It's time we were frank about porn. When I get down to it, pornography has a lot to do with Mike, America, and everything I've talked about over the past week and a half. I am an avid defender of porn. The pornography industry single-handedly blazed the trail for us to watch home videos and surf the web, it's one of the only things standing between us and the trampling of our first amendment rights, and it made fetishism okay in society at large. But what is porn, really? Sexually explicit photographs and video? Or is it something more? This herein is an important caveat I have to make when I talk about porn. Because there is far more to porn than just Bianca Beauchamp in latex or Ron Jeremy doing it to a bass solo. Still reading this? Haven't run away screaming? Good. This is the story of a very interesting realization.
I am obsessed with fetishism. I don't mean this necessarily that I'm a big fetishist--like most men, I do have fetishes, but to think of it solely in a sexual context is to miss the big picture. As strange as it sounds, whenever I read the news, especially about politics, what I see is fetish porn.
I think it would help for me to define pornography before I continue, and this is a trickier thing to do than you might think. There is no real legal definition, just as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said "I know it when I see it." It is indeed a very blurry line. To me, however, porn has always been about the glorification of something for its own sake. This is a pretty broad definition, and it manages to encompass really any idea you can think of, not just sex. Under this definition, something like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ could qualify, or really any of the movies he produced, such as The Patriot, Braveheart, or Apocalypto. In fact, this may be a useful example, because when I read Mike's self-published book, I was instantly reminded of a Mel Gibson movie. I draw heavily here from a chapter in Max Blumenthal's Republican Gommorah (one of the very few examples of quality and informative partisan non-fiction), which details the rise and fall for the Christian Conservative movement, along with the rise of the Tea Party. The general thesis of the book is that the dysfunction of conservative Christian politicians reflects a personal dysfunction of the Christian Right in general, especially as it regards to personal repression, denialism, and unwitting hypocrisy and self-contradiction. Like with any partisan book, it's important to take its more political statements with a grain of salt and focus on the reporting, but a large section on the Evangelical Men's Movement of the 2000s, and in particular the works of Mel Gibson and Ted Haggard struck a chord with me, which directly influences my post here. The important takeaway is that both offered a particularly rigid and self-contradictary definition of masculinity, one that glorified self-annihilation, violence, and dominance for its own sake, and in the process unwittingly glorified male homosexuality. Anybody who has seen any of these Mel Gibson movies should have a fair idea of what Mr. Blumenthal and I mean.
The key point of the key point, then, is glorification for its own sake. Particularly that last part: for its own sake. This is what I think of when I think of Mike, and when I think of conservatives and a good deal of the issues currently being bandied about in Congress and in the news media. Conservative Christians are very obviously fixated on the opposition to homosexuality, abortion, evolution, and science in general. I've spoken with a number of Evangelicals both old and young about this. It's almost as if voting a certain way has superceded Christ. But think about that for a second. It actually seems kind of odd, doesn't it? In the whole wide world of Christendom, with such a rich body of history, tradition, theology, practice, and even emotion, why those very oddly specific issues? Or take the fiscal conservative fixation on marginal tax rates. By any definition it's a relatively narrow issue, and part of a much larger picture. Climate change denialism, too. And if you add them up, the pieces don't really fit together all that well. In the Christian case, the emphasis on the traditional family takes us back to the cultural values of a papered-over and imaginary version of the 1950s, whereas the fiscal position fits very well with someone interested in short-term profits and making a quick buck. But again, that seems very narrowly specific--unnecessarily so. More importantly, each belief becomes self-reinforcing for its own sake, and largely to the exclusion of anything else. By my definition, that would seem to be a fetish. More than that, it's a fetishistic obsession.
Before you make any prejudgments, however, I shoulds say that I am no stranger to fetishistic obsession. I have gotten lost in the details of both my own sexuality before, not to mention the details of many other things, like politics, anger, even my own religion. It's interesting to see how much of that rigid, dysfunctional male ideal Mike embodied, despite not being Christian. Scientists now say that cognitive dissonance isn't real--that would imply that the human mind is integrated in the first place. I don't think one needs to eliminate the concept just because the mind is compartmentalized. In fact, that compartmentalization may in fact lead to the dysfunction. It's sort of like the character Dr. Strangelove from the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name. His hand has a mind of its own, and doesn't always do what he (his brain) wants. We may be made up of modules, but those modules interact with the outside world as one body and one mind. If anything, that makes the suffering of misinformation greater, not less. Mike truly could not cope with the world in which he lived, and it created in him a specific combination of fetishistic fixations.
To conclude my point, there is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does come with a downside. The inability to distinguish between your fetish (be it sexual, political, religious, or otherwise) and your beliefs can leave you very vulnerable to misinformation and cause you to draw disastrously wrong conclusions. If you're fitting your observations to your beliefs and not vice-versa, you're going to miss the truth. This is a real problem, and not one with a ready solution. Thanks to the internet, you can have whatever you believe validated with the click of a mouse, no matter how extreme. We surround ourselves with people who think and act exactly like we do and agree with everything that we say, and make no effort to challenge ourselves and our ideas with outsiders, all while complaining viciously about vaguely personal forces that oppose us, even though we've probably never encountered one of those in person before. But this way--the pornographic way--is easier, and so we'll choose it every time. It sucks, but we haven't developed the mechanism to discriminate just yet, let alone teach it to our children. However, as bad as things are now, I have no doubt that we'll get there. I can already see the beginnings of it. We can all do our part by simply stopping to think about what it is we're consuming, what it means to us, and how it fits in the big picture. It's not hard to do, it just doesn't come naturally to most people. But we can do it. I have faith. We just need a little practice.
No comments:
Post a Comment