Pornified: why admitting that you watch a lot of porn is no longer cool

I am very mad at Amazon because I wrote a review for Pamela Paul’s Pornified last night and it still hasn’t appeared with all the other reviews. I’m thinking about boycotting if it doesn’t post because I hate censorship, and any website that would censor the harmless things I write does not deserve my or any other free-speech loving individual’s patronage. Not only was my review harmless, but a lot of intellectual labor went into it. It took me at least an hour to write even though it wasn’t very long. I painstakingly constructed every word and sentence even going so far as to employ a thesaurus at one point. The reason I think my review might not appear is because I carelessly titled it, “I didn’t read the book, but I have some things to say.” This is not a good way to ingratiate yourself with the Amazon algorithms which might search out and try to subvert attention whores who are just trying to use their website as a free platform. But still, I bought and shipped a birthday gift to my brother yesterday using their “platform,” so I feel this entitles me to write at least one free review of a book I didn’t read. Furthermore, I gave the book three stars and deigned to agree with the author when most of the other reviewers ripped her apart.

From what I gleaned from the Amazon and other reviews, Pornified is a poorly researched and passionate (i.e. biased) book which attempts to caustically demonize the adult entertainment industry. Basically, it uses all the old arguments (many of which are feminist arguments) to call attention to this destructive obsession which is reeking havoc on families and marriages, women, children, teens, society as a whole not to mention men’s minds. According to the author, it is a corrupting and perverting force and perhaps the biggest bane of healthy relations in America. Keep in mind, this is inferring a lot from the scant reviews I read, the title and alluring cover of the book, and the fact that the genesis for this commentary had its origins in a TIME magazine story which ran a few years back.

But still, I felt like I had to stand up and say (or write) how I feel about porn. I think my opinion matters more than a lot of people out there who claim to know so much about the genre not least because of the fact that I was raised on pornography. Yes, I am 33 years old and I am a walking study in the long term effects of what more than half a life of getting off to porn will do to a person who is still relatively young. And lucky for me, I turned out normal. Contrary to what a lot of people might expect, I am not promiscuous, I have never contracted an STD, I don’t sexually harass girls or women (although I do stare), and I don’t set demanding expectations for my sexual partners. I have never videotaped myself masturbating and posted it on a tube site, I have never had cyber sex with a stranger, and I do not wear revealing clothing or send any other sartorial signals which might announce to the world that I am a “slut.”

If I am such a walking example of how porn is practically harmless, you might wonder why I side with Pamela Paul’s basic thesis that some things about it are simply ”bad.” Well, my gripe with porn is probably a little more intellectual than her’s and is mostly rooted in the fact that, when I came into contact with adult magazines and films in the early 90’s, porno was still a very private obsession for most people. It was not considered cool or even safe to transparently advertise your preferences for adult film genres and sex toys like it is today. Blabbing on about how much you dig seeing lesbians kiss or how you own a vibrating Fleshlight in the 90’s would quickly earn you the reputation of a pervert, and even worse, it could get you in serious trouble. I guess we all took it for granted back then that most of our friends and associates probably dabbled in porn, but these self-gratifying habits were protected by a sacred fortress of solitude that made engaging in them seem that much more pleasurable and salubrious.

Now when I see these people unabashedly debating the viscosity of lube and spit, or when I hear porn stars announcing the station identifications of local Middle America radio stations, or when I see a CGI John Holmes trying to sell me a taco in a TV commercial - I feel like I’m being violated. When porn oversteps its lecherous boundaries into normal, clothed society, there is a problem. Some people might see this as a lifting of the veil, or an overcoming of our more counterintuitive and destructive puritanical tendencies. But I disagree. I think we need veils in order to live, and we create boundaries to protect and uphold us. When people have no secrets they become vulnerable.  Without rules of eitquette and deportment, life becomes a never-ending bachelor party full of fart and penis jokes. “Hey, Bob. Want to see my dick, I just got it pierced?” “Um, no I don’t.”

I think I began to realize that the recent “coolness” of porn – started in 1999 by Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Corolla back when they did the Man Show together – had burned itself out when I awoke one morning to hear the DJ’s on the local radio station in my small little non-city interviewing Ron Jeremy live on his decision to retire from the porn business (as if porn stars ever retire). To hear the yokels in my backwards little Rust Belt town cajoling the so-called “king of porn” in real time as I went about my morning rituals caused an unsettling feeling. Knowing that every little weasel in the corner of nowhere that I called home had a personal relationship with Ron Jeremy that was similar in nature to mine, this robbed my secret admiration of the smut king of a huge part of its authenticity. I liked to think that by occasionally cranking one out to a scene starring Ron Jeremy and some callow newcomer to the biz was my own little private escape, and this gave these innocent corpulent and hirsute fantasies a sense of sophistication. It was like I was learning from the world master of the quicky himself, and to see a man who is so disgusting yet so confident in action added greatly to my own optimism and self-esteem. I thought of how I might someday employ his little tricks and seductive charms (like when I’m on a Royal Caribbean Cruise for instance). But to look at the world now and see all sorts of people from all walks of life admitting their fawning appreciation for this man and what his existence has meant and done for them, it seemed like a sci-fi movie in which the nation’s drinking water becomes tainted by truth serum.

These sorts of unchecked revelations are careless, reckless and unhealthy to say the least. There is a time for humor and lust, and there is a time for seriousness and professionalism. When the lines between pop culture and porn culture begin to blur, we set ourselves up for potential embarrassment and disaster. We become a society devoid of decorum where anything goes.

Americans’ ubiquitous exposure to porn is no doubt a symtpom of our overall decline in dignity and etiquette. We are rapidly becoming a nation of bad manners. This is evident in the decline of the standard dress code, the increase in the average waist size, and the elevation of numerous tawdry trends to full-blown domination status. People are starting to wear Bermuda shorts and baseball caps to church, foul language is uttered in places where it formerly wasn’t permitted, and tattoo covered skin is displayed everywhere. Despite the widespread awareness of the life-truncating effects of prolonged tobacco use and alcohol consumption, people smoke and drink more than ever now. Corporations don’t help either when they trample tradition in order to make a quick buck by marketing items which, at their core, are generic, garish, offensive and vapid. Entertainers have abandoned the more sophisticated art of tact and subtlety in their acts and now subject us to bombardment after bombardment of hackneyed immaturety (I swear, if one more recycled sitcom employs a reference to porn in order to invoke that single bachelor/ette levity…). And adding fuel to this fire is an ever-increasing trend of laziness. Generation X, spoiled by their Baby Boomer parents, never seemed to learn the value of hard work. They expect and crave the good life, but many of them lack the discipline needed to earn it. After sitting back for decades and having everything handed to them, they have suddenly grown up, and the awareness of their stark mature lives is no small cause for concern for many of them.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that a porn craze should emerge in this sort of early post-postmodern landscape. Many people who profess their love of porn were most likely raised on it like I was, and they’re probably just trying to bring their otherwise healthy obsession into the light as a way of moving out of the dark ages of the more repressed 80’s and 90’s. But progress is not always a good thing, and having a voluminous knowledge of adult cinema is a useless conversation topic in my opinion. Nobody wants to sit around and discuss the merits of Ron Jeremy’s latest directorial feature, or whether Jenny Layne looked better as a D cup instead of an A. This type of chatter belongs in the realm of sci-fi geekery, and any glib revelations about one’s porn viewing habits should be discouraged just as much today as they would have been ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. I hate to envision a newfangled world where keeping up with the Joneses means having a bigger wall of XXX rated DVD’s than they do!

Probably the most ironic thing about all of the professed “coolness” of porn lately is the fact that, despite having seeped out of its mostly inglorious and invisible niche into more respectable culture, the adult entertainment industry still manages to attract the lonely, the socially awkward, the desperate and the depressed. To have a heavy dependence on porn is to turn away from a life of healthy normal relationships and become immersed in a world of unquenchable virtual sex. Porn may always have a few advantages, but for a lot of people it is a heavy millstone, and the addiction comes when one tries to squeeze water from that stone.

I sided with Pamela Paul not because I want to be an old fashioned fuddy-duddy, but because I am a 1980’s fuddy-duddy. Like her, I would like to see porn go away. Not completely, I just want to see it go back in the closet where it belongs. Perhaps I realize that everybody peeks at porn, but to be constantly reminded of this serves no purpose for me and I’m sure a whole lot of other people. And when people try to use the fact that we’re all secret perverts as justification for destroying all barriers in the world, I get especially mad. I am the kind of person who likes to destroy the world each night and awake to it rebuilt again. I can’t fathom living in a world with no laws, no boundaries and no moral point of view.

Finally, I just want to mention that I think it’s funny that despite the fact that nearly limitless porn is now available for FREE to everyone who has a computer and an Internet connection (did I mention it’s FREE!), people still feel the need to divulge and brag about their masterbutory fetishes to the world. It’s funny because I would think this kind of easy accessibility to all the porn our brains and bodies can handle would enable us to get back in touch with enjoying it the way we used to – in the sanctum sanctorum of our own homes, bedrooms and closets.

33

IN A FEW DAYS I will turn thirty-three. Thirty-three is a significant year, not only because Christ the Lord is eternally thirty-three, but because many other celebrities have kicked the bucket at that age as well. Christ Farley croaked when he was thirty-three years young, and I am especially troubled by this not least because of the fact that I tend to have sleight issues with weight and hyperactivity just as he did (there is also a scary image of a freshly dead Chris Farley I saw once, and it seared its way into my brain to such an extent that I cannot watch his movies to this day without feeling a sickening rising/falling feeling in my stomach). Layne Staley also died at thirty-three – too late by many of his fans’ expectations (and probably the artist’s own as well), but frighteningly young nonetheless. And who can forget John Belushi, the first modern day celebrity with a penchant for excess who set the precedent for dying at thirty-three. Then there is Eva Peron, William S. Burroughs, Jr., Sam Cooke and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy just to name a few.

I have no intention of dying in my thirty-third year, which is why the demise of so many talented careers at this half-grown age is troubling to me.

It is as if there is a preternatural curse on the number thirty-three as it pertains to the lifespan, and it is similar in many ways to the curse that plagues the twenty-seventh year of life. Several entertainment luminaries like Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain have all died at the age of twenty-seven, and I even knew a few people who took their lives at this age as well. The curse regarding dying at twenty-seven is cosmic in nature, and gets its significance from an astrological phenomenon known as Saturn Return. Basically, Saturn Return is a deep life assessment that occurs approximately every 27-30 years, which is the same time it takes the planet Saturn to complete its orbit (i.e., wherever Saturn was at in its orbit when you were born, approximately 27 years later it will be in the same place in the heavens). The first Saturn Return is viewed as a crossing of the threshold from youth to adulthood, and some believe people like Kurt Cobain who kill themselves in their twenty-seventh year are unwilling to relinquish their childhoods and mature into adults. This theory holds a lot of water when one considers the types of entertainers who have offed themselves either directly or indirectly at this age. But it is tragic that nobody told these people that growing up (or “old”) is not obligatory, as there are many fifty year old men and women who like to watch the Disney channel or curl up and read Harry Potter. Sure, Nirvana may have broken up and never recorded another album after In Utero, and Kurt could have gone solo and ended up trying too hard resulting in something that sounds like Days of the New - but he is no longer with us, and Frances Bean doesn’t have a daddy.

Luckily for me, the thirty-third year of life bears no potentially ominous significance in the realm of astrology. The number 33, however, does have revelevance in the similar field of numerology – and it’s optimistic relevance too! 33 is special because it is one of the Master numbers (double digit numbers which cannot be reduced) along with 11 and 22. According to the website www.decoz.com, these numbers, “are called Master numbers because they possess more potential than other numbers. They are highly charged, difficult to handle, and require time, maturity, and great effort to integrate into one’s personality.” 33 is viewed as the most powerful of the Master numbers not only because it is the highest, but because the other two Master numbers – 11 and 22 – can be combined to form it. According to www.decoz.com, 33 is marked by a, “determination to seek understanding and wisdom before preaching to others.” It is also referred to as the “Master Teacher.” It is not surprising, therefore, to see this number ascribed to Jesus Christ when he was at the height and climax of his earthly and eternal mission.

But if 33 is so rich with abstruse compassion, wisdom and enlightenment as the numerologists say (I abstained from quoting more from the website; but, trust me, this is what they say), it did not teach people like Chris Farley and John Belushi a whole heck of a lot. If it taught these men anything, it is not to gamble with your life and think that you can cheat death for another day by snorting all the coke you want. It taught them the cost of their own mistakes. In the case of Layne Staley, he learned the ultimate enlightenment of what he was putting in his veins. But since these has-beens are all dead as a result of their brief and scary satoris, their lessons can be passed on to the rest of us. Their final acts exist as visceral reminders (WARNING GRAPHIC PIC) of the death that hovers not too far above all of us. We can either cling to death and its inevitability, or we can embrace life as long as we’re alive.

I pray that 33 won’t teach me a harsh and permanent lesson like it did to the aforementioned celebrity party animals. I like to think that I am not playing with fire like these people were. Sure, I have my vices; but you won’t see me on any three day coke binge any time soon. I think I would have to gain 100-150 pounds before I resembled Chris Farley, and the only coke you will ever see me using is Diet Coke. But if 33 is the “Master Teacher,” who knows what it will teach me. Jesus often spoke in cryptic parables, and if 33 imparts its wisdom in a similar way, I may find myself sifting through life parables to find the gems of enlightenment contained therein.

Or not. I am not an acolyte of numerology, nor did I even know much about it until I went to www.decoz.com the other day on a whim and looked up the significance of the number 33. But my ability to think analytically makes me somewhat superstitious, or at least I want to believe that my various interpretations of life and the world carry spiritual and supernatural weight. I like to think there is more to life than just coincidence after coincidence. The mysteries are too great, and I don’t find the statistical assurance of coincidence convenient enough. But I think grasping for answers in the stars or picking apart number patterns is misguided. It is simply a way of drawing parallels, and this is where it derives its most intellectual fascination for me.

But it does make you think if there is not something more to everything we see around us. And it goes a long way in proving a point which Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons makes over and over, that the laws of physics (and mathematics and hence science) are God’s laws. There is order and balance all around us, in our bodies, in our ecosystems, in everything. The natural order is very clean and orderly. Whether one is an atheist or not, it has to be admitted that this is a miracle. It can’t always be taken for granted the way the seasons change, the way nature is very resilient, the way language and numbers – the building blocks of human understanding and communication – are so mathematically ordered.

And, of course, the way a celebrity mired in addiction often dies at the age of thirty-three calls to mind this order. It is a coincidence big enough to make even a statistician scratch his or her head, and it should be an actuarial warning to Hollywood people never to hire a coke sniffing, heroin shooting artist/actor for role in a big production if he is an the eve of his thirty-third birthday.

But I still want the pair of boobs featured at the top of this post!

TIM FREEMAN

Tim Freeman, 1992

pictured above: TIM FREEMAN and his mom

I’m about to head over to the gym to shoot some baskets, play racquetball, and hopefully do some stair-stepping, stationary bike riding and weight lifting. I was over at my dad’s house yesterday and I found this old photo of my mom and I. It was taken after a swim meet in 1992 back when we lived in California. I was 15 years old, a freshman in high school, and quite possibly in the best shape of my life. As the picture shows, I have washboard abs, a V-shaped torso, slender waist, and my muscles are toned and well defined. Furthermore, my face is angular and full of life and expression as it often was in those days.

These days I’m afraid to gaze in the mirror. I look like Bill Miller from Still Standing, only I have a slightly more flat affect than Mark Addy’s character. This lack of animation is mostly due to the fact that I wasn’t born a fat person, but because I inherited my weight problem over the course of several recent years which were marked by bad habits and depression. The fact is, I don’t know how to be fat. The experience of being heavy is still foreign and awkward to me. I don’t know what my body is supposed to do most of the time – e.g., I don’t know how I’m supposed to stand, I still don’t have all the balance issues worked out yet, and my mental image of myself is still that of a slender person. This latter part always freaks me out when I see my reflection in windows and mirrors (You mean I look like that I think in horror). I am like a kid that is having a growth spurt who keeps bumping into walls and stubbing his toes because he hasn’t quite grown into his new, bigger body yet. I still expect myself to be agile and capable of performing the same fluid and graceful movements as somebody who is a healthy weight. For instance, my gait naturally wants to be propelled from the shoulders, chest and hips like a thin person’s, rather than from the knees and lower legs like a fat individual. This creates enormous balance problems, especially when I have to stop abruptly in mid-walk. There are other problems that arise as well, such as feeling incredibly winded after a sudden, swift movement.

The point is that I am no longer the svelte and athletic person with the 32′ waist that I once was. And this is a problem because I believe my body was designed to my former slender proportions. Getting fat messed everything up, like building an addition atop a building that was carefully constructed by architects to distribute and compress its weight in such a way when the wind hit it just so. Now everything feels off. My hands hang limply at my side when I walk, like two fat dolphin flippers. I usually have to affect the former natural swaying motion that occurred when I would move about, and this only makes it look like I am paddling in mid-air. I often cross my arms in some unconscious attempt to conceal my belly, but this usually makes me look like a faux tough guy in a Kid Rock video. And yet the mental image I have of myself all the while is that of the cool dude in the picture above. Somehow I think I will always be that guy no matter how fat I get, because he seems to be the kernel of my existence. But I am now twice the man he is in size and weight. I have deformed his statuesque countenance by heaping the crushing weight of so much fat upon him. I have taken his beautiful body and inflated it with a bike pump, watching his turgid skin expand and tear leaving scars that may last a lifetime. And his face, which once exuded a flexible yet resilient spirit, has been reduced to two rolling eyes which try to hide a weakness that is bubbling to the surface from within.

Anyway, off to the gym.

Where is My Mind?

I have been avoiding the blog for a while, not because I want to, but because my mind has been a huge blank this summer. Seriously, I think I might have brain damage. Backtracking, I’m not exactly sure when everything started to go wrong for me. But it’s safe to say that when I was laid-off from my job in June, the evaporation of any kind of formal structure system mixed with the very non-intellectual pursuit of trying to find work, has caused a huge swath of nothingness to open up in my life. Let me clarify that I am normally not one for exhibiting vast amounts of spontaneity, at least not consistently. Consequently, the ridiculous amount of fee time on my hands these past two months has been the bane of my intellect. Late nights have been spent watching B (and sometimes C) science-fiction flicks on cable and endless hours have disappeared into the black hole Internet realm of discussion forums, Facebook and other multimedia sites. Meanwhile, the job search always keeps chugging along unsuccessfully. The only thing tempering this ennui is a stack of books beside my bed, which I have been reluctantly trudging my way through like a fat Indiana Jones trying to pull himself out of quicksand. Thank God for my weekly unemployment benefits or I would be dining at the local dumpster behind my apartment instead of throwing boxes of pizza crust into it.

But more than just being lazy, or unfocused, or mired in a slump (as I like to describe my situation to my psychiatrist), I think I’ve also been hit with an invariable bout of Writer’s Block. I say invariable because these things are bound to happen sooner or later to  most aspiring writers. If the daunting challenge looming over our heads us doesn’t get us down, the realization that maybe we just don’t have what it takes to be a professional writer is sure to hinder our creative motivation. Like a lot of people who have been in my shoes, I am having a problem with the F word. I am finally experiencing what it feels like to cower before that dreaded and towering conception of Failure, a notion that prevents many a person from progressing in life and threatens countless dreamers not to dream big dreams. But – fuck! - more than this, I have been plagued by a syntactical problem which has messed with my ability to construct meaningful thoughts using sophisticated words and sentences. This latter condition is no doubt the result of subjecting my brain to excessive amounts of lowbrow entertainment and drivel during my down time (which I have a lot of). If I’m not ogling free online porn, I’m chatting with White Supremacists in the virtual equivalent of a prison cafeteria. It’s safe to say that I’ve developed some bad habits of late, and rather than try my hand at the writing to steer me back onto the right path, I’ve let the fear of producing something embarrassingly awful keep me away from the keyboard.

David Foster Wallace said that, “Anything that is a failure is always a victory.” Coming from a guy who’s battle with depression ended when he took his own life, these words mean a lot. Speaking at a panel in Italy in 2006 two years before his death, the author of Infinite Jest said, “In some ways what I try to do with myself is just avoid the success and failure thing, because there is so much about writing that is out of the writer’s control – not the action of doing it, but whether is comes alive or not – that if I begin to think in terms of failure, what happens is I get really depressed and the game is over, because I’ve already decided.”

In some ways what I’ve been waiting for is the automatic motivation, that ticket to ride the train of words that flows through the eternal ether. I have lost my Muse so to speak, and the ability to channel my thoughts and feelings into coherent sentences and paragraphs. To be linguistically deprived feels castrating in a way, because I consider my writing talent to be one of my biggest assets. If my ability to express myself and communicate effectively becomes limited, I feel doomed. After all, I don’t have washboard abs and a chisled face to fall back on, or better yet a bloated trust fund. What seems like even more of an affront is that I have all the time in the world to hone my language skills by reading, listening to NPR, or associating with other people who I consider to be smarter than myself. Instead, I watch videos of cats humping on You Tube, I chat with other unemployed people across the globe about meaningless minutiae (like the size and consistency of our bowel movements), and I find the desire to watch straight-to-DVD movies like Hell Raptor III at 1 am too tempting to pass up.

I swear, it feels like some stranger has usurped my brain and body and is using it for his own sick pleasure. Whatever the reason for my recent childish behavior, I don’t think I can go on living this life for very long before something changes. I hope that by taking David Foster Wallace’s words to heart I can overcome the initial urge to play it safe and avoid failure when it comes to writing. And hopefully the fact that I’ve just written about my Writer’s Block means that I’ve already taken the first step in confronting this obstacle.

Fantasy and Voyeurism: Men and the Violence Culture

Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, worries that pornography is carving out a false image of femininity in our national consciousness. She is troubled at how the natural is being supplanted by the artificial, and by the glorification of performance sex over love making.

The negative gender stereotypes associated with pornography are no doubt worrisome, and more so for females because of the demeaning way in which they are often depicted in this genre (name one other form of lowbrow entertainment where perverted fat men get to crack jokes and rate the sexiness of females who they are simultaneously fondling, probing or getting fellated by?). But if women have good reason to be offended by their underling roles in this testosterone-driven industry, we men should at least be leery of the equally testosterone-driven entertainments that appeal to the generic aspects of our gender.

Spike TV is perhaps one of the most notorious purveyors of the notion that all men get hard-ons for cage fighting, muscle cars and bikini clad women. Shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighter Championship and Deadliest Worrier attempt to awaken our animalistic bloodlust with raw, savage depictions of guys beating the hell out of each other and scenes of ancient weapons of warfare slicing through slabs of meat as a way of demonstrating their deadly effectiveness. Entertainment such as this is troubling if one considers the sobering statistic that, in 2006, 1 in every 72 American men was incarcerated in a county, state or federal prison. By comparison, in that same year only 1 out of every 746 women was behind bars. Given our innately virile propensity to fight, murder and self-destruct, shouldn’t the modern man boycott all things which glorify senseless violence and brutality? Is the world so lacking in actual violence to necessitate the creation and consumption of fantasy violence? And just how are we contributing to human growth and progress if we give in to these natural urges which – when carried out in real life – only wreak havoc on our lives and the lives of countless others?

To get a taste of the very real and very permanent consequences of senseless acts of violence committed by men in the throes of passion, one need look no further than A&E’s First 48. This is a series which follows actual detectives around in the first forty-eight hours after a murder has been committed. The blood soaked crime scenes which the burned out and exasperated detective workers must canvass, and the trail of clues which invariably lead to a stoic, cold-blooded murderer – these things evoke a stark reminder of just how ugly a pandemic violence is in our culture. There are no heroic desperados of Hollywood proportion in real-life shootouts and slayings, just lowlife gang members and common street thugs. In light of this, pop cultural glamorization of death and killing seems, at the very least, irresponsible and jaded.

And yet shows like First 48 do more than just feed our curiosity about the procedurals of detective work. There is a voyeurism to it all, starting at the point when the detectives lift the tarpaulin to reveal the slain victim, all the way up till the end when they slap a pair of cuffs on the prime suspect and read him his rights. These police shows are a way for us to peer into the lives of people who we don’t really know or care too much about, allowing us to observe how they kill each other off. This is the real curiosity which gives programs like First 48 their momentum. Everything from the senseless motives for the killings, to the killers’ nonchalant attitudes about taking a life – given their unflinching indifference in the interrogation room you would think they were being accused of stealing a bike – causes every episode to convey an inexplicable foreignness. We know what we’re seeing, and yet we don’t understand it. We know who these people are, we have a vague idea of what they’re all about, and yet after seeing how they kill and react to killing, we understand them even less.

Other real-life shows feed our voyeurism in similar ways. Every weekend MSNBC runs back to back to back documentaries about prison life, visiting places from Alaska (like institutions which house that state’s worst murderers) to Folsom’s historic penitentiary in California to modern day chain gangs in the South. After watching just a couple of these programs, it quickly becomes evident that NBC is indirectly pillorying the weak-willed and downtrodden inmates on their cross country big house tours. The cameras take us though the prisons as if on a tour of a zoo, pausing before a cell to observe how an inmate makes contraband moonshine from fruit and shampoo as if he were a gorilla doing something strange. It is veritable Schadenfreude with a glossy shine. The result is that we feel a comforting contentedness knowing that these manimals are locked up where they are, and not walking the streets with us and our children. The shows also remind us that prison is no place we’d ever want to be, further driving home the old adage not to do the crime if we can’t do the time.

(Let’s also remember one thing: NBC may not have invented subtlety, but they have certainly perfected it in their coverage over the years. They have become psychologists; every word spoken by their anchors or pundits, and every news show, sitcom, biopic, miniseries or movie they broadcast is so saturated with multiple meanings and nuance that it is impossible to take them at face value anymore.)

***

When we give up thinking for the day and cast our burdens upon the TV, there are multiple choices from which to get our violence fix. If we want to vicariously experience fantasy violence there are car chases, endless murder mysteries, or sci-fi movies where we can insert ourselves into the role of a hero who saves the world from an outer space bug invasion just so he can win the girl he loves. If we want entertainment that blurs the line between fantasy violence and actual violence, there are shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighting Championship where the kicks and punches might be truncated so as not to deliver the full force of the blow, but they still draw blood sometimes. Finally, if we want the real, raw stuff without all the dressing up and glamour, there are shows like First 48 and MSNBC’s prison marathon weekends.

As a modern man, which form of televised violence should we turn to when our peaceful boredom becomes too much to bear? As the physically stronger sex, we need outlets for all that extra energy. Viewing violence, reading about it, dreaming of it or partaking in it in some minimal (or big) way almost feels like a necessity – violence always has been and probably always will be one of our many hungers. Perhaps the goal of the modern man therefore shouldn’t be to eradicate violent tendencies from our DNA, but rather our goal should be to learn how to control these tendencies. When violence is in your grasp, you feel powerful, mighty and invincible. But as we’ve witnessed far too often, this power always becomes too great too quickly and invariably leads to people being physically or emotionally hurt, and the imminent imploding (or exploding) of the violence bearer. Riding high on violent power is like riding a huge serpent, you cling to its scaly back for as long as possible before you are eventually thrown off and tossed about in its wake.

Perhaps violence is sacred, something to use only in rare instances when there is no other alternative. They endlessly try to teach us in anger management classes about the realistic allocation of negative feelings – feeling murderous rage towards the guy who killed your daughter is normal, feeling that same type of rage towards the lady that cut you off in traffic is not – but the lessons take a while to sink in. If we can’t control our hormonal tendencies, perhaps it is best to banish them to a faraway place within us.

Violence serves an inverse evolutionary purpose. The longer we are alive, the more it becomes prevalent that the cool kids – the desperados, the slackers, the gang bangers and all the other guys who lived by the seat of their hormones – didn’t get themselves or us anywhere. The phrase “only the strong survive” – coined by Jerry Butler in his titular song and later immortalized by Elvis – may not be such a truism after all. As evidenced by the aforementioned A&E and MSNBC shows, men who fight to defend their personal territory, virility and respect against frivolous threats often end up in prisons or morgues. They finish each other off in street brawls, wars and drag races gone awry. By living in the moment, these men lack the planning and foresight necessary to effectively pass on their genes.

Peacefulness is becoming the new golden rule. There is no place in the future for combative rogues and hot tempered territorial nitwits. The conquerors of history, the ones who will make most proud the thousands of generations of our ancestors who suffered and fought and foraged so that we could exist today, will be the men who were capable of being the better man by walking away from a fight. These males are the humble and happy men who value book smarts over street smarts. They are the teenagers who sacrifice their youths so that they can have a rich future which doesn’t involve a lot of tattoos, gas-pumping and frequent trips to Wal-Mart. They are the future. We are the future. The immature naysayers and trash talkers are shouting into a wind which blows louder and more fiercely with each passing season.

That wind is the Modern Man.

Just A Girl

Amber pushes her dually stroller along the north to south corridor of her small Midwestern city every day. The adorable blonde heads of her toddler twins, Maggie and Megan, poke out of puffy white parkas like chicks hatching from eggs. Pedestrians often stop to remark how cute the girls look, calling them “little angels” and making gaga noises which are reciprocated by wide, wet smiles and excited shrieks of laughter from the girls.

Amber is a regular at the supermarket located near the end of Main Street. She knows all the managers, clerks and cashiers by first name. They always put a few extra cans of Similac on hold just for her and the store manager has even given her free diapers on more than one occasion.

Amber is greeted by Keith at the video store where she often takes out 5-10 movies at a time. Keith stopped charging Amber for late fees after she incurred a balance of $50.00 for a lost copy of The Incredibles. Keith will set aside new releases he knows Amber will enjoy: action/adventure, romance and comedy (Amber doesn’t care much for serious drama and sci-fi, and she doesn’t like anything that is “too artsy”).

After her daily grocery shopping trip, dropping off and checking out DVDs at the video store and sometimes feeding pigeons in the park, Amber returns home where she spends the rest of the day and evening on the Internet and engaged in mommy tasks.

“It is hard to tell people what I do,” she says. But then she corrects herself: “It is hard telling people what I DON’T DO.”

The father of Amber’s twins split two years ago and is now living somewhere in Georgia. He stopped paying child support ten months ago, but even before that Amber says it was hard getting even anything from him (such as a reliable address or phone number).

Amber is embarrassed by her lack of independence. Having no job and no social life, she says, makes her feel like an unproductive member of society. “I am like a useless prop,” she says. “Every city and town is supposed to have its unemployed single moms to laugh at, and that is me.”

As I followed Amber around, however, I became aware that nobody was laughing at her. In fact, people kept going out of their way time and again to help her or just make friendly conversation. When I reminded Amber of this she adjusted her position. “My thinking does tend to get clouded with negativity at times, and this is why I’m seeing somebody who helps me with these emotions.”

Amber visits a psychiatrist twice a month who prescribes Celexa for her depression. A case manager from a local non-profit agency checks in on her every week to make sure everything at home is honky dory. Amber also receives food stamps to help her buy groceries and other necessities for the girls. But rather than feeling entitled to this help, Amber instead feels like a victim. “I wouldn’t be in this mess today if I had been smart and known what I was getting into when I got pregnant,” she says.

Amber’s fixation with romance movies started when her doctor challenged her to find a way to counter her stressful feelings of depression and loneliness. While she admits that these movies make her feel good and calm her down, Amber claims that they also have the tendency to make her reality seem even more confusing than it already is. “These movies show me an entirely different world, one that doesn’t have any real hardships or consequences.”

If Amber’s life seems familiar, that is because it is.

Do you know someone like Amber?

To Chris at McSweeney’s, this is for you

‘TIS THE SEASON FOR CHRIS

It is that time of year again. People will either be rejoicing or groaning as the familiar rush of shopping, Christmas caroling and eggnog sipping reaches its peak.

In recent years we heard about the War on Christmas, a supposed attempt by capitalist dictators and their willing executioners to transmute the holy celebration of Christ’s birth into a secular and economy boosting season. According to a few paranoid fundamentalists, the mere mention of Christ invokes such a feeling of repulsion in the hearer that big box stores and other institutions have caused expressions such as “Merry Christmas” and (even) “Merry Xmas” to be thrown into the dustbin of holiday phrases forever.

But there is another holiday utterance which flies below the radar of conservative pundit censure. The two words “Merry Chrismas.” Let’s be honest, the t in the word Christmas is elided so often in everyday speech as to almost have become obsolete. Only people who speak English as a second language and elocution teachers (and their star pupils) actually pronounce the word Christmas with phonetic precision.

If Christians have gone on the offensive in recent years attacking big corporations and the media for trying to kill Christmas, why haven’t they ever had a bad thing to say about Chris? Because, if I have been hearing things correctly, people have been saying “Merry CHRISmas” for as long as I can remember. Who is this person Chris who has subverted Christianity’s second holiest holiday? Shouldn’t he be the number 1 target the Christian right should be going after?

For perhaps centuries Chris has injected himself into the tradition of worshipping the Baby Jesus. Maybe this is because Chris was an unloved baby himself, somebody who was coddled by an overworked and non-affectionate au pair instead of by a nurturing mother. Or Chris may have been raised by a single teenage mom who employed shouting threats of violence against his cries for touch. On the other hand, Chris could just be a bitter and vengeful ghost who suffered from gift neglect during his life.

Whatever the reason for this Chris person’s need to be an integral part of every past and future Yuletide season, his relationship to this joyous time of year is inseparable. We may overlook Chris every single time we say “Merry Chrismas” to somebody, but he is still there in our subconscious being passed along to future generations.

I invite all of you to celebrate Chris’s day on December 25^th. Make a place in your heart for Chris when you attend your places of worship, when you go door to door singing songs about him and when the exit greeter at Wal-Mart implies the Chris season without actually saying Chris’s name (or a name similar to Chris’s) so as not to sound presumptuous or offend you.

This is supposed to be the time of year when we all stop and bask in Chris’s transcendent and everlasting glory. But if you find yourself unable to refrain from saying “Merry Chrismas,” please do not feel abashed or hindered. Chris would have wanted it that way.

Coming into Focus

Men don’t like to talk about depression. Correction: men don’t like to talk about depression with anyone other than their shrinks. We are supposed to be hard, resilient and not afraid to get hurt. Usually, we are the ones doing the hurting rather than taking it. We might feel some pain in our ribs during a game of football but we just ignore it and make sure to tackle the opponent harder next time. I had a running coach in high school who, when we complained about cramps, would tell us to, “run it off.” This should be every guy’s mantra. 

But men are not gods and we are not made out of steel. We are bags of flesh, bone, muscle and vascular circuitry, stuff that any doctor will tell you is susceptible to have anything go awry with it at any time. There is no way, therefore, for a man to insulate himself against depression. All he can do is learn to deal with it if or when it occurs.

I am going to break the male oath and talk about my depression. The fact is I am very comfortable talking about my inadequacies because I have been doing it for half of my life. It all started when I was 16. Instead of Flinstone vitamins my mom dispensed anti-depressants every morning and evening. During my teens and early twenties I faced phalanxes of psychologists, psychiatrists, shyness and drug abuse counselors and case managers. My journey through the mental health system, I would come to learn, was quite ordinary by 1990’s standards. While I got an early start with the inward pointed telescope, many of my friends would eventually be seated in the hot seat as well telling some stranger about their social phobias and wet dreams.

It is not such a bad thing to be a molded product of clinical psychiatry. After all, society tells us that this is normal. Commercials for all sorts of pills to bring back the clarity used to be (and still are) very popular. TV psychiatrists during the late 90’s like Dr. Katz and Dr. Frasier were famous because we all identified pieces of our own personal therapists in them. Psychologists are like modern day Prometheuses, stealing sanity from the gods and dispensing it to us all for a nominal fee of $100 or more every two weeks.

But rather than going along with a trend, I think a part of me truly is depressed and emotionally imbalanced. The concept of manhood I described at the top doesn’t always apply to me. My emotions have a way of controlling me some of the time instead of the other way around. I don’t always know where the volume switch is so that I can turn the negative feelings down in order to get some work done. My emotional waves might roll over me and I end up riding it out until the tide subsides.

This inability to tame one’s emotions flies in the face of how a real man is supposed to behave. This is not the masochistic man, the territorial man, the cool-headed, assertive and unflinching man. A depressed man is a man who cowers and retreats. A depressed man is polarized because he overreacts to compensate for all those times when he was passive. A depressed man is a backseat driver, someone who wants to be in control but can’t be.

This is exactly the reason why depression is so painful for men and why we don’t want to admit we have it. Men are supposed to be chiseled Odysseuses who can face painful adversity without breaking down. Loneliness, heartbreak, unrequited love, vice and death are the bedfellows of men. They bear the scars of their inner battles with pride. “Look,” a man might say, “I had my heart broken by a girl and now I am stronger and braver.” The man who sags under the weight of his pity is dishonorable, clownish and pathetic.

Is it any wonder why depression is a shameful disease for men? The millstone of depression might be a normal part of life for women–a spell of sadness after the birth of a baby or a divorce–but its symptoms seem so out of character with the way a man is supposed to comport himself. We are reluctant to tell people we curl up in front of the TV in the dark, our troubled thoughts keep us awake at night, we have messy houses or apartments, we don’t take the best care of our pets, family or friends. We are selfish, forgetful, tired all the time. We eat too much or too little, we sleep half the day on the weekends and it takes us longer to complete tasks which we used to plow through with ease and pleasure.

For a man to announce that he takes medication for a health reason that is non-phyical, that he has to have a shrink help him through his small and easy little problems, that he requires structure or else his negative thoughts might creep in–this is the ultimate embarrassement a man can face at, say, a gym locker room. I can just see this scenario played out in an episode of Law & Order SVU:

Ice T: Yay, the Knicks squashed the fuckin’ Sixers last night at MSG, you see that Tim?

Me: What? Ah, no.

Ice T: No? Why not? You some pussy or something.

Me: No, I’m just not that interested in sports.

Ice T: Not interested in B-Ball? Man, you been bittin’ your pillow for too long.

Me: I’m not gay.

Ice: I didn’t say you were gay, I said you been bittin’ your pillow. You know what? You need to get laid.

Me: Um, my doctor said if I want to form healthy relationships I shouldn’t comingle with–

Ice T: Your doctor! What doctor?

Me: Uh, my psychiatrist.

Ice T: You’re a headcase! I knew it. I always thought you were a fag but it turns out you’re really a headcase! HA! HA! HA!

Headcase, mental midget–whatever you want to call it, men have a hard time separating depression from other forms of mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Depression is as common these days as the cold. If you’re not taking anti-depressants you can rest assured your friend is, or your boss is, or that guy sitting next to you on the subway with the dripping nose is.

Last word

I don’t know what the solution is. Should all men start wearing shirts that say DEPRESSION IS OK, I HAVE IT AND IT DOESN’T MAKE ME GAY? Or should we continue to keep shrouding the condition in shame and embarrassment? Is it better for you to ignore that you have depression or is it a serious ailment that needs professional treatment? Certainly this question should be preceded by a consideration of the varying degrees of severity in how depression manifests itself, but can we all throw up our hands and agree that depression sucks and it should just go away?

Probably not. Depression will be with us for a while so we may as well get used to it. But heroic male virtues and the way of the desperado have been around a lot longer, so the dilemma of male depression is not so easily resolved.