0.

Previously, on Three’s Company:



This is how society arrives at an absence of faith. It’s no coincidence that Chad executed his scheme as a tourist: that meant there were no witnesses to his character. It’s no coincidence that he picked a nervous brown-eyed waif—someone with too much self-doubt to trust her instincts, someone who draped herself in the trappings of goodness, someone too inexperienced to know that perfect is always a trap. But Christine was chosen because she was deaf. She couldn’t hear voices, she could only see the words. Now the words are gone. The question is what remains.

A reader responds:

I’m not sure why you and TLP need to bang the drum so hard on “fetishising superficial attributes of your partner and not seeing them as a whole person is bad for them and bad for you”; I mean sure, you’re not wrong, but how many times is it necessary to repeat this in almost identical phrasing?



This is a specious reading for which I accept full responsibility. I know my style sometimes distracts from substance. I promise my intent is not to obfuscate or show off. This is just how I think when I think out loud. I’ll try to enunciate my words.

My complaint is not that fetishization is bad. It is bad, often, but so is unprotected sex, and both are fun, and you knew that already. Hot take: use your judgment.

My obsession is rather with the way in which fetishization is subsidized by society. All societies. The bigger the society, the more one has to perform the anthropologically modern task of pleasing a stranger, and a thumbnail glance followed by upvotes-to-the-left will always favor viral image over substance. The prior essay established a formula for our betrayal by appearances: When you ask for a display of X, you select for people who are good at displays, not X. If the display measures ability to lie, and X is a virtue, then map not only differs from territory, it insults it.

Strictly speaking, this formula only implies that it is advantageous to allow oneself to be fetishized. “So what? Normies gonna norm.” But as competition increases, the cool kids are judged both for their selfie poses and for the tagged faces around them. And if brand is everything and your peers reflect your brand, then fetishizing others is now rewarded.



It seems to me that this is the invisible hand behind the cartography of our loneliness. In kindergarten, poor and rich kids might play in the same sandbox; after college, such friendships are mediated by the checkout counter. Hobbies and neighborhoods segregate race like the lines of a coloring book, girl gangs harmonize vocal fry, even the wokest heterosexual men somehow dissociate from gays. These borders are all the harsher for not being planned, for existing, ethereal, in unlaughed jokes and clumsy prandial opinions in need of tensely-smiled excuses. Harsher, because no individual has to believe in these nudges of ostracism for them to reign. All that is necessary is to wince along with the ingroup as the outgroup digs their grave. You try to palliate the punishment, you promise to make up for it with future kindness, but you’re being watched. And that creates an inevitability more powerful than the best of intentions.

I understand that any meaningful culture requires gatekeeping. It is the fearful, hushed complicity that I am opposed to, because it treats the ephemera of unbelonging as equivalent to actual evil. Turn on CNN in a room quiet enough for conversation and watch human warmth dissipate. Poor, bland CNN and yet everyone feels they have to respond, or else look like the kind of guy who doesn’t respond. “Shit sucks.” Now the second guy has to respond to that. He’s decided on “Yeah,” but a sad-casual yeah or a slow, mournful one? No one wants this situation. And yet are you going to be the one to switch off the litany of injustices? In front of everyone?

I remember walking across a college campus and seeing sidewalk chalk that read “10,000 CHILDREN SOLD IN SEXUAL SLAVERY PER YEAR.” An acquaintance, who was into depression memes, asked me what I thought. “Seems bad,” I said. Seemed safe enough. And yet a cold, echoing silence informed me that I had made the wrong choice. “But…it’s good to know,” I said. “Yes,” the concerned person said. A sad smile: “It’s good to know.”

Was it? In that moment, was it really? Did either of us go Taken or even donate to UNESCO? I can’t help but see everywhere a connection between globalization and gatekeeping and powerlessness and fetishization and the way ordinary people become monsters. What’s it called when everyone trying their best makes things that much worse? “Hey, don’t hate the player, hate the—”

Whom do you call bad? – He who always wants to put people to shame.

What is most human to you? – To spare someone shame.

What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself. (The Gay Science)

I.

Samzdat—for my money, the smartest guy in the game today—wrote a superb essay sequence in part about the replacement of metis, defined as “hard to express,” “local,” “accumulated, experiential knowledge,” by episteme, i.e. “top-down,” “abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge.” Think Soylent in lieu of meals, Brutalist apartment complexes instead of town squares, standardized tests over apprenticeship, nuclear replacing extended family, and the way capitalism selects for profit at the cost of…externalities.



My thesis is that the same checkboxing that has occurred at the macro level is now taking place in the micro: the regulation of the interpersonal for mass appeal. I don’t know how this will affect any one individual, but I can guess at the societal trend. The left will correctly observe an increase in the granularity of racism, classism, sexism. The right will decry political correctness and its penalties for saying the wrong words or liking the wrong things. History will witness a generation of neurotics: body image, IQ, mannerisms, self-worth. But to the system, this is optimization.

Who or what is responsible for this process? Take the neuroticism in the water supply. Last I checked, the brightest minds of Twitter had issued a joint statement: “how can u blame millennials 4 having anxiety when we live in a capitalism that is literally fascist !!!!” These folks take enough beta blockers that I assume they know what’s up, but I wish they were more specific. Assuming that Adam Smith isn’t threatening anyone with a musket, how is capitalism to blame for when your voice shifts up in pitch? Three possibilities, for argument’s sake concede the first half of each statement as true:

1. Capitalism makes people poor, and poverty causes anxiety.

2. Capitalism leads to inequality, and inequality causes anxiety.

3. Capitalism creates competition, and competition causes anxiety.



Okay: Does hypothesis #1 make sense? No one who has ever tasted malt liquor would dispute the sorrows of poverty. But the association with anxiety is peculiar: the latest and largest JAMA Psych survey found that high income countries have triple the prevalence of Generalized Anxiety Disorder as low income countries. With a caveat for cultural diagnostic issues, this squares with my intuition that fear of starvation is not a generalized anxiety at all.

That study did find that low income predicts GAD within nations—similar results in this study on PTSD—and this seems to hint at hypothesis #2. The New Yorker agrees, “much of the damage done by being poor comes from feeling poor,” and I guarantee that a tax bracket extrapolation is being Today-I-Learned at a cubicle near you. But think about this for more than five seconds. If Bezos envy is enough to make Americans cirrhotic, why doesn’t this feeling cross national borders? Why aren’t those blissful Canadians just as torn up? Do rice farmers agonize over not being able to keep up with the Kardashians? “You have to be exposed to inequality.” Whoa, really? So you think that nationalism and gated communities are the solution? Because if exposure is the problem…

Hypothesis #3 solves this objection: inequality itself isn’t bad, but national inequality looks bad because it correlates with competition (and losing at it). Envy may or may not carry a passport, whatever, envy isn’t the problem. The problem is that capitalism asks you to both break and watch your back. Abject poverty may require the former, ill-gotten riches advise the latter, but the frenzied competition of low-income-in-high-income-country demands both.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t explain Twitter. Could there be anyone more sheltered from financial competition than an upper-middle-class twenty-something at a private college getting Yelp $$ with a parent’s credit card? And yet these people are miserable, I do not dismiss it, miserable despite metropolis housing and a suburban home to fall back on, miserable despite subsidized loans and baccalaureated arts, miserable despite—revealed preferences—not caring about money at all.

Look, if you come at me screaming about selfish baby boomers and a wasteland economy, I will shrug and agree. I have no interest in defending the machinations of capital. But there’s a note of truth to my caricature of The Boy Who Should Have Done Comp Sci, and the out-of-touch mogul complaining that millennials need to stop buying avocado toast exists as a strawman so this generational apathy can be ignored. Sorry, they like Xanax in Beverly Hills too.

I’m also not saying that you should care about money to the exclusion of all else. What I’m saying is that your ideology was implanted by a microchip. You think you care about meaningful work. Looks like TEDx agrees with you:

Yes, shall we? Because when I translated the above Newspeak, I learned that millennials are going to a) start their careers later, b) invest more time and money in empty signaling in order to get a job, c) work for established megacorps rather than start their own businesses—which they don’t have the skills to do, and d) accept lower pay in exchange for a dubiously defined “meaningful.” Maybe the avocado toast analogy isn’t so bad after all: you’re not overpaying for the meal, you’re overpaying to be in a place that serves avocado toast.

It’s tempting to view these TEDx speeches as horseshit neoliberal propaganda, because they are, yet if that was the whole story you wouldn’t expect the capitalist class to be tugging their collars. But consider: the kids who talk most about getting rich for its own sake are the children of immigrants. Martin Shkreli’s parents are Albanian janitors = American as a second language = paying $1 mil for a Wu-Tang album, a group now classified as “classic rock.” Contrast with The Rich Kids of Instagram, who still want money, but for the sake of activism, rehab, or…Instagram. Hey, why is Instagram our accepted proxy for status? Open to suggestions, but I think it’s the visual medium. Not only is harder to fake tagged restaurant selfies than knowledge of @dril​ tweets, status-by-text is insufferably obvious. On Twitter, you can see the seams where someone is trying to act cool, Instagram lets you hide class markers like a travelogue Kubrick (n.b. this also makes it better for advertisers).

However, this authenticity is extremely tenuous. Even though Instagram clout is a scarcer resource than Twitter cred, both are far easier to come by than stock options. Rich people are constantly trying to meme themselves into self-worth, #hustle #hustlehard #money #makemoney #millionairemindset #positive #goodvibesonly, but when Tai Lopez boasts that he earned his new Lamborghini by reading a book a day and…giving a TEDx talk, he comes off as memeably lame. His money hasn’t bought him class, which is why he doesn’t realize airport self-help is dirtier than erotica, and that his car doesn’t matter when when you can stream Drive in HD, #moodboard, #aesthetic.

As we send iPads to India and subtitle Pixar in Sanskrit, the supply of status symbols kisses good-bye to demand and the price of class drops accordingly. Put simply: money is worth less, because talk is cheap. The TEDx talks are an attempt to bargain for labor using the nascent social currency. This won’t work for long. It takes time to mine bitcoin, but there’s no limit to how fast you can print meaning. Hence the system’s bipolarity towards social media: a conflict between short and long term interests. Social media is good if it augments consumerism (e.g. advertising), bad if it replaces consumerism (e.g. memes are free); good if it microdoses your oxytocin so you don’t have to leave work, bad if you start a weed blog and stop showing up altogether. Promoting one outcome necessarily increases the likelihood of the other.

This explains why The Boy Who Should Have Done Comp Sci exists, but not why he’s miserable. For that, I recommend Eighty-Sixed, Cazzie David’s Marxist critique of her Dad’s curbed enthusiasm. In Curb, the set-up is the disconnect between intuition and etiquette and the punchline is when Larry tries to adjust the latter to fit the former. “He does what we all wish we could do!” In Eighty-Sixed, the set-up is still intuition vs. etiquette, but the punchline is the opposite—the comical efforts of the characters to satisfy etiquette:

REMI: Can you guys get off your phones? Or can one of you get off your phone so I can get on my phone?

OWEN: Just go on your phone too.

REMI: No, one of us has to not be on our phones, or we’re literally a table of three millennials on their phones. It’s like a really embarrassing stereotype I’m not trying to perpetuate.

OWEN: I mean…you’re trying to go on your phone.

REMI: I mean, I don’t want someone to take a picture of us and have us, become a meme. (Link)



But what did you expect? These are godless 3rd generation immigrants living in post-scarcity zero-intrinsic-motivation Los Angeles. Capitalism is to blame only insofar as it has made them more equal, with nothing left to compete over except social currency. The annoying mannerisms that consequently evolve—manic squeals of emotion, polyethylene politeness, and an infinite series of “special” occasions—are all methods of packaging reality into something that can be efficiently validated from outside [1].

However, as Cazzie suggests, this competition couldn’t be better designed to crush humans into a jelly of learned helplessness. Make no mistake, when social currency was pegged to strength, rank, or gold, as in ages past, it was terrible, but it was predictable. Now social currency is Blanche DuBois fiat, “Ah’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” It never lasts. Back in 2016, human meme Ken Bone earned a backlash for the contents of his Reddit history, which was ridiculous—if tepid politics and softcore preggo porn are the worst of your vices you deserve to be sainted—but raises the question, could any of our chat logs take the heat? Doubtful. The circles of hell have been built deep over the past fifty years, the list of sins writ in blurred legalese. I’m not worried about Black Mirror histrionics, but rather about how this plays out in the micro, with millennials paralyzed by the pointlessness of pursuing any action that wilts under scrutiny, which is all of them, how dare you be happy when 10,000 children are sold into sexual slavery each year? “actually, i’m not happy. i have anxiety.” Well, whatever works.

This is not a polemic against “callout culture,” but rather against the underlying process (compare: the justice system) that makes callouts (compare: prison) unnecessary except as a distant threat. Public shaming will not stop just because you ask the perpetrators to stop. How could they? Just let knock-offs depreciate their street cred? If gatekeepers were nice to posers their currency would Zimbabwe within a month. Throw in the process described in the intro, the fear of being shamed for not shaming others—and everyone turns into a rat.

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Discipline & Punish)

This is the sinuous path to our particular dystopia, collectivized atomization, the conspiracy against each of us by everyone else. Things will get worse before they get better. The politicization of everything mirrors the spread of capitalism: in both cases, local resources (wool, opinions about videogames) are exchanged for global currency (euro, opinions about gender). Over and over again we are told of the importance of making this trade. I’m sure your coworkers like you well enough, but these days no one would be surprised if anyone turned out to be a school-shooting racist rapist. “Nice fella. Quiet. Kept to himself, mostly,” says the naive yokel, to which Dave Chapelle’s white guy voice replies, “My God! That’s the first sign!” Lesson learned: don’t trust your instincts, loyalty is a spook, only the media can see the truth.

In this way, the global community dissolves all communities smaller than itself. Let me be explicit: I am against this. Not against immigration or sending aid abroad, but against the promulgation of a monoculture. Though a complete monoculture will never exist, movement in that direction is harmful: a) any culture that pacifies everyone will satisfy no one, Disney has no terminal values, and b) I don’t think the math works out. It’s niche differentiation, the law of Solzhenitsyn’s gulag: a decrease in the diversity of opportunities for competition will lead to an increase in competition’s ferocity. “My world has been so filtered that I only encounter people half a deviation away from me along any axis and yet I hate nearly everyone I meet,” says the urbanite fake-laugher sipping LaCroix. Yeah, like that’s a coincidence. You’d kill a guy over breadcrumbs if breadcrumbs were the only privilege allowed. When social currency is only achievable through one set of values, then the game truly becomes zero sum.

However, it’s possible to agree with the theory and disagree with the praxis. The counterargument is simple: so what? False positives happen, everybody knows that. Wise men also know not to to look too closely at acceptable casualties. Bad for the spleen. They say: Have you seen human history? Haven’t we made progress? Don’t act like forcing collectivism hasn’t made for a fairer world. Don’t pretend that conformity doesn’t prevent evil acts.

And maybe it does, but I ain’t goin’ out like that. I can’t answer the philosophical question of the false positives—how much hindrance of evil is worth the shackling of good? You’ll have to answer that for yourself, every day. But I am certain that evil will persist under the rule of shame. It will thrive. And I can tell you about the specific form of this evil: the demons that escape our rituals, the false negatives that are missed.

II.

Which brings us to ‘Cat Person,’ the hit New Yorker short story that is good despite all of those words.

Briefly: Margot, age 20, meets cute with Robert, 34, while working at a cinema concession stand. They text for a few weeks, make some in-jokes; Margot falls for Robert; Robert starts acting weird. They go on a date, which is shitty, but Margot attributes this to Robert’s apparent vulnerability and puts the moves on him. They go back to his place, where he liveblogs his anxiety and gives her D-minus dick. Margot feels regretful and miserable. She doesn’t text him the next few days, he panics, she cuts off contact, he says okay, they see each other at a bar, she avoids him, he texts her, I miss you, what did I do wrong, are you fucking other guys, are you, are you, are you, answer me, “whore.”

I like this story—although I prefer the DOOM version—because it tricks you into making the same interpretative mistake as the characters.

For example: Robert is a pig, his “anxiety” is an act he’s learned to manipulate empathetic women, he seeks out young women because they’re more likely to fall for it, and when it doesn’t work, he returns to his baseline hatred.

Or: Margot is a narcissist, her “empathy” only exists as a means to voyeurism, and once she gets bored or dissatisfied with a man she drops him without so much as an explanation. Robert’s slur was the wrong-but-understandable flailing of the powerless.

But the enlightened take, ft. Baudrillard: you will never know. Either, both, or neither interpretation could be true. There’s not enough information to judge, and any new information could be very well be part of the act. And that’s why the characters—both of them—decided to self-destruct, with sex and with rage respectively. Pain is tolerable if it can be told in a story but ambiguity is anti-story and weak people cannot stand it. They have to find out whether their text message construction of the other is real.

The obvious question, then: why did they spend so long texting, if they were just going to wind up at a bar? I’m told you can visit such institutions any day of the week. There is a courtship ritual that involves 1) a quick meet-cute or a headshot swipe, 2) a lengthy vetting process via text, “send me your favorite meme,” “lmao,” and 3) brief dates that are almost formalities, and this courtship ritual is not only modern, it is the future. Do you remember the Softboy?

The Softboy is a fairly recent development, created as a sort of response to the backlash against overt male assholes. Where an out-and-proud asshole might wear a tight white tank-top to show off artificially tanned muscles and a faded tribal tattoo, the Softboy pairs a prefab oxford with a sweater because he cares. He doesn’t listen to fist-pumping rap like those other boys — he listens to Bright Eyes because he’s sensitive. Everything a Softboy does is artifice, a performance to prove to you that he’s not like other men. And that’s why you have to watch out for him. You’re caught so off-guard when he doesn’t immediately treat you like roadside trash that it’s blinding. “Guys,” you text your group chat after your first date of IPAs at a cozy little bar he recommended. “He’s actually…nice.” As the weeks progress, you’re regaled with tales about his beloved mom and sister, the creative nonfiction he writes that always feature non-binary characters, his childhood dog, Sadie. (Source)

If this excerpt gave you cancer and you intend to bring a class-action lawsuit against me, I understand. Still, this thinkpiece fascinates me. It’s like ‘Cat Person’ with none of the variables plugged in: the archetypal, Chipotle-bag form. The woman glows with wit and poise from some conduit of culture—the group chat? knowledge of movies? of etiquette, of good and bad kisses?—while the man flickers potential from under some shadowy blanket of hurt. A tragedy in two acts: she has the power to judge, she judges incorrectly.

Both stories have the same ending, with the guy saying a Bad Word as proof of his Badness. This is unfortunate, because the spoonfed idiots who seize upon that aspect are doomed to repeat the tale forever. Suppose the guy didn’t say an epithet or get an “I <3 MOM” Camille Paglia bicep tattoo. What then? Would he still be a bad guy?

It’s not like he didn’t tell you he was seeing other people, but did he have to tell you about her in such detail? It’s not like he didn’t tell you that he was not sure about commitment, but did he have to string you along? And, really, those missed calls and ghosting acts? Well, technically you aren’t dating…



It should be obvious: yes. I’m not one to cry wolf at the normal tides of a relationship, but I’m also of the opinion that relationships take place on an emotional spectrum that ranges from boredom to abuse. The pattern of abuse is quite specific: a push, then a pull. No one remains uncoerced with someone who is merely cruel, but they’ll fight tooth and nail to defend the honor of someone who follows cruelty with cuddles and headpats. The softboy, then, is manipulating this algorithm in the laziest possible way. He discloses, then ghosts; flaky, then possessive; a wonderful listener, then inexplicably angry; cuddle, then sulk. I’m not saying his behavior is morally equivalent to that of a stereotype in an undershirt, but it wastes the same time and leaves behind the same doubt as to whether you were ever loved at all.

It should be obvious, but it isn’t, because society has trained women (and men) to ignore such dynamics and instead look for creative nonfiction featuring non-binary characters. But guess what: the softboy has checked every sorry checkbox of Good Male Ally, and yet remains a manipulative asshole, because there is no checkbox for manipulative asshole, because recognizing manipulative assholes is metis, not episteme. This is not to say that checkboxes are useless: to the extent that they supplant intuition, they are worse than useless.

The changing connotation of “male feminist” is illustrative. In 2012, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie told TEDx that “We should all be feminists.” T-shirts, snowglobes, action figures, book deal. Five years and a few false negatives later, the reigning take is from Buzzfeed: “17 Types Of Male ‘Feminists’ That Need To Be Stopped.” The outcry against the softboy is part of this checkbox update—but you can predict what happens next. Walking by Starry Night, your long-lashed date will mention that he read this really powerful short story, says a lot about modern relationships, ‘Cat Person’…

I don’t mean to suggest that bare-ankled men should be herded outside the MOMA and shot. I certainly don’t begrudge them their motives: the desire to have casual sex with a bunch of art school chicks is #valid. Now, the intuitive approach here would be to order two Lagunitae and say, “sup babe, u like john maus? wanna fuck?” Gross, I agree, but would you prefer two weeks of stale pleasantries and recycled ex-girlfriend in-jokes working towards the same end? Don’t answer, the point is moot: Any man who tries the direct approach will sooner or later wind up screencapped onto a wanted poster, and any woman who responds positively will be marked as a harlot, by men and by other women.

So, insofar as every group chat is a Panopticon window, coeds have to speak in code. No matter how dope your metis or your doubt of episteme, you must appear as though you value the latter, must display and pursue and speak in the language of checkboxes. Hence the modern courtship ritual: texting, with its idiosyncrasies of capitalization, emoji, and jargon, or better yet, online dating—with its linked Instagram profile, Spotify anthem, and dossier of angled mugshots—delineate checkboxes more clearly than sloshy meatspace: they allow for finer adjustment of brand and offer objective, shareable proof of correct desires and etiquette. Further, the slow pace of instant messaging creates a heightened intimacy—gives time to ponder each slightly-less timid exchange, the summer camp effect—which, like other social media relations, can be managed during 15 minute toilet breaks. Since couples are supposed to be right for each other by facetime, norms shift so that actual dates are a formality: “What more could you need to know?” This is dumb, but as long as checkboxes allow for enough metis that actually compatible people find each other, the system works.

Then monoculture arrives. Checkboxes become more granular and the list of permissible narratives shrinks. Everyone sends the same signals so the signals lose meaning. The Emperor has no clothes. False negatives. Cat Person. Saying “I’m a good guy,” is a Chekov’s gun for public masturbation. Saying “I’m a good guy—and not the type of bad guy who says he’s a good guy,” is a confession to the Zodiac killings. The list of narratives shrinks further. Everyone is using them. And the implosion of human spirit accelerates, toward that last equilibrium which always prevails.

III.

This is not mere rhetoric. I contend that shame-based monoculture brings with it a specific model for masculinity, femininity, and their relation, an equilibrium upon which disparate subcultures are quickly converging. (My examples are mostly American and cis-hetero, extrapolate with care.)

The roles will resemble those of ‘Cat Person’: women with an intangible aura of power and men wounded enough for plausible deniability. But ‘Cat Person’ is a cautionary tale, not a mission statement. Something’s off, and for your consideration:

I do think there’s a hint of class tension in the story: Robert teases Margot about her “highbrow” taste in movies, and repeatedly brings up her college education in a way that (in my mind) suggests the possibility that he hasn’t gone to college himself. Margot, certainly, interprets his behavior in this way: she believes that he’s intimidated by her, that she has the upper hand, and this appeals to her… (Kristen Roupenian, author of ‘Cat Person’)

(Notice the story’s cover photo: pale feminine lips against those of an unshaven, deep-tanned man.)

How could ‘Cat Person’ be changed into a declaration of values? It would have to show Robert’s perspective. No doubt he would be self-aware about his problematic behavior: remorseful, striving to improve. He would possess the intellect and à la mode class opinions needed to mark him as a good kid gone wrong. He would have a mental illness or an unhappy childhood, and though this would not excuse his behavior, we would see his dance with Margot as “sad” but “beautiful”—a story of two imperfect people doomed by a dysfunctional age.

The story would be unchanged in one key respect: it would still get an endorsement from The New Yorker.

Let’s not get bogged down in exposition: BoJack Horseperson is a fifty-something ex-sitcom actor, wealthy, witty, cynical, horny, in good shape except for the gut, insecure, narcissistic, and a depressive of the cool, externalizing variety. That’s right, folks—alcohol, drugs, and h-h-h-heartbreakin’!



My question is simple. This is a Netflix original series, and so by definition MK-ULTRA programming designed to calcify the pineal gland of the viewer, but BoJack seems a little naughty to star in chordate Veggie Tales. So, how and why does the deep state want to justify this guy as a sympathetic protagonist?

Someone is going to tell me that “actually, the show is, like, really sad. It doesn’t justify his behavior at all.” Dead wrong, but here’s your shot at the mic:

BoJack’s roots as a showbiz comedy genre ensure that it’s full of jabs at the expense of the industry. But it goes so much deeper than that. So much of the “BoJack” DNA is tied up in BoJack’s origin story as a ’90s network sitcom star because the show itself is actively working against the concept that sitcoms represent the way stories should work; that there are easy answers for any of its characters. And that’s what makes it feel so fundamentally true, at its core. No hugs or laugh track can smooth over this stuff. The only real solution is to keep on asking the questions. (IndieWire)

When a work of art is praised for “asking the questions,” nine times out of ten that’s because its answers are shit. The critical mistake here is to think that content can overcome structure. However harshly BoJack’s plot rejects sitcom answers, it still follows the sitcom formula: 1-2 topical issues per episode, hamster wheel character development, punchline before scene cut with a hand-holding jingle. Even the most reprehensible characters become sympathetic in the light of this childlike predictability, It’s Always Sunny is a whole lot nastier than BoJack but The Gang Still Gets Gif Captioned. No matter how many times BoJack “gut-punches [the viewer] in the feels,” the lingering emotional aftertaste is catharsis, comfort. Put the pieces together: “There are no easy answers…but that’s okay.” [2]

Which is just what an innovator in a Quarter Life Crisis wants to hear. BoJack turns the banal into “sad” but “beautiful,” per the mawkish “life is just a series of precious, painful moments, man” slogan of those hurtling towards a painful moment. It appeals to the same audience as Frances Ha or Jeff Rosenstock—if you don’t know, good—people with student loans, internet hangovers, fizzled romances, dead-end jobs and “I’m trying to reset my tolerance,” people who want to believe that their debt is going to be worth it in the end.

I don’t fault the L train for finding solace in a middlebrow show about talking animals, but it’s no more possible to pluck Hope from Pandora’s Box than it is to open your skull to comfort alone. BoJack pretends at a quarter-life panacea while in fact selling a specific brand of suffering as aspirational—the duty that Girls abandoned when Lena Dunham was outed as a Russian bot—it has to validate the pursuit of social currency.

Easier said than done. Here’s what it’s up against:

I should have warned you that this clip failed animal safety trials as a replacement for Ipecac. But if you denounce it as “degenerate bugman soy-cuck bullshit,” you’re missing the ball big-time, because repeated punchline is that Sarah Silverman is #problematic.

At 0:47 she can’t figure out the ethnicity of a brown guy. At 1:58 she asks a black woman, “How can I be a good ally?” and gets chastised (“It’s not my job to teach you how to be a good ally.”) At 2:44 she says, “I love you Indians!—I mean, Native Americans!—I mean, First Americans—oh, I can’t keep up.” At 0:15 and 2:37, she forgets the names of red states, so at 2:23, she hedges her bets with “I love you racist south!” This, though stupendously unfunny, is at least self-aware: note that a) this is a country song, b) you’re meant to feel bad for opioid epidemees who vote against their “own interest,” her words, and c) 4:07, “And you call me Hollywood elite? Dude, I’m from fucking New Hampshire…I’m caring about you, I’m condescending to you.”

Conservatives love to hatesturbate to the idea of a PC dystopia where citizens report to vegan restaurants for the exchange of platitudes and/or wives. I loathe political correctness, but a more realistic dystopia involves Sarah Silverman. Friendship is countersignaling, says my man Scott: we bond by nudging at the boundaries of etiquette and then being forgiven. The king chuckles—who knows what wacky yet meticulously anodyne trick this mad court jester will attempt next?—while his counselors spread whispers among the peasants, “See, look how much freedom you have!”

The past and future—among the permatourist grammarians for whom Sarah is an avatar—is not sanitized speech. It is offense, laughter, and “omg, that was sooooooo bad.” Case in point: Sarah, agonizing about “putting people in boxes” at 1:03; about white privilege at 1:27; and about her own class at 3:53. We’re supposed to excuse Sarah’s moments of offense because of these apologies, but I hope that you can see that the causality is reversed, that the apologies sanction her to be offensive.

Nevertheless, Sarah’s comedy of liberal manners would not fly with the leftist audience of BoJack. Here’s how the discourse goes:

SARAH: I Love You Americ-uh

LEFTIST: really? you love america? funny thing, i was just reading about my lai, vietnam. you ever hear about that? where u.s. troops massacred over 300 civilians, bayoneting old men, raping women and shooting children in the back of the head? seems bad to me. but i guess you can’t help but love the old red, white and blue, huh? sorry, continue.

SARAH: I Just Want To Be A Good Ally

LEFTIST: oh, of course you do. hmm, let me think. maybe you could donate some of your income to poor, queer, and disabled people who need it? ever think of that? maybe you could stop gentrifying black neighborhoods. is that a possibility? it’s such typical white feminism—

—and so on. If you’re not hip to blue tribe infighting, the short version is that liberals (e.g. Clinton) tend to see capitalism as in need of “a few tweaks,” whereas leftists (e.g. Sanders) see capitalism more as “a death machine designed to chew up human lives”—that is, per this leftist—and I contend that this mirrors the conflict between TEDx and Twitter, between social currency as an augment to consumerism and social currency as an end in itself.

Sarah’s flimsy politicking, then, constitutes a vicious attack on the value of social currency. We’re all playing on the same team in the long run, follow the spirit of the law, but don’t take the letter too seriously—uh, I spent three years after college doing dissociatives and reading Deleuze, now some chick with no mason jars is gonna tell me that’s worthless? Fuck outta here.

Hence the dialogue above. That the leftist critiques of Sarah may be deserved is beside the point, the point is that they are infinite. In the battleground of ideas, positive beliefs are painted targets. The Democratic Socialists of America mock grrrl-power feminism and commercialized gay pride; the bibliophile right scoffs at God and country; the true communist rejects any dopamine that is the product of capital; the true fascist knows that serotonin is inseparable from the pernicious Jew. It seems broadly true that political extremism comes not from an excess of belief but from a lack. You don’t write the manifesto and then reject everything else: the manifesto is an emergency brake when the rest has slipped away.

While such a nihilism-plus-one forbids many worldly pleasures, it pays dividends in social currency. At bars designed to look like dive bars, millennials compete to agree with each other, drinking beer and talking about places they’ve had beer in the past, standing shoulder to shoulder in a circumferential defense against randos, listening to an algorithmic playlist until they decide it would be more entertaining to sleep. No one says anything for fear of shame, or if someone does, no one is willing to risk counter-shame by shaming them, so instead—silence. No one, that is, save our hero, who has figured out how to say nothing loudly. Performatively overindulgent, a loose-limbed comic stumble, he says he wants to start a fight, he says the bartender looks cute, he says he’s so wasted, he says he doesn’t give a fuck—he debases himself and so is allowed to mock others, he leaves no beliefs to be shamed. “Yes: I admit my complicity. I admit my hypocrisy. I just don’t think anyone, anyone, should be let off the hook when so many people are suffering.”

Perhaps this is why horseshoe theory appears true: left does not equal right, but nihilism always gets big laughs at parties.

BoJack’s politics are what you’d expect from a show that eschews “easy answers” in favor of “asking the questions.” It’s skeptical about factory farming and Big Hollywood, but also about doing philanthropy abroad or writing for a feminist blog. The successful are selfish and complacent, while the main characters, though often selfish, are either clueless manchildren, who need education, or performatively guilty intellectuals, who need love to encourage their betterment. These are the real heroes, the show implies, because they require the least amount of corrective shame.

No wonder The New Yorker likes BoJack—they’re running the same protection racket. Etiquette creates a problem, then offers relative status (over the shamed) in exchange for compliance with an invented solution. The best example comes from season 4, when the journalist character, Diane, writes a blog post about sexual harassment. As we see it scoring fire emojis on Twitter, she voiceovers: “Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: if you’re a man, you’re not gonna get it. Some of you think you get it. You want to get it. You listen, nod, and…”

Since I cut off her quote, this may well be true. But why isn’t she talking to anyone? It’s not just this speech. Either the show indulges that tic of bad satire where a character recites a fact (“because it’s totally cool that…”) and none of the other characters react (“right”) and that’s supposed to constitute a joke—or else the takes are soliloquized into space, sometimes followed by a montage of wrongthink caricatures (“well I think…”) never seen before or again.

There’s a lesson here about the way in which e.g. women are told to express discontent: in marches, with hashtags, with thinkpieces, as part of a homogenous mass addressing society—i.e. not in an individual dialogue, which n.b. would never start with “you’re not gonna get it." Yes, personal advocacy and public activism are nonexclusive in theory: in practice, the latter is a tool to redirect the former, a polite reframing of “take it up with HR.” Anyway, use it or lose it—how can u blame millennials 4 having anxiety? I don’t dispute that public activism helps women (or whomever), I’m trying to explain why society—and its male-weighted net preferences—likes it. And my nasty suspicion is that turning individuals into op-eds is the 21st century version of diagnosing hysteria: “Oh, they’re having feminine problems.”

Crucially, posing such problems to society means that the good guys never have to respond. Not as individuals—how could they? Disagreement is problematic, agreement is sycophantic. Correct response = “I’m making space for the marginalized voices of women and POC. Pass the blunt.” Good guys only respond to the social issue, and the ensuing diffusion of responsibility means they don’t have to respond at all. Funnily enough, dissolute men—from biker jacket bad boys to Tinder hikikomori near you—explain misbehavior with the same appeal to principle. “Well I reckon we was jus’ bad kids from a bad part of town.” “It was a messy relationship—in a sense, both of us struggled with internalized misogyny.” The last man demonstrates etiquette and performs guilt, so no shame is needed. We’re supposed to forgive his cruelties because of these apologies, but I hope that you can see that the causality is reversed, that the apologies sanction him to be cruel.

BoJack is a paean to that sanction—to the conditional freedom afforded by an audience—to celebrity. Old and new, Hollywood glitz and rose gold iPhones, the show pixilates what it would never call but nevertheless remains the American dream. “Instagram made me want more for myself, man. People on there getting famous for nothing,” Hi, My Name Is Todd informs me, “You paying with cash or credit?” Credit, duh. Smart kids know that high school is a means not an end, that’s when they start practicing debt if they hadn’t already: one day, this will all be worth it. There’s no way to survive the dark except to dream of who you might be. Such images are fragile in the morning light, but BoJack promises that all the shame taken and dealt will be worth it; promises that the obeisant—those manly, complex, sympathetic nonentities—will never suffer an absence of mirrors.

IV.

Incentivized nihilism is not unique to our when, where, or who. Through my Campbellian analysis of godawful coming-of-age genre fiction, I have determined that tests of ingroup loyalty allow for three deferrals:

1. “I’m too naive to respond.”

2. “I’m too angry [at the outgroup] to respond.”

3. “I’m in too much pain to respond.”



Each of which once corresponded to a protected group: children, soldiers, and the sick. Yawn, old news. Global monoculture would be remarkable in degree, not kind. I predict: more checkboxes bandwagoned into oblivion, more emphasis on an “authenticity” that will also be branded, more sickness, rage, and naiveté, more nihilism, misery, and loneliness. Hijinks ensue.

What will not happen is that some demographic, e.g. men, will be “cucked by society.” Actually, I’m confident that all 120 million people who think that’s going to happen are 18. You know how I know? Because the worst a Scantron can do is ask you to say some shit—words are powerful, they are not genitals—and only an 18 year old wouldn’t even consider lying, only an 18 year old could be so narcissistic as to think his opinions, his story, are so valuable that the world ought take heed of its hypocrisy and listen [3]. If I wanted to Patreon that kid’s lunch money into a retirement fund, I’d say something like:

“Sorry, the hypocrisy isn’t going anywhere. Grow up, learn to fake it—the world won’t tell you, but this stuff only matters if you take the bait. I mean, if a fine revolucionaria demands that I salute Comrade Stalin, you better believe that millions of deaths are about to become a statistic. And more often than not, it turns out she was faking it too, or didn’t literally mean what she said, and we talk about family and get some jokes going and it’s chill. If I have hope to offer, it’s that. We’re not as different as the inane bullshit we use to keep others from seeing us.”



All of which is objectively correct, and by the time I finished talking the kid would have figured it out on his own. BoJack himself uses deferrals #2 and #3 (rage and misery), the rest of the show’s male cast uses #1 (naiveté). Rick & Morty uses #3 and #1 for R and M respectively. Punk rock, pundits, and podcasters lean heavily on #2, as do the undercover frat boys of progressive circles, keeping a stock list of grievances to reroute thorny conversations. Ed Sheeran, Aziz Ansari, jomny sun, Let’s Players, and people with anime profile pics use #1. Rap music has shifted from triumphalism to defeatism, but make no mistake, the performative sadness is not consequent to the pursuit of hedonism. It is a justification.

It’s true that a few amateurs of these templates will method-act their way into the morgue, but that’s show business. Compare and contrast with other rites of passage. It beats the fire ants.

And yet, my advice contains a lie of omission, and teenage gestalt has a note of the truth. Because I didn’t fake it, not at first—it was more like society decided that the tune I’d been humming since preschool was now counterpoint to the national anthem. My alarm went off and the sun rose in the east and every tabloid and pop-up and fortune cookie and listserv email had been fitted for those of my class and generation. WHAT HAPPENED? Did all the back-row agitators and pubescent late-bloomers team up and They Live the establishment? Did they intern and work their way up? Did they save up enough tips to buy a majority share? Come on, admit it—isn’t it strange how the toys of one’s childhood become the sexy Halloween costumes of adults?

Once I understood the rules, then I guess it became fake—which, take the money and run, I know. I don’t believe in a true self or any glory thereof. I get that everyone’s a phony because you gotta play telephone to reach other people. But it seems kind of fucked that my life got so much easier when I stopped treating people like people.

As we leave the comfort of this quietist interlude and return to the nausea of doomsaying, the message is unchanged: in the end, things are going to look pretty much the same. They may not feel the same, but they’ll look it. Technology erases externalities, mythology erases the records of their erasure, the characters aren’t as nuanced but the arc remains the same. What use is a time-machine, what could be said? Be strong? Be kind? Be patient? The good guys always win? How could it be otherwise? That’s how the story goes.

V.



Back to the plot: Shame leads to nihilism, nihilism to masks, masks to the hell of being with other people and alone.



We still need to talk about the last step, and nowhere is it more obvious or fun than in romance or lack thereof—e.g. Cat Person—so I want to carve shame’s causal chain with regards to gender. It’s long, but the synopsis goes like this: men defer on the big scary questions, women gain control of the public space; women get social currency, men get the soft power to determine what social currency is, the streets have never been cleaner, and everyone gets what they want in private.

We’ve covered everything up to "women get social currency,” a step which is neatly illustrated by S4E6 of Broad City, ‘Witches’. Abridged for your convenience:

Ilana notices that Abbi has a grey hair. Ecstatic, she insists that Abbi is becoming a witch. Abbi doubts this: she is distraught because she is Manhattan poor and by the touch-of-grey era ought to have a “MacArthur Genius Grant” or be posting pictures of “Akai [sic] bowls on Instagram.”



Ilana goes to see a sex therapist, an elderly black woman wearing glasses and a hamsa hand necklace, who says “vulva.” We thus learn that Ilana has been unable to orgasm since the election: not only has she upped her SSRI for feeling “anxious and depressed,” her in-office attempt at masturbation is interrupted by a mental montage of Trump-related misogyny. “I think I’m just broken,” sigh.



Meanwhile, Abbi sets up shop selling handmade cards outside the Met. She’s cheered by a witchy old white lady, but depressed by an Asian Upper East Side dermatologist who appears younger than stated age. After being further upset by the visit of an ex-bf—who, like the derm, throw down an insane amount of cash on her cards, “I love helping struggling artists”—she decides to get Botoxed.



“Fuck you Trump, I’m going back in,” Ilana announces, and this time her synapses flare Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Beyoncé, Malala, Oprah, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Martha Stewart—and the pudendal nerve.



After one cheek injection, Abbi changes her mind. “I think you’re really beautiful,” she tells the dermatologist, “and I think you would be, even if you didn’t do any of this crazy shit to your face.”



Ilana and Abbi meet up. Ilana explains that she’s tapped into a “ferocious female current” and seen the “witches who run the world.” They receive an invitation to a spooky gathering in the park where the side characters are playing bongos, Abbi runs back and fetches the dermatologist, and Ilana has a screaming orgasm implying literal as well as figurative circlejerking. The end.

Standard disclaimers apply: blessed are those who put forth original content into an unoriginal world. Still, the praise for this episode as "incisive” and "compelling” astounds me—I’m not sure a dedicated misogynist could tell a more damning tale.

- Ilana is so brainwashed that not only her mood but her libido is tied up in politics, like an insect waiting for the go-ahead from the queen. Have some fucking dignity, please.

- Abbi is a struggling artist in NYC…her vision of success is an award or an Instagram post…okay, spitballing, could there be a connection? The pursuit of social currency at the cost of tangible success? If you’re gonna suffer for art, make art an ends, not a means, else you’ll make postcards. “Aww, but don’t worry,” the show replies, “either way, the rich will donate enough to keep you afloat.”

- Which is the same solution Broad City offers Ilana: masturbating to a Pinterest board of politicians, CEOs, and celebrities. It’s not like these luminaries are rousing her to do great things, which would be fine—instead she’s accepting her fate and living vicariously through them. Note that this makes her a cuck.

- And oh man, the racial politics. I’m not calling the show problematic—which is obnoxious and fails to interrogate meaning for the audience—but if your fantasy involves a benevolent black lady offering spiritual guidance, consider whether you’ve invested too much in lip syncing to Cardi B. Needless to say, the dermatologist is Asian, fool that she is to have worked for the Sinai residency when she could have been “self-deprecating” and stoned.

- At the end of their review, Entertainment Weekly says that Broad City tells stories about “what it really means to be a New Yorker.” Yes. I agree.

Here’s the deal: society ladies are under diamond-making pressure to be looked at, and the happening look is “powerful.” Being powerful has its perks and perils, but that’s not what’s mandated by the disembodied miasma of shame, that’s not what society sees. Hence counterculture: symbols of power, costumes and identities, at a discount compared to actual power.

Witches are in. So are other feminine mysticisms that hint at superpowers without compromising delicacy: goth couture, chokers, collars, cloak-like outerwear, piercings, nose rings, gauges, acrylic nails, colored eye shadow, winged eyeliner, anime (now endorsed by Kim K), cosplay, pastel-colored hair, emojis, tattoos, astrology, crystals, communism. Fashionable toughness: bomber, denim, Carhartt, and Salvation Army jackets, beanies, camo print leggings, knives, combat boots, bisexuality, short hair, streetwear, hip-hop, AAVE, conspicuous interest in black men—a woman once rattled off a list of celebrity fuckables, then told me, “I wanted to see if you were cool with it.” “‘It?’” (n.b: She was a virgin.) The messages of failed suitors, some grossly sexual, some worshipful and desperate, some merely unskilled, all uploaded to a fake Instagram and brandished with glee: “Sorry to inform you, but your gender ain’t shit,” another she said. “Yeah, although to be fair, you come off as pretty callous and unlikable yourself.” She laughed.

This is a not a comprehensive look at femme fashion—normie culture has its own regalia, the neotenous pixie look is somewhere between; but anyway, though I’m jaded I’m not a hater, everyone’s gotta get dressed in the morning and I don’t think it’s particularly noble to tighten a corset and cough like you have TB. Still, why in 2k18 are women across so many subcultures encouraged to look powerful? “FEMINISM,” says the guy that’s all Adam’s apple and no forearms, returning his turkey wrap to a Ziploc in the pocket of a faded peacoat. Like duh, women shame other women, those group chats turn to subgroup chats fast enough to make entropy blush. And he might have a point, except isn’t it strange how so many of those countercultural traits sound like “hot”?

What do men want? A few months ago I saw Bladerunner 2049, which had not one but two stubbled white anti-heroes—the younger of which wins the grudging respect of the older—aerial shots of grey cities and brown landscapes, a Hans Zimmer score, and that Zach Snyder humorlessness that scans as masculinity for nerds. I liked it, by which I mean it had sexy robot babes. Such as: Luv, an assassin and the second-in-command of a robot-manufacturing company,

whose off-white Rick Owens and perfect skin merely hint at the depths of her wickedness. She flirts with softboy everyman Ryan Gosling, kills his female boss (who also flirted with RG), fights with him, wins, fights with him again, loses, and gets choke-drowned in a scene that was prolonged enough to raise my Tarantino-kink hackles, although she’s evil, so, can’t be sure.

Or Mariette, a prostitute,

whose dyed hair and colored eye shadow reveal her as an agent of the robot rebellion. Mari(on)ette puts the moves on Ryan, asks for a cigarette. He says no, but later his hologram gf, Joi, who has bangs, says it’s okay (“I want to be real for you”) and Voltrons with the prostitute so that Ryan, tormented, unsmiling, can have a Very Special threesome. Mariette then bugs his trench coat—she was using him!—but though the rebellion has questionable means (also: trying to kill the older white anti-hero) they have virtuous ends, so he’s like, K.

Luv kills Joi in Act 3. Not touching that. Ryan, now at the 180 mark in the Hero’s Journey, wearing Chinatown nose tape and the blue-pink lighting of a sensitive boy,

encounters a giant, naked, advertisement for his dead girlfriend. “You look lonely,” the behemoth sayeth, “I can fix that.” Rain is falling, the trench coat is trenchant, the neon is screaming, EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO HEAR, EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO SEE, and the poor dude’s circuit-heart fritzes—

—And that’s the money shot. Lamentations that BR 2049’s gender politics “aren’t that futuristic” are not even wrong: It’s porn. Descriptive more than prescriptive, and if you don’t believe me, compare Luv to the dermatologist to evil CEO Tilda Swinton in Okja to the boss lady in Westworld to a bougie season 4 villain of BoJack; compare Mariette to Lady Bird to the redhead punk girl from BoJack (voiced by Abbi of Broad City); or watch, I’m sorry, The Emoji Movie: “Jailbreak,” heroic punk girl; “Smiler,” vain forewoman of a robot army; and this reject from vore. All 2017. You can argue this is bad porn or mock the audience that wants this from their porn, and I do, but if you get mad at Brazzers for not being Khan Academy you’ll wind up with blue balls and an F in differential equations.

Why do powerful women so outnumber powerful men in male-centric BR 2049? Warning for some ugly topics I am going to discuss casually. The simple answer is this: when women look powerful, it’s “okay” to hurt them. Female villains are ideal, since their strength counts for feminism but also they deserve to be hurt. FYI, if they “valiantly” control “silicon” or were popular in high school, they’re evil.

Choking lovable losers isn’t so easy to justify, but where public broadcasting fails, private browsing steps in. For the inimitably modern query “online hookup,” the top Pornhub results come from a studio called Hookup Hotshot. Sample titles: “Skinny Latina Finds A Guy Online & Gets Brutally Fucked,” “Gorgeous Teen Nasty Anal Sex Tape,” “Goth Girl Hooks Up With Guy For Rough Anal,” and the evocative “Pretty Teen Loves Getting Destroyed.” The ladies are decked out in collars, chains, eye shadow, pastel or rainbow accessories, and schoolgirlisms. The dude, a bearded-glasses white guy somewhere on the barista spectrum, uses the porn name “Bryan Gozzling,” which didn’t surprise me, because there have only been like four people, ever.

These clips share a narrative, admirably paced compared to BR 2049, where the seduction occurs via dating-app messages between the woman-of-the-week and Bryan. The woman most often initiates the dialogue, and even when Bryan does his flirtation is docile: once, no joke, “I like your aesthetic.”

Gozzling shoots these one-on-one, POV-style scenes intimately, with no production or lighting crew: “By being alone with the girls, we are able to focus more on each other, and the sex is more natural and intense because of that.” (AVN)

Extreme online dating! Ever wanted to fuck the shit out of a girl you met online? Watch Bryan Gozzling find a cute new dating site chick every week and fuck them ROUGH. Just the way they like it! (“About,” Pornhub)



Compare this to the casting couch videos of old. “Hey…so tell me…do you ever…masturbate?” Rather than hire Serge Gainsbourg for this crucial voiceover, they use the guy who takes your order at Wendy’s. This is not an accident, the absurdity is part of the appeal. The casting couch is not a fantasy of discovered masculinity, nor of coercion, nor of getting lucky, but of having a role, backed by setting and the cameras streaming live to the Panopticon, that compels her to want to have sex with you. This backing, though my description may have strayed from traditional feminist theory, is the patriarchy.

Ctrl + W and tab over to Bryan: was the patriarchy vanquished? Sure seems like it—these ladies are 100% taking the initiative in calling out Daddy. Double entendre of the year, folks: please note that a) the Daddy meme-kink explosion started on Tumblr and spread to other homes for the moderately woke—a self-described “art hoe” once complained to me that it was being “appropriated” by “basic white girls”—and b) amazingly, the backlash against it is mostly from men, guys who talk in the Lawful-Good-Because-I’ve-Never-Been-Outside voice, “Well, I believe in sexual liberation, but this just seems…wrong.” Sorry, you sound like a teenager getting righteous about grinding at prom. Like, really? It’s 3 am and you’re gonna rock Nicole’s world with a Viennese Waltz?

Kink, the casting couch, dirty dancing, and alcohol share a societal function: they democratize erotics. Since online hookups obviate the latter two and millennial porn scenes are shot like mumblecore, the roles that patriarchy once assigned are instead explicated by kink—here, “specific acts”—and more generally, fetish: symbols of power.

Feminism and kink thus correlate for a reason: they both decentralize patriarchy. You can read a zine about that, but what the hollow letters won’t tell you is that kink is short of breath on the same treadmill as other etiquette. Gosling’s hologram and Gozzling’s paternity are ominous signs of the endgame: when there is nothing left to want, except…

Which means we gotta talk porn theory. Frame the question like this: How’s a guy s’posed to recover from a 9-5 on eggshells and a friend group that plays board games, assuming that actual change is impossible? According to Nietzsche and the anthropology department at 4chan, he has two options:

1. He fetishizes his public life, i.e. he becomes a cuckold.

The original sin of cuck porn is being too meta. Cucks aren’t jerking off to the girl in porn, nor to a male magnification of themselves, but rather to their separation from the action, to the fact that they’re watching porn. That doesn’t make it a fetish of weakness, an idea both empirically nonexistent and definitionally wrong. With e.g. femdom, the man’s weakness is balanced by a fetish for the strength of his dominatrix. He commands her power, even as it is directed at him. Cuck porn follows a similar principle, but erases the need for a partner. It is a fetish of self-pity and aggrandizement at the cost of individual connection, and this is what makes it contemptible.

Cuck porn is defined by dehumanization of the bull: if you call death of the author and root for the winning guy, it becomes infidelity porn, a more traditional fantasy of potency. Race and class are useful to this effect—truckers, bikers, high school bullies, big black cock in America, immigrants in Europe, faceless businessmen in Japanese hentai, masked bigwigs in Eyes Wide Shut, the very poor and very rich who appear almost beyond the rule of society—but not sufficient. Within the race example, note that a thumbnail of professional interracial porn spikes blood pressure even without “cheating,” while the doings of amateur couples don’t provoke quite the same response—they might actually like each other.

The bull can never be likable, because the fantasy is of a sexual potency that compels the woman to want him despite everything else [4]. The bull is often portrayed as morally depraved (e.g. pseudo-rape) or intellectually inferior (jock vs. nerd); at the very least, he must lack dimension, must be chosen for his demographics and stats alone. This injustice is the crux of the fetish and of the visceral fury against it, because now the cuck’s victimhood—linked by race, class, and relationship status to following the rule of society—has been equated to virtue.

As with the casting couch, then, the cuck is empowered by his identification with the camera: he gains access to the societal power that assigns his role and the other. His embrace of impotence via the incubi in his private sanctum (i.e. wife), is—similar to other religious rituals—the sacrifice of individual dignity necessary to dissolve into the herd. Cucks describe an initial anguish followed by a tremendous relief: this is the individual shame and mass salvation of a sermon. The evildoers are strong, we are pure but weak. Though you may not see it now, society knows what’s best. All is ordered, all is forgiven. Be thankful. Jerk off.

2. He fetishizes his private life, i.e. he lives in taboo.

Start with a case study and work backwards: Enraged by the prevalence of the cuck fetish—the cultural effect of which (rage and prevalence) cannot be understated, if you type “love porn” into Bing video you get “Wives and girlfriends love BBC”—the internet is trying to diversify raceplay, with “blacked” now joined by the terms “bleached,” “beaned,” and “riced,” in a kumbaya endorsement of women as objects and political spite as the ultimate pleasure.

To make these narratives work, pop culture is working overtime to divorce the connotations of race from race itself, so that if you drop Soundcloud rhymes or wear Supreme, hip-hop girls legally have to fuck you for your “blackness”—for your race as masculine role rather than you as a fallible man. Eminem codified this trope for poor white people, the Jews perfected it with Drake, Lil Peep’s martyrdom opens the door to softboys, and I predict Rich Brian - Dat $tick (92M views) and Lil Xan - Betrayed (165M views) will do wonders for Asian and Mexican-American assimilation. Similar process among women: as gentrification and Steven Pinker put skinny minority girls into porn, greyscale Tumblr gifs bestow the white girl glamour of the missing, suffering, pilot episode flashbacking, and otherwise Laura Palmered.

These are only a few broadly offensive examples of how innocuous traits are woven into narratives of power. Yes, animal lust makes it possible to get off to the meditation voice app if you try hard enough, but once sexual preferences reach consciousness—regardless of origin in nature or nurture—they inevitably attach to a narrative. The supposed “crossed wires” of a foot fetish are transformed into a story of sole as “forbidden”, the tactile pleasure of biting or hair-pulling is archived into a mythos of rough sex, a coffeeshop crush on a cardiobunny blonde is Pavlov’d into visions of a yoga club Eden.



Even this is reductive. Because kink is mostly depicted in discrete traits and communicable acts, private, idiosyncratic fetishes—she rolls her eyes like that, he bites his lip like this, she was such a dork in high school after her parents’ divorce and now she writes poetry and works at Sephora—are ignored, except by Murakami. But in long-term relationships, these narratives predominate and become staggeringly complex. That’s how you stay interested in someone, you go out in the forest and you name all the animals, you rewrite reality into a folie à deux, that sweetly narcissistic take on good old sexual selection: “Aww, you’d do that? For me?”

These semantics are unimportant except as they clarify the underlying logic of fetish. Why do innocuous traits become sexualized? Secrecy and intimacy—you’re the only one who knows these things [about your partner], you’re the only one who can do these things [to your partner], you have a power that no one knows, you’re being someone you’re not supposed to be—Taboo is what separates the private from public.

The object-level argument I’m making is about sex, but it doesn’t have to be: Ivan Ilyich spurns familial intimacy for social appearances and dies by them; Blow Out John Travolta fetishizes his narrow domain of expertise and is stunned when reality shrugs. In an ideal world, a mild taboo would separate private from public and neither would be so intolerable that the other would have to substitute. But this is not an ideal world, and between the two strategies, any decent person would choose the one that allows for love.



Unfortunately, couple-on-the-run plots tend to finish with bullets or holes. Taboos only last so long as no one snitches, but why shouldn’t they? Private narratives are inefficient, since familiarity takes time; effortful, since they require trust in one’s own judgment; and worst of all, they bring no social currency. Sooner or later, enough people cash in that the taboo becomes society-approved. This is a contradiction waiting to happen, and so:

…One has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization—repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking—are speaking to us of freedom. (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)



I don’t know how much sexual desires have changed throughout history. Deep inside the germ cells, probably not much. But in the superficial expression of these desires, I think so. When I was young and dumb, BDSM was male, taboo, and ugly. The bad role models to whom I was shyly, ambivalently, inexorably drawn—not for their badness, but for their candor, for the absolution that comes from being around the much-worse—often whispered about force and running mascara, tidbits of conspiracy: “Pretty much every chick is down to be treated like shit.” A 25 year old alcoholic engaged to an 18 year old feminist-poet with a gluten allergy tried to explain women with a spectacularly rapey clip from Wild At Heart—which nicely complements the Frank Booth scene from Blue Velvet, “It’s Daddy, you shithead! Where’s my bourbon!”—anyway, I remember being scared; I think I made up an excuse to leave.



Toxic masculinity? Sure. But look at how it went down: leatherbound queer industrial music mainstreamed by Trent Reznor in 1994, then Janet Jackson (1997), Britney Spears (2001), Secretary (2002), and the snowball keeps rolling past Rihanna (2010) and Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)—is it fair to say that kink has never been seen as more female? OKCupid claims that interest in bondage is up another 23% since 2013—is it fair to say that kink has never been less taboo? A meta-analysis of 36 studies on polyamory and BDSM found that participants were “overwhelmingly white, with relatively high socio-economic status”—is it fair to say that kink has never had more social currency?

The pop culture of sex is voiced by women because men don’t feel “allowed” to confess desire, except in repressed geek lingo (“if you know what I mean”) and submissive fawning (“can i eat your ass and see pics of your feet.”) Accordingly, men often resent the “I Had Sex With A DJ And He Couldn’t Find My Clitoris” thinkpieces—which, to be fair, are not exactly Bluets—but they ignore society’s tax on these pieces, which women pay and men could if they so desired: local currency into global. Your orgasm must be instructive to society as a whole. If men would play the part—nonthreatening “sex nerd,” against stigma, pro-education, attracted to fictive characters and unattainable celebrities, moving suburban to urban for a journey of self-discovery—they could have thinkpieces galore. They won’t, or suck it at, which is why those traits code female.

And yet the thinkpieces of today were the male fetishes of yesterday, because men determine what social currency is. When a sensitive boy errs on the side of roughness with a new hookup, this implies some heretofore hidden power, a duality of the homeschooled which may or may not exist, and this gets positive reviews even if the woman asks him to tone it down: a knowing grin, a text the next day, “smh, can’t believe you left bruises.” Conversely, men complain about the demand for scolding and spanking among the purpose generation, but if you picture the hypothetical woman that’s into those kinks, is she more or less attractive than average? Your correlation leads to causation.

Over the past few years, kink has become not only prevalent, but predictable. Hookups will pause at second base and ask for completion of a checklist of preferred kinks for the sexual encounter. It’s easy enough to tell in advance anyway, or at least to detect the trendy submissiveness, F >> M, “I like being told what to do,” that correlates with class, high emotional quotient, bullying in middle school, lower-case font, confessional poetry, and anxiety—“I’m not even that insecure about anything, I just want to be liked.” I’m not knocking the brand, just pointing out that it is one: maybe intentional, maybe not, but when sex went on camera it became something to sell, the patriarchy had acne up close and so switched from PR to marketing, and if you’re seeing it, it’s for you.

It’s damning that in female-demo Fifty Shades, Christian gets a backstory for his kink (abused as a child, doesn’t like to be touched) while Anastasia is a virgin who reluctantly goes along with it to please him; but ironically, this vast infrastructure to give men what they want, doesn’t. Not because pop kink shows consent poorly or autotunes S&M—those are academic complaints—but because it makes domming into an expectation, into another performance of gender at which men must measure up. Forget the rising male insecurity about “nice” as a slur—even for bad boys, the greater the checkboxing of power, the more it feels like like submission. Of course there is pleasure in doing unfreedom well, and some men have put in the hours, acquired a taste, and scored the associated plaudits; and maybe they would have liked it anyway, who knows? Both sexes play house with the dolls of a past generation. There is no outside view.

For each willing man, however, two have recoiled, and society now has to deal with an influenza of working-age NEETs going on disability and protest-fapping to anime crossdressers. Compare the feminine Pornhub searches above to those more popular among men: milf, step mom, step sister, hentai, 3D, VR, overwatch. What’s the theme? I’ll accept “femdom-y comfort” (incest, heroines), “no male competition” (POV, Freudians), or “stuff you can’t thinkpiece about” (= still taboo), but the most salient trend is that they are fake, maximum pretense: you know that’s not his mom, right?

This pretense is our deus ex machina: it’s how society eases the MGTOW back onto the path. Remember the fifth Gorillaz member talking to Ryan Gosling?

You look lonely—I can fix that.

No, she can’t. Like his girlfriend, she was programmed to say that. Just another performance for which he has to hear and read lines. Except—except—she doesn’t know she’s been programmed.

That’s his edge. When your sweetheart says, “Fuck me like you hate me,” it takes a few seconds to register and then you must choose. You can decline, if you’re a fucking pussy. You can go through the motions, though it won’t be convincing and you don’t want to, not during intimacy with the one person who’s supposed to be an escape from faking it. But how can you convince yourself to hate her? You’re supposed to turn off your childhood values and tune out the buzzwords that are blasted from propaganda screens 24/7 and reduce her to orifices deserving of loathing and spit in her mouth and squeeze her carotids and call her a worthless slut?

The honest move is to hate her for asking. For femdoming you into dominating her. For using you. For forcing you to be a man, not just here and now, but in the thousand microscopic acts of toxic masculinity necessary to put her into your bed. You hate her for her hypocrisy: for being so progressive, for looking so powerful, and yet still being—you tell yourself—programmed to submit.

And that’s the endgame, the single byte of privacy that can never be stripped, the only inexhaustible source of desire in a hyperreality: the fetish for the lie itself.

Now change camera angles: I’m fascinated by the popularity of Lana Del Rey, whose lyrics and videos set 50s Hollywood and Badlands imagery in the modern day—one video starts with Lana and her ear-gauged beau in front of a rippling American flag—among 1st and 2nd generation immigrants living in Harlem, a demo that also makes shrines to Hepburn and Monroe. A whitewashed mythos that couldn’t be more of an anathema to well-intentioned progressives, and yet to the Youtube comments in Portuguese this ahistoricism is exactly the point. The nonfiction past weighs heavy on the Google-doodling present, with its malign or obsequious reminders of difference, while the hyperreal past offers a clean break, an American grandeur that has no modern heir—and so a chance at assimilation.

It’s no coincidence, then, that Lana repeatedly refers to her boyfriends as ‘Daddy’: it’s the same democratization via the hyperreal, the last resort and logical conclusion of identity kink. Everyone has a father, he’s innately an authority figure, and the name requires nothing from its bearer: no restriction on race, looks, strength, or demeanor; if a guy wears Nike Air Monarchs and spends the weekend in a furor about sorting the recyclables, that just means he’s the real deal. Men grouse and grumble about this, but they’re supposed to, it protects them from the shame risked by asking for the role. “She dotes on my every need and wants me to randomly inflict ‘funishments’ on her for unworthiness. It’s like, what can I do? She’s crazy.” This “craziness” then incorporates itself into the glamour of the fetish. ‘Video Games’ opens with three silent seconds of alien skyline, spavined towers piercing red thunderous clouds, and then the music starts and we return to Lana and grainy footage of skate parks and pool parties: None of this is real. I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true? [5]

Sounds bleak, but isn’t this what we wanted? Think about how perfect it looks when the camera zooms out from the hundreds, thousands, millions of lying and entwined bodies. The women look so powerful, and yet this does not diminish their delicacy. The men look so gentle, and yet this does not diminish their strength. Women with an intangible aura of power! Men wounded enough for plausible deniability! EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO SEE! EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO HEAR!



That’s my interpretation of that Bladerunner clip, anyway. Heartbreak is the goal because the defeated have societal permission to tell their stories without shame. Then again, maybe that reward isn’t enough. In the last few seconds of the clip, Gosling looks down at his gun.

I’ve noticed that some women tell stories about past relationships with a sort of compulsion, to anyone within earshot. The stories are told well enough that they must have been told before, but with such urgency that the essential point must have never been quite communicated. Certain words recur: “jerk,” “asshole,” “gaslighting,” “emotionally abusive”; emphatic, imprecise words; words that try and fail to describe a wrongdoing that no checkbox quite fits.

So instead there are examples: “He made me feel small in front of my friends.” “He was super cold for no reason when we were on vacation.” “He broke my phone.” “He kept using Tinder.” “He threatened to kill himself.” “He screamed at me when I didn’t want to go down on him.” “He wouldn’t come and pick me up from the ER.” “He broke my phone again.” “He would wear headphones and ignore me when I cried.” The physical abuse stays subtle enough to seed doubt: a blocked doorway, a shove during an argument, refusal to wear a condom, coercive violence masked by a context of kink.

The prelude to these offenses is the same: The woman breaks character and the man’s worldview collapses. He’s performed so much, and yet…After everything I’ve done for you? The relationship was based on a lie: She’s nice enough, and from just the right angle…On debt: I can learn to like her. But it is impossible to maintain a single lie. A lie corrupts everything. It forces honest words to arrange themselves around it and in so doing become dishonest. A new equilibrium crystallizes, a new truth. And so when she lapses, however slight, the whole relationship is called into question. The relationship that assigns roles, the relationship that is the sole basis for his manhood. So he has to hurt her, in some small way. The hatred smolders from that day on.

“You know it’s funny, when you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags,” a sad witch once told me, quoting, she explained, BoJack Horseman, shortly after giving me 10,000 words on the minutiae of her ex-boyfriend’s brand. I guess once you get burned, you can’t help it: you tell the full story, and whisper, “Please don’t be this.” But though I wasn’t the person she described, I couldn’t help noticing that if I was, she would have just told me who to pretend not to be. And I didn’t have the heart to correct her, but I don’t think the metaphor works. The flags are still red. It’s everything else that’s changed.

VI.



One question remains: cui bono?

In my third year of med school, I rotated in a specialty that I did not like. Let’s call it “Surgery.” Midway through, I was called to the course director’s office for feedback. This doctor, whom I didn’t know well, was tense with bureaucracy. A stiffness of the neck, jokes with no humor but timed for a laugh, an inquiry in each sentence regardless of question mark, or maybe it was that her family photos were turned towards my side of the desk. She read a list of templated praise—I was accused of being “enthusiastic” and “professional”—then she paused, smiled, and asked how I thought things were going.

Reader, the rule is simple and ironclad: never trust a bureaucrat who asks for candor. But candidly, things were not going well. Each day I spent 5a to 6p in the hospital and accomplished maybe one hour of useful work. Most of this hour was spent filing out a spreadsheet that was redundant with the electronic medical record and of unclear purpose. A script to automate this was rejected for reasons also unclear. Although I had to be present for surgeries (forearms scrubbed thrice, cap, mask, glasses, gown, gloves, unable to move hands above nipple line or below waist), my role was mostly limited to inflicting the same fate on the patient (eyes taped shut, tube up bladder, tube down throat, gauze between lips, arms wrapped at side, sterile blue covering all but the relevant flesh). Talk was discouraged, screaming unidirectional. The fire alarm went off daily, the emails were marked urgent. Both were ignored. The same trauma page went out for simulation mannequins and real bodies; in my one hands-on experience with the latter, I learned that new defibrillator models offer, I kid you not, constructive criticism. “PUSH HARDER,” it said. The man’s broken ribs were floating on so much blood that the sensation was of pushing crackers down into soup. He was very dead, which was no doubt why I was allowed to participate. “PUSH HARDER. PUSH HARDER. GOOD COMPRESSIONS! PUSH HARDER.” “This isn’t your fault, it’s not working!” someone said. The machine didn’t care.

So, it was like any other job, albeit unpaid, but my presence was so useless that it called the rest of my education into question. Our grade was for a) #enthusiasm and #professionalism—which, ironically, lead to a covert arms race of ass-kissing between students, some of whom never returned to speaking terms—b) a standardized test of factoids unrelated to our hospital work, and c) several mindless assignments that were essentially grade subsidies. Why? Why all the mandatory lectures and quizzes and essays in the first two years of medical school? Why $50k per anum? Why did I need a baccalaureate? Little was pertinent, less retained, and for my future income, none of it mattered, save the rubber stamp of attendance, and my scores on the standardized tests, on factoids, which I could and did learn at home.

I said, "I’m not sure what my role is on the team. Sometimes I feel a little lost.”



The bureaucrat went to absolute zero. “Explain what you mean.”

“Well…”



“Has anyone been bothering you?” the bureaucrat said, “Mistreating you?“

Came out of nowhere. “No, I don’t think…”



She leaned forward: “Sometimes residents or doctors can behave problematically. And we can do things to help, if you’re being mistreated.”

At last I understood that I was being encouraged to rat someone out.

Was I being mistreated? Not like that. Medicine harbors plenty of jerks and assholes, sure. My theory is that it’s because med schools have such high standards: when you demand perfection, you select for perfect people—there are a few—and many, many liars. I was prepped for my admission interviews by an esteemed local doc who advised the university pre-meds. “Keep your narrative in mind and come back to it no matter what,” he told me, “They want coherence. Never answer the question they ask. Answer the question they should have asked.”

Seemed like a bug; I now realize it was a feature. Acing the interview is an end in itself, because if you can fake it that well, you’re not going to dilute the brand. Bryan Caplan says students go to college for signaling. Colleges pick their students the same. They don’t care if first years Silk Road smart drugs in ethics class: They care that their students brand themselves as ethical, which is why attendance is mandatory but the assignments are ungraded. If you’re neurotic enough to jump through the hoops of an irrelevant bachelor’s degree and irrelevant research and irrelevant community service—intrinsically good, sure, but which have nothing to do with reading an EKG—then you’re not the type that risks misbehavior; and the more time-and-money debt you’re in, the more you have to lose by rocking the boat. Clincher: This arbitrary complexity can be used to lobby the State. “Here’s why only doctors who make $400k are qualified to change this bandage. Nurse practitioner what?”

So I was right: Surgery was never about learning. Every minute and muscle fiber accounted for by a regimented task—it was more like a boot camp. The boot camp proves to the officers that you’re willing to suffer, a tenacity which may have use-value or may not, but either way separates the zealots from the merely interested. It creates loyalty through debt and promises the power such loyalty brings: “I don’t like being yelled at, of course,” a future plastic surgeon told me, “but I really like the idea of being the guy yelling.” And the boot camp convinces everyone involved that any future good fortune has been earned. So when someone observes that “healthcare costs are driven by price, not utilization” and that prices are largely set by a cabal of financially-interested specialists, the brass can reply, “Are you kidding? Do you know how much I suffered for this?”

Admitting my distaste for credentialism would have been a failure of the real test. The bureaucrat was trying to protect herself and also a star pupil. Naming names would exculpate both of us.

We haven’t quite reached the #MeToo chapter, but in that debate, here’s a question I’ve never heard asked: why don’t men falsely accuse women of rape? The patriarchal legal system should be on their side, right? You can hedge, “men don’t want to admit weakness, even falsely,” but I assure you there are plenty of men who would happily prostrate themselves if it let them hurt a woman with power.

However, even those men have an instinct for self-preservation. And if you go to HR about rape there is a high pretest probability of being (illegally) intimidated, demoted, or fired. Empathize with the amoral, profit-maximizing bureaucrats for a moment. Once an accusation is made, true, false, or complicated, there is liable to be: clocking in late, crying on the job, minor acts of sabotage, and split loyalties among coworkers. The bottom line has no patience for such workplace drama. The verdict must be clear and unanimous so that no one wastes time talking about it: either the accuser shuts up, or someone—accuser or accused—has to go.

The company would like to fire the less valuable employee, whomever that may be, but if that employee goes public with a tale of injustice, the company might lose more from bad press than they would from firing the higher-valued employee. So if you go to HR, they perform a calculation: How likely is the story to go viral? It matters how plausible the story is, as it should. But race, class, gender, brand—of perpetrator and victim—are just as important.

The math works out well for accusations against celebrities. Almost guaranteed virality, and if the accuser is a free agent, the celebrity’s employer cannot buy silence with threats of termination.

But here’s a different hypothetical: a famous surgeon (white) was working for the first time with a new resident (Asian) and the latter made a mistake. Not a surgical mistake—he asked a question. A little too casually. Talked back. Broke rank. The surgeon went on gastric bypassing but a few minutes later asked the resident where he was from. “Japan.” “Ah! Japan!” The surgeon talked about a few cities he’d visited. The resident laughed. The surgeon then launched into a story about a visiting Japanese doc, who had stood “with his hands like this” and watched a procedure silently up until the most intricate part, when he said [the surgeon did a voice]: “Oh…may I…attempt?” In moments, the visitor had finished the procedure. “Could barely speak a word of English, but an absolute surgical genius,” the surgeon said, “We could use a hundred like him.” The resident laughed weakly and was quiet.

The intent was clear and the effect precise: humiliation. Also maybe to allegorize something about immigration and social currency. But good luck reporting “he did a funny voice” to HR. And if the resident did, what’s the best case scenario? Woefully in debt, newbie in town, can’t leave the program without a black mark, the resident has zero leverage—and that’s the problem. I don’t dispute that harassment policies sometimes help workers, use them and any other resources at your disposal. But institutions like harassment policies out of pure self-interest. Racism and sexism are bad, but there will always be racists and sexists. By framing the problem in those terms, as a zero sum game between individuals, the real issue—being unable to fight back—is ignored, is defined out of existence.

Which leaves only one explanation: “It sounds like maybe you’re not making the best use of the curriculum,” the bureaucrat who controlled my grade said. “We make our residents write ‘constructive criticism.’ Yours is: ‘It’s clear that he knows the material. He needs to be more confident! Take the initiative! Speak up on rounds!”

An expectation floated between us. I said that she was right. I said that I had some anxiety and was working to open up. And she nodded—stiffly, but with limitless understanding.

VII.



So we arrive at #MeToo, late. The consensus take—using shame as a proxy for justice is unfair to Socrates, but when wronged you’re allowed to Kill Bill a mofo by any and all means—is fair, but addressed to the ghost of a movement. As is the nature of hashtags, the initial crisis morphed into a seasonal ritual, complete with costumes and magic words to be spoken, and a seemingly unstoppable momentum was revealed as a pendulum swing now gently ticking with the passage of time, much discussed, ever-present, never pressing: equilibrium.



We can trace that first swing from the Weinstein report in the Times (10/5/17) to the Aziz Ansari story in Babe (1/13/18). Same day, The Washington Post replied “Ladies, let’s be reasonable about #MeToo.” Next day, The Atlantic published “The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari.” Two days later, the Times bait-and-switched, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader,” and I witnessed the following exchange:

A: [link to the Atlantic article]

A: the whole thing is super interesting

B: yeah it’s definitely causing a lot of discussion

A: yeah

Then the topic changed. Equilibrium.

Fundamentally, I agree: Weinstein is a psychopath, Aziz’s worst crime is having stretched out vowels into a comedy career. The Babe exposé was so atrocious, however, that you’ve got to wonder why it was allowed to exist. The allegations against Weinstein and others were filtered through the Pulitzer-winning objectivity of excerpted quotes, “emails,” “lawyers,” “previously undisclosed allegations.” C.f. Babe:

Before meeting Ansari, Grace told friends and coworkers about the date and consulted her go-to group chat about what she should wear to fit the “cocktail chic” dress-code he gave her. She settled on “a tank-top dress and jeans.” She showed me a picture, it was a good outfit.

After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. “It was white,” she said. “I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.”

This is insipid—the hot takers obsess over it—and could easily have been cut if you were supposed to take her side. You’re not: The Babe story was born to fail and thus define the boundaries of #MeToo.

Aziz is a liminal being. He’s 35, near the border between millennial and Gen X. He’s feminist-lite. He’s brown-skinned and a second generation immigrant. His politics are between liberal and leftist. And though his accuser was a girl he met through his celebrity, he had no direct power over her and the wrongdoing did not occur at work.

Result: His behavior was judged to be on the margin of acceptable. Aziz doesn’t show up in the Times list of misconduct cases, and interestingly, neither does James Franco (40), despite accusations of impropriety by at least five women. In fact, of the 71 men, there are only six under age 40 and only one under 35 (Ed Westwick, a British actor).

You can explain the geriatrics as a correlate of wealth. It takes time to get rich, and as 80s feminist icon Catherine MacKinnon put it, “economic power is to sexual harassment as physical force is to rape.” But like, really? Steve, the masturbating hobo of Penn Station, does not appear on the Times list. Creepy bodega owners, handsy bouncers, lascivious masseurs, fuckboy purveyors of dick pics—nada. You’re ignoring most harassment if you just hit the finance majors, but that’s not what’s happening either. On the list, I count 29 men in entertainment, 19 in journalism, and 14 politicians. Is this representative of economic power? Is Garrison Keillor one of the reptilian elite? Does “Hollywood” or “Washington” or “The Media” have a problem with sexual harassment? Or is it not a coincidence that these three fields happen to be those most dependent on public approval?

I’ll repeat myself: most of these men deserve punishment. But if you decide blow is permissible but the evils of crack cocaine are not, and it just so happens that most crack users are black—well, you have to wonder about intentions. And when the demographics of the accused are considered, it appears that #MeToo is only incidentally about gender.

The people claimed the right to observe the execution and to see who was being executed. The first time the guillotine was used the Chronique de Paris reported that people complained that they could not see anything and chanted, ‘Give us back our gallows.’

…And yet the fact remains that a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared. (Discipline & Punish)

Contrarian folk-hero Michel Foucault once defined the two historical modes of punishment as “right to death” and “power over life.” The former was meted out in the name of the king: it was his “right” to punish, and the punishments were symbols of his rule. Hanging, pillorying, mutilating, branding, and the chain-gang—penalties were overt, public, and prurient. “If the executioner…managed to cut off the head with a single blow, he showed it to the people, put it down on the ground and then waved to the public who greatly applauded his skill by clapping.’” Glory and infamy surrounded the criminal as well, and crowds not infrequently rioted, either to free him or to tear him apart themselves.

Foucault states that this ritual vanished with the Enlightenment and the replacement of the aristocracy by the capitalist bourgeoisie. Now punishment acquires a humanitarian rationale: to re-educate, to reform. The death penalty wanes. The prurience fades. Punishment becomes a solemn duty meted out in private, becomes individualized, and then ceases to be a punishment at all. Instead, it sublimates into guidelines. Changes in infrastructure. Confessions of aberrance, classification, treatments for-your-own-good. Preventative measures. Power over the way life is lived. Silent, insidious shame.

I’ve spent most of this essay discussing the second mode. But the spectacle of the scaffold never quite left us, because the class that benefited from it never quite disappeared. The values of aristocracy, who derived authority not from their labor or even the labor of others but from symbols of such rule, live on, decentralized, in our pursuit of social currency. Some careers are more dependent on social currency than others, of course. If I had to name three, I’d say: entertainers, journalists, and politicians.

No wonder there’s pleasure in watching trials-by-shame. Weinstein had shock value, caught us off guard, but after the Louis CK allegations the takes were 50% memes, 50% smug iterations of “life comes at you fast.” For you, bystander, that’s the benefit of #MeToo: to create the illusion that something is being done, that your social currency has brought about justice—the branding of flesh as torture, circa 2018.

Here’s the irony: by a completely unrelated mechanism, something is being done. Since the “workplace drama” of sexual harassment is, in fact, bad for business, harassment has to stop:

A four-year residential college is what sociologists call a total institution: it controls the conditions under which students eat, sleep, work, and party. “You can just imagine all these contextual dimensions in college that could be tinkered with to create a less stressful, less hard-drinking, more respectful environment,” Hirsch said. The assumption is that some college students are committing sexual assault when they don’t intend to, and that many are more vulnerable to sexual harm than they ought to be. (The New Yorker)

That’s the basic power-over-life idea of “Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sexual Assault on Campus?”, published a month after AnsariGate, which describes a $2.2-million Columbia research project, headed by a psychologist and an anthropologist, to “classify student identities” and modify structural risk factors for sexual assault. It sounds vaguely dystopian: it will probably be very effective. But since few results are mentioned and wouldn’t be deipnosophist-able anyway, the article has to convert the project back into social currency. Hence the dramatic,

Hirsch looked at her closely. “Do you want to do this with me?” she asked.



And cutesy asides,

“Snacks, we learned, were a really big thing,” Hirsch said.

Which serve no purpose except to warm us to these bureaucrats and advertise their endeavor. “You’ve heard about sexual assault on campus, but don’t worry—at Columbia University, Something Is Being Done.” [6]

So, score one for the bourgeoisie. But note that the aristocracy benefits from these articles as well: By agreeing to advertise megacorps as woke, they remain arbiter of what a woke business is. Do you remember that nonsense about Youtube Kids?

It was a typical night in Staci Burns’s house outside Fort Wayne, Ind. She was cooking dinner while her 3-year-old son, Isaac, watched videos on the YouTube Kids app on an iPad. Suddenly he cried out, “Mommy, the monster scares me!”

When Ms. Burns walked over, Isaac was watching a video featuring crude renderings of the characters from “PAW Patrol,” a Nickelodeon show that is popular among preschoolers, screaming in a car. The vehicle hurtled into a light pole and burst into flames.

Okay: I sympathize. Had the right branding, actually a copy of Videodrome. We’ve all been there. The kid will survive being scared by the monster, I promise, and your delirium tremens both a) isn’t helping, and b) speaks to the arrogance of privilege, a certainty that you will never see a guy gargling his own vomit after a heroin OD or even a masturbating hobo.

This is as fake as fake news gets. The 0.005% of Youtube that is Cronenberg should be removed, but will always exist, is the price you pay for the zany user-generated content that makes kids prefer the site over edutainment bullshit that will make them #childfree by 16. But that doesn’t slow the Times’ agenda: case studies from Indiana, Utah, and Tenness