Is That Porn In Your Congress? That's So Hot

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.

Manly Man is Manly

Perhaps nothing about Mike the Broken GI Joe was so noticeable as his masculinity.  Mike was in many ways the masculine ideal put forth by our society.  Before I go on, a few disclaimers about this post.  One, this post isn't really about him so much as it is about me.  Two, (and I really hope you haven't closed the window in disgust yet at the words "masculine ideal") this isn't some sort of horseshit gender theory treatise.  If you want gender theory, you can read a book by CJ Wilson any day of the week (who incidentally isn't bad, if a little biased towards feminism).  Three, I have yet to meet a single guy (myself included) who was very comfortable talking about this.  Clearly this is a sensitive topic, but one that must be addressed for my narrative to continue.

Still reading?  Good.

I have long had a difficult relationship with my manliness.  My mother was a sex-negative radical feminist who really wanted a daughter, and when I turned out to be a boy, she intentionally tried to raise me without gender roles.  At the same time, she often refused to socialize me at a young age, and following a series of coincidences, I wound up thrust into a predominantly blue-collar Italian-American neighborhood on Long Island to start kindergarten.  My relationship with my mother deserves an arc of its own, and so I'm not really going to comment on it beyond what I've already said.  More important to this post is how I got along at school, which was not very well.

I have always struggled with my emotions.  I have Bipolar Disorder and a long history of both Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and dissociative phenomena.  I feel things very strongly, often overwhelmingly so.  Compounding this, my parents made little or no effort to teach me how to regulate my emotions as part of their raising me.  This was not without benefits, by the way, and I can't exactly fault them for it because it is an important part of who I am now, but it also did come with significant drawbacks.  Crying was rewarded in my home.  This is a real problem in a rough-and-tumble school system.  Again, don't get the impression that I think this was wrong or even really disagree with it, at least not totally.  It solved a lot of problems, but caused a lot of others.  This is not really the skillset one needs to grow and adapt socially through childhood and going into adolescence.  I fell behind.  I was a wuss.  I cried in public over bullying and teasing.  I could be pushed, and I'd snap and lose control.  It was actually a testament to my classmates and friends that it didn't go further than it did, at least until I graduated to middle school.  By the time I was in the sixth grade, however, I was not just a faggot, I was THE faggot.  The word was carved into my locker repeatedly.  I was spat on.  Every time I was punched or thrown against a locker served to further disconnect me from reality.  I grew paranoid.  I grew suicidal.  There was talk of pulling me out of school.  Then, just as it was all entering its crest, we moved out of state the following summer.  But the damage had largely been done.  I don't think I fully recovered from it until my twenties.

Whether it was the dissociation, my mother's influence, some other part of my illness or experience, it was hard to consider myself masculine after that.  Then my body began to change.  I was freakishly skinny and effeminate as a child.  I was frequently mistaken for a girl, even with short hair.  Then, in the summer before the eighth grade, my body very suddenly became very broad.  Compounding this, I was put on a medication that caused me to gain a lot of weight.  I went from 86 lbs to 195 in only two years.  Since I got so little exercise, it was almost entirely fat, not to mention that it was all out of proportion given my pubescence.  In my mind, however, I still felt like I should be skinny and effeminate.  This was about when Jennifer and the alter who would become Emma started to separate from me, which only made things worse.  I had been raised to be an intellectual; brainy, and now my illness was taking even that away from me.  I'd lock myself in my room all day and live my life through my computer.  It was really only when I started writing in earnest when I was sixteen that I finally found an outlet, and even that was an expression of my femininity far more than it was my masculinity.

All of this sort of makes me wonder what exactly it is that men are trying to be.  The boys I grew up with, and most boys in general, I've gathered, were very focused on destruction.  It's a compulsion towards violence, something very primal, and reinforced by society.  Whether it was nature or nurture, I never shared it.  This actually caused a noticeable change in the way my teachers treated me, consistently lumping me in with the girls instead.  The girls policed this too.  So this is not just limited to men.  Where I grew up, physicality was everything.  You were masculine based upon what your body could do, and how dirty you got in the process.  The dumber you were, the cooler you'd be, it seemed.  In their documentary The Merchants of Cool, Frontline labeled this character the Mook.  They cited Tom Green of turn-of-the-century MTV fame as a shining example.  My friends' favorites were Opie and Anthony on the radio (first  on WAAF in Boston and later on Sirius Satellite Radio).  For girls, the same documentary offered The Midriff (epitomized by Britney Spears), but girls always seemed to have an easier time breaking that mold than boys did theirs.  Give modern feminism a lot of credit: it works.  It is regrettable that what few attempts there have been to do this for boys (such as my mother's) garnered mixed results at best, if not an abject failure.

I never really grew comfortable with my body until very recently.  Going from so skinny to so overweight (and ballooning back and forth a few more times similarly, first because of medication again and later due to an eating disorder) made it very difficult for me to be aware of my own body.  Part of my walking meditation has evolved into teaching myself about my body and what it can do.  As my relationship with my body changes, my sense of masculinity changes as well.  But there's more to it than that, of course.

There is also a requisite rigidity that I notice in all my more masculine friends, this kind of self-reinforcing refusal to compromise.  A harsh and highly compartmentalized system of judging others, as well.  The only thing that can seem to truly overcome it is shyness.  In the media, and even in books, heterosexual men are so often portrayed with these strictly hierarchical world views, and the more egalitarian men are almost always portrayed as homosexual, submissive, or in some other way not masculine.  These concepts become as self-reinforcing as the rigidity, especially in group situations.   I highly dislike hanging out in large groups of other men for that very reason.  Yet there has seemingly been little or no attempt to study this phenomenon, let alone make an effort to change it.  Male college attendance lags far behind females, and boys' high school grades are very often much lower than their female counterparts.  The male response in government and in society seems to be to try and subjugate women as much as possible in order to force things back to the way they used to be, but that's no more of a solution than throwing a hissy fit: the legislative equivalent of running around with your hair on fire. There can be no self-reflection, because self-reflection is a supposedly feminine trait.  Emotions are the enemy: a sign of weakness.  Not only that, society's expectations of men haven't changed.  In fact, there exists a frightening double-standard these days.  Men are supposed to provide and be mature and all of these things they used to be, but women seem to want to have it both ways: the benefits of this system without the responsibilities.  One of feminism's great failings is its failure to address this.  If you ever wondered why men feel so threatened by homosexuality, this paragraph contains all the answers you'll need.

So where does that leave me?  To be honest, I'm not sure.  Emotional mastery should be the goal in life, not emotional denial.  To that end, I think I've succeeded.  I can see my body for what it is now, and it can do lots of things I would have been far too afraid to try even a year ago.  The more confident I feel about my body, the more confident I feel socially, and that's really where the conflict ultimately lay.  And what about Mike?  Mike ran away from his anger and fear, which only allowed it to dominate him.  I take this as a cruel lesson in self-awareness.  Acceptance is impossible without awareness. That's just as true of oneself as it is one's relationship with the world.  This at least is my goal.  The consequences of failure are immense.

Mike the Broken GI Joe

After a week and a half-long absence, I'm back.  I'd put the blog on hold while I finished up my latest manuscript, which commanded my full attention for the past ten to twelve days.  I have a new arc of posts that I'd like to do here, building off what I've written in the past few months.  I'm going to start by talking about someone specific: a friendship that went terribly, terribly wrong.  But this story, and its moral, are bigger than any one post.  To truly do it justice will take an entire week of blogging.  It covers a lot of ground, and brings up a lot of the themes I've written about thus far.  So, without further ado, I give you Mike the Broken GI Joe.

Mike could have been a great man if his life hadn't intervened.  He was attractive, charismatic, intelligent, articulate, and imaginative.  Some of the most tragic people are the ones who seemed to have all the elements of greatness but for a fatal flaw.  In that sense Mike is an incredible tragedy, the story of a would-be genius done in by insecurity and fear.  For if anybody I ever knew embodied fear and a hopeless insecurity of oneself, it would be Mike.  Mike and I were destined to be great friends for a very long time -- ten years -- but that friendship was ultimately doomed.

Back in 2000 and 2001, Mike ran a music review website that specialized in obscure and underground metal -- the kind you don't hear on the radio, and exactly the kind that I had just begun to listen to en masse.  The number of bands he introduced me to that I still listen to even now is almost too big to list: Opeth, Katatonia, Agalloch, Mercenary, Soilwork, Dark Tranquillity, Evergrey, Sentenced, Theory in Practice, to say nothing of the Children of Bodom and In Flames mix CDs we traded a full decade before they became popular.  It was a prodigious time for me: I was seventeen and coming of age, just starting to figure out my identity.  Mike was in many ways a mentor to that identity: an older brother figure I'd lacked.  Mike embodied a certain kind of machismo and masculinity I still struggle with to this day: aggressive, cynical, and wholly unaware of itself.  He was cool in the way that adolescent boys aspire to be.  Here was one of the cools kids from high school taking me under his wing.  I lacked any self-awareness to perceive his flaws.


Mike was a former Marine, an aggressive clubber and womanizer, and an ardent opponent of illegal immigration despite being a quarter Mexican.  He was tough and mean because he perceived himself to be constantly under attack, whether by real or imagined foe alike.  He worried constantly that he was a failure, a weakling, or socially compromised, even though this was almost never reflected in what he said.  It's always the people whose actions are inconsistent with their words that are the most dangerous, and Mike's thoughts always seemed to reflect his words, not his actions.

Even still, our relationship, though sometimes distant and sometimes more intimate, remained steady.  I wanted his approval.  He was a validator: he told me I was all right.  Two things changed, though as the years went on.  The first was me.  The other was him.  It was to be our undoing.

I have written extensively about a certain kind of cynicism I notice in people who feel insecure and threatened.  I know others like this: uncompromising, rigid, perenially disappointed.  In fact, as far as heterosexual male friends go, I seem irresistably attracted to them.  It's at once a strict form of idealism, and the experience of being crushed under the weight of one's beliefs.  Mike was the living embodiment of that type.  I knew what he wanted to be.  He wanted to be an intellectual.  He wanted to feel smart and respected for his intellect.  But during the critical years when that part of one's identity forms, he lacked the discipline or the financial means.  I've seen so many like him.  The failed intellectual is the most dangerous kind of all.  Without a requisite self-awareness, reason always devolves into misinformation and the worst kinds of self-righteousness.  One need only look to many of history's great revolutions (French, Soviet) for exmaples of this kind of thinking put into practice.  One of my favorite authors, the great religion scholar Stephen Prothero, likes to describe this as the following: "The most dangerous game man ever plays is dividing people into the good guys and bad guys and suggesting that the bad guys be punished."

At some point between 2008 and 2010, the weight of Mike's disappiontment began to finally crush him once and for all.  I saw warning signs: frequent links to Glenn Beck and his radio and television shows; conspiracy theories; paranoid delusions of the government and groups of designated "others" out to get him.  But I still needed him to validate me, so I ignored them.  It was, however, also around this time -- 2010 especially -- that I began to change.  I had gained a level of self-awareness and inner peace that I finally felt comfortable expressing myself outwardly to the greater world, for all my virtues and flaws.  And I was not like Mike at all.  There was a time when Mike and I could share that certain cynicism about the world.  But as I've grown older and up, my own cynicism and disappointment seems only to be diminishing, not increasing.  I was never a pessimist.  A realist, yes, but an optimist to my core.  I do genuinely believe that human beings are basically good.  I don't know when I began publicly asserting this, but it marked the beginning of the end for our friendship.  Neither of us are very good at shutting up, and at least until recent months, I wasn't particularly good at letting go of a fight.  Mike made certain assumptions about the way the world worked.  I made others, and we disagreed.  Our clashes grew more intense by the week, and started getting personal.  As I came to realize, Mike lacked the ability to distinguish attacks on his words and actions, and attacks on his person.  I still do believe that at his core he's a genuinely good person, just terribly misguided.  In many ways, people like him are far more dangerous than the truly malicious and evil.

There was no ultimate confrontation between us.  I simply unfriended him from Facebook and removed any means for him to contact me otherwise.  I think that was for the best.  I don't hate him.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I pity him.  He was in many ways pathetic and broken; a failed person.  Understanding Mike has allowed me to understand so much more about the world.  He was in some respect one of the catalysts to my own self-realization.  And for the better part of a decade, he was a good friend to me.  People have called him a douchebag, and he may have been nasty and tone-deaf to others sensitivies, but that doesn't make him a bad person.  He may have been in the process of flaming out when I knew him, but that doesn't mean I can't learn from him.  The lessons his example has taught me will form the next several parts to this story.  For now, though, I think I'll leave it at Mike the person.  Destruction always saddens me, particularly destruction seemingly without a purpose, and Mike is no different.  It didn't have to be this way.  So I mourn, not only for our friendship, but for his own inability to be happy.  As for me, however, the end of my relationship with Mike would come to be the beginning of a realization on my part of just how wonderful the world truly is.  Stay tuned for the sequel tomorrow.

The Cult of Avril Lavigne's Femininity

I think you might be taking your "punk princess"
title a bit too literally here, Avril.

Bold title, huh?  This post has been a long time in the making.  What side of me it reveals to the world I'm not entirely certain, but it's the next part of my narrative, and thus gets a post like the rest of them.  This post is ostensibly about Avril Lavigne, but it's really about perception, and how things are not always what they appear to be.  I will begin with a confession: I have an incredibly twisted, one-way, love-hate relationship with pop singer Avril Lavigne.  This relationship has existed since the release of her first album in 2002, and it continues to this day.  I have expended great time and effort trying to explain this relationship to myself, and now finally nine years later, I think I can.

I'll begin with some background.  I was not really popular with the ladies until my senior year of college.  I've lived most of my life in abject terror, held hostage to flickering, overwhelming anxiety about people, and in particular women.  I have a long history of run-ins with female authority figures, which while pertinent, are too lengthy to list in any detail here and deserve their own posts, so for now I'll trust that you can take me at my word.  My dating history before the age of 22 is equally dodgy.  I had one significant relationship in 2001, for which to say it ended acrimoniously would be a tremendous understatement.  Then nothing save for an on-again/off-again fling from 2003 to 2005, until finally in 2006 my love life started to pick up, culminating in meeting my fiancée in early 2007.  Social skills are not something that really developed in me until my twenties.  In the meantime, in part because of my romantic experiences and in part because of the way I had been raised (my mother is a radical femininst, but that's a post for another day), I had come to view women and feminine power as a kind of strange magical force -- a force I both feared and sought for myself.  Let's call it femme-manna.  Enter Avril Lavigne, who entered my life while I was working at a bookstore in 2002 and 2003 after dropping out of high school, while all my friends were starting college.

I am obsessed with direction.  There have been long swathes of my life where I felt like I've had very little of it, and I crave it more than anything else.  Presented with anyone young and successful -- their persona and image, but also particularly their confidence -- will quickly become the object of considerable envious obsession.  To me, direction is power.  So when I read an article about Avril Lavigne in 2002 after her debut album began to make it onto the playlist for our overhead sound system at the bookstore where I worked, there was an instant and devastating connection.  She plays hockey with boys.  She's confident and assertive.  Oh yeah, she's only seventeen.

Power.  Pee on me to show your dominance, why don't you?

Yes, like a good dominatrix or reptile, Avril Lavigne is the master of displaying her dominance.  Watch her videos, or read her interviews, or better yet, listen to the lyrics in her songs.  Whether it was her first record LET GO, THE BEST DAMN THING (of Girlfriend fame), or her latest single What the Hell.  I am Avril, she shouts, I am better than you, and I am in charge!  Moreover, she carefully cultivated a personal style that rebuked the loud, sexualized, but also subtly submissive femininity of stars who were popular at the time such as Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson.  At first it was actually quite masculine, evolving into time into the more feminine pink skulls that almost seemed to announce: "I have not only captured my femininity from THEM, but I've conquered it as well."  Not only that, there was this other element to it too: like she was saying "This is who I truly am."  Especially viewed side-by-side with someone like Britney Spears, she certainly made a compelling case.  And if Avril is one thing, she is very good at convincing others of how genuine she is.  In the cult of femme-manna, Avril was High Priestess.

So it went for the better part of a decade.  Avril continued with her message, each record she made seeming to only increase the level of intensity of her message, and me like a hopeless addict worshipping at the altar of the feminine power women seemed to hold over me.  She even managed to penetrate the fantasy world, shaping how I viewed my sexuality and allowing me to warp it around my own delusions of dominance and submission.  This was, in fact, a spell that remained in place even throughout my relationship with Kari.  For years I couldn't explain it.  Except now I think I can, and herein lies the lesson in perception.

There's always been a part of me that wanted to call Avril a fraud.  She didn't really mean any of her lyrics; this was all a sham, a giant dog and pony show fueled by a cynical desire for money, fame, and power.  I won't deny that probably had something to do with it -- after all, why does any artist slave away over their creations but for the glory?  This I can actually relate to.  But there was always something more to it.  I believe very firmly that if we tell a story about ourselves long enough, that story will eventually become us.  This is true regardless of how genuine or deceitful that story is.  Avril has been broadcasting her message for a long time now.  If she didn't start out that way, she certainly seems to be living it now.  In fact, it is because Avril seems so genuine about her message that I feel like I can finally understand it.

For the sake of argument, let's take Avril at face value.  That means we'll take her music, lyrics, and image literally.  What is she?  Avril Lavigne is, quite literally, what we expect a famous empowered young woman to look, act, and feel like.  I'm not using the word "empowered" here in its colloquial sense, but rather a literal one.  She has a lot of power, and she wields it.  Read her lyrics.  Sk8er Boi, Girlfriend, My Happy Ending, What the Hell, the title track from The Best Damn Thing (in which she actually goes to the effort to spell her name out as part of the song, and proclaims herself quite literally "the best damn thing your eyes have ever seen").  She kind of comes across as a selfish bitch.  Not just an allegorical one, either.  She is someone who I genuinely do not wish to meet or get to know.  I've watched video of her concerts: they only seem to reinforce the notion.  I've been to both large and small concerts.  There's always some degree of interaction between artist and audience.  This ain't it.  Rather, it's high mass at the temple of femme-manna to the glory of the high priestess herself.  And before you claim that all pop singers do this, watch any Lady GaGa performance and see if she does the same thing.

Yet, at the heart of it, this doesn't make me enjoy or desire Avril any less.  It's the social equivalent of a highly-sophisticated optical illusion.  I desire her power and prestige and seek it out.  She embodies it.  All this despite the fact that what that power and prestige actually means in functional, literal terms is something highly undesirable to me.  Avril isn't what I actually want.  She's what I think I want.  Therein is the heart of her genius as a pop singer: give us what we think we desire, and make us believe it.  We do want to believe it.  There is some powerful part of our brains that tell us not only that this is the way things are, but that it's desirable and damn the consequences.  To a girl between the ages of eleven and fifteen, I can imagine this message is especially powerful.  It carries all the more weight, because she's been so successful at putting her fame to useful ends.  The fragrance, the clothing line -- she's a brand and her brand is now a business.  The most successful artists all do the same thing.  Artists don't really sell art anymore, or at least the ones who do don't see a whole lot of material success for it.  Materially successful artists sell an image, and that image becomes a brand of which their art is only one interlocking part.  Purists decry this as a corruption, but I don't see it that way.  It's a natural evolution, and there's nothing wrong with it.

We all tell stories about ourselves and the people we meet and see in our lives.  Avril to me is a story, for better and for worse.  There's nothing wrong with that.  The only time it should be considered a problem is if it causes the storyteller distress.  I am not an artistic purist.  It doesn't matter how eloquent and beautiful your message is if you're screaming it into a brick wall.  Rather, let this post just serve as a caution not to let the stories you tell and the beliefs that go with them go to your head.  Things are not always what they seem.