The Souls of Yellow Folk

by Wesley Yang

  “I think where I’ve had my biggest and most positive audience is in recently democratized countries—Ukraine, Poland, Burma, and Indonesia,” he says. “In places like that, I’m still a rock star. In places like that, the End of History writings allowed people to see themselves as a broad historical movement. It wasn’t just their local little disputes; there were deeper principles involved. And to be able to go to those places and tell them that they are on the right side of history with regard to political change—to this day I’m touched by it. To be able to go to Kiev and tell people there that democracy still remains the wave of the future—it’s in those moments that I feel most fully that I’ve made and am making a lasting contribution.”

  The Guardian, 2014

  PART III

  8

  INSIDE THE BOX

  I KNEW ABOUT BRITNEY SPEARS a few months before the rest of the world. What I mean by this is that I was a viewer of The Box in 1998. You could call into The Box to request a video, and the idea was that at some interval after you had made your call, the video you had requested would appear. I sometimes thought about doing this, but the logistics of it seemed daunting to me, and I could never muster the nerve. Instead, I was content to watch the videos that others had chosen, which were not the videos I would have chosen. To judge by the videos that did play—and there seemed no difference between this pseudodemocracy and the usual kind of preprogrammed channel, since the same handful of videos rotated with numbing regularity—The Box catered to an “urban” demographic underserved by MTV, which was then in a transitional phase of its existence, long past the heroic days when it featured gender-bending synth-pop from limp-wristed limeys with a perpetual sob in their voice, and just at the beginning of Carson Daly’s brazen ascent at Total Request Live (TRL).

  The Box played the trashiest videos by the trashiest acts with the lowest production values. And many of these videos showed a lot of skin, which made them an indispensable resource to young men caught in the New Jersey suburbs. Back then, in the days of dial-up Internet access (and it may be hard for our younger readers to conceive of this), it was hard to find things to masturbate to if you weren’t ready to admit—as mostly people weren’t, back then—that you were a disgusting pervert willing to spend money to see women treated like objects in front of a camera.

  If you had one of the old cable boxes, you could press channels 3, 5, and 7 simultaneously and get a flickering, distorted look at the Playboy Channel. Sometimes the screen resembled a gold mosaic bearing the faint outlines of an image; other times a chaos of harsh colors in scrambled flux. Occasionally, it would resolve into a clear image, though only for a few seconds at a time. You would see a breast surging in slow motion as it passed through a sprinkler, brushed by the water’s prismatic spray, or cutoff jean shorts shucked off onto a hay bale. Or a car wash would degenerate into a naked sudsy free-for-all. Though you could not hear, you could imagine the various soundtracks—the perfunctory fiddle and banjo accompanied with the airless Syndrum beat; the warthog growl and squeal of a neon-pink B.C. Rich, as the guy with the black-painted fingernails eased off the whammy bar. Time was short: You had to be ready to respond to these inducements, to answer the call to solitary arousal.

  If you wanted to see a picture of a penis penetrating a vagina, you had to venture out to a former warehouse space on the West Side Highway and pay $25 for a magazine that came hidden in a brown paper sleeve. You had to put yourself in the company of seedy characters bathed in blear light amid the all-pervading odor of ammonia. If this was your interest, you desired something known then as “hardcore” pornography, which was ostensibly against the law as recently as the early 1990s. It was a curious time to be trapped in the hormonal tempest of that period of life—between the Meese Commission’s report on pornography, and the publication of Catharine MacKinnon’s groundbreaking work on sexual harassment (and more than thirty years after the release of the Beatles’ first LP)—when one of the consequences of sexual exploration was death from an incurable illness, and when Christian morality and radical feminism both inveighed against what the consumption of pornography was doing to the heart and soul and loins of a people.

  We took these dire admonitions at least partially seriously, we earnest youth of America, because though we didn’t really believe in any Christian creed, we believed that there was something inherently precious and singular in everyone (but particularly in ourselves) that deserved to be loved, something that was endlessly fragile and needful of protection. Even if we held the hysterical aspects of campus feminism at a remove, we believed that equality was the foundation of the true love that would express itself in an intimate, mutually fulfilling eroticism. That’s what we thought back then.

  My mood in those days was somnolent. I drove a 1989 Nissan Pulsar NX that my parents had bought me for $500. I was working as a reporter at a free weekly newspaper in East Brunswick, New Jersey, earning $15,482 a year and living in Milltown, New Jersey. I would drive down a peculiar strip of Route 18 that looked like one of those long tracking shots that filmmakers rely on to establish a mise-en-scène of anonymity and cheapness—those garish colors attenuated by years of grime, those ghostly commercial icons suspended on massive pedestals projecting into the sky, and all those tons of polished metal darting around the off-ramps bearing their vulnerable human cargo. You grew accustomed to risking death at the jug-handled turn ramps that were unique to New Jersey highways. It felt like the end of the world.

  The music I preferred on these excursions were hissy dubbed cassette tapes of Glenn Gould playing Bach in that bludgeoning, affectless style he invented, so remorseless in its inhuman power. The music, turned up all the way so as to be audible over the wide-open windows—the car had no air-conditioning—felt a little bit like purgatory, and a little bit like anesthesia, and most of all like the cold rapture of thought struggling to transcend its surroundings. I’ve never felt as alone as I did in that little box, the hot wind battering my face, cutting through those desolate stretches of big-box stores, passing through the newly built subdivisions that had sprung up on raw pastureland. But sometimes, when the music was high, and the sun was a hot smear at high noon, or you were hurtling down an empty stretch of road at night, you felt the immense power of the car you were driving to propel you beyond yourself and into . . . Jameson called it the hysterical sublime.

  Those were the days when (if I wasn’t watching The Box) I would work my way through the dense thickets of the pseudophilosophical jargon that proposed to name this condition in which I was living, to dignify it with a lofty vocabulary that radiated a paranoid dread that seemed to be the only feeling worth feeling back then, the only feeling that was real and alive. What was this malign historical stasis I was living through, that my own life seemed so helpless a product of, in which there was no fate beyond bored passivity in the face of capitalism’s triumphal march?

  When I first saw Britney Spears on The Box, in the fall of 1998, what I thought about was Britny Fox. Now, Britny Fox was a terrible hair metal band that had scored a hit earlier in the nineties with a song called “Girlschool.” It featured a classroom full of Catholic schoolgirls gyrating to the beat in defiance of a stern teacher. They roll up their shirts to expose their abs, and muss their hair, but they don’t go any further—there isn’t anywhere further to go. Thus the video, which started off promisingly, reaches a narrative impasse, and the women just keep swaying around in the classroom for the rest of the song.

  But that was a sexist video by a horrible hair metal band that exploited women. Britney Spears was something else—an inflection point in the culture. TRL’s arrival in Times Square was an important signpost in that neighborhood’s new identity. Giuliani’s quality-of-life police ran out the junkies and the prostitutes. Disney remade the square as a gleaming, candy-colored monument to anodyne, family-friendly, corporate-sponsored mass entertainment. Britney, the former Mouseketeer, literally straddled the divide between Times Square’s old and new identities.
It was a further elaboration of the “winner take all system” that still obtained in the world of 1998, whereby all the money that might once have supported an ecosystem of joke-tellers in the Catskills was sitting in Jay Leno’s pocket. Instead of an army of diseased whores, there would be one perfectly airbrushed youth whom the whole world would watch together.

  Now, none of this became clear to me until the spring of 2001, when Pepsi ran an amazing ad in which Bob Dole is sitting alone in his bedroom, bathed in that eerie blue light cast by the TV screen, watching Britney Spears dance around singing an anthem of generational change that is also a paean to Pepsi. And this one-handed war hero and presidential aspirant who was, by that time, better known as a commercial spokesman for Viagra, is as engrossed by the image of the young Spears as any man who would like to have an erection but requires the help of cutting-age technology would be. His dog barks, and Dole says: “Down, Boy.”

  And there was something about this moment more eloquent, radical, and true than anything I had read in those candy-colored paperbacks. It was like a wild utopian novel condensed into a single, electric image: freedom, spontaneity, youth, and a sexuality that was boundless, innocent, and all-encompassing confronting age, authority, infirmity, limitation, subsuming and vanquishing it. Or it was like a dark dystopian satire folded into an instant: a man of power and authority prostituting himself to the seduction of a dream world concocted by corporate masters who feed out endlessly deferred dreams of power, success, and love in the name of fizzy, corn-syrupy water. The commercial did not merely suggest, but actually demonstrated in the most palpable way, that no man had the dignity to rise above this fate.

  Most of all, it was a picture of the world as it was, it felt like the American present, and it felt like life. I went on Amazon and liquidated what remained of those theory books while they still retained some value. It was the spring of 2001 and American prosperity was at its height. We had elected George W. Bush president, Britney Spears was the biggest pop star in the world, and I had finally acquired a broadband connection. I was ready for what was to come.

  n+1, 2009

  9

  ON READING THE SEX DIARIES

  SO THERE’S THIS IPHONE APP called Grindr. It’s a GPS-enabled social-networking service for gay men. It tells you how many feet away a possible hookup is standing. Each profile comes with a picture, a tagline, the relevant stats, and a declaration of interest. You scroll through a column of heads and torsos arranged in descending order of proximity, tapping on the ones that seem promising and chatting with the ones who want the same things you do. As you make your way through the city, the menu of men reshuffles, and the erotic terrain updates in real time.

  Has the search for erotic gratification ever been so efficient? Until recently, being a cad or coquette took a lot of work: You needed to buy a little black book, and you had to go around filling it, and then you had to schedule your calls for a time when the target of your seduction was likely to be at home. The less self-assured daters in New York faced the sickening anxiety of the first phone call, or the cold approach in the bar. There were palliatives designed to help people cope—the newspaper personal ads, the paid dating services, the dirty videos and magazines—but they were generally understood to be the province of weirdos and losers.

  No more. The social technologies that assist in dating and mating today are more than palliatives—they’ve changed the nature of the game. If the cold approach is more than you can deal with, put up a Craigslist ad, or join OkCupid, Manhunt, or Nerve. If the phone call makes you nervous, send a text message. And while you’re at it, send a text message to a half-dozen other people with everyone’s favorite late-night endearment: “where u at?” If nothing works out and you find yourself alone at home again, simply fire up XTube or YouPorn and choose from an endless variety of positions to help you reach a late-night climax.

  Virtually everyone under the age of thirty has grown up with their sexuality digitally enhanced, and the rest of us are rapidly forgetting the world before we all were hooked into the same erotically charged network of instantaneously transmitted messages and images. This must be true across the country, but it seems particularly suited for a city as dense, morally libertine, and sexually spirited as New York. Part of the promise of this city has always been that there’s another prospective partner a subway stop away, but not until recently could that partner interrupt your daily business with a cell-phone snapshot of their parted thighs. And of course, the same technology that makes it easier to score also makes the sexual boast or confession easily transmissible to millions of other people.

  Every Monday since April 2007, this magazine has posted on its Daily Intel blog a seven-day diary of an anonymous New Yorker’s sex life. It began as an experiment intended to entertain the bored at work, but the candor of the Diarists soon attracted an outsize and devout following. Since October 2007, they have been joined by a rambunctious cacophony of commenters as obsessive on the subject of sex as the Diarists themselves. They criticize, malign, offer support and tips, and digress into arguments about everyone else’s sex lives, as well as their own. The Diaries are often flooded with over 100 comments within 24 hours. Two months ago, the comments on one diary were closed down at 895.

  Over the course of the Sex Diaries’ 132-week run, we have seen the city through the eyes of cuckolds and cheaters, sluts and prudes, victimizers and victims, starry-eyed lovers and detached pleasure seekers. We have followed aging women on dismal Craigslist dates, lonely gay men in pursuit of ostensibly curious straight guys, happily polyamorous couples, and codependent serial monogamists. We’ve watched some Diarists terrified of succumbing to their feelings and others unable to feel much of anything at all. We’ve watched a black man fly to meet a white couple at a TGI Fridays in the Midwest and have sex with the wife as the husband watched.

  The Diaries can be arousing, a little. But in aggregate, they wound up doing something more interesting: They cracked open a window into the changing structure, rhythm, and rhetoric of sex in New York. The Diarists are a self-selecting group, of course: bizarrely oversharing New Yorkers motivated by the impulse to brag or, as often, the urge to fling their terrible abjection in the face of the world. But as we watched them struggle with the peculiar hazards of mating in New York today (failing spectacularly, or succeeding all too well), we saw that their hassles were everyone’s writ large, and their stories posed a question: Are the digital tools that make it easier to find sex compounding the confusion that accompanies it?

  The editors of this magazine asked me to read all 800 pages of the Sex Diaries, and, using them as a source text, develop some kind of taxonomy of contemporary sexual anxieties. (Let others parse Chaucer, my role was that of exegete of “The Polyamorous Paralegal.”) So that’s what I’ve done. Herewith: ten things that seem to be making our playful, amorous youth crazy.

  1. THE ANXIETY OF TOO MUCH CHOICE

  A fact so readily apparent that it has escaped reflection: The cell phone has changed the nature of seduction. One carries in one’s pocket, wherever one goes, the means of doing something other than what one is presently doing, or being with someone other than the person one is with. Take this excerpt from a thirty-one-year-old straight male Diarist (“The Transportation Coordinator Seeing Three Partners”) living on the Upper West Side:

  12:32 p.m. I get three texts. One from each girl. E wants oral sex and tells me she loves me. A wants to go to a concert in Central Park. Y still wants to cook. This simultaneously excites me—three women want me!—and makes me feel odd.

  This is a distinct shift in the way we experience the world, introducing the nagging urge to make each thing we do the single most satisfying thing we could possibly be doing at any moment. In the face of this enormous pressure, many of the Diarists stay home and masturbate.

  2. THE ANXIETY OF MAKING THE WRONG CHOICE

  A Diarist with any game at all has unlimited opportunity. A few find this enjoyable and are up to the task: Identif
y the single best sexual partner available, or at least the person most amenable to their requirements at the moment. They use their cell phone to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead. This can get complicated quickly, however, and can lead to uneasy situations.

  An inordinate number of Diarists find themselves at the brink of enjoying one sexual experience, only to receive a phone call or text from another potential suitor. They become a slave to their compulsion and indecision. Consider these snippets in a week of one Diarist, who is deeply conflicted between Pseudo and Ex:

  2:55 p.m. Pseudo G-chats me. Looks like he might be interested in hanging out tonight after all.

  9:30 p.m. Meet up with Ex and friends at bar. Text Pseudo to see if he’s up for doing anything.

  2:20 a.m. At a bar with Pseudo and other friends. Ex drunk-texts me: “Wanna fuck?”

  3:17 a.m. Half-bottle of wine plus mucho beer plus a few rounds of shots leads to me texting Pseudo, “Let’s get out of here and go back to my place.”

  3:18 a.m. Pseudo texts back, “I don’t feel like dealing with you.”

  11:45 p.m. At a bar with Pseudo. Ex drunk-texts me.

  1:30 p.m. Ex calls and wakes me up. Says he needs to talk in person.