Susan Sontag defined camp in the 1960s as an aspect of gay sensibility, a self-conscious performance of a clandestine sexual identity. Camp is a theatricality of desire. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” Gay speech was coded speech. Gay desire was coded desire, a flight from its own secrecy and shame, ultimately a flight from acknowledgment of its own existence. And through the metaphor of life as theater, camp converted the variety of sexual desire into elaborate play in a mirrored cave.
Through a vast organization effort and personal struggle, gay people in Western democracies have shrugged off the need for camp. They have embedded their self-worth in the public institutions that give societal solidity to straight sexuality. They decided to stop hiding in theatricality. They altered the meaning of gayness in the process. The gay men I grew up around, went to school with, and worked with lived this change. Many had come from small towns. Many had been abandoned by their families. They had to find work, support themselves, educate themselves. Then a bunch of their friends died while they were still in their midtwenties. When the bastards spat at them, they organized. I compare these habits of life with those of my straight male friends, in basements, in clouds of puff, dealing with the fallout of one failure after another as lazily as possible. The gay man used to be the sissy, the nancy-boy. Now the gay man possesses the traditional virtues of a soldier, a husband, the antithesis of camp. Meanwhile straightness has become a big act.
Neil Patrick Harris represents the switch perfectly. When he plays straight characters, like Barney in How I Met Your Mother or “Neil Poon Hound” in the Harold and Kumar movies, he plays them camped to the hilt, with an endless surface of suits, strippers, motivational posters, hookers, and drugs. Instead of morality he has the Brocode, something closer to a code of etiquette for roving animals than an ethical system. Harris understands, perhaps better than any straight actor, how brittle hypermasculinity is. When Barney shatters, he shatters completely. As a person, or the approximation of personhood provided by celebrity, Harris has become an icon of the new gay normalcy, with the solid partner, the kids, even a separate room in his house for his favorite hobby (magic), and the easy confidence that comes from not taking yourself too seriously. As a celebrity gay man, he’s practically too boring for a profile. On screen, as a straight guy, he’s a freak in a perpetual identity crisis.
The quotation marks have shifted from gay to straight people. They’re disconcerting at first, but also liberating. It is possible, for instance, to look like a lumberjack and be a stay-at-home dad, and to find no contradiction in that sensibility. It is possible to try having sex with a man without considering yourself gay. It is possible to like manicures and be a gangster. Masculinity and femininity are growing lighter, more fluid than ever before. Retreat and overcompensation are increasingly recognizable as signs of failure. The straight man as willful loser, the straight man as empty bastard, the douchebag, will go. Male and female sensibility will have to develop simply because the historical reality is developing. And we will have to decide what we want to keep from the past and what we want to throw away. What does a masculine style mean? What does a feminine style mean? Will it be closer to Free to Be You and Me or World Wrestling Entertainment? Or both? The two run parallel to one other: the single dream of equality and the many dreams of theatrical sexual style.
Straight camp means that you have a choice in how to be a man or a woman. It also means you must choose. The corollary of Balzac’s Maxim 40 is Balzac’s Maxim 41: “Negligence of clothing is moral suicide.” The world of play can be delightful, but no one is exempted anymore. The dance may be joyful or sorrowful. But you must dance.
* * *
I choose to wear my grandfather’s watch. It is a style that I put on. Its most powerful effect is that it liberates me from the sense of having a style. There are more important problems than the petty concerns you call your “worries,” it says. You do not have to fly over German cities, bombing them to ensure the survival of democracy.
My father also flew for his country. In his twenties, though, midway through his training, he decided that he couldn’t in all conscience bomb people. What honor could there be in flying thirty thousand feet in the air and ending the lives of tens of thousands of people indiscriminately? After he’d had many discussions with friends and then even more discussions with his superiors, the bureaucracy moved him over to a desk job involving the nascent, eccentric field of computing, on which basis he built another career.
Neither my grandfather nor my father ever spoke to me about life in the military. Their silence was similar, though their actions were distinct. One bombed; the other did not. Both had to make significant personal sacrifices in that act. This is what the watch makes me feel. It connects me to the world of men who lived with honor.
The nature and meaning of honor, the nature and meaning of what it meant to be a valuable man, changed and keeps changing. As I write this, the U.S. Army is integrating its forces. Women have taken command over six Virginia-class nuclear submarines. Does any sane person doubt that they’ll do as good a job as men did? Seventy years from now some granddaughter will be restoring her grandmother’s watch. Perhaps the Iraq war will be the last to fill America with a backwash of devastated young men; next time it will be devastated people. And the meaning of honor will shift once again.
Nevertheless I wear my grandfather’s watch. It reminds me that honor still matters, despite the vagaries of the past seventy years. The value of honor may be confused and muddy and all play. But men without honor aren’t worth anything, still.
The watch has survived when maybe it shouldn’t have. It’s kind of a pain in the ass. I have to wind it every morning. But somehow it keeps working.
* * *
I. Actually Steve doesn’t read many women’s magazines, and I’m not sure he’s right here. I recently picked up a copy of Glamour and found almost every page had a feminist flavor. There was a photo essay on the women running the American presidential campaigns, a Q&A with the feminist comedian Tig Notaro, and a page on clothing that featured lionizing images of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Reading it was uplifting, and I nearly signed up for a subscription.
II. Study after study after study show that men ask for more money way more often than women do. I’ve read all those studies, and I know it to be true from my own experience. My male employees ask me for salary increases two or three times more often than my female employees. And yet, despite knowing all this, despite knowing that pay equity is a real problem and that it is partly based on the female employee not valuing her own work as much as men value theirs, I myself have only ever asked for a raise once—and guess what? I got it.
III. Yes, providing you look nice. Lagarde is a trim, attractive sixty-year-old woman with great scarves and an expensive haircut. Feminism has made many things possible for women, but not for women who are fat, ugly, or old. Show me a powerful female Chris Christie or Rob Ford.
IV. Alice Munro stories sting too. They can be totally devastating, no?
FOUR
* * *
The Pornography Paradox
WHEN I was around twelve I caught a glimpse of a page ripped from a soft-core porn magazine in the trunk of my soccer coach’s hatchback. I can still recall the image precisely, every detail: a woman standing on a ladder, a thong lowered to the midpoint of her thighs, in soft focus, with an angular haircut (possibly, now that I consider it, a wig), tossing behind her an over-the-shoulder gaze. A scene from a store catalogue, though more improbable and more naked. According to the cliché, pictures sear themselves into memory, and in this case the cliché is the only accurate description—a burning, an ineradicable mark. The power of the image of a naked lady then was due to its rarity. Today, nearly every time I search for a television s
how on my MacBook I see naked gyrating asses in the banner ads for chat rooms or live cams or escort services, and my son sometimes sees such images when he’s beside me as I search. I barely notice them, partly because I’m no longer twelve and partly because they’re so common. I suppose I should avoid them somehow, but the truth is that the naked gyrating asses are part of the background to my life, digital wallpaper in the pornified culture we inhabit.
I’ve lived the whole history of online pornography as it has darkly dawned over our intimate lives. In a world of cultural fragmentation, when even the most popular television shows and movies are seen only by niches of the population, Internet pornography is the one product that every man—every single man you meet—has encountered. Osama bin Laden, not only a Muslim extremist opposed to all forms of representation but a man with four wives, had his stash the same as everyone else—a “fairly extensive” stash, at least according to the SEALs, and who knows what they consider extensive. Every fourteen-year-old boy with an Internet connection has seen a woman anally penetrated with a baseball bat. YouPorn, one of maybe a dozen equally popular free porn sites, is six times bigger than Hulu; Xvideos, with 4.4 billion unique visitors a month—three times the size of CNN or ESPN—streams fifty gigabytes per second. When Pornhub released its data in 2013, it averaged 1.68 million views per hour. The only competitors for porn in terms of views are the Facebooks of the world, even though the vast majority of users come from only one gender. British prime minister David Cameron—a man who may or may not have fucked a dead pig, according to people who knew him in college—described pornography as “polluting the Internet.” But pornography is too big to be pollution; it is a significant proportion of the Internet, and therefore a significant proportion of consciousness.
* * *
Panic has followed the porn surge. Male masturbation, far from being accepted with a lighthearted shrug as it once was, has become a political issue. Several countries, notably Iceland and Britain, have taken legislative steps to restrict online pornography. In Britain the issue achieved a rare cross-party consensus: an antiporn law requiring that Internet service providers include a porn filter on all streaming networks was passed by the Conservative government in July 2013 with the enthusiastic support of Labour. “I want to talk about the internet, the impact it is having on the innocence of our children, how online pornography is corroding childhood,” Cameron said in announcing the law. “And how in the darkest corners of the internet, there are things going on that are a direct danger to our children, and that must be stamped out.” Masturbation has become a source of mysterious abjection. What is all this porn doing to us? What is technological change doing to our most intimate lives?
No previous period in history has offered the brute exposure to sex that we take for granted. Never mind naked asses, how many images of vaginas have I seen in my lifetime? I couldn’t possibly answer that question accurately, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were several thousand.I And I came to Internet pornography relatively late in my life, in my thirties. If I had been a teenager with a high-speed Internet connection, I imagine I would have see many tens of thousands more. That’s more images of vaginas than all of my ancestors, collectively, could have dreamed of seeing.
Of the many differences between art and pornography, not the least significant is that pornography provides you with information. John Ruskin, the art critic who, among other intellectual achievements, defined the initial reception of Pre-Raphaelite painting, a man who studied nudes his whole life, famously couldn’t manage to have sex with his wife on their wedding night. “It may be thought strange that I could abstain from a woman who to most people was so attractive,” he declared during the annulment proceedings, in perhaps the least chivalrous public statement of all time. “But though her face was beautiful, her person was not formed to excite passion. On the contrary, there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked it.” His biographers have interpreted “certain circumstances” to mean pubic hair. None of the statues he had studied possessed any.
Whatever the reason for Ruskin’s ignorance, some aspect of a real woman would not gel with the ideals contained in his love of art. Pornography, like art, is a distorted fantasyland, but it is an instructional one. A young pornography viewer might be surprised by the presence of pubic hair in a real woman but only because it’s so out of fashion at the moment. Pubic hair is now a way of carbon-dating pornography: the full bushes of the candlelit 1970s; the tense landing strips of the 1980s, surreptitiously mimicking thick lines of cocaine; the depilated present, with no obscurity whatsoever to the genital specimens. “Raised by porn” is an epithet used to describe an emotionless and clichéd lover who is sexually demanding and degrading. But those who are raised by porn know the physiology. No one needs to wonder what a blowjob is anymore; a million examples are a click away. The sexual manuals of the past are mostly hilarious in their triteness. They once considered acts currently performed in married couples’ bedrooms several times a week to be the depths of illicit carnal knowledge.II
Pornography, strictly as a visual medium, is the dark underside of enlightened sexual education. Not only do we see more sex than ever before but we think about sex more and we know more about sex. Any teenager who attends a high school that is not deliberately retrograde has seen a cross-section of an inserted erect penis or a molded plastic cast of labia minora nestled in labia majora, for some reason always in butcher’s colors. Sexual exposure removes ignorance, removes mystery, removes danger. At the academic level sexuality has been researched to the point of blasé indifference. Flipping through the Archives of Sexual Research provokes serene boredom. I see there’s a case study of a young man who suffers from eproctophilia, sexual attraction to the smell of farts. Well, why not? Whatever gets you through the night.
* * *
Massive sexual exposure is an inevitable result of two separate, though related sexual revolutions, both brought on by technological change. The Pill separated sexuality from procreation, and the computer screen has separated sexuality from the flesh. Both have opened vast new realms of sexual choice and openness, the climate necessary for the flourishing of pornography.
My wife’s grandmother, Bubbe Helen, born in 1920, once told me that the ability to try each other out for a while before marriage was the best thing that happened to men and women in the twentieth century. I think she has to be right. We do not have to sleep with people for the rest of our lives because our parents think it’s a good idea. We don’t have to sleep with people for the rest of our lives because we guessed wrong. Sexuality has taken on the properties of cheerful consumerism: Go out and find whatever you like, as long as it’s in your price range. Sexual consumerism, like any kind of consumerism, expands constantly the range and nature of the choices available. Viagra and the female equivalent, which is shortly to appear on the market, have made lust itself a calculation. Technology has expanded the options exponentially.
Pornography remains the model for the vast spectrum of choices the Internet can offer people. Don’t like that ass? Swipe screen. That skin a bit too freckled? Swipe again. That convenience, that facility is being translated into every aspect of sexuality and human relationships. All problems of sex and dating are finding digital solutions. Ranges of lovers can be culled by algorithm or by curation: Want someone nearby to have sex with? There’s Grindr or Tinder, to taste. Want to find out if a new guy is worth your time? There’s Lulu. Couples’ apps like Kahnoodle can gamify your relationship if you want a gamified relationship. And we are only at the beginning. No doubt every relationship problem we can identify—from how to meet people you wouldn’t ordinarily meet to how to communicate sexual desires you can’t articulate to yourself and how to live with other people’s secrets—will eventually find a proposed technological solution. And why not? Why shouldn’t we have relationship algorithms? The search for intimacy has to begin somewhere. Why not algorithms? The other way is booze.
The emp
hasis on personal choice in our sex lives has an intellectual and political corollary: the idea of “consenting adults.” In a world of overwhelming sexual variety, consent becomes elevated to a sacred principle; it underlies the newly emerging consensus around sex, a consensus that is legal as well as social. All sexuality will eventually be judged on the basis of whether it is between consenting adults. In the 1960s pedophilia and homosexuality were both considered sexual diseases. Now homosexuality is an acceptable act because it is between consenting adults, while pedophilia, because it is a violation of consent, is a monstrous evil. Throughout history, pedophilia has frequently been acceptable when sexual acts between grown men were not. Even as recently as a decade ago pedophilia was punished by prison sentences of as little as two or three years. In 2012 Jerry Sandusky—the child molesting assistant coach at Penn State—was sentenced to sixty years.
As a complete system for comprehending human desire, consent is as arbitrary a basis as any other sexual morality. Adultery becomes purely a matter of the violated contract of marriage, not a social crime. Bestiality remains criminal, however; it is more socially acceptable to kill a pig than to fuck one because a pig cannot offer sexual consent. The major sexual conundrums of our time are questions of muddled consent. In Germany, for instance, the legalization of prostitution hinges on the question of whether prostitutes constitute “consenting adults” and on what terms their consent is granted. The conflict between pro- and antiprostitution activists is between two visions of the act itself: one in which prostitutes are independent contractors who willingly sell the labor of their bodies and another in which prostitutes are sexual slaves. Almost nobody, except outdated moralists like the Catholic Church, believes that the act itself—exchanging sex for money—is inherently wrong. (There are others who ask whether money is merely another species of compulsion.) Polygamy is stigmatized because of the abuse widely reported in poly marriages, but theoretically who can object to an arrangement undertaken between multiple rational and consenting adults? No one minds that Tilda Swinton is living with an old guy and a young guy. That’s her choice. The question of surrogate pregnancy is problematic exactly because it involves a seemingly irresolvable contest between two competing claims to control—the genetic material in the womb and the woman whose womb it has filled. Contemporary sexuality is a subset of contract law.
The Unmade Bed Page 9