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.)

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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.

Reflections of L.A.: 2007

L.A.: not exactly your mom’s burbs

All of my preconceptions about Southern California were shattered shortly after arriving at the Long Beach airport. I was anticipating suburbia: square mile after square mile of strip malls and tract homes populated by endless iterations of soccer moms, office park dads and the broods of kids typically associated with these kinds of people. Instead everything screamed Civilization, trendiness, wealth, sophistication, art, nightlife and fun – lots and lots of expensive, unatainable fun. Southern California may as well be New York City with beaches and palm trees.

The Shocking Truth about Celebrities

“It was surprising to learn that famous people in L.A. are in fact more human than one raised on a steady diet of Hollywood fantasy might expect. I always imagined the celebrities sort of as offspring to the gods who never went anywhere without their retinues of helpers and small armies to prevent them from being mobbed, molested or kidnapped by the hoards of unsophisticated ‘normal’ people. It was weird to discover that they travel around with friends or alone, eat at restaurants, shop for shoes or just stop in a park bathroom to expose themselves much like the rest of us.

I saw John Voight at a Jewish deli. He entered alone (where were his body men, I thought) and scanned the room for his party. The other patrons might have leered over their roast beef sandwiches, and there were some hushed whispers – “Look, it’s John Voight,” “John Voight! Where?” – but he was not mobbed and no madmen jumped up and tried to assassinate him. John Voight looked and acted for the most part as if he could care less that he was John Voight. The muted excitement in the restaurant lasted less than a minute and then life resumed as normal.”

On being a self-described ugly person in the Land of Beautiful People

“I enjoyed taking in the sights, sounds and smells of Southern California as one might enjoy attending a beach party while encased in a bubble. I was close to all of the action yet I didn’t feel like a part of it. Ultimately, it was this detached proximity that made me feel invisible and conspicuous at the same time.

The whole experience was not unlike my recurring nightmare in which I find myself at a cocktail party after work on the same day that I just happen to forget to wear clothes. As if the nudity part of the dream isn’t bad enough, when I try to open my mouth to explain myself chirping birds fly out. The other party attendees in the nightmare who smartly remembered to wear their tuxedos and spangled dresses eye me as if I’m a lost cause, while my work superiors give me stern yet understanding looks which say, “Well, just remember to wear clothes tomorrow, okay Tim.”

“If The Beautiful People and the celebrities are practically indistinguishable in the fairy tale realm of Southern California, one would think haughtiness would flow down Wilshire Boulevard and the Sunset Strip like apocalyptic blood. This, however, is not the case. Just like the celebrities, the many semi-important beautiful people of Southern California do not act as if they are endowed with any corporeal advantage over the rest of humankind. They need a certain level of humility to survive just like the rest of us. Based on this fact, one would be inclined to think that this “humanness” would make them less scary. But it was not the quality of the Beautiful Peoples’ personalities that made them so intimidating to me – it was their quantity. I could not walk down a street without lines of mannequin-like perfect people criss-crossing all around me. While their body language gave no hint of hostility and no snobbishness could be detected in their glances, the simple phenomenon of being outnumbered made me feel unwelcome. Something instinctive told me I should go back home, work on my looks, read a ton of books and earn some money before I ever attempted to walk the streets of Southern California again. And yet at the same time my experience felt so cliche in that gauche out-of-towner culture shock sort of way.”

Be real, be yourself

“The corporate distillation and distribution of Southern California to the rest of America is creating a strange and funny illusion. After my vacation enlightenment, I have to say that the brains in Hollywood (especially the fashion brains) are doing a good job at making average Middle Americans resemble Venice Beach hippies or jet setting socialites. But the distance between the real world of Southern California and its parallel imitation world is proportionate to the distance between the Earth and the Moon. One of life’s biggest faux pas, in my opinion, is for a person to look like a Southern Californian when they have little or no understanding as to the actual essence of what makes a Southern Californian truly a Southern Californian (the same goes for a New Yorker or a Brit or a…fill in the blank).”

“I envied what few other imperfect people there were who appeared to have found stylistic ways to compensate for their physical shortcomings. There was one heavy man I saw at a restaurant who seemed to wear his excess weight as if it were a bulky cashmere sweater. A cashier was able to offset a long, crooked nose with a loud purple haircut. And a man at the beach was able to turn his physical deformity into an attention-getting act. Viewing these individuals made me wonder why I haven’t been able to find the right fashion accessories to call attention away from my pear-shaped torso and large head. I wondered, as I gazed at all of the eclectic people in coffee shops and and restaurants, why I am not able to exude my inner qualities in the same way that a lot of these people did. It was introspective moments like this that instantly made me loathe my stiff, timid gait, my high forehead and bushy, glowering eyebrows. As I was forced to endure myself in this environment, I longed for nothing more than to be back home in my room drowning my low self-esteem in diet soda and reruns of Law & Order. It was too stressful to face myself as I really am, even in the city that is often notoriously considered the mecca of everything that is fake.”

Conclusion

Los Angeles may have made me long for myself, but it has proved to be a productive longing thus far. It is a longing that has made me want to search, explore and try new things that will enable all the parts of me to coalesce again. The city may have initially chased me away, but it is also calling me back (or else I wouldn’t have written this, right?). And I believe in the future it will continue to call me back and challenge me to search for that latent potential which is hidden within (if not also to cause me to obsess about what is visible to the rest of the world from without).

Homework 101 (Social Studies)

Because I like doing other people’s homework for them.

Discuss how the rationalization of society has changed the nature of social interaction from long-term, personal relationships to short-term, impersonal contacts; discuss which particular interactions in today’s world continue to be traditional in nature.  Which interactions are based primarily on rationality? Finally, which of your own social interactions tend to be traditional in nature and which are driven by rationality?

Hmmmmmmmm. Well, the workforce is more mobile these days. Very few people grow up, live, work, retire and die in the same city anymore. This curtails the average lifespan of a relationship to maybe five or ten years. This might also lower the expectations in relationships–i.e., if you think you might pack up and move to Phoenix in two or three years, you aren’t going to try to form any lasting bonds with new people. You will keep it light and simple.

Facebook in my opinion ties us to the traditional since it is a vehicle for old friends to become reacquainted. I’ve found several of my friends on facebook from 15 or 20 years ago. The charm of facebook is that it invokes the nostalgic. I think home is an abstract place for most of us rather than a tangible place that actually exists. Like James Joyce, we are all trying to go home whether we can actually still go there or not. Our scattered connections – the friends we’ve made throughout school, college and work who we’ve deemed worth keeping – might represent something traditional in today’s society. These connections can exist in the virtual realm of facebook or in other forms, both distantly far away yet safely out of reach.

I could go on about how:

1. The rise in crime over the last half century has eroded human trust and heightened people’s fears. New relationships require a peeling away of the various layers to get at a person’s core. Subconscious plays a huge part in who we are both individually and collectively as a society: things aren’t often as they appear on the surface. Impersonal interaction, therefore, has many benefits: it is safer, less risky and allows us to exchange information without divulging too much or ourselves or discovering what we may not want to discover about other people.

2. The devaluation of anything sacred has chipped away at tradition and increased impersonal interaction. Marriage is no longer the sanctimonious institution that it once was. Rather, people go into marriage believing they have perhaps a 50/50 chance. The trivialization of marriage is compounded by a trivialization of of sex. Pornographic pop culture has sucked much of the love and sacredness out of sexual intercourse. Being the huge driving force that it is, sex is probably what prevents many of us from becoming complete loners. But since having a satisfying sex life no longer requires going beyond the impersonal, the need to build lasting, strong relationships serves less of a societal function.

3. Impersonal social interaction leads to the breakdown of institutions. Since impersonal relationships are lacking in the kind of trust which stronger relationships exhibit, corruption is able to breed and grow in our institutions. Besides contributing to poorer teamwork, an institution made up of many impersonal relationships allows for things like misconduct and embezzlement to become more common and frequent. In educational institutions, the breakdown of strong relationships leads to academic dishonesty, poorer study habits among students and less school pride and spirit. Kids might walk around and mope that, “My school sucks,” or employees might say, “Chase Bank is crappy, I want a better job.”

The one beneficial outcome of an increased reliance on impersonal social interaction, however, might be that it fosters a greater self-reliance and personal discipline. Students might not work well in groups, but they might become better independent students. In the same way, employees who fumble a meeting or a conference might do their best work in an office room all by themselves. Their Power Point presentation might be lacking and they might not tell the best jokes around the water cooler, but the results of their independent work will be no less of an asset to the company.

Social studies is fun, isn’t it?

listen

disgusting

Sick people.

The only video I can think of that is more laden with images and messages of propaganda is that cheesy, “Citizen Soldier” video by 3 Doors Down which gets played at movie theaters before the previews. What is most disturbing about this video, however, is that it is trying hard to be artistic while it is basically just an advertisment for the military. Thinly vieled propaganda passed off as art. Sick.

I have lost all respect for Chris Cornell.

Websites where Barack Obama’s name comes up under spellcheck as being mispelled

Yahoo Answers -

In the months leading up to the election there was heated debate, bickering and trolling on this questions & answers website. Every question asked in the politics category was a salvo in an endless trench warfare battle between democrats and republicans. For instance, republicans would ask questions such as, “Can America really afford to have a Muslim terrorist as our next president?,” and democrats would ask things like, “Why is it assumed that Sarah Palin won the debate because she didn’t pass out and pee all over herself?”

But the disturbing thing about participating in the Yahoo Answers  melee is that whenever I would ask (or answer) a question about Barack Obama, the lightening fast and nagging spell-check feature would always indicate that I was misspelling Obama’s last name. What is worse, the spell-check gave as the first suggestion in a list of “similar” words to the Obama “typo” the name Osama. I am NOT shitting you! Osama, as in Osama Bin Laden.

Now that Barack is president Yahoo has obviously fixed this “little” glitch. Hmmmmm…did they actually think Obama wasn’t going to win in a landslide victory?

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I encountered this Obama typo again and again as I perused the web and left comments in the months leading up to the November election. I wish I could remember all the websites that tried to slander and censor our new president as he battled McCain and Palin. I had to say it was quite aggravating and disturbing to see the republicans take their oppresive media propaganda smear campaign to the internet arena.

max headroom

If Rush proteges on TV start trying to brainwash me I can always turn them off. But the next place after television where I’m going to go is the Internet (since my eyes seem to require at least 4 hours per day of staring at luminescent screens). And if my mind can’t be free, relaxed and liberated online I don’t know where I am going to find this release. In books I can certainly let my mind expand and roam, but reading is a very private and personal type of escapism unlike watching television or typing on the Internet. The constant sound, images and response of other people in these two latter mediums mimics real-life socialization.

But who wants to argue all the time? Because that is what invariably happens when I go online and start chatting with other people when I use websites like Yahoo. All it takes is one Obama typo and I instantly know that I am utilizing a republican mouthpiece. And as a natural born democrat I instantly want to infect that mouth with my own liberal thoughts and beliefs.

But anyway…

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The spellcheck feature on this websitealso doesn’t recognize the name Barack Obama.

Cotton Candy

Has is really been 20 years?

This is what I’m feeling right about now

Novemeber 4th, 8:46PM.

where fantasy meets reality (or vice versa)

I had to post these pictures because I’ve been dying to share them with somebody…anybody. In my vicarious TV life I live somewhere in Southern California (maybe on the yacht below) and I am employed in commercial real estate; or maybe I’m a bar tender who moonlights as a sleuth; or better yet I’m a secret agent with amnesia and a double life.

Anyway, my uncle and aunt – who live in northern CA – recently vacationed in LA and they sent me these exotic pictures of their trip.

This is a yacht that was anchored at a wharf in Marina del Ray. My aunt commented that, “This person is so wealthy that he has his own helicopter on the back of his yacht,” and that, “It has a British flag on the stern.” I thought, maybe this is what Pierce Brosnan uses to get back and forth between LA and his home in Hawaii? (I know he’s Irish so the Union Jack wouldn’t exactly work with my conjecture–oh well). No, it belongs to an American. This guy actually.

I love Venice Beach. I was there in 2007 with both of my brothers and a sister-in-law. If you’re wondering where all the Dead Heads went after the Grateful Dead and Phish broke up, they’re all camped out at Venice Beach. The boardwalk is bordered by shops and kiosks selling and offering a gamut of tattoos, massages, piercings, tee-shirts, pipes, art work and palm reading. Hardcore burnouts and unique colorful characters throng the place every day. Think Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley only with nicer weather, a sprawling beach and friendlier hippies.

This guy is a Venice Beach icon. He has been playing tunes at the beach for 30 years. He sells CDs of his music, he has been featured in movies and – weirdly – I saw him in the parking lot party at a Grateful Dead concert in Sacramento, CA in 1992 (Shhhhhh–I was 15 at the time and wasn’t supposed to be there).

But Venice Beach isn’t only the haunt of hippies. Tourists, jocks (Muscle Beach), surfers, gangsters/rappers, dog walkers, Frisbee throwers and even celebrities (my brother saw Vince Vaughn and his girlfriend riding bikes) all congregate to the place to make it one of the hugest cluster fucks on the West Coast. But unlike cluster fucks the place is mostly functional. Some of the nastiest bathrooms in the Western hemisphere might be situated at Venice Beach, but they place still scores highly as a popular hangout for everybody and anybody.

Rich people also can claim Venice Beach as their own. All the houses and apartments that line the boardwalk look like the domiciles on the show Miami Vice. If you have a couple million to lay down on a home, you might be able to get something modest at Venice Beach.

This is looking south at Pismo Beach. This is not Venice Beach but rather this is the hotel where my uncle and aunt stayed on their trip. From the photo it looks very nice, the swimming pool so close to the ocean looks superfluous and excessive. But my aunt was quick to point out that the place reeked of guano. Seagulls nesting on the cliffs nearby saturated the air with guano smell and attracted swarms of flies. The sunbather in the photo, however, doesn’t seem to mind.

Here is a better picture of the guano.

And here is the British diva Faith Brown (I just had to include this).

So that is the real LA. Not too different from the fantasy LA I imagine myself living in. Only my vicarious world is more exciting. In real life I might leisurely stroll down the Venice boardwalk and marvel at the thonged black dude who enlessly lifts weights at Muscle beach. But in my vicarious life I would be on my cell phone talking to Faith Brown about our secret affair when suddenly the thonged black dude would point at me, flex his muscles and say in an accusatory voice, “You!” I would look in the other direction before looking back at him. Then I would point at my chest and ask, “Me?” “That is right, YOU!” he would repeat.

Cut to nightime. I am sifting through the garbage near MuslceBeach for clues. That is when I find a needle with the words “monotricholride dietholnol” printed on the side. I would think to myself, Hm, this is the performance enhancing drug I read about in the paper that was being smuggled to the baseball players at UCLA by their coach. Just then my cell phone would ring and it would be Faith Brown. She would say the words, “Mr Pecksniff is hungry” and instantly I wouldn’t know where I was. Or rather, I would come to and wonder why I was wearing ridiculous clothes and sifting through the garbage at Venice Beach.

Then I would meet Faith Brown back at our yacht in Marina del Rey. We would sail out to sea, stand at the stern under the stars with the Union Jack flapping in the breeze above us. It wouldn’t smell like guano. We would toast our cocktail glasses, get in our helicopter and fly to an imaginary island where androgynous children our born and raised before being released into the world on their 18th birthday.