Elizabeth Smart Takes on the Deep Evils of the Purity Myth

At a recent panel at Johns Hopkins university, Elizabeth Smart asked us all to approach victims of kidnapping and human trafficking with compassion and empathy—imploring us to offer them safety and support, rather than merely gawking at the grisly particulars of their ordeals or getting lost in the callous, irrelevant question of why or when a given person did or didn’t run.

Her comments are especially worthy of our attention right now, given the horrible ordeal that just ended for those three women in Cleveland. It’s worth thinking about why people (mostly men) do these sorts of monstrous things to other people (mostly women), and why victim-blaming (of which the why-didn’t-she-run question is certainly a facet) remains so pervasive.

Smart talked very openly about her experience being kidnapped and held captive for nine months, during which time she was repeatedly raped:

I was raised in a very religious household, one that taught that sex was something special that only happened between a husband and a wife who loved each other. And that’s what I’d been raised [to believe], that’s what I’d always been determined to follow—that when I got married, then and only then would I engage in sex.

And so, for that first rape, I felt crushed: who could want me now? I felt so dirty, and so filthy. I understand—so easily, all too well—why someone wouldn’t run: because of that alone. I mean, if you can imagine the most special thing being taken away from you, and feeling like that—not that that was your only value in life, but…

Can you imagine turning around and going back into society, where you’re no longer of value? Where you’re no longer as good as everybody else?

Smart then immediately, explicitly traced her feelings of shame and worthlessness to abstinence-only education.

I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about—well, about abstinence. And she said, “Imagine you’re a stick of gum. And when you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And then, if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum. And who’s going to want you after that?”

That’s terrible. Nobody should ever say that. But for me, I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’m that chewed-up piece of gum. Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away.” And that’s how [easy] it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value.”

There are lots of problems with abstinence-only education. One problem is that it doesn’t seem to work at all. It doesn’t produce teenagers who are more abstinent, but only teenagers who are more ignorant. For another thing, then, children without sexual information are easier targets for sexual predators; how can they know what inappropriate or threatening behavior looks like when they have only the foggiest idea of what safe, healthy, appropriate behavior looks like?

But Smart’s comments also address something bigger than abstinence-only education, bigger than rape culture: the idea that a woman’s value derives from her virginity, from her purity—that whereas a man becomes incrementally more awesome (and thus more valuable) with each sexual conquest, sex renders a woman sluttier (and thus less valuable). This means that a woman’s first sexual experience markedly, massively, irretrievably reduces her value.

Let’s begin by agreeing about how fucked up that concept is.

We construe a woman’s virginity as, in Elizabeth Smart’s words, “the most special thing” she possesses. Smart stops just short of saying that virginity is a woman’s “only value in life.” If a woman isn’t a faultless sexual gatekeeper, then she’s nothing, whatever else she may have going for her. As Jessica Valenti outlined in The Purity Myth, sexual “purity” is held up as the cardinal virtue of female life, over and above actual virtues like kindness, intelligence, creativity, and integrity.

Now, this crap does make some semblance of sense, in an “evolutionary history” kind of way: before the emergence of birth control as a technology and genetics as a science, the only way that a man could guarantee himself children that were biologically his own was to exert total control over his reproductive partner’s sexuality. Even as women achieve greater measures of equality—and even as science strips old gender configurations of all utility—men and women alike continue to believe that female sexuality must be policed, restrained, reigned-in (and worse, that this inequity is somehow the natural order of things).

Peggy Reeves Sanday pinpoints this as the founding cultural myth of victim-blaming and female non-agency, expressed most succinctly in the work R.F. von Krafft Ebing and Havelock Ellis—who, following from Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection, attempted to find a “natural” explanation for rape. “Ellis conceives of human sexual behavior as a game of combat,” Sanday explains. “Playing the role of the hunted animal the female conceals her sexual passion by adopting a demeanor of modesty in order that the male may be more ardent and forceful.”

More specifically (and also more creepily), Ellis argued that female resistance is eventually, inevitably met with “an element of real violence, of undisguised cruelty,” and that this combativeness-unto-violence “[puts] to the test man’s most important quality, force.”

So on Ellis’ account, aggressive coercion is a valid tactic for men perusing sex, and female sexual gatekeeping is a performance: really, she wants it, but it’s her responsibility to withhold it, except that she won’t be able to, because she’ll find the sheer virility of her increasingly coercive paramour to be just that damn irresistible.

This tangled knot of misogynist non-logic helps to explain why we think of sexually active women as less virtuous, and why we think this even when the sex-acts in question occurred against their will—and also, why so many men who rape do not think of themselves as rapists. The cultural script tells us that women are supposed to resist, and that men are supposed to overcome that resistance. Nothing wrong here. Just sex-as-a-zero-sum-game, forever.

Succinctly and without exaggeration, this idea is one of the deepest and most pervasive evils ever to riddle the human psyche. This is what leads us to ask what rape victims were wearing when they were raped. This is what makes it possible to regard “honor killings” with anything other than open horror.

This is also what makes it possible to use a rape as a weapon of war. Rape is self-evidently monstrous in itself, but it couldn’t tear societies apart if the members of those societies refused to shun and despite its victims—if they reserved their disdain for the perpetrators of the crime, rather than those against whom the crime was purpotrated.

I’m not claiming that I know how to untangle this knot, but I do know that we won’t get anywhere while so many of us persist in beliving—obstinately, confrontationally, and against all available evidence—that the whole problem is fictional or long since solved. We need to begin by noticing these malignant assumptions in ourselves, and fighting them whenever they emerge.

I’m not claiming that’s easy. Just that it’s necessary. We stand to make the world an infinitely more humane place, if only we can all see sexual “purity” for the pernicious, corrosive bullshit that it is and supplant it (bit by bit, thought by thought, interaction by interaction) with a better and saner cultural script.

Religious Freedom Requires a Secular Government

This recent attempt in North Carolina to establish a state religion was a little too dumb and a little too doomed to actually be scary. It fails on its face, because it violates the very first line of the very first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America—”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—and much like Kansas trying to ban abortion in spite of Roe v. Wade, it was never going to result in anything more than a costly public spectacle at the state taxpayers’ expense.

But it does reveal a genuinely troubling strain of ignorance among our duly elected representatives, who apparently do not realize that devoutly religious people, perhaps more than any other group, need secular law. Secular law is not a decadent intellectual luxury, nor is it by any means an attack on anyone’s religious freedom. Quite the opposite, secular governance is a necessary precondition to the free exercise of religion.

Let’s assume that the hypothetical theocracy in question is an Abrahamic one (even though that’s not necessarily a given). Is the government Christian, Jewish, or Muslim? If Christian, is it Catholic, or Protestant? If Catholic, does it adhere to the principles set forth at Vatican II, or those that were in place beforehand? Even if we assume that the state religion is exactly your own, does it operate according to the teachings, interpretations, and rhetoric of your religious leader, or of someone else’s? You only have to have been to two houses of worship in your life to know that the differences between them can be substantial, even within the same sect/order/denomination/faith. And those particularities, so fussily esoteric to an outsider, are often intensely important to a practitioner.

In other words, if you’re devoutly religious, a theocracy would be far more likely to impede, disable, and criminalize your faith than to support it. As I’ve argued in past posts, religious people are demonstrably more free to practice their religion under a secular government than they are under a theocratic one.

If your religious beliefs align precisely with the those of the theocrats du jour, then you are in a certain sense free to practice the state religion, unpersecuted. But that’s not religious freedom. It’s merely a false and accidental approximation of religious freedom, a dart thrown in the dark that so happened to hit the sweet spot on the Venn diagram of your beliefs and your government’s. The moment that your conscience compels you to change your beliefs in any way, or that some new elected or appointed official changes the law of the land in the slightest, your illusory freedom evaporates and your faith has no protection whatseover.

Secular law protects all of us, whatever religions we do or do not practice, from falling into so precarious a situation. This means that you and your religious beliefs are protected, both from the tyranny of the majority and from the vagaries of bureaucracy. But it also means that your personal morality is not and can never be one-to-one with local, state, or federal law.

As Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion for Loving v. Texas (the case that established the unconstitutionality of sodomy laws), the United States cannot outlaw “private conduct not harmful to others” purely because one religion (or even all religions) might find that conduct objectionable (or even wrong).

If your religion forbids homosexuality, then the law protects your right to practice that religion, but those very same laws can and must (and will, sooner or later) protect gay rights. The opponents of same sex marriage have categorically failed to explain what harm committed gay relationships will somehow do to the institution of heterosexual marriage, or to adopted children, or to the stability of family units, or to anyone or anything else—so their moral revulsion is not a valid legal argument. (We all have the right to keep Kosher if we want to, but we also have the right not to keep Kosher, so however much we may want to, we can’t criminalize cheeseburgers).

We can believe in religious liberty, or we can believe that one particular religion’s morality should be the law of the land. But we plainly, clearly cannot believe both of those things, because they are mutually exclusive.

On Being Offended (by The Onion or by Anything Else)

I want to talk about The Onion, but first I want to talk about the boob song.

At last Sunday’s Oscars, there was this bit about Captain James T. Kirk traveling back in time to tell Seth MacFarlane how not to be the worst host in the show’s history. Among the fatal missteps that Kirk wanted to help MacFarlane avoid was singing “an incredibly offensive song that [upset] a lot of actresses in the audience.” On the off-chance you didn’t hear the song or read about it, dear reader, it’s called “We Saw Your Boobs,” and it catalogs the films in which Naomi Watts, Charlize Theron, and numerous others have appeared bare-chested—complete with shots of those actors looking grumpy and defeated, and of Jennifer Lawrence looking victorious because “we haven’t seen [her] boobs at all.”

Get it? Because she wins. Because you see, “sex is a contest,” and “men win and women lose when sex or nudity happens. It’s an archaic, prudish, creepy concept that derives from twisted notions about female purity and women-as-property.”

Plus, to celebrate the act of cinematic mammary-ogling while simultaneously slut-shaming the women to whom those breasts belong—in direct proportion to how naked they’ve gotten, and how often—is both manifestly regressive and spectacularly moronic. Besides which, MacFarlane was more or less daring the women he name-checked to do anything other than play along, because hey, they totally asked for this by being naked on camera, the dumb humorless floozies. (Headdesk forever and ever).

But what I found equally irksome, if I’m being honest, was the way the song was declared “offensive” first and foremost, as though that quality alone justifies its existence and assigns it comedic value. The mechanics of jokes matter, so I’d like to use this one, with its hoary premise and its lazy framing, as evidence that we all need to stop leaning so heavily on “offensive” as a category.

I’m not saying that we need to banish the word offensive from our vocabularies, exactly. Being offended is a valid reaction. It’s just that it’s not a particularly informative one. You can be offended by earnest, mean spirited hate-speech, yes. But you can also be offended by prescient, valuable satire. Or you can be offended by button-pushing attempts at incisive commentary that come up sort and thereby come out muddled. All of those things are equally likely to offend you, and the fact that you are offended will not help you to tell them apart.

In other words, nothing is objectively offensive, but lots of things are objectively problematic. And problematic things can spur useful dialogue, whereas all we ever seem to want from offensive things is a Big Old Apology (which all too often means very little and accomplishes even less). The time and effort we spend talking about whether something is offensive could, therefore, be better spent talking about whether it’s harmful, or immoral, or tone deaf. Even if the cultural object in question is all of the above, you can still like it—and you can like while still acknowledging that, in some respects, it’s kind of fucked up.

Which brings us to The Onion.

As Maryann Johanson points out, this joke is problematic for a whole host of reasons, “like how women of color come in for extra bonus disrespect and misogyny, and how little girls are inexcusably oversexualized.” Very, very true.

“But that’s not what this tweet was about,” she continues. “I didn’t see Wallis as the butt of this joke. It seemed completely obvious to me—to the point that I didn’t even have to think about it—that the butt of the joke here is people who say such things about women.”

Again, the mechanics of the joke matter. This is parody by exaggeration. Say that same bitchily misogynistic thing about Jennifer Lawrence, for exmaple, and it wouldn’t even register as satire; it would just register as the the kind of thing that people constantly say about women, especially but not exclusively on the Internet. Say it about an indisputably adorable and irrepressibly ebullient little kid, however, and the hatefulness of the sentiment becomes freshly obvious and sharply visible—which is supposed to make us ask why it’s OK to talk about anyone that way, if we can all agree that it’s not OK to talk about Quvenzhané Wallis that way.

Jonhanson concludes by conceding “that if you have to explain a joke, the joke has failed. So The Onion screwed up. Just not quite in the way that a surprising number of people seem to think they have.” We can appreciate that The Onion was taking aim at a valid target (that target definitely not being Quvenzhané Wallis), while also acknowledging that they missed the mark pretty severely (hence the widespread, perfectly understandable misunderstanding that their target was Quvenzhané Wallis, which again, was not in fact the case at all).

The Onion’s own apology calls the tweet “a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire,” but I think it would be a mistake to decide that this joke, because it is so problematic, has no value—and to some of you, that statement will mean that I am taking The Onion’s side, explaining away their error, and telling their detractors to shut up and stop being offended. The comments section of Johanson’s post (which, as with so many comments sections, I would strongly encourage you not to read) contains a whole lot of outrage along those lines.

But look, I’m not making excuses for The Onion, nor am I telling anyone not to be offended, and I don’t think that Johanson is doing any of that, either. Rather, I’m saying that it’s pointless to talk about who is and is not on the The Onion’s side, because everyone in this discussion, including The Onion, is on the same side.

That’s what we stand to gain when we stop using offence as our primary unit of measure. We can eschew the reductive, self-congratulatory fiction that the world is neatly divisible into an enlightened, empathetic Us and an ignorant, boorish Them. We can see that Seth MacFarlane’s shtick is fundamentally different from The Onion’s in terms of form, intent, and effect, even if both end up being offensive. And most importantly, we can move past the idea that being good is a fixed state rather than an ongoing process, and that it’s more important for offensive parties to seek absolution than it is for all of us to seek understanding.

Personally, when I’m offended by something, I try to approach it as the beginning of a potentially meaningful conversation, not the end of one.

Daniel Tosh and the Anatomy of One Particularly Tasteless Joke

Let’s begin with a big old trigger warning, as the topic at hand is a rape joke.

So, Daniel Tosh was doing standup last Friday. Depending on who you ask, he either did a bit about how “there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them,” or about “rape jokes always being funny.” Depending on who you ask, a woman in the audience either “heckled” Daniel Tosh during that bit, or simply yelled out that “actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

As far as I know, it is not in dispute that Daniel Tosh then said something along these lines: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” Neither does it seem to be in dispute that the a fair portion of the audience laughed at that suggestion, or that the woman in question then quickly left the comedy club.

It seems to me that the important question is why is that supposed to be funny? Let’s put aside for the moment whether the joke worked—a tasteless joke that lands always seems less tasteless than a tasteless joke that doesn’t—and let’s take a look at how the humor is supposed to be operating. You’re supposed to laugh at the idea of this woman being suddenly raped by a group of men (1) because it’s supposed to be an ironic and precise punishment for a self-serious killjoy, like dropping a piano on the head of someone preaching against cartoon violence, and (2) because the image is supposed to be over-the-top; it is unlikely that five men would spontaneously rape a woman in the audience of a comedy show, and the idea is clearly intended to be absurd.

OK, now let’s talk about why the joke may or may not actually be funny. The first part (a killjoy getting her comeuppance) only works if you think that those who object to rape jokes are killjoys. If you don’t, then the element of retribution just comes of as unwarranted meanness at best, a misogynistic power-play at worst.

The second part (the absurd extremity of the image) only works if you believe that it is utterly impossible for a group of men at a Daniel Tosh show to rape a woman. So it’s worth mentioning that the “heckler” herself found the idea “pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place,” she says.

The really sinister undercurrent in the suggestion that this woman might be gang-raped is that it’s not particularly implausible. The only element in the joke that strains credulity—the only thing that makes it a joke rather than an actual, immediate threat, in other words—is the suggestion that the rape might take place right then and there, in the middle of Daniel Tosh doing his set.

But after the show? What in fact is absurd or implausible about that? In point of horrific-but-undeniable fact, that kind of shit happens all the time.

So it’s important to note that Daniel Tosh’s rape joke is not problematic because it’s “offensive.” I’m sure that some people are simply offended, and that they just want Daniel Tosh to apologize or do a public service announcement or whatever, but those reactions completely miss the point. The point is that this particular joke operates on deeply fucked up assumptions about gender politics—the feminists want to take away our toys!— and a gross underestimation of the real danger that real sexual assault poses to real women on a daily basis.

I literally could not care less whether you personally think the joke is funny, but whether you do or not, the mechanics of it matter. Because this particular joke is prodding at some extremely important aspects of gender, and is doing so in just about the stupidest way imaginable. That’s why it’s problematic. And also dumb.

We Could Use More Memorial Day(s)

Today is Memorial Day. Today we’re supposed to remember those who’ve died while fighting in the name of the United States of America, and unofficially, those who have died since doing so. For those veterans who’ve survived, we have Veterans’ Day. These two holidays have become generic, catch-all dates of much-deserved appreciation, but each has a much more specific—and a much more profound—historical significance.

Memorial Day used to be Decoration Day, which commemorated and honored the Union soldiers who died during the Civil War. On May 30, 1868, this was how President James Garfield began the very first Decoration Day address:

I am oppressed with the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice.

For Garfield, the only halfway-decent tribute to our entombed soldiers is silence. Words can lie, promises can be broken, and protestations of national destiny or personal bravery can be, and frankly quite often are, bullshit. So for a moment, we need the words to stop, and we need to take in the full significance of these Americans who sacrificed their lives for something bigger, though not necessarily better, than themselves.

We still observe a moment of silence on Memorial Day, sometimes. But it’s worth remembering why we do it. Moments of silence are not merely suspensions of words and sound and noise. They acknowledge that some things are beyond words and sound and noise, beyond our powers of expression, beyond our otherwise unlimited capacity to justify violence.

Let’s turn to Kurt Vonnegut for something else worth remembering, namely that

all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

Again, silence. A moment when we allow words to fail—which might be as close as we can ever come to hearing the voice of God.

Whereas Decoration Day heavily favored the canonization of one side (the Union), Armistice Day abandons any such pretense to ancient traditions of victor and vanquished. No, the really important thing was that the killing had stopped, plain and simple. The sheer weight of the fight, for that one suspended moment, meant considerably more than whatever we’d all been fighting for.

Given that historical context, I think it is supremely unwise to flatten our nation’s myriad wars and countless fallen warriors into just two days of semi-silent observance (with breaks in the silence, of course, for bargain-hunting). We shouldn’t be consolidating our days of remembrance. Rather, we should be multiplying them, as our foreign entanglements have multiplied.

We should have one day for the First World War, and another for the Second World War. A day for the Civil War, and a day for the Revolutionary War. A day for the conflict in Vietnam, a day for the conflict in Korea, a day (or more) for the recently-ended war(s) in Iraq, and a day for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, our longest to date. A day for each of the wars we waged against barbary pirates. A day for each of our McKinley-era colonial conquests. A day for the Mexican-American War, and one of the Cherokee War, and yes, one for our wildly extralegal Reagan-era adventure in Nicaragua.

And on and on and on, filling up our calendar, demanding that we all learn a thing or two about each past confrontation—some of them as heartbreakingly necessary as others were heartbreakingly unnecessary—and forcing us to acknowledge that no federal holiday, no words, no promises or high-minded nationalist rhetoric, could ever constitute a fitting tribute to those lost.

We can’t slap a neat little bow on their sacrifice without being (at best) patronizing or (at worst) morally insane. It’s bigger than that, it’s more complicated than that, and it’s well beyond the scope of a holiday or two.

The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile,” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

The Visual Age

This is the second post in a series about the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here.

In his appearance on the Brainy Gamer Podcast, art historian John Sharp suggests that we are “leaving a five-hundred year period that [was] dominated by visual culture, and moving into one that’s much more about systems.”

Prior to the Renaissance and the dawn of the visual age, Sharp argues, “the whole idea we have of art today did not exist.” Before that, art referred to what we now call design. “These well-crafted functional objects–that’s all there was, really. There wasn’t such a thing as these objects that we created simply for enjoyment, for aesthetic appreciation, and so on.” The Renaissance signaled a cultural shift toward the visual, toward using our eyes “as the primary filter for thinking about the world.”

Painting, sculpture, print media, and eventually photography were not just the predominant forms of Western art. They were art as such. So much so that, as cinema and television came to be considered worthy of aesthetic contemplation, so too did they come to be categorized as primarily visual media, despite the inclusion of sound in the majority of cinema and virtually all of television.

Just as the idea of autonomous art-objects (and artists as a special creative class) has a specific historical context, so too does the oft-cited idea that the sole function of true art is to converse with the sublime, or to explore profound truths about the human condition. “That’s this very Romantic 19th Century notion… a bit of cultural baggage” that tends to limit our understanding rather than expand it. Just because that’s what Vincent Van Gogh (or rather, our posthumously mythologized version of him) was up to does not mean that all artists must necessarily live and work along similar lines. To think of commercial art, or bad art, or disposable art as oxymorons is to take an unnecessarily narrow and restrictive historical view of the terms involved.

Knowing that, we can easily understand the past century of “is x art?” hand-wringing. It’s not that a stolen urinal or a guy getting shot in the arm isn’t art (whatever that would mean), but simply that those things aren’t addressing themselves to the tradition of visual perfection that has been art’s perceived aim since the Renaissance. What matters isn’t how those things look, but rather how they fit into larger systems, and what they demand of the viewer.

In that specific sense, large swaths of art theory have failed to keep pace with art practice. Try to evaluate Dada on the same terms as you would evaluate Piet Mondrian (let alone the representational art of the Renaissance), and you’ll just end up confused. I think that when people walk into an art gallery and feel lost, confused, or intimidated, it is this disconnect that is tripping them up. Art galleries are designed for looking at things, but they’re now filled with art that is not meant exclusively, or even primarily, to be looked at.

So all of that muddles our understanding of art, both as a usable word and as an intuitive, unspoken concept. In my next post, I’ll break down that problem.