May 10, 2010, was an important day in my life. Not birthday important, or free book day important, or free Laffy Taffy important, but important nonetheless.
Actually I can’t remember the exact date. I picked that one because it sounded good. It’s almost alliterative. In fact, in the Kabbalistic tradition, those numbers mean… absolutely nothing because Kabbalah is silly bullshit.
So imagine with me, if you will, a date. In fact, you can pick whatever date tickles your perineum. Got it? Good.
On this day I did something that changed my life.
It was the day I read 20% of the international bestseller, “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Now after you’re finished groaning to yourself, let me explain myself and my moment of metanoia.
It didn’t arouse me. I’ve been accused of being a bit puritanical sexually. Maybe in response to reading it, or rather reading as much of it as I could, I have strengthened the firmness and fortitude of both my pre- and post-coital handshakes.
It didn’t offend me because of its explicit content. I’ve been aware of sex ever since I was five when my mother threatened to shove me back into my dad’s cock. I must confess I heard this as “clock,” and, as a result, it wasn’t till much later I understood the look of horror on my father’s face as he limped out of the room, both hands firmly on his groin as if it might fly away. This event is possibly the reason for my irrational fear of both cuckoo clocks and the Pink Floyd song, “Time.”
It didn’t introduce me to BDSM. I was introduced to that by reading the works of Marquis de Sade, the man so diverse in his deviant sexual proclivities that his name was the foundation of the word sadism.
It didn’t open me up sexually, help me understand people’s sexual desires, or make me more accepting of people’s sexual appetites. I still think a lot of the things other people enjoy during sex are fucking weird, because well… they are.
It didn’t make me buy more leather. I already had enough to graft a farm full of severely burned cows.
What it did, is it made me stop recycling.
Once again allow me to explain. For those of you who weren’t educated in a pinko hippy free-for-all elementary school without Pavlovian bells and an adherence to strict Emersonian standards, or who haven’t lived in New York City, where not recycling is a crime punishable with hundreds of dollars of fines, recycling may not mean the same thing to you as it does to me.
To me, it’s the one time as an adult I feel like a superhero. Hell, I’d wear a cape when I did it, up until I got sent to that therapist, but that may have been because I never wore pants with the cape and hummed my own theme song.
In the previously mentioned school, recycling was sold to us as the easiest way a person could save the world, and we all believed it. My juice box will not strangle an anthropomorphic cartoon singing salmon on its way upstream; it would become a part of low-grade off-white paper that would smear the eraser marks on my shitty drawings until I crumpled them into the blue bin, and then it went on to make even shittier paper. Thus the circle of sustainable consumerism lived on.
Well actually, they said the easiest way to change the world was the golden rule, treat people the way you want to be treated, which I’ve never bought into for two reasons. One: Fuck people.
Two: It doesn’t apply to masochists. Cause, let’s face it, they aren’t gonna beat themselves up. That’s up to us well-adjusted folks with a penchant for self-destructive addictive behavior, and adoration for damaging relationships, emotional and sexual frigidity, and/or stupidity, and media-enforced body image issues.
So recycling for me is tantamount to the feeling I had when I was a kid and tied a towel around my neck and protected the house from cops and robbers. Each time I recycle something, I feel empowered and self-important, so much so that George Carlin’s bones are clawing at their coffin, salivating at the chance to kick me in the short and curlies so hard I fly into traffic, where a leaking honey truck, drags me to the wilderness for the wolves to do their bidding.
Each time I recycle something, I feel like I’m saving the world.
So all this begs the question: Why the hell would a book — a book I didn’t read all of and didn’t care for — how could this book make me stop recycling?
The answer to that is rather simple.
After reading a brief excerpt of this pile of compressed excrement — I pause here for a moment while those of you who are fans of this work may just say to yourselves, “Alfred, you’re just jealous that nobody loves you, and that you haven’t written a worldwide bestseller.”
To the former I retort, that’s not a very nice thing to say, or alternatively, you must know my family. To the latter I say, while I applaud your use of Aristotelian argumentation, and thus the expression of the teleological argument that spite is always at the route of true outrage, I say to you ignoratio elenchi, colloquially known to the non-pretentious, as missing the point, much like petty bickering solves nothing. Or, alternatively, well of course I’m jealous, doesn’t make me wrong though, so go fly a kite. Or even more alternatively, your momma.
After reading this book, I was appalled to find that the main male character was an abusive rapist. Now I’m not sure how familiar all of you are with the BDSM community, but because of the risks of injury and death, there are strict rules. As an expression of intimacy or love or consenting debauchery, whatever the case may be, the goal is to enhance the sexual experience, not to hurt the other person or persons. Well, not to hurt them too much anyway. Now while I personally think that the better part of the BDSM experience is a bit like putting a good book into a meat pie and trying to sodomize it while eating it, that’s really not the issue here.
The main male character ignores safe words. A safe word in a rough sexual drama is necessary, to denote when pleasure-pain turns to pain-pain. Or, to be vulgar, when a breathless “Fuck me” turns into a shrill panicked “Fuck you” with several exclamation points.
In case you still don’t get it, a safe word, in vanilla sex terms, means, “Stop right now,” “No,” or “I really, really, don’t like what you’re doing.”
Anyone who breaks those rules in the confines of a sexual relationship is, by definition, a rapist.
Now there have been worse characters in media, but in this supposedly more enlightened age, the fact that millions of women were beguiled into making a fictional rapist a demagogue and emulating the behavior of his victim’s Stockholm Induced participation, a la “Polly” by Nirvana, robbed me of the little shred of hope I had for humanity. So, like I said at the top, I stopped recycling because suddenly the world wasn’t worth saving.
I puttered about for a week or so, wrestling between my urge to tell everyone about this revelation and my urge to just give up entirely and move into the woods.
It was about two weeks later when I saw someone litter on State Street. When I say “litter,” I mean, juggle two bags of dog shit, an iPhone, a leash and a big gulp, pitching all of them except the phone and leash into the street. I got enraged, but I had a plan. First, I thought, I’m going to punch that granny in her freakishly childlike face, and then I’m going to pick up that garbage and be a hero.
But then I remembered that I didn’t care, and didn’t recycle anymore. Somewhere in the distance Barbara Streisand’s “The Way We Were” played, and I started to cry, because I hate that song, and I’m a Midler fan.
When I was finally able to get a friend to listen to what had both devolved and evolved into a three-minute rant about the sorry state of the world, which the success of this book wouldn’t allow me to ignore, I found myself confronted with another ugly reality.
As my friend put it, You make excuses for the things you enjoy and find to be important art-wise, why shouldn’t other people be able to do the same? And if you thought the book was good, you’d probably be defending it.
I stood silent for a moment, before the subject changed, and didn’t mention another word about it. We parted ways.
Then I started thinking about the real people I’ve made excuses for, to one extent or another: the Marquis de Sade, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski and, in the early days of the accusations, Bill Cosby.
The Marquis de Sade. Well, his work was a parody. You know, like Machiavelli? Machiavelli was a supporter of the republic and a proponent of democracy when it was still a twinkle in its father’s eye. With Sade it’s the same kinda thing, so when he was writing about a bunch of rich libertines kidnapping a castle full of men, women, boys and girls to rape and stuff with excrement, he was talking about the system, man. Open your eyes! OK fine, he was a grimy hedonist and a horrible 1% shitbag, but he was such a good writer. Besides, who hasn’t accidentally gotten period blood on them or vomited on someone mid-coitus? Oh, you haven’t? Yeah me neither.
Michael Jackson? No way! He had more money than God, and he owned The Beatles’ back catalog. Nobody with that amount of money and talent would ever do anything like that. I mean if that were even possible, there would be a lot of people who turn to music and art as professions to escape from inner torment.
Woody Allen did what? No way, that’s just the plot to “Manhattan.” He married her? Well… see that’s a man who adheres to family values. You know what they say: If you can’t keep it in your pants, keep it in your family.
Roman Polanski? Do you know his life story? Parents murdered in the Holocaust, pregnant wife stabbed sixteen times by the Manson family, which is 11 more than they needed ‘cause five of the wounds were fatal, they just wanted to make sure they killed the baby. Anybody who had lived through that trauma would never inflict horror on another person. Wait, he admitted it? Well, I mean technically he’s not a pedophile, he’s an ephebophile, ‘cause the gal was in the 15 to 19 age range. And you know how they are in Europe. No, that doesn’t make it right! I think it’s horrible and disgusting, but it’s primarily because of my cultural upbringing. Technically most sexually healthy people are chronophiles, I mean I love older women, not like Harold and Maude old, but older. Should I be judged based on our particular society’s ever-changing stringent rules of decency? Drugged? Well, shit — have you seen “Chinatown”? It’s like the best movie ever. What do you mean, how can I watch that? It’s amazing, and it came out before he committed a crime against God, humanity and the universe abroad.
Bill Cosby would never — Goddamn you, Bill. Now I can never listen to “Chocolate Cake For Breakfast” ever again.
There’s an odd cognitive dissonance we can achieve with musicians, filmmakers, actors and the like.
I recently had a discussion with one of my good friends while writing this, lamenting over the use of the word, butchered, when relaying a story of a horrific murder or a grotesque performance. The use of the word, butchered, in either of those contexts, though I’ve been guilty of it myself, makes me wonder where these people get their steaks and cheese. Butchering is an art form. It takes a skilled artisan to make those cuts, which are the complete antithesis of the mauling the oft referred to “butchered corpses” receive. It just isn’t right.
Butchers also get the short end of the stick because they can’t utilize the loophole we’ve created for artists and musicians. Imagine, if you will, the world’s greatest butcher. This butcher always cleans the knives and slicer in-between cuts for the more finicky or dietary-restricted customers. The meat, fish and cheese are always fresh, the cuts supple, round and taut, has vegetarian options for customers who can’t make it to a further store, and never, ever, puts a thumb on the scale. Can you imagine this person committing a heinous crime, like the aforementioned artists, and people defending this butcher because of their skill with a blade? So they [insert heinous unforgivable act, preferably in a verb in the past tense] — he or she makes the greatest cuts of filet mignon, remember those ribeyes? And the rump roasts? Shit, don’t even get me started on the rump roast.
Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance distilled to a couple of sound bites is similar to Orwellian doublethink, as it allows people to hold two disparate ideas while reaching a conclusion that adheres to their inherent prejudices, be they negative or positive, to achieve a sort of mental balance, weighted down by obvious logical fallacies. Self-justification or apologetics develop for otherwise illogical or reprehensible behavior.
It’s things like this that allow us to justify our racist, misogynistic, transphobic and homophobic ideas.
It’s also what allows the media and corporations to create terms like “ excited delirium” and have them be accepted (until very recently) by the National Association of Medical Examiners, the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, and the American College of Emergency Physicians. For those of you who don’t know, Excited Delirium was the prime cause, according to the Fairfax PD in the death of 37-year-old Natasha McKenna, the woman who died as a result of four or more — the numbers may never be released — brave officers defending themselves from a disoriented schizophrenic 130 lb, 5’5 woman in a hospital gown, shackled to a chair. Authorities claimed her death was the result of excited delirium and not from having a group of officers shoot her in the chest four times with 50,000 volts of electricity.
You may be asking what Excited Delirium is. Well, it’s paranoia, removal or lack of clothing, incoherence, hyper-aggression, sweating, a rapid heartbeat, and the perception to others that one may have superhuman strength.
Now while that may sound like either being drunk or the results of a person with severe mental illness being put upon by a group of officers in attack formation, the law and part of the medical community don’t share that opinion. Even though the phrase, “excited delirium,” in this context was created by the tasers, it previously only applied to people who had taken too much clinical cocaine. Paranoia and incoherence were indeed present in Ms. McKenna’s last words, “You promised you wouldn’t kill me.” Which I have no doubt were used to demonstrate her state of excited delirium as no one at this time in history could rightfully expect that behavior from an officer.
Cognitive dissonance, an explanation that, at its core, is arguably no different than me excusing the horrific behavior of people whose work I enjoy.
A slightly nicer example is Chinua Achebe’s landmark essay on Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” Achebe was able to accurately describe the infantilization of African people in the landmark work often touted as a racially progressive book for the era because it highlighted the horrors of colonialism. Achebe famously announced it should no longer be considered a great work of art as a result of these shortcomings. However, when he was later questioned about the rampant misogyny in his landmark novel, “Things Fall Apart,” he was able to dismiss the accusations, based on the fact that his work was an accurate presentation of life in Nigeria at the time.
Whether you think “Fifty Shades” is art or not, and it sure as fuck isn’t art, it made me take my language and presentation and male gaze more seriously, and stirred me to return to my readings of scholarly works on feminism and sexual relations. I could attack the horrors of fiction and allow their faults to influence my behavior negatively, but fiction is where cognitive dissonance belongs. While reality can’t fight the negatives of fantasy, fantasy (be they songs, physical art, movies, books, delusions of grandeur, or hope) can all fight the negatives of reality. They can be a force for good, a force for change, either raising the human spirit to soar like a phoenix or rebuilding a foundation on more equivocal and less flowery grounds.
By the time all of this had occurred to me, I was finished with my 1.5-hour commute home, Bette Midler was crooning “Wind Beneath My Wings” into my headphones, and I was fired up. So I headed inside, took off my pants, put on my cape and took out the fucking recycling.
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