Sleaze addiction (26 Sept 2007)

Every time I see another one of American Apparel's ultrasleazy ads, I presumably fall into the trap these ads have set for me and find myself wondering about sleaze's effectiveness as an promotional strategy. (Angry advertising blogger copyranter has an informative set of posts on the campaign here, if you need a reference point.)The people I know who wear American Apparel's clothes usually claim to wear them despite the ad campaign, claiming the clothes are exceptionally well-designed, or comfortable, or well-fitting or some other mitigating factor -- because they obviously want to disassociate themselves publicly from the implications of the ads, namely that sluts and pervy scumbags wear American Apparel.

It's fairly well-established that American Apparel founder Dov Charney is a tad skeevy; this NYT story about his selling the company to a private equity group details how employees now sign a sort of sexual harassment waiver: "American Apparel is in the business of designing and manufacturing sexually charged T-shirts and intimate apparel, and uses sexually charged visual and oral communications in its marketing and sales activity." But he's also a successful businessman, as the NYT article also makes amply clear, so obviously this ad campaign would have stopped long ago if his skanky predilections would have had any chance of hurting his big payday. Clearly the ads keep coming because they are working; one of the ways they work is that they prompt people like me to fret and complain about them in a public forum, doing word-of-mouth advertising for them gratis. And plus I get the prude's thrill of being titillated by what I complain about without having to acknowledge fully to myself that it's so. "These ads are so terrible; just look another one, aren't they terrible?" But people like me will never support the company by actually buying the clothes.

So these ads must have something for actual fashion-conscious shoppers: They must project an identity that some consumers apparently identify with and find attractive; some people must see these ads and feel a vicarious thrill at the lifestyle they suggest: the possibility of blase sexual exploitation lurking around every urban corner. If you buy into these ads, maybe wearing American Apparel's clothes makes you feel sexualized as well, makes you believe that wearing a T-shirt is suddenly bold, even risque.

Perhaps the ads, by depicting fetishes unapologetically, tap into something comparably compulsive in consumers, giving sanction to the innate tendencies toward sleaze that we typically suppress. But eventually when we become too conscious of the gratification, we'll reject the source of the dissonance. We'll feel as though the advertiser is trying to cheat by circumventing the approved filters, the customary disguises -- fashion advertisers may be able to get away with perviness under the guise of brash transgression for a while but eventually it becomes distasteful. Suddenly, depersonalized sex seems not a promise of some kind of transformative freedom (a pretty far-fetched notion the more you think about it) but an illustration of how depersonalizing fashion itself is.

American Apparel's popularity reminds a bit of the late 1970s power pop band the Knack, who seemed bizarrely compelled to take something immaculately crafted (pop songs as opposed to T-shirts) and sully it with sexist sleaze: "Good Girls Don't", "Frustrated", etc. Their signature song is like Dov Charney's interior monologue: "Never gonna stop give it up such a dirty mind / Always get it up for the touch of the younger kind." Yet the song is at the same time a clinic in pop craftsmanship; every nook and cranny is filled with an irresistible hook, and the guitar solo is one ear-tugging riff after another. When the Knack first caught on, they were ubiquitous, but soon audiences turned against them -- perhaps it was the overdone Beatles imitation of their album design, but it may also have been that the sleaze that was at first edgy and vaguely interesting -- making the familiar pop seem daring, hipper than its popularity would generally allow -- suddenly revealed itself as tedious and unimaginative. Their second album proved this to be so. Dov Charney, of course, is in the fortunate position of not having to come up with a second act for his career.

The ecstasy of boredom (19 May 2007)

Having previously offered a theory of boredom I read this post by blogger A White Bear with great relish. AWB claims to love boring art and cites slow and spare Antonioni films as examples of what she is talking about. I usually think of boredom as a character flaw, as a quality in the subject rather than the object, a kind of impatience with reticent, lulling things. But AWB suggests an aesthetics of boredom that hinges on a lack of "narrative necessity." So-called boring things don't provide that ready path for one's mind to rush down, instead they perplex and retard the imagination, force the mind back on itself and make it do a lot more work to remain engaged. Boredom opens up a space for languid speculation, for productive frustration, for conceiving several concurrent hypotheses about what the hell the point is. Works that supply "excitement" often close off the speculative space, hurrying consumers along to largely predictable outcomes that nevertheless are experienced as suspenseful. No one doubts that the killer will be killed in a film like, say, Disturbia,yet nonetheless this pass as suspense. Something truly unpredictable -- Antonioni's L'Avventura, for example -- can often seem boring in its aimless meandering. Boredom, then, stems from the absence of familiar genre conventions or recognizable rhythms.

AWB argues that the suspended nature of boring works gives them an erotic quality -- the jouissance of the endlessly deferred climax transferred to a text that denies closure, that refuses to put forward a organizing principle that allows you to put everything in place. The unstructured material forces you to contemplate it for its own sake, in the moment, and that inspires a sensuality that comes to the surface when we starve the rational, puzzle-solving side of our brains. AWB sees this as a minor pleasure, dubbing it masturbatory -- "satisfying without satiating."

I don't think I would describe masturbation that way. But is it true that details become more erotic as they become more arbitrary? In another post, AWB defines pornography in a similar way, as "a rhetorical mode" that lulls readers into vicariousness with its repetition and details for details' sake. The danger of vicarious experience -- what makes pornography immoral in AWB's view -- is that it supplants a reader's direct experience of the world with texts, simulations. Here, I become skeptical, as I'm not sure how you distinguish authentic experience from simulated experience in our recursive world of late-capitalist consumerism. Most of our experience is already mediated, already in a sense secondhand, vicarious. Thus vicarious experience is virtually indistinguishable from lived experience, which if we encountered it, we'd probably reject as "boring" since it comes free of an interpretation, free from having been slotted into some pseudo-glamorous niche after having being represented elsewhere as entertainment, as worthy of rapt attention.

I would argue that the vicarious experience from texts prepares us to conceive and process our lived experience in certain prepackaged ways -- it makes our own experience legible to ourselves, give it forms that are amenable to being stored as memories. Vicarious experience through entertainment also reinforces patterns of emotional satisfaction serviced by consumerism. I would define the pornographic not in terms of its arbitrarity but its instrumentality, how it facilitates the most convenient route to a precisely delimited goal. It makes emotional responses rote in a way that pleases us, the same way genre conventions keep us from being bored. Porn is sort of the ur-genre, I think, not a suspension of narrativity. It does aspire to a transparency that effaces textuality -- the formal qualities and the careful word choices and the other things that make us pay attention to the medium itself; boring things force us to contemplate the nature of the medium, halting mediation.

I completely agree that consumers prefer what AWB calls the rhetorically pornographic because it protects us from the messiness of actual experience, which involves other people. (I make the porn=convenience argument here.)

I don’t want to moralize here about these aesthetic aspects of pornography, although a great deal of my dissertation is about the social and political issues that arise when readers begin to confuse texts for experience, and to privilege fictional characters’ experiences over their own, which partly happens because of the near-pornographic rhetorical nature of scenes, for example, in Pamela. But what is obvious, over the past three hundred years of mass print culture, and then mass art, music, and film cultures, is that the public always craves the rhetorically pornographic, especially when it does not explicitly offend a prudish sexual sensibility.

There is a fine line, in fact, that “pop” tends to walk now, between providing the pretense of an unmediated experience of something sensory and representing actual sex. My very prim, religious students are reduced to puddles by passages like the one from Dracula above, which gives them something almost like an experience without any of the messy complications of consequences or interpersonal relations, which is why, I think, they place such an outlandish value on their ability to experience along with every text.... What bothers me most is that they seem not to know the difference between reading and doing anymore.

I don't think rhetorical porn -- material that invites vicarious absorption -- promises unmediated experience; I think it promises the pleasures of the precisely mediated. The transcendence (being above the action, it having been designed for you) compensates for the apparent passivity of vicariousness -- whether or not the interpretative effort is passive, whether it is not a kind of activity to suspend disbelief and let yourself be absorbed by a text, is a different question. (This question reminds me that I should probably re-read Michael Fried's Absorption and Theatricality.) This doesn't efface the personality of the reader so much as remove it from the field of play, where it can take on the illusion of completeness, of being untouchable, of not being altered by experience.

Our relations with texts (be they films, books, crap bought at the mall or whatever) have the potential not so much replace our experience of reality, of other people, but format it so that it becomes instrumentalized. Reading and doing become the same thing, and not merely because so much of social existence is about interpreting signals and signs. Rather, the reader/doer presumes himself to be at the center of his own drama, with everything occurring around him seeming to have been designed solely for his amusement. This has the effect of granting identity to the reader, when seductive texts call out for one's attention, interpolating the reader as an individuated subject, as Althusser argues in his essay about ISAs. The protagonists in pornographic literature may become interchangeable, but in so becoming they protect the reader from the fate of anonymity; the reader becomes the stable center around which the dance of anonymous entities and the highly detailed sensations recorded through them are choreographed.

(Hence compulsive self-revelation on the internet as a means to extend self-dramatization; a new tool to further a goal as old as print. Incidentally, my big research topic when I was a graduate student was about how vicarious experience was developed and systematically commercialized in 18th century novels. AWB's dissertation sounds like one I would want to read, especially if it is as well-written as her blog is.) The way our entertainment patronizes us prepares us for life in this hermetic bubble. When entertainment bores us, that's because it is forcing us outside of that bubble. (Porn is never boring in this sense; when clicking through channels randomly, while marooned in a hotel maybe, I never fail to pause when I hit porn; it's compelling as the most concentrated form of mediation, perhaps -- the most instrumental of entertainments, which all aspire to manipulate us with ease.) All that to say that I think what AWB is noticing in her students is the expectation that life itself shouldn't ever transcend the level of vicarious experience, that life should never be anything more than entertaining.

The porn supply (15 Feb 2007)

At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen wonders why it's profitable to sell new porn when there's such a huge amount already in circulation. " I don't understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material. Why don't they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um...busy...for many years?" He suggests that it might be "that buying the material yields more pleasure than 'using' it."

I had a similar thought in this essay, where I argue that pornography makes sex more like shopping and thus aligns the pleasures it gives closer to those we are acclimated to by consumer society, namely convenience and ownership as ends rather than means. Consumer society seems to encourage us to collect experiences rather than simply experience them; continually collecting porn rather than having sex or even masturbating seems symptomatic of this. The moment of pleasure is moved from the point of experience to the point of purchase; the pleasure is change from a sensual one to a conceptual one based on convenience and security (a stockpile of potential experiences in your porn heap defends you from the fear of exhausting desire.)

At the Economist's blog, Megan McArdle (presumably) suspects the answer to Cowen's porn paradox "must be some evolutionary imperative towards novelty," and asks, "Why do listeners demand such a steady flow of new music, almost all of it inferior to, say, Beethoven's 9th?" What's interesting is the implicit connection between music and porn: both are digital-media products widely and controversially distributed on the Internet. Both track, in their way, trends in fashion. Both tend to be male preoccupations -- especially in terms of building collections. Is recorded music analogous to the commodified desire of pornography -- is recorded music to performance what looking at porn is to sex? Could the impulse to continue to acquire both stem from the same impulse, the same wish to pin down and master the excitement (in the specific sensuality and in the zeitgeist changes they record) each are able to arouse, control it and domesticate it by turning it from an experience into a possession in a ritual that must be continually reenacted? It may be that we enjoy this ritual (albeit in a kind of defensive, self-protective way) almost as much as we'd enjoy direct experience of music or sexual desire.

Yes, porn makes available for direct consumption and enjoyment all sorts of patriarchal prerogatives, but I want to put that analysis on hold for a moment to make a different point about the impulse to collect. As the experience of accumulating music and porn becomes easier (as it becomes, in more and more cases, free), the moment of reassurance and mastery seems to come not at the moment of purchase but the moment of classification, when that digital file is given its appropriate place, is understood and processed and stored in some theoretically and permanently accessible way. Digital reproduction and distribution are making classification more important than ownership -- tagging is all-important, very Web 2.0. We master an unlimited supply by asserting control over it, capturing it, with the unique taxonomies we generate. Novelty becomes an opportunity for taxonomy.

I think this explains the vast amount of music on my years-old iPod that I've never listened to once. In some significant way, the moment I drop a song on the playlist has supplanted the moment of listening to it -- at that moment I am able to experience the satisfaction of the song without having to spend all that time actually listening to it. I manipulate it in a more direct and convenient way that provides me a feeling of mastery, which is what I may be looking for rather than sensual experience. The same thing seems to lurk behind porn blogs, where people curate their porn collections for public view. Something about the impulse to organize one's fetishes has itself become fetishized. And fetishes, in general, are about containing anxiety rather than permitting open experience.

The fear that beauty (in music, in another body) inspires is that it will be lost to us; it summons an intolerable awareness of its own loss. Our culture (and not, I would argue evolution -- the need for novelty seems contingent on what society can promise and provide) prompts us to defend ourselves against this anxiety by accumulating more and more of the stuff, and we think with technology we can realize the dream of perpetual availability. (This plays into the interpretation of porn as primarily being a fantasy of perpetual female availability, i.e. of women's objecthood, of her significance being regarded as received rather than self-generated.)

Rape logic (15 November 2006)

I woke up this morning as usual to NPR (National Public Radio, or Nice Polite Republicans, as the liberal blogosphere has been calling it), but I heard a piece of news that seemed to come from an alternate reality. It was a BBC report about how the Pakistani parliament was reforming the law that required women to produce four sworn male witnesses before they could proceed with a rape accusation. The reforms, however, did not guarantee that the accuser, the raped woman, would not still be charged with the crime of adultery herself. In my coddled and sheltered little nook of the world, the idea that rape is still regarded in many places as a kind of property crime by men against other men was a little bit shocking. (It certainly puts Borat's admonitions to the "village rapist" in a different perspective.)

This reminded me of a recent Slate article by economist (and frequently smug contrarian) Steven Landsburg crowing about a study that correlates Internet access and its corresponding distribution of pornography to teens leads to a decrease of the incidence of rape. Landsburg seems pleased because this shows up psychologists and their silly, well-intentioned studies:

Psychologists have found that male subjects, immediately after watching pornography, are more likely to express misogynistic attitudes. But as professor Kendall points out, we need to be clear on what those experiments are testing: They are testing the effects of watching pornography in a controlled laboratory setting under the eyes of a researcher. The experience of viewing porn on the Internet, in the privacy of one's own room, typically culminates in a slightly messier but far more satisfying experience—an experience that could plausibly tamp down some of the same aggressions that the pornus interruptus of the laboratory tends to stir up. In other words, if you want to understand the effects of on-screen sex and violence outside the laboratory, psych experiments don't tell you very much. Sooner or later, you've got to look at the data.

As Amanda Marcotte points out, Landsburg and the researcher he cites blithely assume that rape is a crime committed out of sexual frustration, from an inability to find a lawful receptacle for lusty impulses, just as public urination is a crime caused by the unlucky perpetrator's inability to find a suitable bathroom. They don't recognize the view that rape is first and foremost a hate crime and has little to do with sexual desire -- instead it expresses contempt for the victim and a desire to see them suffer and be put in their place. A reason why patriarchal societies are hesitant to criminalize it, then, is because it's an enforcement tool (think of prisons) for assuring subordination. It reminds victims that not even their bodies belong to them. As Marcotte asks, "if rape is motivated by sexual frustration, why do rapists so often brutalize their victims more than is 'necessary' to subdue them? And if it’s about getting off, why do rapists do things like throw their victims out to walk home in a humiliating state of undress, if they aren’t enjoying the suffering?"

But if Landsburg's assumptions are correct, and porn can be substituted for rape, that might actually be worse, because then the implication would be all men who look at porn (i.e. pretty much all men) are basically would-be rapists, and that looking at sexualized women is tantamount to raping them (as antiporn feminists have claimed all along). Marcotte asks:

So is porn a way to release sexual tension so men don’t rape? Or are the defenders of porn-as-a-crime-preventative saying that porn is a substitute for rape itself, the urge to violently hurt and humiliate women? If porn is basically rape-by-proxy, then are they implying that all men who look at porn want to hurt women?

Is that assumption so much of a stretch in a society dependent on female subordination? In such a society, all men are supposed to want to hurt women, to its structure apparent to all. Pornography then would have to be considered a product to accommodate men whose culture encourages them to think of rape as their natural hierarchical right but can't bring themselves to actually enact the droit du seigneur. They are supposed to be raping, to demonstrate their rightful place in patriarchal society, and reinforce the rules of that society, but instead take the cowardly way out and merely "rape" women by consuming them in pictures or videos. These pictures and videos then stand in for all the consequently uncommitted rapes as the evidence patriarchy requires to show that it still adheres.

Thus the creepy subtext of Landsburg's article: "These women are lucky there's Internet porn around, or else more of us would have to resort to harsher measures to show them their place." Let's just hope Marcotte's right (that rape may be diminishing because patriarchy is waning and feminism has reeducated society), and that this study merely amounts to evidence of how some people strongly wish this link between rape and pornography existed, so that pornography could continue to be a proxy for the fear women are supposed to feel, but are hopefully feeling less and less (outside of places like Pakistan, that is). If the massive mountain of Internet porn is a pile of possible rapes (throw into this the frequent assumption that women are coerced, literally or economically or psychologically, into appearing in pornography), then it can be lorded over women as so many cautionary tales -- a gendered take on that moment in Do the Right Thing: No matter how nice the men in your life seem to be, here's what they think about you.

Not that pornography isn't ever a tool of oppression and exploitation, but as I've written before, I think pornography serves primarily as a model for commmercializing natural experience -- the leading edge in making all experience subject to mediation, packaging, impulse buying, etc. -- all the hallmarks of quotidian life in consumer society. An interesting question is to what degree pornography's position in consumer society suggests that such a society must also be patriarchal/sexist.