| I Kissed a Girl | 2008-12-29 | |
| An open letter to the world's sociologists and taste-makers: ruminations on the lack of generic rules and constraints for writing about the manner in which every generation mistakenly believes that it invented sex. | ||
"She kissed me and it felt like a hit." | ||
| Much more remarkable than the phenomenon it describes, is the pressing need apparently felt by each generation's leading intellectual lights to discuss the manner in which every generation deludes itself into the belief that it invented sex.
Additionally, the very fact that the epigram is a commonplace is good evidence of the prevalence of writing that describes the manner in which each generation's sexual maturation is represented in popular art: the phrase "every generation thinks they invented sex" could hardly have been exulted to the level of cliche without the help of a legion of volunteers whose tireless laboring resulted in a not insignificant amount of ink having been spilled in the effort of ensuring that a significant portion of American cultural criticism and commentary of the 20th century was devoted to helping us learn the phrase--and, more importantly, the idea--by rote. And why has this been the case? Well, one very plausible explanation for the prevalence and popularity of this sort of criticism is the ease with which one can write it without leaving his personal Comfort Zone. It doesn't take a brilliant imagination or copious research to start pre-writing and even blocking out paragraphs for the music nerd blog post about how Katy Perry's breakthrough Top 40 smash "I Kissed a Girl" doesn't even make an oblique reference to Jill Sobule's 90's classic. Throw down a few lines about what it means that Sobule, whose generation (the Xers) are now bored and old, now speaks dismissively of Perry's song and thus the novelty felt by younger persons at plumbing the (hilariously shallow) depths of their own sexuality: "It will be about how I kissed her, left the dull boyfriend, got gay-married in California, and really no one gave a shit."Then wrap the whole thing up with a bow in the form of an impossibly snobby reference to Ani DiFranco's "If it isn't Her" or even kick it old school with some HD Sapphic Modernism. Be sure also to use snappy neologisms like "celesbian" and "fauxmosexual". At any rate, the point is that any subject can be put across in this form; it's an easy cipher. Writing about "how" and "to what ends" people write about the sexuality of others is one easy way to frame up and represent specialized knowledge that you already possess. The hypothetical blogger might juxtapose the lyrical content of the above-mentioned songs in order to make a point about how Youth is always the standard-bearer of sexual urgency and ignorance and how Old Age is always dismissive of youth and he wouldn't even have to query JSTOR to do it. Another possible explanation for the abundance of write that takes "each generation believes it invented sex" as its thesis, might be the unusual degree of creative and social license granted to the author by virtue of the subject matter. Taking up this thesis is a great opportunity to playfully push the rules of politeness and test the reader's willingness to suffer crudeness. When writing about the manner in which his peers or those slightly younger than him have come to grips with their own sexuality, the writer is given free reign to write with an earnestness that intentionally borders on sententiousness (and occasionally pole vaults across that border). With or without irony, the writer who takes one generation's fumbling (groping) progress towards understanding its own sexuality as his topic is free to depict mature themes in a graphic manner, giddily euphemise the taboos of his own milieu in an ever-winking, mock-anthropological tone and pun liberally. And as anyone who has done any serious social-scientific writing and analysis can confirm, any opportunity to set aside one's professional gravitas and set one's hand to working with a subject that demands silliness and lightheartedness is not to be missed. (If you don't believe me, find communitas proponnent Clifford Geertz's article on Balinese cock-fighting and social performance in South America. Better yet, find Geertz and call him a liar if he claims not to have gleefully peppered his article with dick jokes.) A third possible explanation for the popularity and prevalence of writing that endeavors to throw a light on the after-hours doings of young humans in heat is the fact that it titillates without being titillating. It's sizzle-hot copy by virtue of its subject matter, but it's at a significant remove and therefore can not be accused of having crossed any boundaries in the sands of decency. It's an easy hook and it comes with no strings attached. Whatever the reason for its ubiquity, it's my feeling that this sort of writing is a genre. The Internet-tubes are chock full of everything from book-length studies of the manner in which every generation thinks it invented sex, one to five thousand word articles on the topic, AP/Reuters summaries, countless footnotes and blurbs, etc. And if the ubiquity of a thesis and the forms to which it lends itself are such that it may go unmentioned when a popular writer makes an appeal to it, then we're talking about a genre. In a piece for Salon by Tracy Clark-Flory, you've got a professional piece of writing about professional writing that comes close to acknowledging the status of "every generation thinks it invented sex" as a genre. In the piece, a professional writer is discussing the fortunes of her peers who, by virtue of the fact that they a.) work a beat and b.) work the sex beat, are a de facto part of the sex industry. Clark-Flory proceeds from there to describe how these writers have been impacted by recent economic turmoil--how they are indirect victims of the capital "R" Recession--and wonders aloud about what this might mean for them and their audiences. Throughout her reportage, Clark-Flory and the writers whose predicament she discusses, take for granted that so-called "sex journalism" is a journalistic commodity not totally unlike the business news, arts coverage, etc. She even goes this far: "I don't read sex columns for the voyeuristic thrill, either; I read them for the same reason I read novels or watch movies--it helps me to intimately know people. Good sex writing is like an inkblot test, for the author and reader."There is, as is almost always the case in sex meta-commentary, more noise than signal in that quote. The above-the-fray sobriety and general immunity to titillation with which she purports herself is extremely unlikely (to put it mildly) and distracts from the point by drawing the reader's attention to the writer's dishonesty. This doesn't make her observations useless, however. Many have observed that in order to be plausible, a lie must be founded upon some kind of truth. And the truth in which Clark-Flory's fib is rooted is the one we've been discussing. Her point, lost as it is in her tortuous (non-)confessional, is that sex columns are a journalistic commodity and it is therefore perfectly logical to pursue the manner in which people relate to sex columns with unimpassioned, clinical(-esque) analysis. The fact that she offers the Rorschach test as an analogue for reading sex columns is not an accident. If we can look at one person's relation to a given bit of racy journalism and give it Cartesian coordinates, then we are creating an object for study. And if we've got one object, we can create more just like it and have groups of objects. And if we've got groups of these objects to study and describe, there are going to be schools that consistently describe similar groups of objects in the same way. And thus we have generic responses. A genre is, after all, a set of representational conventions that can be safely assumed or taken for granted. If one of the supporting cast in a Vietnam War movie is a fast-talking, politically indifferent black man from a major metropolitan area who uses cheerful antique slang to describe drug and spouse abuse, no one bats a lash in offense or wonders what the screenplay writer might have been getting at. It's an obvious appeal to genre. It follows then, that if, in the course of his supercilious caviling, MTV's Kurt Loder lampoons Lindsay Lohan's latest love-interest(s) with a tongue-in-cheek near-reference to The New Our Bodies Our Selves without having to explain what he's trying to imply about a.) LL's motivations and b.) those who have been critical of her motivations, then he's making an appeal to popular genre-sense. It is widely accepted and understood that criticism of a given celebrity's sexual antics may take any of a given number of forms, and that the discussion of those forms would be (very literally) academic, then we're dealing with a genre. And if we truly have a genre on our hands (as I believe we do), then what sense does it make that we haven't yet got a critical language in which to discuss it. Why haven't we got a terminology for the iconography and isomorphology of writing about "sex writing". If so many writers are writing about the false-starts, wildly lurching progress and hard stops of each generation's progress towards sexual self-definition that we can reasonably roll our eyes at what we correctly identify as "old hat", then why don't we have words for the attributes by which we recognize that particular hat? | ||
| File under: Social Studies | ||
| A Shotglass of Lymph: |
| In America we have a saying: "Living well is the best revenge." In China, they have a similar saying. This saying tends to be credited to the Sun Tze's Art of War and it goes, "If you wait by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy floating by."
The Chinese way to say it is objectively better. In the American way of recommending impassivity, there is a lot of pride and self-centeredness inherent in bringing the ideas of "living well" and "revenge" into the equation. The Chinese saying about impassivity is much less self-interested and therefore much more serene and impassive: it talks the way it walks.
Date: 2008-04-30 | |||||||||||||||||||
 Uploaded: 2008-08-03
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