When it Takes 70,000 Signatures to Get to Second Base

Last week I received an email encouraging me to sign a petition requesting fair media coverage of the Affordable Care Act, coverage that would include the perspectives of millions of Americans for whom the odds of staying alive and well have suddenly improved. The petition was the work of a father-daughter team, and they planned to deliver their signatures, 70,000 strong at the time I received the email, directly into the hands of CBS News. And for all of the problems with the ACA, from its dysfunctional website to the built in incentives for the unholy alliance between M.D.’s and Big Pharma to engage in further profiteering, it remains, on balance, a good thing; like the old saying about 1 billion Red Chinese, 44 million newly insured Americans can’t be wrong. But despite my solidarity with Obamacare and my respect for this honorable effort to pressure the media into “fair and balanced” reporting, I didn’t sign.

It would be easy to chalk up my abstention to the busyness of life. The petition seemed to fall into the category of benevolent could-do’s that are almost always trumped by daily have-to’s. But if that had really been the case the petition, like the steady stream of requests in the mail from local charity groups for the donation of gently used clothing, would have quickly been forgotten. Instead, several days later, I am still thinking about it. And what I‘ve realized is that I abstained from signing the petition not because I simply didn’t have to, in the way that I never seem to give to the destitute folk with signs at city intersections because nothing at all will change about my day if I keep my window up and the sports radio on, my absence of charity resting on a foundation of nothing to lose (this “it costs me nothing if I ignore my neighbor” orientation is both a) what some might plainly call sinful, and b) strange bedfellows with another belief that informs my praxis, which is that “it costs me nothing to smile”; apparently one can be both very friendly and selfish at the same time, which combination is likely how we can remain self-centered enough to survive in an increasingly unfettered free market economy while still thinking of ourselves as basically good people) but because something about the petition felt off kilter.

Reading the petition felt strangely like what it must have been like trying to get laid at Antioch College in the early 1990’s. It was then that Antioch put into effect the following infamous policy: “Obtaining consent is an ongoing process in any sexual interaction. Verbal consent should be obtained with each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct.” The Antioch policy is very much like the petition in that both are born out of good intentions, the former to address the very real problem of sexual assault against women, and the latter, of course, to confront our staggering cultural disregard for the basic needs of others (to see how far the total disregard for the poorest among us has gone, one need only look as far as the Hawaiian State Representative who spent several weeks toting around a baseball bat to smash up the personal belongings of homeless people, with whom he is “disgusted.” And no one did anything to stop him. Please note that this guy is a Democrat, bringing to this registered Democrat’s mind the old saying that with friends like these, who needs enemies. I’m not making this up: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/11/19/2966371/hawaii-homeless-smash/ ) Despite these good intentions, the authors of Antioch’s policy lack the most basic level of insight into human sexual behavior. This is not to suggest that men should take what they want without first obtaining consent (and, to be clear, no indeed ALWAYS means no), but the devil is in the details, that devil being the fact that some questions can only ever be answered, but never asked (unlike those questions which can be asked but never answered, e.g. “Does this dress make my ass look fat?). These unspeakable questions include “Do you love me?”, “Will you forgive me?”, “Are you going to tell the truth?” (which can be asked in the courtroom, but nowhere else), and, in play here, “Do you want me?”

The art of seduction requires that one ask that last question without ever verbalizing it; “Do you want me?” can only ever be pantomimed. It is, like the Tao, a truth that can never be spoken. And everyone on planet earth, but for the well meaning folks at Antioch, knows this, thereby collapsing the policy into absurdity. It is no less farcical than requiring everyone to stop and think before each breath. Not to mention how confusing it would be to put into practice. Would the traditional first, second, third, and home base progression suffice for defining “each new level of physical and/or sexual contact/conduct,” or would it require questions such as “May I now press my thigh into your mons veneris?”

The similarity between the petition and the policy goes much deeper than the mere fact that both result from a good faith effort to make the world a better place. To understand how the petition asks a question as unspeakable as “Do you want me?”, we must turn to Noam Chomsky, the Grand Poobah of that endangered species, the leftist American public intellectual. (After Chomsky and Cornel West, I am drawing a blank; I can’t think of anyone else with the chops to qualify. As Tony Kornheiser would say, “That’s the list.” A vigorous opposition being part and parcel of a functioning democracy, the near vacuum one finds when looking for substantial thinkers who question the reigning American ideology is but one more reason that Bill Moyers may be right when he says, in a Salon article last week, “We are this close to losing our democracy.” (http://www.salon.com/2013/12/12/bill_moyers_we_are_this_close_to_losing_our_democracy/ )

Chomsky is crystal clear in his take on what he thinks the media should be doing, which contrasts with the role he sees it actually playing, and his formula for the former is as simple as it is clear: “what the national press ought to be doing is looking at the world from the point of view of its population.” (http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm ) But instead, “the product of the media, what appears, what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would be kind of a miracle.” (Interestingly, if we fuse these two thoughts, Chomsky is essentially saying that miracles ought to be occurring. And if there is one thread in human history that seems universal, it is that the miracle of our existence is never enough. There is an urban legend that in China if you save another person’s life they don’t owe you a thing, but you are suddenly obligated to care for them for the rest of your life. Perhaps God is one of these mythical Chinese, and by indulging in the miracle of creating us, She is forevermore on the hook for swinging us more and more miracles.)

Chomsky’s analysis then divides the corporate media in two. In the first camp are the mass media, who are “basically trying to divert people.” If you have ever watched five minutes of The Jerry Springer Show you know exactly what Chomsky is talking about and know everything you ever need to know about the mass media; Springer’s formula of gawking at poor people for the first 55 minutes of his show and then tying it all up in a bow by delivering a moral platitude in the show’s last five minutes can rightly be categorized as pure evil. (In a depressing echo of the bat-wielding Hawaiian fascist, Springer too was once a Democrat in elected office, in his case as mayor of Cincinatti. The only difference is that rather than smashing up the belongings of the impoverished, Springer demolishes their dignity.) Chomsky’s second group, among whom he explicitly includes CBS News, serves an altogether different function: “the elite media set a framework within which others operate.” The elite media establish and guard the boundaries of the ruling ideology. Looking back over our shoulders at the petition, we might say that the elite media determine the unspeakable. Money, of course, is where the ideological rubber meets the road; Chomsky draws on George Orwell’s observation that “the press is owned by wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public.”

Before connecting the remaining dots, a word in defense of Chomsky’s assault on the vanguard of the elite corporate media. One man’s leftist public intellectual is another man’s radical left wing nut bag, and it would be easy to dismiss Chomsky’s media critique as the tired rant of an old man whose definitive characteristic is a cancerous animosity towards his own country’s way of life, and perhaps just towards his own country. I’m just saying. So to put Chomsky’s analysis to the test, I thought of two questions: when did the labor movement, along with voting rights the greatest tool the people ever did have, peak, and when did television, the greatest tool wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public ever did have, become widespread? The answer: The labor movement, legalized in the 1930’s under FDR, saw widespread growth in power and influence right up into the 1950’s, when membership peaked, the same decade in which that ultimate tool in the manufacture of consent first sunk its teeth into our collective skulls. The correlation in the subsequent decline in union rolls with the increased consumption of televised media is as rock solid as the correlation between the rise in CO2 gasses and the rise in global temperatures. Noam Chomsky is right as rain, while, to borrow an image from David Foster Wallace, we’re all busy staring at the furniture.

Delivering a petition to CBS News for fair coverage of the Affordable Care Act, then, is no different than asking “Do you want me?” Asking an unspeakable question provides its own answer, and, whether one is asking after love, forgiveness, truth, desire, or fairness, the answer is always already no. The rich have their own way of putting the very same thing. “If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.” The rest of us need to put down our impotent petitions while also laying down our arms in the pointless culture wars that only serve to distract us from the only unspeakable that matters: One never asks for permission to go on strike. (Or, for that matter, to turn off one’s television.)

The Importance of Being Richard

Decades of feminist toil notwithstanding, the framework of the relationship between the male and female of our species remains on display in the exchange between male John and female prostitute: women continue to be granted access to the means for economic survival only to the extent that their sexual wares remain for sale. The inviolability of this sexual paradigm in late twentieth century and post-millennial America is writ large in the Hollywood career of Richard Gere.

Gere first shot to fame via 1980’s American Gigolo, in which Gere flipped the sexual script in his portrayal of the male prostitute servicing a female clientele. The success of this film hinged on the erotic potency of the violation of taboo found in its illicit rearrangement of sexual typecasting (re. the box-office potential of taboo-busting, witness the aptly titled pornographic film Taboo, one of the highest grossing blue movies to date, in which a male in his late adolescence lusts after, and ultimately consummates a sexual relationship with, his mother). The success of American Gigolo simultaneously made and unmade Gere, as he had unquestionably ascended to star status, but on his way up became marked as persona non gratis, effectively emasculated by the viral femininity that had leeched into his Hollywood aura during his turn as prostitute, i.e. Woman.

It is crucial not to let the box-office success of Gere’s 1982 smash hit, An Officer and a Gentleman, muddy the waters. Understood correctly, An Officer and a Gentleman is the exception that proves the rule that when one swims against the tide of masculine domination, one swims at one’s own risk. Gere’s ability to temporarily transcend the stain from American Gigolo is secured in the famous final scene of An Officer and a Gentleman in which Gere, in full Marine dress blues, storms onto the factory floor and literally sweeps Debra Winger off of her feet and out of the factory, to the cheers of her female factory co-workers. Each element in this scene is crucial to Gere’s brief transcendence. The marine uniform as warrior’s cloth cloaks Gere’s sexual stain, obscuring it from the viewer’s gaze. Gere sweeps Winger off her feet in a factory, the archetypal site of involvement in the wage economy, symbolically removing Woman from the labor pool and placing her economic survival back in its rightful domain of sexual object-hood. Winger swoons in Gere’s masculine embrace, an embrace which clearly references Man’s purchased ownership of Woman’s sexuality via marriage as rendered in the traditional carrying of the newly betrothed bride over the threshold, which is always a precursor to laying the virgin down in the marriage bed and taking possession of her sex. This shot reverses the transgressive act of taking women back across the threshold into sexual freedom that Gere, by bedding them for pay, had symbolically accomplished in American Gigolo. Finally, the cheers of Winger’s female factory co-workers signal their complicity in the sexual status quo, as they long to be liberated from the oppressive workaday life of factory labor by their own knight in shining armor; a life of indentured sexual servitude seems a small price to pay at the end of an eight hour shift on the factory floor for peanut wages. These women’s cheers signal that the feminist’s victory has in fact been Pyrrhic in nature, as the fruits of liberation from masculine domination are revealed as but a subjugation of a higher order. The song of women’s liberation is lost in the throbbing beat of workingman’s blues.

Post- An Officer and a Gentleman, Gere’s career entered its wilderness period, as the stain of American Gigolo, temporarily undone in the narrative of Officer’s denouement , reasserted itself in a near-decade long series of box-office disappointments. The only heat Gere generated during this period came in the form of a perverse urban legend. Legend has it that Gere engaged in a radical form of bestiality, inserting a mouse encased in a condom inside his rectum, with the frantic scratching of the mouse intended to generate sexual stimulation. Gere almost certainly never actually engaged in any such sexual shenanigans, but the viral spread of this rumor, which became so commonplace as to be considered a matter of course, had nothing to do with whether Gere actually stuffed a mouse in his arse. The ubiquity of this urban legend was an expression of zeitgeist, a collective recognition of the stain attached to Gere as a result of his actions in American Gigolo. The urban legend was a reformulation of the cultural stigma attached to Gere’s transgressive sexual persona. It was the very success of American Gigolo, in which mass culture encountered its own unacceptable desire for non-traditional sex, which foundered Gere. Gere’s stain, translated to narrative form via the urban legend, was the accompanying equal and opposite reaction to our collective repression of unacceptable, libido-driven desire.

Gere’s salvation as Hollywood leading man came with 1990’s Pretty Woman, in which Gere permanently erased his stain by renouncing American Gigolo’s radical core. By portraying a man paying to have sex with a female prostitute, Gere is able to stuff the terrifying specter of our sexual unchaining back into Pandora’s Box. It all plays out like a failed psychoanalysis, in which Gere shares his dream/nightmare of being paid to provide sex to a woman, only to have the analyst misinterpret the potentially transformative content of the dream as a symptom of pathology, the only available treatment for which is a reversion to socially acceptable sexual norms, a real, yet cloaked, pathology invisible to the incompetent analyst; the failed analyst, of course, is you and I.

The erasure of the stain enacted by Gere’s performance in Pretty Woman is as comprehensive as it is pathological. Pretty Woman is Gere’s public recital of the requisite Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s, proscribed by that other analyst figure, the Priest (we are, of course, also Priest, in the church of public opin{repress}ion). One conjugal embrace with girl-next-door cum slut Julia Roberts later, and Gere’s sins are completely absolved. The absolution’s probation period ends with Gere’s installation as People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1999. Gere’s new status as Hollywood’s (un)enlightened uber mensch is then codified by his exalted gig as the Dalai Lama’s number one Hollywood henchmen. Namaste!

Gere’s talent as the reverse Harry Houdini, inexplicably capable of re-chaining himself to social sexual norms after the near symbolic-death experience of American Gigolo , is celebrated in 1993’s Somersby. Gere portrays a returning Civil War veteran who, while physically resembling himself as he was before the war, is somehow just plain different enough to raise the question of whether he really is himself after all. Jodie Foster, a real-life “glass closet” lesbian, here dressed in (patriarchal) period costume, perfectly representing the figure of unacceptable, repressed desire, says to the new Gere, in order to prove to him once and for all that he is not the man whom he once was, “I never loved him the way I love you.” Foster’s stated passion for the new Gere is the acceptable, sublimated version of a passion our society is clearly not ready to own: our unequivocal, secret and diabolical desire for our American gigolo.

Horseshoes, Anyone?:  Towards an Understanding of Male Sexuality

 

            There is more than meets the eye when it comes to the game of horseshoes.  Traditionally played by men gathered in social settings such as backyard barbeques or VFW halls, horseshoes is the quintessential male bonding activity.  Horseshoes, as a reenactment of the sexual chase, unites men in the shared experience of sexual follies and triumphs.  Each toss of the horseshoe represents a pass at a female of the species.  Inevitably, most tosses of the horseshoe miss their mark, just as in real life most male efforts to attract the opposite sex result in failure; were this not the case we males would all tout Wilt Chamberlainesque sexual resumes.  But the law of averages is with the male, and if he persists in the hunt eventually a female shall, ahem, succumb to his charms.  Throw enough horseshoes and eventually you will score a ringer, horseshoe wrapping itself suggestively around the post.  Bringing us to some rather obvious and unavoidable symbolism….

            

There is a common saying, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”  Leaving aside for the moment the implications of this phrase for the endeavor of warfare, it is a key marker of the importance of horseshoes as a male bonding activity.  In horseshoes, the ringer, while sublime, is not the only way to score points.  Get close enough to the target, and points are accrued.  What this tells us is that what brings individual men into the community of men is not the achievement of sexual conquest; you don’t have to get laid to be a man.  As always, the journey is far more important than the destination.  To enter the community of men one must simply make a reasonable effort to get laid.  This participation in the sexual hunt is all that is required to enter the realm of socially defined manhood.  Whether, or who, you’re shagging is beside the point.  Along these lines, not only does “close count” in horseshoes, one ringer is as good as the next. 

Perhaps this explains the general acceptance of the ideal of lifelong monogamy among heterosexual men.  Marriage, as permanent symbol of participation in the sexual hunt, stabilizes membership in the male social bond.  All hunts that end in marriage achieve, in the language of horseshoes, the never-ending ringer, elevating all married “hunters” to the same sublime status, at the same time defusing potentially destructive sexual rivalries among the hunters.  If all ringers are equal, and if all marriages bestow the never-ending ringer, then the community of men is ideally one of equals.  Unmarried hunters are granted full equality of membership, as long as they are engaged in the hunt.  Close DOES count in horseshoes.

The stability of the male social bond is problematized by the presence of the homosexual male.  The homophobic male fear of being labeled a homosexual is nothing other than the fear of being excluded from the male social bond.  The act of male homosexuality is, within the heterosexual male framework, the act of exiting the heterosexual male social bond.  This was illustrated in the famous Seinfeld episode when Jerry and George repeatedly and emphatically proclaim themselves not to be homosexuals, on each occasion adding “not that there is anything wrong with that” (i.e. wrong with homosexuality).  George and Jerry were clearly voicing the truth of heterosexual male homophobia.  From a heterosexual male perspective there is “nothing wrong” with sexual relations between men, in and of itself.  What is “wrong” with male homosexuality, the “threat” that exists in being perceived as homosexual, is the very real danger of being excluded from the heterosexual male social bond.  In the heterosexual male universe, male homosexuality only functions to mark off the boundaries of membership in the heterosexual male social bond. 

This logic is on display with the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the United States military.  “Don’t ask, don’t tell” specifies that there is nothing inherently wrong with the gay male soldier; he is the straight male warrior’s equal in every respect, just as long as his sexuality remains unstipulated.  Even if his sexuality is an open secret, the gay male warrior is accorded full membership in the heterosexual male bond which is the symbolic glue that binds the US military into a cohesive fighting force, an Olympic horseshoes team, if you will.  But once the gay warrior is formally unmasked, his sexuality revealed to the big Other, the symbolic order that maintains US military cohesion is destabilized.      

The instability of the heterosexual male social bond comes into further relief when compared to the rock solid stability of the female social order.  Unlike men, who must compete in horseshoes in order to be accepted as men in the social bond, females must simply achieve menses in order to achieve womanhood.  In this sense, there are no “gay” or “straight” women, just women.  This is why women’s sexuality is frequently and insightfully referred to as “fluid” in a way that the male social bond would never sanction in a man; a woman can sleep with whomever she wishes without ever endangering her status in the female social bond, a status guaranteed by the fact of her biology, while the male’s status as man is stricto sensu defined by who he is sleeping, or attempting to sleep with.   The same reasoning explains not only why men are turned on by “lesbian” porn (granted that the on-screen “lesbians” are of the male fantasy variety), but why it is acceptable in the male social bond to be turned on by hot “lesbian” sex, i.e. there are no “gay” women, just women, so the shadow of homosexuality, the shadow of social banishment, never intrudes on the straight male’s arousal.  In fact, it is said that the truth serum for a man’s sexuality is his arousal, or lack thereof, in response to (male fantasy) “lesbian” porn.  All of this to say that there’s only one kind of horseshoe, the kind that is to be tossed at the post.  It is completely irrelevant, from the horseshoe player’s perspective, why a toss misses the post.  You simply move on to the next horseshoe.  If two errantly tossed horseshoes happen to land on top of one another and intertwine, well the game just goes on as if nothing happened at all.  And, according to the rules of horseshoes, nothing really has.  

Gay males, by definition, can’t play horseshoes.  And, like it or not, for the straight American male in 2009, horseshoes remains the only game in town.  If, as Freud famously postulated, we humans are all actually bisexual, perhaps it is time for a new backyard barbeque pastime.  Tiddlywinks anyone?