Porn Stars: The Future Of Celebrity

Kim Kardashian owes her fame to a self-released sex tape. Her ass is her pass into the cultural conversation. Softcore pornography is already mainstream. Voyeurism has penetrated once sacrosanct boundaries. When will we, as a culture, stop beating around the bush? It's time to elevate porn stars to the rank of talkshow-guesting, magazine-profiling mainstream celebrities.

Unlike most reality stars, porn stars have a skill: fucking. Being good-looking is not enough. Truly successful porn stars earn their fortune and fanbase through a talent for the craft. The models and lite-actresses who feature in Maxim and Details are pale (actually, typically orange) imitations of the Real Thing. Why pay to see, why pay attention to, the empty signifiers of sex, when the real carnal heroes are ready and willing?

Tyra Banks, fashion model, looks down on Tyra Banxxx, pornographic model. Her disdain is thinly disguised fear. Banxxx has an appreciable talent that society needs. Society, filled as it is with the lonely and unloved, requires vicarious sex partners. It does not require human clotheshangers. Banxxx should be the one with the TV show, the media empire, the mainstream emulation. In due time, Banxxx will be that maven, and Banks will join silent film stars in culture's scrapheap. What's to stop her? Public decency? Kim Kardashian owes her fame to a self-released sex tape

Dreams Of Collapse

Maybe I'm not the only one who dreams of collapse. Nothing so dramatic as suicide; simply collapse. Let friends drift away, never leave home, accumulate dust. Spiral down, let beard grow, observe the world from a distance if at all.

"Be responsible." Of course. I take my filial duty seriously. I must make something of myself before I collapse. Or at least erect walls between myself and the truly collapsed: the dregs, the rap fans, the hopeless. Erect them just high enough to avoid bringing shame upon the family name. Then I can collapse in peace.

Every animal dreams of burrowing a hole and burying itself alive. My coffin will be a bookcase. I will fall asleep reading and never wake up. My bones will crumble. My penis will retreat into its skin. My words will form protective porcupine thorns. I will scavenge the ruins of my former self, sifting through memories in the absence of novelty.

This is my temptation. Maybe some men feel the urge to kill or rape or watch sports. I feel the urge to collapse. I am driven to dive to the floor. I want to find a quiet spot underneath the carpet. I lie in the bath and hope to never get up. I await the disappearance of phone calls. Lord, save me from nirvana.

Put The Veil Over My Eyes

Ancient wisdom agrees that sexual emission depletes man's vitality. Freud affirms that all works of culture result from sublimation - the rerouting of sexual energy. In a culture that celebrates unrestrained sexuality, the most radically liberating move is chastity.

Self-flaggelants will be the old-new exhibitionists.

Free porn makes the challenge greater than for any previous generation. But the rewards for self-restraint are potentially all the greater. Sexual frustration is a primal power. He who conquers himself may conquer the world.

The Middle Ages produced saints. Modernity will produce gods.

Sex is samsara, futile desire, post-coital sadness, pre-coital ensnarement. Sex empowers others and depletes our selves. The Muslims have it right but totally backwards. We need blindfolds for men (ocular veils), not burqas for women.

Sluts will walk. The chaste will rise.

The Unintended Consequences of Identity Politics

History is a tale of unintended consequences. Take the existence of Palestinian nationalism. "Palestinian" did not exist as a self-conscious identity prior to the creation of modern Israel. The Arabs who lived in what would become Palestine did not see themselves as Palestinians, but as part of the Muslim Ummah, or Arab nation, or Greater Syrian subset of the Arab nation. The Jewish intellectual Gershom Scholem observed, "We educated the Arabs about nationalism. It was our very existence that created Arab national consciousness. That is the peculiar dialectic of history and I'm not sure that there is any escape from it." Palestinian identify developed in symbiotic response to the emergence of Israeli identity. Israel unwittingly created Palestine, just as anti-Semites unwittingly created Zionism, by dashing the assimilationist dreams of European Jews like Theodor Herzl.

Today, I see the "peculiar dialectic of history" that Scholem spoke of working on various fronts. Its incubator is typically the university. (I speak as a Canadian, but I take it that American colleges function in a similar manner.) The university celebrates multiculturalism. Every cultural group has its own club, and will often man a table in the concourse to advertise or proselytize or raise funds. When I was an undergraduate, an acquaintance spoke half-jokingly of forming a Western European club. This acquaintance was not a right-wing radical, or a racist, or even someone particularly political at all. She simply thought, "Everyone else has a club, so why not us?" The idea never came to fruition but it will, eventually. As the multicultural paradigm becomes ever more dominant, the formerly majority culture will become but one culture among many (as it already has in many major cities, i.e. in Canada, Toronto), and develop similar institutions of cultural representation.

Darker-skinned folks are trained by universities to identify themselves as "racialized." The term "racialized" acknowledges that race is a construct, yet the bearer claims the right to a racial identity based upon the fact that other people define her by this social construct. As Hannah Arendt wrote, in the context of European anti-Semitism, "You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself." Barack Obama defines himself as black, though he is only really half-black, because most Americans see him as a black man. "Racialization" fortified if not created Obama's identity as a black man. Obviously one can, like Tiger Woods, stake out a multiracial identity even if most people see a drop of black as equal to fully black, but few people of any race are strong enough to go against society's flow.

When I am in my heavily white hometown of Hamilton, I am part of the white majority, and am not conscious of being "racialized." When I am busing to work in minority-majority Scarborough, I am aware of my heretofore non-existent or subliminal identity as a white person (even if, by some more stringent white people's definition, I am not white but "ethnic"). Demographically, the North American metropolitan future is Scarborough, not Hamilton. Consequentially, white or European racial consciousness will begin to be more frequently articulated, even if in a carefully post-postmodern, "racialized by the Other" sense. As my apolitical (and this qualifier is key, because most people are apolitical) university acquaintance said, "If everyone else has a club, why not us?" I am not making a value judgment here. I am simply predicting, based on what I know of social psychology, what I foresee happening.

The other modern example of the "peculiar dialectic" I wish to mention is the emergence of a self-consciously "masculinist" identity. Again, the university is typically the incubator; it is where the educated classes come to a rudimentary political and cultural self-awareness. "Feminism" is a broad term, but one wing of it, a wing with undue influence in the university, demonizes men. At the very least, that's how the situation is perceived, by both men and women I talked to who had taken Women's Studies courses in university. Recall Arendt: "You can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as." Attacked as men, men will defend themselves as men. This is simply human nature. Men will, and already have begun to, articulate and defend their own group interests. Extreme masculinists will be the inverse of Andrea Dworkin and the "penetration is rape" school of feminist hyperbole. Cooler heads will, hopefully, push the movement in a more moderate position where it can meet feminism somewhere in the middle.

Feminists tend to be confused and/or threatened by a masculinist identity. This is because they think of men as the dominant class in society. Yes, most CEOs are men, but most men are not CEOs. Yes, most "players" are men, but most men are not players. The silent majority of men are no more "privileged" than women and, in some circumstances, less so. Where men are a minority, which includes the university and an increasing number of middle and upper-class professions, men will increasingly become conscious of themselves as a "genderized" interest group. Nice guys will no longer be content to finish last, but will begin to craft themselves a new social script as neither cretins nor milquetoast. Arguments about a history of oppression will not fly with newer generations who have not seen, and feel no responsibility for, "the sins of the fathers."

The peculiar dialectic can unfold in any number of ways. Recently, Europe witnessed the atrocities of a self-styled Christian Crusader, who clearly saw himself as the inverse of a Muslim Jihadist. A heightened Muslim corporate identity begets a heightened Western corporate identity, at least among a few (at first). Yet a heightened Western corporate identity need not manifest itself in violence. It can also manifest itself as a stronger, more cohesive society, willing to deal with other societies on the basis of mutual respect. On an individual level, a person aware of, and proud of who he/she is - whether this identity is biologically or socially constructed - need not hate who other people are. After all, who other people are helps define who we are, and vice versa.

Ode To My Madness

I cultivate my madness. It keeps me sane. It allows me to go through the motions without feeling motion sickness. I gorge my madness on music and words, and I sing to it "Grow."

I pretend to be normal to the best of my ability. They reward me by saying I'm mostly harmless. Another day then I can go home again, to cultivate my madness in peace.

I sing sonnets to my madness. I lie in bed with it at night. My madness is closer to me than you could ever be.

Confession of a Luftmensch

I am a luftmensch. This Yiddish/Germanic term means air person, someone whose head is in the clouds. Luftmenschen are concerned with ideas, not logistics.

Logistics bore and depress me. I skip over the details to get to the conclusions. Why, not how, is my perennial question.

Society has no place for the luftmenschen. Rather, it has one place, the ivory tower. The ivory tower is full of self-hating luftmenschen. They cling to the notion that, through "Theory," they are changing the world. Marx, not Socrates, is their model. Truth? It's only meaning is as a political weapon.

Despite loathing the typical "radical," I do empathize with anti-capitalist sentiment. In the capitalist system, the luftmensch has no value. Money talks, and everyone else is as good as mute. This, of course, also applies to the realm of erotic capitalism.

Living on air is lonely. But when you've seen the ground from up high, there's nowhere else you'd rather be.

The Ivory Tower Is White And Has Its Head In The Clouds

Graduate school: where idealists are put into quarantine.*

* except when they're on day-pass occupying streets.

The Word Made Flesh Is A Stripper

This blog has been around since 2003. I first posted when I was 18. It has a history! It is me but is not me. By this point, Head Wide Open is an autonomous being. A part of me, to be honest, is an egomaniac who thinks it should be much bigger than it is. Another part is impressed that the the void into which I shout - occasionally - echoes back, jarring my sense of isolation. A reader commented that my writing displays a lot of testosterone. I never thought of it that way, but it's true. I am mostly placid in real life. I keep things inside, hence Head Wide Open, which is not in fact my natural state.

Head Wide Open is an open diary of consciousness. I can think of no better description than that. I suffer from a surfeit of consciousness. It's not an attractive condition. So here is where the consciousness goes. It is not academic or journalistic - filtered. There are enough filters in the outside world. "Man is a miserable pile of secrets." Here are mine, piled up. The weird thing is that other people are conscious of my consciousness. Some of them may be more conscious of my consciousness than I am. For a solipsistic disembodied Cartesian I (that is, I), this is disturbing but also vaguely arousing. I am displaying my psychological dirty parts. To see my self, true self, through the gaze of the Other makes me an objective being. The Other is the aleph to my golem.

The elephant in the room is death. I am horrified by death. This is my mind trying to live forever. Everything not word is flux. I am trapped in a world of perpetual becoming, archly symbolized for me by my obsessive thought patterns. My every pacific state is disturbed by the imp of the perverse. But this, this is permanence. This is the invisible made visible. As such, it is an idol. It is not the real thing. But the real thing is inchoate and incommunicable. Head Wide Open is the facsimile of my self. My brain also contains links, which I am constantly clicking.

I am not always, or usually, so conscious. But when I am, I have to capture it. Here it is, captured. Tomorrow I work, nod, smile, and live in the real world, except for a small part which I have just put the zoom lens on.

The White Girl Mob: Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Kali-Yuga

When a friend introduced me to the White Girl Mob, all I could think was: I surrender. The world belongs to sexy postmodern white bitches with glasses. We're just living in it. We are lucky to make it into the margins of their video shoot, their Facebook album, their Tumblr feed. Otherwise, our lives are void. Hail, Caesar!

Twenty-Six Years On My Way To Hell

Nine Inch Nails are my favourite cathartic juvenalia. Every time I listen to them I remember how I felt when I was fourteen... okay, sixteen... okay, twenty... okay, still: like an angry, embittered outsider desperate for sex. Trent Reznor is too fond of the word decay and things that rhyme with "hole," but he is able to deftly capture negative psychological sentiments with simple lyrics.

"Closer," with its "I want to fuck you like an animal, I want to feel you from the inside... You bring me closer to God," ably captures the truth expressed by Malcom Muggeridge, "Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society."

"Burn," with its "This world rejects me, this world threw me away... Sometimes I think I could burn this whole world down," is the Platonic form of the sort of vengeful nihilism Nietzsche dubbed ressentiment.

"Only," with its "I just made you up to hurt myself... There is no you, there is only me," is the crystallization of solipsism.

"Down In It," with its "Just then a tiny little dot caught my eye, it was just about too small to see, but I watched it way too long and that dot was pulling me down..." absurdly conveys the inherently absurd downward spiral of obsessive thought.

"Wish, " with its immortal rallying cry "Twenty-six years, on my way to hell!" is particularly relevant to me, as I just turned twenty-six.

No, it's not Mozart. No, it's not even the more operatic negative depths of Swans. But I've seen Nine Inch Nails twice in concert, and they provide a ritual purgation for eternal adolescents no other misery-grinders can equal.

The Strange Faces Of Facebook

As poet-Sodomite Jim Morrison observed, people are strange when you're a stranger. As a stranger, I use Facebook to follow that strange breed, "people," up close but from a distance, like a bird-watcher with binoculars. I have a number of "Friends" who are only my "Friends" because I'm fascinated by people I have nothing in common with.

My favourite was (alas, she unfriended me) my real-life friend's stripper ex-girlfriend, who would frequently post rap lyrics glorifying her vagina and its ability to extract money from men. Other choice faces are the unfailingly cheerful Filipina (is there any other kind?), the Panamian girl who's always jajajaja'ing, and the young socialite Jewess who posts about fashion and her cat Boo.

Upon self-analysis, it's clear that I am strangely drawn toward non-intellectual, non-ironic, non-jaded females to whom I have nothing to say. I don't wish to enter their perfect world, or shatter their perfect world. (Unlike Marxists, I believe in the firm necessity of false consciousness.) I'm content to simply spy on their existence in awe and wonderment. They are strange to me because I don't know how people can be so unstrange.

Erotic Capitalism

I don't accept all the implications she draws, but I find Catherine Hakim's term "erotic capital" a useful one. Will Self writes:

Hakim endorses Schopenhauer's characterisation of the "striking effect" of young women's beauty and sex appeal, and gives us cross-cultural statistics to prove that not only is their "erotic capital" consistently greater than that of young men, but that it is also always undervalued: it is attractive young men who get the better jobs and secure the higher wages, attractive young men who end up being US president – regardless of their skin colour. This might seem counter-intuitive in a world seemingly plastered with images of this "striking effect", displayed in every possible state of dress and undress, but the strength of Hakim's analysis lies in the very crudeness of its metric. According to her, while young women may possess considerable charms, men's desire for them always vastly outstrips supply. The reverse is simply not the case: men are both less attractive to women, and markedly less desired by them, especially as those women grow older. What Hakim terms "the male sex-deficit" underlies both the ubiquity of female sexual imagery – as pornography, as marketing adjunct – and the persistent unwillingness of society at large to "valorise" women's good looks.

To tie this in with my previous post, 5 Things Women Unfairly Expect of Men: young women, on average, have more erotic capital than men. Thus they can more easily defy gender expectations and still receive attention from the opposite sex. As I wrote:

Given that most men are libido-enslaved and not very selective, women have the luxury of playing around with gender roles and still being fawned over. But if a man of average appearance takes a feminist's advice and stops doing what society expects of him, he will be doomed to loneliness. Women, snidely disdaining lower-ranked males' advances, have no idea of what it's like to be unwanted. If the choice was celibacy or traditional womanhood, they would choose traditional womanhood.

I also found confirmation of my earlier post, Gays Have It Easy, in a responding comment to Self's article:

As a straight man, my many gay male friends never seem to experience sexually fallow periods. If not with a partner and even when heart-broken, they have plenty of fun, consensual sex that is often temporarily emotionally and socially rewarding. My experience when single is the reverse. There is no straight 'Grinder'.

Gay men are free to defy gender expectation because they possess greater erotic capital in the eyes of other men. Much straight homophobia is no doubt latent resentment of the social freedom coupled with sexual cornucopia that gay men possess. Such social freedom/sexual fulfillment is unavailable to straight men who are doomed by the biological lottery to be attracted to women.

The business-oriented straight male will conform to social (read: feminine) pressure to make up for his lack of erotic capital. He will strive to become one of those alpha males feminists love to castigate almost as much as they love being fucked from behind by. He will work to achieve a high-paying job so women will pay him notice - and then be scorned for contributing to the gender wage imbalance. How dare he seek capital capital to make up for his lack of erotic capital, when women should rightfully have their share (the majority) of both.

The passion-oriented straight male will reject social (read: feminine pressure) to conform to alpha male status. He will sublimate his sexual frustration into fanatical dedication to an art or science. If he is extremely gifted or lucky, his efforts will pay off (literally) and he will achieve erotic capital as well. He will then be scorned for contributing to the gender genius imbalance. How dare he seek artistic/scientific success to make up for his lack of erotic capital, when women should rightfully have their share (the majority) of both.

Of course, capitalism being what it is, most men will simply be failures, without even the feminine option of living by and through their mate's success.

That "gay" also means happy is no coincidence.