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.

postcard from another "bleeding-heart nympho"

I think I've marveled before at the serendipity of the Netflix queue. So often, it seems that what arrives in the mail--whatever I may have added months ago--reflects something uncannily timely.

This weekend, I got a little film called The F Word. It's an odd film in that it's hard to keep in mind that the whole thing isn't real, so documentarian is its style. In the film, Joe, a radio talk show host, takes to the streets of NYC on the last day of the 2004 Republican National Convention-- and that day just happens to be the day on which his teeny indie station is being shut down by the FCC for not paying some extortionistic obscenity fees. The show itself is called The F Word mostly because its primary discourse surrounds first amendment rights ("F," I think, is meant invoke not just that f-word that in the most concupiscent of Carlin's 7 Words You Can't Say on Television, but also the F in "freedom.") Hence, the pointedness in the plot device of the FCC's iron-fisted edict.

As Joe ventures forth, he stops to interview all sorts of folks, attempting to capture as many different opinions on the re-nomination of Bush as the Republican presidential candidate in 2004. I honestly have no idea how much of what his interviewees said was scripted and how much of it flew out of their mouths in rough draft form. For most of the film, Joe meanders in and out of the crowd of 500,000 people who were protesting the RNC in one of the largest political demonstrations in the history of our country. Remember that? It was all over the news. Oh, right. It wasn't. The so-called liberal media totally squelched it. Barely a mention of it made the national news shows. But it did happen. 500,000 people of every political stripe-- the pro-military conservatives, the run-of-the-mill liberals, the anarchists, the libertarians, the Green Party-ists, the hippies, the women's rights proponents, the angry, the disenfranchised, the gung-ho, the opinion-havers--took to the streets and, by and large, the news media ignored them. And Joe tries to talk to as many of them as possible. And it's only when the credits run that you realize that all the people with whom he speaks are actors, with real names different from the names of his interviewees. Lending some realism is the fact that there is real footage of the protest and the convention itself interspersed with the low-budget handicam stuff in which you see Joe and friends. Reminding you that we're dealing in fiction, however, is a fairly odd dream sequence (which we learn was originally meant to be a drug-trip sequence in the "deleted scenes" portion of the DVD extras) starring Sam Rockwell.

The film was released in 2005, just a few short months after the second inauguration of our less-that-illustrious current lame duck. Clearly, it was meant to be a document of its very specific moment, and not much more. Toward that end, I'd say it is most successful. Here, I think I mean that it illuminates a remarkably stark contrast between this current election season that of 2004. In fake interview after fake interview, the left-leaning portion of the folks made it clear that they were not voting for John Kerry. They were voting against Bush. And those New Yorkers were pissed that he was using their city, one of the most progressive cities in the country, as a pulpit from which he could spew his retrogressive vitriole and 9/11-exploitative, hot-button-y rhetoric. But they would've been pissed anyway. They'd watched in helpless dismay as this man led the country in a direction they did not like for four years and were then hollering for a change of course as loudly as they could. Needless to say, not too many of us heard them. Thanks again, "liberal" media. Way to have our backs.

The frustrations and fears of these people are palpable in the film. But so is their resignation with regard to embracing a candidate like Kerry. One of the ugliest truths of the last election that the most devoted party-liners amongst us felt no real love for John Kerry. He was better than Bush, but he was milquetoast. Neither offensive nor inspiring. Simply palid. Beyond that, he was just too damn conservative. And therefore alienated a bunch of us who were supposed to be his base. A mistake, I'm afraid, Hillary Clinton might have repeated this go-round.

Four years ago, the DNC held their convention in Boston. Does anyone else remember Obama taking the stage at that convention? I'm sure you do. Before that, I'd seen his picture in a few magazines. I think I'd heard him give a short interview or two on morning news shows. He was engaging, handsome, smiled easily and beatifically. He looked like a politician. But on that night of the convention when he spoke, I was dutifully watching from my parents' kitchen, hoping to get just a little fired up about the candidate for whom I'd doubtlessly, eventually, vote. I had just finished my MFA. I was unemployed. I'd just ended an important long-term relationship. My personal footing was off-balance and I was scared about everything-- my own life and my country's.

When Obama began speaking, something just...shifted. He didn't make Kerry seem any more appealing but he reminded an awful lot of us of the essential humanist ideals for which our party is supposed to stand. A lot of folks talk about "drinking the Obama Kool-aid" or "being hypnotized" by his style-- and maybe some of that has gone on. Maybe a lot of us really are wowed by the more superficial aspects of his presentation.

I, however, choose to think there's more to the man. And that there's more going on in this election.

Now, several of my blogging friends have suspended usual blogging activities to focus primarily on this election, and I've been glad of it. Their blogs have been the source of many a YouTube video that I've forwarded around to my politically akin friends. However, I decided I didn't really want to do that. Based on pretty much everything I've ever written here, my political persuasions should be readily discernable. Though I am certainly as liberal as humanly possible about a lot of things, I value my civil liberties above all and therefore sometimes find myself resenting the limitations on those liberties imposed by well-intended liberal legislation... and casting furtive glances toward the civil libertarians. But because I've been so transparent about my beliefs up to this point, I figured who needs any more ramblings from yet another "bleeding-heart nympho?"

However, watching that movie has put me in a mood to spill out some of my reflections on our current campaign season. Please forgive me the cheerleading that is to come.

The morning after Obama's speech at the convention, two young black kids in black suits rang my parents' doorbell. I answered in my pj's, against my better judgement. The first thing they asked me was, "Are you happy with the way the country is going?" I probably snorted and said, "Um, no." Then one of them said, "Do you have any hope that it'll get better any time soon?" Right then, some little tremor of emotion pricked up through my throat and nose, as Obama's "I-don't-believe-there's-a-red-America-and-a-blue-America" speech rang in my head.

To my surprise, I told these kids, "Yeah! Yes. I honestly do!" They looked at me a little dumbfounded. Apparently, I'd inadvertently upended their script. They then handed me a couple of issues of The Watchtower, the dogmatic publication of the Jehovah's Witnesses' church. Oh. Of course. That's why they were there on my doorstep.

Now, these were two kids-- they couldn't have been much older than 16 or 17-- who'd pointedly been denied access to information on the political goings-on in their own country for their whole lives. Their church taught them that it is not the place of men to govern each other. God's, after all, is the only power that matters. As this was the belief system in which these boys were raised, they were scarcely aware of our country's two-party system-- let alone one rising-star senatorial candidate from Illinois. They had no idea that Democratic politicos from across the country were meeting in Boston at that very moment. And among those politicos was a man who was to be the first serious contender for American president who shared their skin tone. And that that was a big deal. Probably, they didn't really care.

But I wasn't lying when I told them I had hope for our country based on that speech. Truthfully, I developed a big ol' ideological crush on Obama that very night. Throughout all the hemming and hawing of the primary season, I knew he was my man. And no, I do not think that my early preference for him over Senator Clinton makes me any less of a feminist (quite the opposite, actually, but that's something for another post). I'm not in love with everything he's proposing -- I'm wary of tax breaks for anyone in a time of such extreme national debt, I do not think his proposal for maintaining the employer-based model of health insurance goes far enough towards dismantling and rebuilding a very sick system, and I honestly don't know how he's going to afford a lot of what he wants to do-- but I see something rare in this man.

I've been reading articles lately that criticize Obama's unflappable, cool demeanor and call him "detached." These articles warn us of a disengaged, do-nothing president, so passionless that he will be unable to rise to the occasion of any real challenges. I read those articles quizzically because, in my mind, detachment and disengagement are not the same thing. In a perhaps more Eastern mindset, one could define detachment as the opposite of attachment. Detachment would then include the notion of the ability to step back from one's own biases, recognize them for the the biases they are, and then make a more objective decision that wouldn't be possible if one stubbornly insisted upon standing by one's initial opinion. That's not disengagement at all. In fact, I might argue that that's a more fully engaged position that the unquestioning assertion of singular truth to which our current president is famously predisposed. Furthermore, I might argue that this capacity of detachment, if it's really present in Obama, makes him uniquely qualified to lead the sniveling, bitching, whining, partisan, bickering masses of us. Could it be possible to have a president capable of rising above the fray every once in a while? My goodness! What a boon that could be.

Beyond that, Obama is thoughtful. He is mindful and he values intellectual discourse. These aspects of the man's character are as transparent as daylight. Those are things I value in a leader-- as well as a person-- and they're not things I see as readily apparent in John McCain. Certainly, Bush's hokey anti-intellectualism and misplaced accusations of "elitism" are diametrically opposed to that for which Obama seems to stand. Diametrically.

However, I want very much to be able to say that I'm not voting for the character of either of these men. I want to say that I'm voting for the man who's written the platform more closely aligned to my own belief system than the other one's. And fortunately, that happens to be true. The courses of action McCain has planned seem short-sighted at best, catastrophic at worst, from every angle at which I look at them. I do not think it's a mere regurgitation of campaign rhetoric to assert that he will perpetuate and calcify mistakes that have merited Bush the lowest approval rating in history. I really do think Obama's ideas are simply more practicable and more sound. And would benefit the greater number of people.

However, there is no denying that it takes a special kind of charisma to inspire a center-right nation to vote a more progressive candidate into its highest office. Now, I'm writing this when we're still two days off from the election, buoyed on the optimism of the current polls. But even if the polls are wrong and we wind up with another four years of misguided conservatism, I think it's still clear that something in this man has sparked a light in the voting constinuency. And that's new.

The F Word really did hit the spot, in so many ways. Not the least of which is that it points at the possibility that the Democrats of Tuesday, 4 November, 2008 will not be voting out of lack of alternatives but out of, dare I say it, hope. And out of genuine, if cautionary, excitement about Obama's leadership, his character and his policies. How far we've come in four years, eh?

My polling place is about two blocks from home. When I walk over there Tuesday morning, I'm anticipating doing so, not with resignation that I'm voting for Senator Not Awful, but with goopy, sloppy elation that, for the first time since I've been of voting age, I'll be voting for a candidate in whom I believe. Goddamnit. That damn near brings a tear.

Correction: another bleeding-heart nympho dork!

More specifically, though, I'll wont' be voting against McCain, but for Obama. That's the difference 4 years makes.