!The worser the better
---
agk's diary
18 March 2024 @ 06:09 UTC
---
written on GPD Win 1
in bed too tired to make much sense
---
I'm helping my local Pride committee design an 18+
club for Pride weekend to be safer from overcrowd-
ing and heterosexual hegemony than last year.
I see thorny issues to protecting the space's
gayness, due to the "gender wars" that have for
years played trans against nontrans gays and
lesbians, at least in the ratings-obsessed sections
of the media landscape.
I've been thinking about the feminist sex wars of
the '80s, MTV's The Real World from the '90s, and
how intra-elite struggles, cast as populist, get
adopted or rejected by ordinary people.
Sex wars ('80s)
---
There was a fight between feminists in the '80s
that I know of as the sex wars. It ranged over
years and it included everything from fierce
rhetoric to pickets, legislation, blacklisting,
public shunning, court decisions, and the breakup
of long-running friendships and community projects.
The fight was in part over prostitution, porn, and
sadomasochism. Are they inherently "oppressive" or
"liberating"? All the little questions are way more
interesting than the big question. The conservative
anti-ho/porn/SM camp, in my opinion, made some
important arguments and supported bad legislation.
Some of the fight was also a culture war, between
defenders of "ordinary" women and defenders of
"elite" women. Like, "ordinary" women are beaten,
financially controlled, treated as objects, etc.,
because of power gradients that are tangled up in
porn and prostitution; but "elite" women have
negotiating power so can have fun and make money
"transgressing".
A half-generation before, conservative woman
Loretta Lynn sang,
> Now what was I doing?
> Jimmy get away from there
> darn, there goes the phone
> Hello honey
> What's that you say?
> You're bringing a few ol' Army buddies home?
> You're calling from a bar?
> Get away from there!
> No not you honey, I was talking to the baby
> wait a minute honey the door bell
> Honey could you stop at the market and... hello?
> Well I'll be.
> The girls in New York City, they all march for women's lib
> and Better Homes and Gardens shows the modern way to live
> and the pill may change the world tomorrow
> but meanwhile today
> Here in Topeka the flies are a-buzzing
> The dog is a-barking and the floor needs a scrubbing
> One needs a spanking and one needs a hugging
> Lord, one's on the way.
> Gee I hope it ain't twins again
Some of the strongholds set up by "radical" '70s
feminists addressed the troubles of Lynn's ordinary
woman. Domestic violence shelters, research, and
training for judges, police, nurses, teachers,
social workers, preachers, etc.; employment
protections, especially for white-collar and
secretarial women; separatist land retreats where
men were not allowed and other women's spaces, like
music festivals.
In the '80s, some of the struggle was over
allocation of attention, volunteers, donations, and
public dollars. Some was over respectability. Some
was over who would get to be unelected spokespeople
for women---important both for personal standing
and for which women were spoken about.
The sex radicals probably expanded access to
quality sex education, which may have helped
decrease unplanned teen pregnancy, and may have
made it easier for teen girls to report molestation
to enforcement systems the sex-conservatives
maintained. There may have been other synergies.
Also, backpage and craigslist made tricking less
dangerous for a while, queer non-heterosexual
identity flourished, some labor reforms happened in
the porn entertainment industry, and the stuff the
conservatives were safeguarding wasn't destroyed by
these modest victories of the sex-radicals.
Reality TV (1990s)
---
COPS went on air in my country in response to the
network needing programming to fill the gap caused
by a writer's strike. It was followed four years
later by MTV's The Real World, which was modern
reality TV. Young people lived in a loft rigged
with cameras and gave up privacy and dignity for
celebrity. They gave short "confessional"
interviews to add context to their arguments,
crying, or whatever.
It started out trying to be prestige television,
depicting [wikipedia says] "sex, prejudice,
religion, abortion, illness, sexuality, AIDS,
death, politics, and substance abuse." Reality TV
learned, though, that ratings don't take all that
work. All they need is messy, outrageous people and
interpersonal feuds. Same formula as professional
wrestling and soap operas.
Dolan and Frel wrote in Neighbors from Hell (2015),
> The network tells Rhonda to sob and be mean---
> She's paid by the tantrum,
> makes hundreds per scene!
> They film her daily, from breakfast to breakdown
> and applaud when she treats her close friends
> to a takedown.
> Rhonda stumbles along between botox and detox,
> and her big life dilemma is
> "White socks or pink socks?"
> Her three little monsters
> have learned mommy's rules,
> so if you ever see them, run home from school!
> They'll hurt you and hope it gets on the show.
> The worser the better, is all that they know.
Even as the exploitation of reality TV was
critiqued for commercialism and artificiality by
The Truman Show (1998), and in stronger terms for
its diversion from concrete material issues and
damage to participants by The Hunger Games (2008-),
social media influencers appeared, producing their
own lives as reality TV. Some grew into A-list
celebrities for their self-produced entertainment.
Celebrities are supposed to be rich, sexy, and have
a cause. Late-stage reality TV, Keeping up with the
Kardashians (2007-2021) ran concurrently with the
rise of influencers. The show was a 30-minute
commercial for Kardashian-Jenner retail stores and
endorsement deals. It wouldn't have been the
phenomenon it was without the family's wealth and
connections (OJ Simpson trial, Paris Hilton), Kim
Kardashian's sex tape, or the bland Conservative
wrapping monologue each episode about the
importance of family. Of course, their income was
dependent on their ratings.
The part about needing to have a cause is the part
that's most relevant to my thoughts in this essay.
To try to do feminist or lesbian stuff in today's
world, I have to wonder how it will impact the
followers of various influencers, whose take on the
issues often has less to do with questions of
nuance and care than with the feuds and outrageous-
ness necessary for them to keep their monetized
self in the limelight.
[A recent list, presented from the anti-trans or
"gender critical" perspective, is on the www by
Nina Paley as "Newbie's Guide to the Gender Wars."
The list is presented on the www without the shock
and outrage by longtime trans advocate Andrea James
as "Gender Wars anti-transgender playing cards."]
Influencers don't just directly monetize attention
through ads and endorsements. Those in the gender
wars, on both sides, also become the public faces
of networks of foundations, nonprofits, thinktanks,
lobbying organizations, and PAC and "dark money"
groups.
These networks grew up in the 1990s around "family
values" conservative evangelical corporate
Christianity, corporate Pride and LGBT civil rights
litigation, etc. They employ a lot of people to
call donors, write their grant applications, lobby
their politicians, update their spreadsheets, craft
their messages, make their powerpoints, keep their
books, provide legal council, etc. Their largest
funders largely control their agendas, and their
largest funders are billionaires: Pritzgers, Kochs,
Clintons, etc.
The stuff influencers are talking about gets really
outlandish and mean because that sells the ads.
Below the surface, it also aligns with the whims
and profit centers of the wealthy. For example, how
come there's such a battle over whether trans kids
can get very expensive plastic surgery? Whose whim
does that offend? Whose profit does that juice?
Here in Topeka
---
The gender wars also structurally resemble the sex
wars of the 1980s in rhetoric. The most coherent
"gender criticals" resemble the most coherent '80s
sex-conservatives with their concerns. Are ordinary
women's concerns---shitty dudes, employment
protections, pay gaps, unpaid caregiving, abortion,
pregnancy and children, women's spaces, etc---going
to be pushed aside by advocates for a tiny
minority? Will trans advocates gain the legitimacy
to speak for half of the population?
These are the anxieties of professionals and
managers, the people who operate in the network I
described above---not the entertainers, but the
office workers. Steve Waldman called their anxiety
"predatory precarity."
> ...if we haven't rigged our housing choice so
> that the local public school is good enough, we
> pay up for a private school. If we can afford to
> be choosy...we pay up for the private school that
> devotes significant resources to the searches and
> scholarships that deliver...a "carefully curated
> integration...that allows many white parents to
> boast that their children's public schools look
> like the United Nations." It is extraordinarily
> expensive to be both comfortable and some
> facsimile of virtuous. You'll never see as many
> rainbow flags as you see in Marin County.
>
> ...you are missing something important, as a
> matter of politics if nothing else, if you don't
> get that the people who are your predators
> financially are, in their turn, someone else's
> prey. Part of why the legalized corruption that
> is the vast bulk of the (dollar-weighted) US
> economy is so immovable is that the people whose
> lobbyists have cornered markets to ensure they
> stay overpaid are desperately frightened of not
> being overpaid, because if they were not overpaid
> they would become unable to make all the absurd
> overpayments that are now required to live what
> people of my generation (and race, and class)
> understood to be an ordinary life.
It's not novel to note trans people need decrimin-
alization, housing, education, and employment, but
trans advocates want to sell medical and plastic
surgery interventions. Anne Tagonist wrote about it
in 2009 on her livejournal.
It's not earthshattering to note that programs of
universal concrete material benefit like a national
health service funded by single-payer medicaid for
all, debt and loan jubilees for individuals and
countries, jobs guarantee, universal free daycare,
twelve weeks of family leave, progressive taxation
and estate taxation, and so on, would particularly
benefit the most vulnerable people the trans rights
activists and the gender criticals say they
represent.
Instead of mass politics, we get paternalist
politics, because that is what juices the
billionaires, employs the predatorily precarious
professionals and managers, and sells the ads.
Here in Topeka, the wash still needs a-hangin.
Regardless of populist rhetoric, paternalist policy
has pretty narrow, often debatable, benefits for
ordinary people it putatively defends.
Here in Kentucky, in my quest to make Pride's 18+
clubhouse safer from overcrowding and heterosexual
hegemony, I'm going to relax. I want more gay men
to feel at home there than last year, and more
lesbians. I want trans and gender-variant people
and crossdressers to feel welcome, too.
Partly because of different ways of life, partly
because of the background noise of the gender wars,
members of these groups don't always feel welcome,
relaxed, or in control---in some cases in space
that's too shared, in other cases in space that's
too segregated.
An idea, a way forward, to make the club fun and
decrease the anxiety of partiers is to have hours
"for" subgroups and ways to "flag" membership in a
subgroup. Each of these are ways to be celebrated
or self-celebrate without overdoing paternalism
or "y'all come" lassez-faire neglect of peoples'
anxieties. Least that's my hope.
