But in truth we surrendered long ago, and to a totalitarian claim on the imagination that is far subtler, and far harder to see, than any of the spectacular regimes that populate our entertainment. A necessary project is to make this system visible. As novelist Daša Drndić once said, “There are no small fascisms.”
Another magazine cover: In February of 2019, Esquire published “The Life of an American Boy at 17.” Ryan Morgan, the subject of this profile, is not the kind of American boy a police officer could get away with murdering, nor the kind who kills himself because his parents send him to a camp that tortures him into loving differently. In fact, the magazine seemed to have chosen Ryan as a provocation or dog whistle, as if to reinforce the presumed, blank whiteness of “American boy” in a nation where many boys are not white, and in fact nothing like Ryan.
Words, though, are not blank; “American” and “boy” are not white. But it is their history, their usage, and their context in this country that make them feel otherwise. When this history and context are overlooked or taken for granted, especially in mainstream publications, that bias can leap off the page and affect the way people live, or die. The way writing—especially journalistic writing—is taught and evaluated helps reinforce this bias. According to the mainstream criteria of journalism, Jennifer Percy’s article is well written; she is almost entirely invisible. Only once does she intrude, as the author, to challenge what Ryan says—his minimizing remark about baseball player Josh Hader’s homophobia. It’s the only part of the piece that stakes an ethical claim. Otherwise, Percy leaves uninterrogated Ryan’s support for capital punishment, his stance against abortion and safe sex, his misogynistic views on the social roles of boys and girls, and several other beliefs that, as he enters his local polling place for the first time, will affect real people’s lives.
Instead, we are meant to form our own opinions about who Ryan is and “what it means” for a seventeen-year-old straight white boy in a conservative municipality of Wisconsin to have these views. Thus, the piece is written as if Ryan is an unfamiliar or exotic subject for profiling when in fact he is the institutionally approved median, or “neutral,” of young masculinity in the United States. Ryan is at the center of two centuries of culture, entertainment, law, education, art, and politics. This country was built, mostly by enslaved people, for boys like him.
I, for example, have always known who he is, because Ryan is the model I was supposed to imitate—at least until my sexuality got in the way. It’s not only insulting that a mainstream publication assumes I can’t see him—that any queer, any person of color, or any girl or woman, can’t see him. It’s cruel. And it seems a deliberate cruelty, because all Esquire did was re-emphasize this neutrality, this apparent normative ideal, against which the rest of us read as un-American.
Clinging to a false neutrality like this only strengthens the ideologies of whiteness and male chauvinism. Percy may not have written this propaganda on purpose, but neither is Ryan, on purpose, a bigot whose unchallenged ignorance can and will harm other people. This is what people mean when they lament the inevitability of “the system”: Percy is doing what the system asks of her—recording what happened and who said what—and doing it well. Ryan is behaving like the boy the system wants him to be. Jay Fielden, Esquire’s editor at the time, proved equally faithful to this system, in which words are supposed to be transparent, self-propagating tools of something called civilization. They are, we are taught by this system, objective.
Like any ethically unmoored aesthetics, these are behaviors and beliefs modeled after imitation, even play. We imitate forms of beauty, for example, because those are the forms our culture calls beautiful, and then we call those imitations beautiful. This is how genres come about—images cleaved from one another and labeled, which seems to be not only the great project of Western art but of Western civilization. These words—genre, order, species, class, medium, gender, archetype, trope—and many like them are the legacy of European thought, which has named, ranked, divided, and classified nearly all of human experience, and placed it in jars of formaldehyde. “American boy,” for American readers, connotes someone like Ryan thanks to centuries of this kind of thinking.
In these systems of classification, what starts as science spills into politics, ethics, art, and even, via Freud, our imaginations. Freud’s temptation, as one of history’s great mythographers, was to diagnose all personalities, to excise each from an illusory normality to which no one is bland or blank enough to belong, and then pathologize civilization itself: “The super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual . . . May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become ‘neurotic’?” Immensely creative—a genius of pattern recognition—Freud applied a scientific vocabulary to the literary or mythological imagination, erasing and rewriting real personalities belonging to real individuals. Like Marx or Hegel, he created a total system; anything can be assimilated into its definitions.
Adhering to Freud’s mythography are the archetypists, whose work, while seductive, is predicated entirely on this erasure of individual life. In 1990, Camille Paglia published Sexual Personae, the first of two volumes of psychoanalytically saturated art history. Her insistence on gender performance, identifying men with Apollo and women with Dionysus, celebrates subjugation and destruction: “Male bonding and patriarchy were the recourse to which man was forced by his terrible sense of woman’s power . . . Woman’s body is a labyrinth in which man is lost.” Of course, she adds, not all men ruin themselves over their desire for women’s confusing and terrifying bodies: “By turning away from the Medusan mother, whether in honor or detestation of her, the male homosexual is one of the great forgers of absolutist Western identity. But of course nature has won, as she always does, by making disease the price of promiscuous sex.” (Since the HIV epidemic began, more than forty million human beings have died of AIDS-related illnesses.)
After reading Paglia (which is horrifying but rarely boring), it’s no longer possible to be shocked by the rhetoric of reactionary movements. Autocratic populism, white supremacy, misogyny, and other bigotries are one-dimensional theories that, on paper, create the illusion that the complexities of human life would disappear if everyone would stick to their role, regardless of how or by whom such roles—sex, race, creed, blood—are assigned and policed.
Like Freud, Paglia has no interest in the individual except as canvas. This obsession with reduction, with the taxonomy of sex and art, reaches its “economic glorification in capitalism,” or “the mysticism and glamour of things, which take on a personality of their own.” Capitalism, she writes, “is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture.”
Sexual Personae vol. 2 has yet to be published.
The path away from Freud is more interesting, and more difficult. If, in Paglia’s consciousness, the “thingness” of human existence is glorified, in Simone de Beauvoir’s it is abhorred. “Along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence,” she writes in The Second Sex, “there is also the temptation to forego liberty and become a thing.” To accept one’s objectification by a dominant culture is to accept one’s otherness. Culture itself is built on this reciprocity: “Males could not enjoy [their] privilege unless they believed it to be founded on the absolute and the eternal . . . Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.” As the political, economic, and biological sciences advanced, they too were co-opted and deployed to reflect these supremacist ideologies, and at great profit to those in power: “One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most humble among them is made to feel superior . . . The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.”
For de Beau
voir, there’s no such thing as “eternal” values: “Every objective description, so called, implies an ethical background.” It’s here where Freud’s ethical compass, after a lifetime of imposing identities, neuroses, and mythologies—particularly upon women—becomes nothing but a gnarl of projections meant to disable, disbar, delineate, and depress. Even today, when biology or chemistry are deployed as objective truth, it’s with a subjective and limited ethics: implying that gender is biological destiny, for example, or that same-sex relationships are unnatural because they cannot provide children. This is also (if less harmfully) fallacious from the opposing viewpoint—pointing to gay penguins, for example, as a scientific defense of homosexuality, or toward the neurological mapping of emotions as a way to prove literature has value in a consumerist society. Assigning chief epistemological importance to any one category of knowledge only means that whoever controls the category controls the culture—and who gets to live and thrive within it. Applied to any philosophical or technological system, the label “objective” is just a claim to ownership: This structure is meant for me, not for you.
The photographer’s compulsion echoes the pathologist’s—using the limits of the frame to separate this landscape from that, the self from its environment, and to call it the truth. But just as it is with ideologies, there is no objective photography; even satellite photos show the gaze of the governments and corporations that launched them.
In truth, whoever shares the image controls its context. Without careful consideration, quotation, and deployment, photographs—particularly in their reach toward even the most terrible beauty—dilute rather than elucidate meaning: “The aestheticizing tendency of photographs,” as Sontag writes, “is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it. Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.” Just as musculature, mountains, sunsets, voluptuous curves, and refracted light are made beautiful—part of our natural world—so too is death, pain, war, starvation, isolation, and subjugation. Contemplated amorally and quoted unthinkingly, photography is beautification in the service of power, celebrating a hierarchy of suffering as an eternal verity of life on earth. It becomes one more way to say, as in photographs of dead or dying children: This is how it is; nothing can be done. Searching for truth in beauty alone elevates form over individuality. An aesthetics without ethics is a violent erasure.
This amoral approach to the beautiful is a terminal one. In “Fascinating Fascism,” written alongside the essays that comprise On Photography, Sontag criticizes Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs of the Nuba in southern Sudan—published nearly forty years after Triumph of the Will—as reflective of fascism’s reductive, dehumanizing agenda. “What is distinctive about the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage is its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic,” she writes. Though the Nuba are Black and not Aryan, “Riefenstahl seems hardly to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films. And her portrait of the Nuba goes further than her films in evoking one aspect of the fascist ideal: a society in which women are merely breeders and helpers, excluded from all ceremonial functions, and present a threat to the integrity and strength of men.” Here again: nature, eternal values, biological destiny; thinkers like Freud and writers like Paglia have prepared us to accept these as “common sense.” Fascist and totalitarian movements promise this kind of hidden simplicity or universal translation—where animal nature prevails over cultural constructs, where what is meant to be is plucked from the chaos and brought to the fore. This is seductive because it erases contradiction, complexity, and hesitation, especially in increasingly complex, tolerant, and democratic environments. Thought becomes unnecessary. Speech—in images, in language, in art—requires no interpretation or interrogation. The inconsistencies that make us individuals cannot be tolerated. Fascism is pure form and we are destined to be shaped as its content, our lives superfluous.
For a nation that harbors such paranoia over the “thought control” deployed by totalitarian regimes depicted in our entertainment, both whiteness and male chauvinism (or toxic masculinity) seem peculiarly to alter one’s beliefs and behaviors, consciously or not. But this is where representation becomes important: We grow more fluent in our identities as we familiarize ourselves with an image vocabulary that is larger than any one self could contain. As we see and share alternative, pluralistic versions of ourselves and of others, we resist a capitalist species of totalitarian control. But this resistance depends upon seeing—or watching.
On the day the Esquire story was published, Fielden defended himself from its critics, calling contemporary America a “Kafkaesque thought-police nightmare of paranoia and nausea, in which you might accidentally say what you really believe and get burned at the stake.” A debate “used to be as important an ingredient of a memorable night out as what was served and who else was there. People sometimes even argued a position they might not have totally agreed with, partly for the thrilling intellectual exercise playing devil’s advocate can be.”
Later, Fielden alluded to “the digital Jacobins prepar[ing] the guillotine for me,” referring to criticism from people who are not like Ryan (which also means, it should be noted, people who are not like Fielden), and who had spent the better part of two days articulating why the piece was so offensive, especially during Black History Month. That Fielden would equate critical dissent from Black Americans with public execution is hatefully irresponsible in a country where those same Americans are murdered without trials if they’re even perceived to resist threats from police officers.
For many in this country, the continued valorization of a neutral, idealized whiteness—or of a standard way of being a man—brings literal death. When people say, This hurts, and Fielden responds with metaphors suggesting that he’s the person at risk, he creates an equivalence so disingenuous you’d have a hard time believing it, at least if you were as insensitive to whiteness and misogyny as men like Fielden—or boys like Ryan—seem to be. But if you are white or cis-male or both, it is an ethical imperative for you to see these ideologies.
The consumption and creation of images, like the usage of language, are political; every choice has behind it an ethics. There was a time in my life, for example, when I filtered Black and brown men out of my porn. This “preference” did not enrich my life, but impoverished it. Most white gay men might not consider this act of selection to be toxic, but what could be more poisonous to an already vulnerable community? In adhering to my racially and bodily based type, I’d instructed myself that gay men are acceptable like this but not that. To me, gay meant white and young and fit and no one else—another imagined neutral that is anything but.
Some myths, Barthes said, are ancient: “But there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and death of mythical language.” As a historical imagination, assembled by human beings, myth is a theatrical vocabulary meant to help us understand, with great pleasure, the natural world. But taken as truth, it is—like Paglia’s—a politics that erases its footsteps so as not to be followed or challenged. The myth of masculinity supposes men as aggressive, dominating, virile, and strong. Again, there’s nothing wrong with loving these qualities in men or in oneself. But so too can one love and cherish the way men cry out in helpless frustration when denied their orgasms, or how they curl up and sleep like cats when their fingers and toes get too cold. Men too can be soft, carried around a room, penetrated, consoled when they cry, and objectified as beautiful bodies; and this too is masculine—this too finds joy in the emotional and physical experience of testosterone. One doesn’t even have to be labeled male on one’s birth certificate to assume and perform these traits.
In truth, masculinity is as welcome a performance as any other, but only in the safety of its theaters—never imposed upon others, and never as a mask the self feels it can’t remove. Never, in a word, unsolicited.
“What we need is an ange
l,” de Beauvoir said, “neither man nor woman—but where shall we find one?” There is a reason totalitarian frameworks reject, quarantine, and exterminate what is queer. Queerness is the ultimate protest against fascist binaries, including those established and enriched by capitalism. Capitalism too is a total philosophy, capable of assimilating anything measured against the rigidity of its definitions. Like fascism, it seeks to divide, classify, rank, and describe. This is, after all, how one assembles a product catalogue. When it comes to queerness, the capitalistic framework is particularly careful to police its images, showing consumers the cleanest, whitest, and least-threatening characters in advertisements and entertainment. It says, Expressions of this behavior are allowed, but only as we’ve shown. In Chomsky’s metaphor, rather than reflect what is possible, capitalism “sets the bounds” for queer visibility and identity. Conversely, the celebration of gender fluidity, nonmonogamous relationships, bodies of every type, polyamory, communal households, pansexuality—even cosplay—are all acts of queer resistance; and not only against capitalistic predation but against any totalizing aesthetic mythography, Freudian or Marxist or Paglian or Hegelian or Smithian or otherwise. Queerness rejects absolutely the impulse to pin every butterfly to its board, place every specimen in its jar, and record every individual in the columns of its financial statements: profit or loss.
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