On Making Your Own, #4: Culture Change

Here are two poisonous but common myths in the culture I live in:

(1) People who like erotic representations are really a bunch of pathetic losers masturbating in their mother’s basements, and

(2) Only a tiny number of people are actually kinky, even in their minds.

And these myths serve those who want to beat down others who are not like them sexually, or, more insidiously, others who are like them sexually but unwilling to live lives as hypocrites. We all know that there are too many such people: busybodies and bigots. Why someone should want to behave in such a vile way to one’s fellow human beings is a a mystery to me, but we are confronted with the brute fact of their existence, and the brutal fact that they can do immense harm.

But in a larger cultural context that at least formally honors human liberty and equality (thank you, Enlightenment!), the proposition that you should be allowed to beat down other people for no other reason than that their sexuality pisses you off is not going to sell. “Because my religion tells me I must” might get marginally more traction, but not much more. In a religiously pluralist society, claims like that understandably make people nervous. But what you can sell is the claim that somehow you’re doing people a favor by suppressing their revealed sexual preferences.

And how do you do that? By advancing the claim that their sexuality is somehow inauthentic. By claiming that other people are helpless, passive vessels into which bad wine been poured. They’re brainwashed. They have false consciousness. They’ve gotten bad lessons from the media/the patriarchy/corporate capitalism/Satan. They’re addicted. If only we took Pete Pajama’s porn away from him he’d get out of his mama’s basement and fine a real girlfriend for a change. They’re sick. They need therapy. We know they’re sick because there are millions of us and only a few of them so if they disagree with our consensus reality, we know they must be wrong, right?

You know the litany.

The point here is that if you’re a creator you are presenting to yourself to the world as no longer passive. Being able to create involves being inherently active: you select your materials, you choose, you shape. You have no choice but to reach into yourself and engage with the world. In the place of the passive loser, you put a Promethean self.

And of course, you can no longer be represented as lonely, because your very act of creation is likely to involve creative partners, and you are reaching out to the world, making friends and making fans. Making art of any kind is a social act, because it involves an audience.

And not only are you reaching out, you are encouraging others. Lots of people have interesting ideas and intriguing fantasies but are intimidated about expressing them. If you create, you encourage others on the margin, who will encourage others and others.

If we do our jobs right, in the end there will be millions of us creators, linked to each other by billions of strands of friendship, influence, and affinity. And that’s a lot harder for bigots to beat down that a lonely, disconnected individual.

Similar Sex Blogging:

• On Making Your Own, #3: Hedonic Philanthropy
• On Making Your Own, #2: Friends
• On Making Your Own, #1: Fun

Rachel Maddow, WTF?

Rachel Maddow, who’s usually fierce and tenacious about going wherever a story leads, covered yesterday’s attack on and destruction of Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ art photograph in a curiously timorous fashion. Not only did she refuse to name the photo while describing the attack on it, she didn’t mention a word about its storied history. Wikipedia has just the barest outlines; my own memory is that the painting was at the center of a national firestorm, in 1989, at the peak of that particular great wave of the conservative war on popular culture. Its mere existence was trumpeted as a justification for defunding public art at all levels, and the National Endowment For The Arts came under massive attack for having been in some manner supportive of the work (I don’t recollect the exact details).

Although the specific conservative buttons pushed by Piss Christ have more to do with religion than sexuality, the culture war of the late 1980s got a lot of its oxygen from sexual issues, especially those surrounding gay culture and homophobia. (See also: Robert Mapplethorpe.) Given Rachel Maddow’s sensitivity to and ready willingness to stir into culture-war issues affecting the gay community, I find it astonishingly unlikely that the name Piss Christ doesn’t trip as easily off her tongue as it does mine when she views the footage of the destroyed photo. I suppose it’s theoretically possible she’s ignorant of the history; after all, she’s some younger than me, and was only 16 or so in 1989 when the photo first rose to national political prominence. Theoretically possible, yes … but wildly unlikely.

How, then, to explain her curiously tepid coverage of the destruction? Why was the destruction news? You and I know it’s because of the photograph’s history; Rachel must have known, or there was no story. But she didn’t tell her viewers who didn’t already know … not a word, not even a gesture to the fact that the history exists. I expect better journalism from her, and normally get it.

One possibility, I suppose, is that MSNBS, General Electric, or the FCC simply won’t let her say “Piss” on cable. That seems unlikely, and anyway, Rachel routinely circumlocutes around awkward vulgarities that are central to her stories, using graphics with asterisks and “a word I can’t say that rhymes with” phrasings. So no explanation there.

We’ve already covered the faint possibility that Rachel is too young to remember; but she has staff, and they can’t all be younger than her. And everybody on that show, Rachel included, knows how to Google.

So an icon in the culture wars gets destroyed with a hammer and spray paint. Rachel chose to cover the destruction without naming the work or even hinting that it ever was an icon in the culture wars, even though that iconic status is what made the destruction into an international news story.

I’m scratching my head here. It doesn’t make any sense. I know the photograph is horribly controversial, but it’s not like Rachel to blink like this and let an important story pass without saying why it’s important.

I suppose I could just shrug and say “old media, it all sucks anyway…” but that’s too facile, and doesn’t (usually) apply to The Rachel Maddow Show. There’s got to be a reason I’m not spotting.