Many people who read the book growing up therefore came to consider the book a “classic” and to insist that their children needed to read the same book. As a result, nearly everyone who has gone through the United States public education system has been required to read the book at least once at some point.

To Kill a Mockingbird is, however, not an ideal work for teaching students about racism against Black people in the twenty-first century. For one thing, the entire book is told from a thoroughly white perspective. This is hardly surprising, given that Harper Lee, the author of the book, was a white woman. The protagonist of the novel is a white girl named “Scout” and the vast majority of the other named characters in the novel are white as well.

The white-centeredness of the novel is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, but, if you’re going to teach students about racism against Black people, it’s better to do so from the perspective of the Black people who are actually affected by that racism.

ABOVE: Front cover of the edition of To Kill a Mockingbird that I read when I was in high school

Things get even thornier when we consider the novel’s white savior aspects. A white savior narrative is a story in which people of color are portrayed as helpless and in need of a noble white person to save them. White people generally love this kind of narrative because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy about themselves, but narratives of this kind are actually harmful because they perpetuate harmful stereotypes about people of color.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson, one of the few major Black characters, is portrayed as helpless and in need of a white savior. Aside from this, he is given very little attention and his personality is never fully fleshed out. Scout never has a one-on-one conversation with him, so everything readers hear about him comes either from what other people say about him or what he says at his trial.

Even this coverage is very incomplete. When the jury convicts him, the novel never describes his reaction. When the prison guards ultimately shoot and kill him while he is trying to escape, the novel never says anything about his family’s reaction, even though we are told that he has a family.

Instead, all the focus of the novel is on Scout’s own father Atticus Finch, a white man, who is portrayed as a quintessential “white savior” figure in every way. He is portrayed as noble, courageous, and determined to help Tom Robinson at great personal cost. These are certainly admirable qualities, but the fact that the novel makes Atticus’s personal character and integrity the focus of attention at the expense of the actual Black characters is a really glaring problem.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Atticus Finch as he is portrayed by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird

Another difficulty with using To Kill a Mockingbird to teach students about racism is the fact that it was published in 1960 and is set in the early 1930s. The fact that the novel is set nearly a hundred years ago is not strictly a problem in and of itself, but it does mean that teachers need to work to emphasize the book’s contemporary relevance.

If white students only read about racism from nearly a hundred years ago, this could lead them to assume that racism is no longer a problem in the twenty-first century, since this is what conservative politicians and pundits keep telling them. In reality, white supremacy still has both deeply ingrained, institutional support and enormous, wide-reaching influence—as the success of Tucker Carlson himself aptly demonstrates.

If you really want to use literature to teach students about racism against Black people in the United States in the twenty-first century, you would be much better off to do so using a novel written by a Black person from a Black perspective that is set in a more recent time period.

A potentially better work for this particular pedagogical purpose might be The Hate U Give, a bestselling young adult novel published in 2017 by the Black author Angie Thomas. I unfortunately have not had time to read the book itself yet, since I’ve been so busy reading other things that I’ve needed to read for my classes and for articles, but I’ve read about a dozen reviews of it and they all seem to agree that it is extremely good.

The novel’s protagonist is a sixteen-year-old Black girl named Starr Carter, who lives in a lower-class, mostly Black neighborhood, but attends an elite, mostly white school. Near the beginning of the novel, a white police officer shoots and kills Starr’s childhood friend Khalil right in front of her. The rest of the novel deals with the fallout of this event. The reviews I’ve read say that the novel does an excellent job presenting both the complexity and gravity of its subject matter for high school-aged audiences.

ABOVE: Front cover of the novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, which might be a better book for teaching students about racism against Black people in the twenty-first century than To Kill a Mockingbird

Why Tucker Carlson is talking about this

Now, at this point you may be wondering why Tucker Carlson is talking about To Kill a Mockingbird at all. Why does he care about the book? The fact is, he probably doesn’t. I highly doubt that it really matters to him personally whether students are reading To Kill a Mockingbird or not. He just knows that many people have fond memories of the book and that, by telling those people that evil leftists who have been empowered by immigrants are attacking the book and trying to ban it, he can incite them to hate immigrants and leftists.

Telling people that evil leftists are trying to ban To Kill a Mockingbird also helps Carlson set the stage for the argument he makes later in the segment by establishing a false contrast between the traditional works of “classic literature” that leftists are supposedly trying to ban and the works of “sexual propaganda” that they are supposedly forcing on children that he himself would like to ban.

Risqué content in young adult literature! How scandalous!

After finishing his rant about To Kill a Mockingbird, Carlson moves on to rail against critical race theory, The 1619 Project, and efforts to make teaching mathematics more equitable. I’ll skip over those parts because they aren’t especially relevant to literature, which is the subject I want to focus on in this article. Once he has finished ranting on these topics, however, he returns to the subject of literature to talk about the content in young adult novels that some students are being assigned to read:

“It’s lunacy! It’s the French Revolution! This stuff is everywhere. Have you ever taken a look at the books that your kids are being assigned to read in school? Have you actually read them? Parents in Loudoun County actually did read them! And one mother had the temerity to read portions of those books aloud at the Loudoun County school board meeting. Watch.”

Carlson then plays a clip of a woman reading passages from some young adult novel or novels that her offspring was apparently assigned to read in a literature class. The passages in question read as follows:

“Jasper wasn’t even my boyfriend—just this dude I did some hacking with once in a while. It was pretty basic library systems, low-security [bleep]—not in my league at all—but he had a big [bleep] and sometimes a girl just needs a big [bleep].”

“Her top lip curled up. ‘Wait a minute. Is that what’s really going on? She did your homework and you ate her [bleep]? Is that why you’re crying?’”

“‘It’s ok. It’s cool. This is what girls do at parties,’ I told myself and kept dancing with the boy. I couldn’t see the alcohol making my waist wind faster.”

Unfortunately, the passages are all read completely out of context and absolutely no citation is given for them, so I am unable to identify which book or books these lines actually come from or what context they appear in.

Likewise, neither Carlson nor the woman in the video specifies at which age students are being assigned to read the books that contain these passages. I agree that these passages are definitely not appropriate for elementary schoolers and arguably not appropriate for middle schoolers, but my guess is that the books that contain these passages are probably being given to high schoolers.

If this is indeed the case, I really don’t see how these books are age-inappropriate. All high schoolers know what sex is. Many of them are already having sex themselves. They are also familiar with all the most common obscene words. Many of them use these words habitually.

I went to a very small public high school in a very conservative, rural area outside a small town in Indiana. I was undoubtedly a loner. I had no close friends, I never went to any dances or sporting events, and I generally avoided spending time with fellow students whenever I had the opportunity. For most of my time in high school, I sat alone in the cafeteria at lunch, alone on the bus, and alone in every other place where I had the opportunity.

Despite this, when I was in high school, I heard far worse things than anything the woman reads in the clip played by Carlson every single day. All I had to do was listen to what other students were saying to each other while I was walking through the hallway, sitting on the school bus, or sitting in the classroom before class. High schoolers are not innocent children. They know about sex stuff.

“Classic literature” versus “sexual propaganda”?

Let’s interrogate Carlson’s narrative a bit further, though. The narrative that he is clearly trying to tell here is that, for generations, people studied “classic literature,” which was good and wholesome. Now, though, according to Carlson, students are reading degenerate literature, full of foul language and sexual depravity.

This narrative is not even remotely accurate. Literature has always been full of sexual content and foul language—ever since the very beginning. If modern young adult novels are degenerate, then most works of so-called “classic literature” are degenerate as well. Let’s look at a few examples.

ABOVE: Painting made by the German Gothic painter Conrad von Soest in 1403, depicting an apostle wearing eyeglasses to read the gospel—or, who knows, maybe just medieval smut

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The oldest work of literature that is sometimes taught in high school literature classes is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the standard version of which was written in the Akkadian language by a Babylonian scribe named Sîn-lēqi-unninni at some point between c. 1300 and c. 1155 BCE, based on various older sources that were originally written in Sumerian. Even though it was written over three thousand years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh is replete with risqué content that would almost certainly make Tucker Carlson pretend to be scandalized.

Tablet I of the poem introduces Gilgamesh as the young, tyrannical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk who, among other things, mandates by law that he must have sex with every bride at every wedding before the groom. The deities decry Gilgamesh’s misbehavior, so the goddess Aruru creates Enkidu, a wild man completely covered in hair, as a rival for Gilgamesh.

Enkidu lives in the wilderness with the wild animals until a hunter sees him destroying the traps he set for the animals. The hunter tells his father, who tells Gilgamesh, who sends a prostitute named Shamhat to seduce Enkidu and thereby civilize him. Shamhat presents herself to Enkidu and strips naked for him. Enkidu and Shamhat have sex nonstop for six days and seven nights.

Finally, once Enkidu has fully satiated his lust, he discovers that, by having sex with Shamhat, he has become civilized and therefore much weaker. Enkidu goes to Uruk, where he finds Gilgamesh trying to break into the bedchamber of a traumatized young bride in order to rape her. Enkidu confronts Gilgamesh and two men wrestle. Neither man is able to overpower the other, so they eventually give up and, respecting each other’s strength, they decide to become friends. Many scholars have interpreted the subsequent relationship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu as having homoerotic undertones.

Later, in Tablet VI of the epic, Ishtar, the goddess associated with sex, beauty, and attraction, presents herself to Gilgamesh and begs him to have sex with her. Gilgamesh refuses her, pointing out that all her previous lovers have met bitter ends. Ishtar, infuriated, goes to her father Anu and demands the Bull of Heaven, which she unleashes to cause havoc and destruction upon the earth.

Thus, the Epic of Gilgamesh includes systematic rape, prostitution, possible implied homoeroticism, and a horny vengeful goddess.

ABOVE: Ancient Mesopotamian terra-cotta relief plaque dating to between c. 2250 and c. 1900 BCE, depicting Gilgamesh slaying the Bull of Heaven

The Iliad

Now, some of Tucker Carlson’s viewers might object that the Epic of Gilgamesh is a work of decadent “eastern literature” and that “western literature” has always been much more wholesome and refined. I think that this distinction between so-called “eastern literature” and so-called “western literature” is really quite arbitrary, especially since it is well established that early Greek literature was heavily influenced by ancient Near Eastern literature. (The renowned classicist M. L. West wrote an influential monograph on this subject titled The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth.)

This hardly matters, though, because even so-called “classic works” of “western literature” have been absolutely redolent with sexual and obscene content since the very beginning. Just look at the Iliad, which is often described as the oldest surviving work of “western literature.” This title is somewhat dubious, since there are uncertainties about the date when the Iliad was composed relative to other very early works of Greek literature and about what actually constitutes “western literature” in the first place. Nonetheless, there is no question about the primacy that the Iliad holds in the so-called “western canon.”

Despite this, the Iliad literally begins with an argument over sex slaves. At the very beginning of the first book of the Iliad, Agamemnon, the leader of the Achaian forces, has enslaved a beautiful young Trojan woman named Chryseïs, who is the daughter of Chryses, a priest of the god Apollon. In ancient Greece, it was common for adult male slaveowners to sexually exploit the people they enslaved, especially if those people were young and attractive. It can be safely assumed that Agamemnon probably exploits Chryseïs in this manner.

Chryses prays to Apollon, begging him to send a terrible plague to devastate the Achaian forces. Apollon does this and the Achaian seer Kalchas foretells that the plague will only end when Agamemnon willingly returns Chryseïs to her father. The Achaian warrior Achilles insists that Agamemnon must return Chryseïs or the entire army will perish.

Agamemnon eventually agrees to do this, but he insists on taking Briseïs, a young Trojan woman whom Achilles has enslaved, as compensation. Outraged, Achilles tries to kill Agamemnon, but the goddess Athena holds him back. In anger, Achilles declares that he will neither fight for the Achaians himself nor allow the troops under his command to fight. This sets the main story arc of the epic into motion.

ABOVE: First-century CE Roman fresco of Achilles surrendering Briseïs to Agamemnon from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii

On top of this, as I discuss in this article I wrote in October 2020, Achilles is portrayed as having an extremely intimate relationship with a fellow male Achaian warrior named Patroklos. Achilles repeatedly describes Patroklos as his “πολὺ φίλτατος . . . ἑταῖρος,” which means “by far most beloved companion.” When the Trojan prince Hektor ultimately kills Patroklos in battle, Achilles is so devastated that he refuses to eat or drink until he has avenged his companion and he declares that, when he dies, he wants his ashes mixed with those of Patroklos so they can be together for eternity.

Although the Iliad does not explicitly say that Achilles and Patroklos were lovers, it does seem to imply that there is a sexual component to their relationship. Many later Greek authors, including the tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 455 BCE), the philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE), and the orator Aischines (lived 389 – 314 BCE), unambiguously interpreted them as lovers.

Of course, the Iliad wouldn’t be about Greek mythology if it didn’t have deities having sex in it. In Book Fourteen, there is a famous scene known as the Διὸς Ἀπάτη (Diòs Apátē), or “Deception of Zeus.” In this scene, the goddess Hera goes to Zeus while he is on Mount Ida wearing the girdle of Aphrodite so that she can seduce him in order to distract him from the war so that Poseidon can help the Achaians. Zeus conjures up a golden cloud to cover them as they have sex. Then, Hypnos, the god of sleep, whom Hera has already bribed by promising him one of the Charites as his bride, puts Zeus into a deep slumber.

Thus, the Iliad includes sex slavery, implied homosexuality, and fairly explicit descriptions of horny deities screwing on mountaintops. It is not a poem for the Puritanical.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to around 500 BCE, discovered in an Etruscan tomb at Vulci, depicting Achilles bandaging Patroklos’s arm

Archilochos’s dirty ditties

If you want blatant pornography, you won’t find it in the Iliad, but you’ll find it very early in the Greek literary tradition nonetheless. Archilochos of Paros (lived c. 680 – c. 645 BCE) is possibly the earliest ancient Greek lyric poet of whose work any fragments have survived to the present day. His work stands at the very beginning of the western literary tradition and, although most English-speakers have probably never heard of him, some of the phrases he coined are still widely used today.

For instance, most English-speakers are probably familiar with Archilochos’s Fragment 201, which has become a very well known proverb in English. The fragment reads as follows in the original Greek:

“πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα.”

This, of course, means, in English:

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Archilochos, however, wrote a lot more than just this phrase; he also wrote explicitly pornographic lyrics as well. For instance,

“ὥσπερ αὐλῷ βρῦτον ἢ Θρέϊξ ἀνὴρ
ἢ Φρὺξ ἔμυζε· κύβδα δ᾿ ἦν πονεομένη.”

This means, in English:

“Just like a Thrakian man drinking beer through a straw
or a Phrygian, she sucked his dick; and she was bent over, working hard.”

Fragment 43 reads as follows in Greek:

“ἡ δέ οἱ σάθη… ὥστ᾿ ὄνου Πριηνέως
κήλωνος ἐπλήμυρεν ὀτρυγηφάγου.”

This means, in English:

“And his cock was overflowing just like that of a Prienian donkey,
well-bred and fed on corn.”

This is some seriously dirty poetry, but it’s also some of the earliest writing in the entire “western” literary tradition.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a relief carving from the Archilocheion on the island of Paros dating to around 500 BCE, depicting the lyric poet Archilochos reclining on a couch in sympotic posture

Catullus’s nasty side: Carmina 16 and 97

Now, some people might try to object that the ancient Greeks were an early aberration and the rest of “western literature” is, in fact, very clean. This, however, would be blatantly false. If we fast forward several centuries, we find that ancient Roman authors were just as prone to sexually explicit and obscene content as their Greek predecessors.

Today, the Roman poet Gaius Catullus Valerius (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) is one of the most beloved of all Roman poets. Most of his poems are short, entertaining, and written in relatively simple Latin, which makes them perfect for introductory Latin courses. Some of his poems, however, are shockingly sexually obscene. His most notorious poem is probably “Carmen 16,” which is addressed to two men who dared to criticize his poetry for being effeminate and indecent. The first two lines of the poem read as follows:

“Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathici et cinaede Furi…”

This means, in English:

“I will fuck you in the ass and shove my cock down your throats,
sodomy-lover Aurelius and anal-pervert Furius…”

Catullus goes on to explain that his poems do not actually reflect what he is like as a person, hinting that he is not actually capable of anally and orally raping Aurelius and Furius the way he threatens. Nonetheless, the fact that he even threatens to do these things to them at all is deeply disturbing.

Catullus’s “Carmen 97,” in which he ruthlessly criticizes a man named Aemilius for his poor oral hygiene, is less notorious than “Carmen 16,” but it contains sexual imagery and obscene language that some readers actually find even more disturbing. The poem reads as follows:

“Non (ita me di ament) quicquam referre putavi
utrumne os an culum olfacerem Aemilio.
nilo mundius hoc, nihiloque immundius illud,
verum etiam culus mundior et melior:
nam sine dentibus est. hoc dentis sesquipedalis,
gingivas vero ploxeni habet veteris,
praeterea rictum qualem diffissus in aestu
meientis mulae cunnus habere solet.
hic futuit multas et se facit esse venustum,
et non pistrino traditur atque asino?
quem si qua attingit, non illam posse putemus
aegroti culum lingere carnificis?”

This means, in my own English translation:

“I think it does not matter at all (so may the deities help me!)
whether I smell Aemilius’s mouth or his asshole.
In no way is the former any cleaner, and in no way is the latter any dirtier.
In fact, his asshole is actually cleaner and better:
for it is without teeth. His mouth has teeth a foot-and-a-half long
and gums truly like an old wagon-box.
Furthermore, it tends to have a gape just like
the cunt of a pissing she-mule, cleaved open in the summer heat.
He fucks many women and he thinks that he is handsome
and is he not handed over to the mill for the donkey?
If a woman touches him, then do we not suppose that she would
lick the asshole of a diseased executioner?”

Here at least Catullus does not threaten to rape anyone, but his insults are still highly gratuitous.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern bust showing what the artist imagined the ancient Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus might have looked like

Geoffrey Chaucer’s filthy fabliauxs

Now, Carlson or his fans might object that the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the poems of Archilochos and Catullus are all works of “pagan” literature. They may very well insist that western Christian literature has always been much purer than “pagan” literature. This assertion, however, is easy to disprove.

Just take a look at Geoffrey Chaucer (lived early 1340s – 1400), who is probably the most famous of all medieval English authors. Chaucer was certainly a Christian, but yet he includes several wildly obscene and filthy tales in his long narrative poem The Canterbury Tales, which has long been considered a masterpiece of English literature. The most notorious of these tales is probably “The Miller’s Tale,” which, in the poem’s framing narrative, is told by a drunken miller named Robin.

The story goes that there was a carpenter named John who lived in the town of Oxford and had a beautiful wife named Alisoun who was much younger than him. John rents a room in his house to a clever young man named Nicholas, who is a student at the University of Oxford. Nicholas lusts fervently after Alisoun and longs to have sex with her. One day while John is out of town, Nicholas sexually assaults Alisoun. Chaucer describes the assault as follows in Middle English:

“And prively he caughte hire by the queynte,
and seyde, ‘Ywis, but if ich have my wille,
for deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.’
And heeld hire harde by the haunchebones,
and seyde, ‘Lemman, love me al atones,
or I wol dyen, also God me save!’
And she sproong as a colt dooth in the trave,
and with hir heed she wryed faste awey,
and seyde, ‘I wol nat kisse thee, by my fey!
Why, lat be,’ quod she, “lat be, Nicholas,
Or I wol crie out “harrow” and “allas!”
Do wey youre handes, for youre curteisye!’”

Translated into Modern English, this means:

“And, privately, he grabbed her by the cunt,
and said, ‘Yes, unless I have my will,
for secret love of you, Sweetie, I’ll spill.’
And held her hard by the buttocks,
and said, ‘Sweetie, love me now,
or I will die, and God will save me too.‘
And she sprung as a colt does in the trave,
and with her head she twisted fast away,
and said, ‘I will not kiss you, by my faith!
Why let go,’ said she, ‘let go, Nicholas,
or I will cry out “help!” and “alas!”
Do take your hands away, for your courtesy!’”

Despite Alisoun’s initial protests, Nicholas speaks sweetly to her and convinces her to have sex with him. They therefore begin a protracted affair. Later, when Alisoun goes to church, another man named Absolon makes sexual advances towards her, but she spurns him.

Nicholas, wanting to spend an entire night having sex with Alisoun, hatches a clever plan. He convinces John that God has sent him a terrible vision, telling him that, next Monday night, he will send a flood three times as large as the one he sent in the time of Noah and that the only way they can survive is by hanging three tubs from the roof of Nicholas’s barn, stuffed with provisions and axes. They must then sleep in the tubs and, when the flood comes, they must cut the ropes and hack their ways through the roof of the barn so that they will be able to float away.

John totally falls for Nicholas’s trick and, as soon as John falls asleep in his tub in the barn, Nicholas and Alisoun gleefully sneak back to the house to have passionate sex together in John’s bed all night long. While they are busy having sex, Absolon comes to the window and begs Alisoun to give him a kiss. She eventually agrees, but, instead of presenting her lips to the window, she presents her anus. Because it is pitch black, Absolon cannot see which part of her is really at the window, so he gives her anus a nice kiss.

Angrily realizing that he has been tricked, Absolon runs to grab a hot poker. He calls for Alisoun to give him another kiss, intending to shove the hot poker up her anus. This time, however, Nicholas presents his anus to Absolon at the window instead and Absolon shoves the poker up his anus. Nicholas shrieks in pain and shouts “Water!” meaning for Alisoun to get water to assuage his pain.

Nicholas’s cries wake up John, who has been sound asleep in the tub hanging from the roof of the barn this whole time. Upon hearing the scream of ‘Water!” John instantly assumes that the flood has arrived and cuts the ropes that are suspending the tub from the ceiling. Because the flood isn’t real and there are no waters to carry the tub, it crashes to the ground. John breaks both his arms and the sound of the tub crashing to the ground wakes up all the townspeople, who come to laugh at him.

ABOVE: Illustration from folio 34v of the Ellesmere Chaucer, an early fifteenth-century manuscript of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, depicting Robin the Miller playing his bagpipes

William Shakespeare’s spectacular corpus of sex and body humor

Now, some people might object that very few high school literature classes in the United States are reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the poems of Archilochos and Catullus, or The Canterbury Tales. This is probably true; of the works I have mentioned so far, The Canterbury Tales is the only one that I was ever assigned to read any part of for a class in high school. Even for that one, I was only assigned to read excerpts from it in a dual credit class that I took the last semester of my senior year and those excerpts did not include “The Miller’s Tale.”

We did, however, read the entire tragedy Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare in my ninth grade honors English class and, let me tell you, that play has some parts that are downright racy. Many of the exchanges involving Romeo’s friend Mercutio in particular are filled with not-so-subtle sex jokes. For instance, here’s an exchange that takes place in Act II, Scene 4:

MERCUTIO: “Nay, I am the very pink of courtesy.”

ROMEO: “Pink for flower.”

MERCUTIO: “Right.”

ROMEO: “Why, then is my pump well flowered.”

MERCUTIO: “Well said: follow me this jest now till thou hast
worn out thy pump, that when the single sole of it
is worn, the jest may remain after the wearing sole singular.”

In this exchange, the “flower” is widely recognized as a euphemism for Juliet’s vulva and the “pump” is widely recognized as a euphemism for Romeo’s penis. On top of that, many readers of the play have interpreted Mercutio as gay and this exchange as an example of gay flirting. (This is how many modern productions of the play have chosen to portray Mercutio as well.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Italian actor Luca Giacomelli Ferrarini as a long-haired, gay-coded Mercutio in a performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from 2014

Romeo and Juliet is not the only famous play in which Shakespeare mixes high drama with crass body humor. For instance, just look at his comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he most likely wrote in around 1595 or 1596. The play has several interrelated subplots. In one of these subplots, a group of amateur actors known as the “mechanicals” go out into the woods to rehearse a play based on the legend of Pyramus and Thisbe, which they plan to perform for Theseus, who is described in the play as the “Duke of Athens.” One of the actors is a weaver named Nick Bottom, who is obnoxious and boisterous.

Meanwhile, Oberon, the king of the fairies, is angry with Titania, the queen of the fairies, because she refuses to give him an Indian changeling boy, who he says he wants to use as his “knight” and “henchman.” (Many readers have interpreted this to mean that Oberon wants to make the boy his catamite.) Oberon instructs a hobgoblin named Puck to make Titania fall madly in love with something hideous and embarrassing to punish her for disobeying him.

Puck comes across Nick Bottom and the other mechanicals rehearsing and decides to make a little mischief putting a spell on Nick Bottom to give him the head of an “ass” (i.e., what we today would call a “donkey”). He then causes Titania to fall madly in love with the donkey-headed Nick Bottom.

Through this whole scenario, Shakespeare is clearly making a pun on the word arse (or, as we Americans spell it, ass). The word bottom was often used in Shakespeare’s time as a synonym for arse and arse is pronounced identical to the word ass, meaning “donkey.”

ABOVE: Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, painted in 1851 by the English painter Edwin Landseer

Shakespeare probably wrote his comedy The Twelfth Night in either 1601 or 1602. In the play, the character Malvolio is introduced as a “Puritan” who despises fun and games, but he secretly harbors a longing for the Lady Olivia. As a prank, the character Maria forges a fake love letter from Oliva addressed to Malvolio to make him think that she loves him back. Malvolio reads the letter in Act II, Scene 5 and believes wholeheartedly that the letter is written in Olivia’s handwriting. He declares:

“By my life, this is my lady’s hand these be her
very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her
great P’s. It is, in contempt of question, her hand.”

If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll notice that Malvolio has just accidentally spelled out the word cunt on stage (with the conjunction and standing in the place of the letter n) and commented on how he recognizes the way Olivia urinates.

Then, just to make sure that the audience members who haven’t been paying close enough attention get the joke, Shakespeare has Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who is watching the scene unfold, repeat Malvolio’s spelling out of the word cunt, asking, “Her C’s, her U’s and her T’s: why that?”

It would be hard for him to make the sex joke any more blatant.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Royal Shakespeare Company of the scene of Malvolio reading the letter he thinks is from Olivia from their 1969 production of The Twelfth Night

References to sexual behaviors in To Kill a Mockingbird

Sexual content and references to sexual behaviors can be found in many other works of so-called “classic literature” that are commonly taught in high school literature classes. In fact, even To Kill a Mockingbird—the exact same work that Tucker Carlson ostensibly attempts to defend—contains sexual references that are far from seemly.

In some respects, To Kill a Mockingbird is about how the American legal system is systemically racist towards Black people, but people often forget that it is equally as much about how the legal system unjustly protects white male sexual predators. In the novel, Bob Ewell, Tom Robinson’s accuser, is heavily implied to sexually molest his oldest daughter Mayella on a routine and perhaps almost daily basis.

He is implied to have raped her repeatedly in the past. One detail that many casual readers of the novel haven’t picked up on is that the novel says that new Ewell children keep mysteriously appearing—even though Bob Ewell’s wife has been dead for many years. This strongly suggests that the seven younger Ewell children are actually the children of Bob and Mayella, born of violent, incestuous rape. It is further implied that, after Bob Ewell caught Mayella with Tom, he beat her and raped her himself and then accused Tom of having beat her and raped her.

Despite all the evidence presented in the novel that Bob Ewell sexually abuses his children, he never faces any legal repercussions for his actions. The system protects him because he is a white man, making Mayella Ewell just as much a victim of systemic injustice as Tom Robinson. When Bob Ewell finally faces consequences at the end of the novel, it is not because he is tried and convicted of child abuse, but rather because he attempts to murder Scout and Jem with a knife and Boo Radley saves them, killing Ewell with his own knife in the process.

Now, it is true that the references to sexual subject matters in To Kill a Mockingbird are much subtler than the ones in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Archilochos, Catullus, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, but they are still very much there and they are important to the message of the novel.

ABOVE: Image of Mayella and Bob Ewell as they are portrayed by Collin Wilcox and James Anderson in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird

Ban everything?

If Tucker Carlson really wants to prevent high schoolers from being exposed to sexual content in literature class, I’m afraid he’s going to have to ban The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, The Canterbury Tales, probably all the works of William Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, and tons of other works of so-called “classic literature” as well.

Thus, ironically, even though Carlson tries to make it sound like evil leftists are trying to ban “classic literature,” if we were to consistently apply the criteria he himself proposes for which books should not be allowed to be taught in literature class, he would actually be proposing a far, far more wide-reaching program of book-banning than anything anyone on the left has proposed.

Generally speaking, people on the left are not proposing that we should “ban” works of literature that are traditionally considered canonical. Instead, we are arguing that, in some cases, there may be other works that are better for specific pedagogical purposes and that, when we do read works that are considered “classic” or “canonical,” we should not be afraid to critique aspects of them that may be problematic for various reasons.

Tucker Carlson’s dangerous influence

Unfortunately, Carlson has enormous influence. A prime illustration of this is the fact that, ever since he featured the extended segment on his show about the books students are being assigned to read in literature classes, in which he calls Andrea Weiskopf an “idiot” and a “lunatic,” people on Twitter have been subjecting her to ruthless harassment.

I can only see the tweets people have been sending her publicly and I am sure that the messages people have been sending her privately are much worse, but even the public tweets against her are extremely vicious and overflowing with all kinds of fat-shaming, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. For instance, here is a quote tweet that someone under the name “Ricardo De La Cuesta Y Rozas” wrote in response to a perfectly innocuous tweet Weiskopf made about shouting her support for Black Lives Matter:

“I don’t believe for a second your morbidly obese ass is capable of shouting when you can barely articulate your insipid position on a book you wish to burn without gasping every other word. You fetid, ulcerous sow.”

The same person has written a quote tweet in response to nearly every tweet Weiskopf has recently made. They wrote another quote tweet directed at Weiskopf that ends with the words:

“Burn in hell, you obese Christ killer.”

“Christ killer” is an anti-Semitic slur alluding to the centuries-old notion that Jewish people are guilty for the crucifixion of Jesus.

This person, along with the other people harassing Andrea Weiskopf, clearly found out about her from watching Tucker Carlson’s segment. Carlson undoubtedly knew that some of his viewers would do this when he decided to use the clip of Weiskopf in his segment in the way he did. There’s simply no way he could have been so naïve so as not to have known.