Freak vs. Perv: a battle for public opinion

Take, for instance, the really beautiful packaging and marketing of Agatha Bois' Carnival Wax perfume oil line. It's inspired by all manner of carnie oddities. Sexy, no? Intriguing, even.

Bearded ladies show their tits. Circus midgets dress for burlesque. The tattooed lady is usually just plain naked, her skin creating its own inky, illusory costume. Somehow the spectacle of carnival freaks is rarely not suffused with a certain kinky sexuality. Do you want to fuck the hot feminine body topped with the face full of very masculine hair? Does it make you a freak, rotted through with gender confusion, if you do? What about the girl who can't drop her uniform at the end of the day? She may be beautiful-- she may not--but you can hardly see her through her markings. To what deep-down dirty desire in you does her self-obfuscation speak? These are the implicit semiotics of the sexy circus freak.

OK, so, it stands to reason that, collectively, we'd have a hard time parsing sexual deviance from other forms of weirdness. After all, they make such a luscious, macabre and transgressive picture together. However, I mean to argue here that a conflation between perversion and a more generalized nonconformity begets a multi-stranded brand of bigotry that ultimately profits no one--except the people who seek to make themselves feel better about their own weirdness by scaling it next to the weirdness of those onto to whom the designation of Official Freaks is conferred.

This post, of course, is generated by the yesterday's death of Michael Jackson. Firstly, I should say that the day any celebrity dies is also the day thousands of other anonymous folks around the globe die. Practically speaking, I don't suppose fame lends more momentousness to one death than another. It really doesn't. People die. Big deal.

And even this death in particular. Sure, I was a little kid in the 80s. I have very specific memories associated with many, many songs in Jackson's oeuvre. Some of those songs elicit nostalgic affection and others, well, forgive me, get on my nerves. His celebrity in and of itself doesn't seem a thing worth mourning, for sure. But, even if you don't actually enjoy his poppy output in an aesthetic way, it's very difficult to deny that the spark of creative genius dwelt within him. I don't much like Elvis or Sinatra. Will I acknowledge they each contributed some rather remarkable accomplishments to American pop culture? Well, sure. Why wouldn't I?

But I'm no music critic. What the hell do I know about music? I couldn't care less how people take sides on the earth-shatteringly important, tremendously divisive issue of Michael Jackson's talent. What does bug me, however, is the way folks think a) they have a right to opinions about celebrities purely by virtue of their being celebrities (and, subsequently, how much they relish those opinions when they're negative) and b) their opinions are informed enough to be meaningful in the first place. My disclaimer here, of course, is that, no, I don't think everyone's entitled to an opinion. I think everyone's entitled to an informed opinion. If you don't feel like bothering to get informed, well, then, shut the fuckityfuckfuck up. (Also, whether immunity from strangers having opinions about your personality is something you sacrifice when opting into the fame-and-fortune game is a whole separate issue that would constitute a digression, so forgive me for not addressing it here.)

But sadly, I've been reading a lot of uninformed opinions about the man that Jackson was. Twitter's been full up to the brim with so many pedophilia jokes I'm half-tempted to run out and grope some boys my own damn self. (Shut up. You know nothing.) The reality is, folks, that we know very little about Jackson himself. We know there were charges brought against him. We know the father of the kid openly admitted he was after a hefty pay-out. We know our legal system offered Jackson full, unconditional exoneration on, not one, but two separate occasions.

However, we also know that calling Jackson eccentric is an understatement. This morning, I posed the following question on Twitter: why insist upon conflating sexual deviance with more generalized oddness despite multiple unqualified legal exonerations? In response, I got some layperson shrink-speak that I found sort of annoyingly presumptuous... something about symptoms of sociopathia or some such. To me there's a pretty grand disconnect between what we know of those who achieve stratospheric celebrity and what we could deduce from seemingly similar behaviors in our intimates. So, in general, playing armchair psychoanalyst to these people strikes me as a keenly fruitless endeavor. Celebrities aren't our friends. We have absolutely no context for their nuttiness. We are never given anything in reasonable semblance to the full story. Therefore any opinions we form around them are inherently uninformed, and therefore not worth much.

That said, please allow me a moment to engage in the aforementioned fruitless endeavor for just a minute. Before I do so, however, let me also say that I posit the following as pure speculation. I do not know what I'm talking about. I'm peering in at the life of Michael Jackson through a wee pinhole, same as you.

OK, now: it seems reasonably plausible to me that everything we've seen of Michael Jackson that appears aberrant to us "normal folks" is what might happen to a person whose psyche crystallized when he was a very young child. The high-pitched voice, the gravitation towards people who are of a similar mental age, the complete disregard for the value of money, the toys, the tree-climbing, the trouble anticipating the consequences of things like hanging a baby over a banister, the naming of his real estate complex after a fantasy-land from Peter Pan, etc., etc. -- I'm sure we can all think up a handful more examples. Everything about him suggests "child" to me. Not "pervert."

Perhaps you'll call me naive for saying that, but bear with me. Just hold the Jackson-as-developmentally-retarded model in your head as a possibility for just a minute. Now, we can conjecture further that the pressures put upon him during his actual childhood did some irreparable damage--we all know the story--and he then spent the rest of his life trying to escape the very grown-up burdens that were thrust upon him long before any normal human would have developed the proper mental tools for coping with them. Add to those burdens a particularly heightened sensitivity as is common among people blessed with inordinately impressive creative abilities? Roll him in chopped pecans and you've got a recipe for a real nutbar.

For the sake of argument, let's just say my own armchair-shrinkery up there is all completely dead-on correct. (What? It could happen.) Michael Jackson was a child who had unusual taste and had been given limitless access and money. Up to this point, all his behavior could be easily assessed as outcroppings of those parameters. So, what I'm wondering is when, exactly, in the course of our understanding of any authentic nonconformist, do we fetishize, eroticize and translate hyperbolic strangeness into full-on perversion? In this case in particular, I want you all to think back: weren't you saddened when you first heard about the accusations? I mean, Jackson was the quintessential eccentric genius when I was a kid. Even then, I remember feeling plain ol' disappointed that such a black mark would forever after be associated with him. And then relieved when it turned out that first kid's dad had put him up to it. Given, I'm not one who reaps some schadenfreude-laced reward from watching celebrities flail. Lindsey Lohan breaks my freakin' heart. But tell me honestly: did it not ever occur to you that there might be some merit to the idea that that kid's dad was an opportunistic fuck, who saw a freak and tried to exploit him on the basis that it wouldn't be too hard to convince the public that a freak is a freak in every way?

Let's stop for a minute and think about Michael Jackson's outward sexual persona(e). I've read an awful lot of people calling him "effeminate" and "creepy" and even "dirty." Personally, I find all those descriptors to be a realy quite divergent from my own perceptions (and, again, they are merely my perceptions). To me, Jackson's stage persona is actually aggressively masculine. He curls up his lips and bares his teeth like some kinda sepulchral coyote. That thing he'd do where he'd puff out his chest, throw back his arms and scream? It's the same kind of gesture you'll see, like, Wolverine make (OK, maybe Hugh Jackman's not the best example of raw, manly beastiness, but you probably get my point anyway). The pelvic thrusting, the crotch-grabbing? Those are not feminine dance moves. They, in fact, scream, "I have a penis, watch me grab it, thus asserting my status as a fully intact male." OK, you don't have to believe me about that either, but really. Just try. Watch some of these video clips of his performances running in infinite loop on every TV station ever right now. Report back to me what kinda swishy, girly preening he does. Honestly. I don't see it. But I'll eagerly await being corrected.

But what about his off-stage sexual projection, you ask? How can I deny his limp-wristed, twee little ways? Easy. I don't see any sexual projection when he's offstage. Again, folks, I'm just telling you what I see. You may well see something different and you may be right. But so might I, and here's why: he is a man-child. Well, not quite. Children often have very real, very perceptible sexualities. He is the man-child of his own platonic-ideal-of-a-man-child fantasy, i.e., a wholly asexual being, not particularly consumed with the "corrupting" impetus of sexual desire.

In the last several years, he's voided himself of virtually all secondary sexual characteristics--of either gender. On her blog today, Susie Bright said, "MJ was not only denied childhood, but his gender feeling, his sexuality— everything real about him had to be refuted." That's not something someone who wants a whole lot of sex does. His ongoing self-sculpture process, which, by the way, I do tend to conceptualize as part of his creative output, was not designed to be sexually attractive to anyone-- men, women, adults, kids-- anyone! His visage called up, not kinky sexuality, but asceticism. If you listen to interviews, he used the word "innocent" like a wistful refrain. His usage was not in the sense of "not guilty." He uses it to mean, alternately, "chaste" or "youthfully unencumbered." Try as I might, I can't see someone who goes to such lengths to de-sexualize himself and who so idealized the idea of "untainted youth" as one also consumed by lust for mid-pubescent boys.

Again, I, like all the rest of you, am only looking at Jackson through a weensy chink in the wall. But I don't see a pervert. I see an emotionally stunted whackadoo. And once again, with zero standing evidence supporting the accusation of child molestation, a whackadoo does not a pedophile make. If someone wants to find me said evidence-- and no, unmitigated conjecture doesn't count--I'll be happy to change my tune. But no one was able to provide it in either of two legal proceedings, so, for the time being, that's good enough for me.

What's more, I like whackadoos. Right. I know you're shocked. In my experience, an authentic nonconformist is rarely such by choice. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, being weird is not about getting attention. Sometimes garnering attention is a result of being weird and sometimes the weirdo in question really likes the attention, but the weirdness itself, from what I can tell, is nearly always self-propelled and self-perpetuating. When it's real, anyway. And as great as witnessing weirdness can be for all the rest of us (I mean, it is great. You are hardly ever bored in the presence of a strange human, even if the strangeness does, indeed, make you uncomfortable), it's a very tough way to live for the weirdo him- or herself. What I mean when I say that noncomformity isn't a choice is that, well, why would a person choose to feel alienated from every other human on the planet, at all times, if he or she didn't have to? Inevitably, a life spent swimming upstream leaves scars. And most of us are too chicken or too myopic to do more than glance askance at a freak's scars, for any number of reasons. The bizarre, the outre, the unexplainable-- they're all just plain scary for a lot of us. We do worry about contagions and all, don't we?

Ultimately, I think that what makes us so uncomfortable about Jackson is not that he may or may not have been capable of molesting children. It's that he screwed around with his own gender identity to such a degree that we don't have a framework for understanding it. That's unnerving for the herd. But then, what's so great about being part of the herd?

To that end, why, you ask, do I like freaks so much? Do I identify with them? Do I have some kinda romantic aspiration to be one? Am I secretly one myself, but cover well with all my good personal hygiene and whatnot? I can't say I want to populate my life with nothing but freaks--that would undoubtedly be a greater emotional load than I could bear--but I certainly adore the ones who grace my existence now (and there are a few--gleaming gems, all). As for whether I identify with them? Well, not exactly. Personally, I think I'm deeply, tiresomely normal. Why wouldn't the things I do seem perfectly normal to...me? In fact, I often grimace in the face of my own mundanity. However, oddly enough, most other folks with whom I interact, both cursorily and intimately, seem to think I'm kind of a whackadoo my own damn self. So, I supposed I've internalized a little of that feedback. I negotiate both spheres, perhaps. Neither very well, maybe.

I do think, however, that I'm pretty good at empathizing with oddness, whether or not I'm terribly odd myself. Or rather, I appreciate the pain of the abrasions caused by rubbing our culture the wrong way--and think flouting social rules that feel unnatural is a goddamn honorable way to earn those abrasions. And for that reason, I find I'm far sadder reading commentary that speculates about and makes light of Jackson's supposed sexual proclivities than I was reading of his death itself. Again, I don't care if you liked his music or didn't. I don't care if you thought he was a laughable fop or if you respected him as an iconic superstar of your childhood. I just hate to see a bona fide nonconformist get raked over the coals in the court of public opinion, primarily because of his inability to square himself with the rank and file, when the court of law found him blameless. That hurts my heart, people.

Beyond my somewhat kneejerk championing of our culture's rarities and throwbacks, however, I'm also fairly deeply concerned about the wider ramifications of, as I mentioned on Twitter this morning, the conflation of a more generalized weirdness with sexual deviance. How quick are we to assume that a person who deviates from the norm socially also deviates from the norm sexually? When you stop at your local independent coffee roaster (I'm watching you! No effin' Starbucks, ya here?) tomorrow morning, try playing the pin-the-thigh-restraint-on-the-kinkster game. Who is the weirdest person in the room? The the uber-friendly barrister who thinks forcing social interaction with sleepy customers equates with good customer service? The ponytailed girl with a Coach bag sitting at the sunny table? The girl with smeared kohl under her eyes and holes in her fishnets? My point is that social maladroitness, unusual wardrobe choices and sexual aberrance can certainly appear in the same person, but there isn't much more than a tenuous correlation amongst the three. In other words, not every tattooed lady is your good-time gal. But sometimes the redhead in the tasteful retro pin-up pumps is.

It's a crying shame to think that we have no way to conceptualize weirdness without fetishizing it and associating it with perversion. And make no mistake: sexualizing nonconformity does, indeed, fetishize it. The social consequences of not maintaining a cognitive distinction between eccentric behavior and sexual deviance can only ever be drastic and unfortunate. If you assume all nutbars are pervs, we may as well go ahead and force them to sign sex-offender registries right now. Yeah, let's restrict all their freedoms. Let's apply the most suppressive, most limiting normative dictums to the authentic noncomformists among us just in case they get a wild hair to stage a performative hog-fucking ritual in front of The Limited at your nearest shopping mall. Because you never know with those people. (C'mon. Try to tell me Michael Jackson isn't your Other. Just try.) Or, better yet: let's enact boatloads of legislation that restrict how we touch each others' genitals, how we get aroused thinking about the sort of genitals we'd like to touch, what sorts of tools we can use to touch each others' genitals... all on the grounds that both weirdness and kink are both inherently terrible, awful, very bad, no good things.

Except that neither of them are.

Here's where I land: There is a lovely edenic locale, somewhere between empathy for a tough life and appreciation for a talent of geologic proportions, that bids us resort to neither crucifixion nor idolatry. How 'bout we all go there? I bet they have carnies. And they'll hold you like the River Jordan.