The Phone-Sex Era in American Culture and Politics
This is a copy of a post I wrote for A Life of a Phone Sex Operator.
For the majority of the Baby Boomers' lives, we as a society increasingly live in what we might dub the "Phone-Sex Era": an era in which technology not only amplifies, but in many cases sustains human fantasies. The list of technological interfaces is not only extensive, but stretches back before the telephone. It ranges from the photograph to the mpg, from the "party line" to erotic text messaging--from the early 20th C medical invention of the vibrator, to the flesh light. No, perhaps technological "interface" is not the correct term. In effect, it's more of a technological sexual "intervention." The strategy circumvents actual sex in a preference for the experience of sex.
Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek has called such technological interventions "sex without sex." He sees these sexual trends as merely symptoms of larger social movements, social movements that produce side effects far beyond sexual preferences. In Zizek's estimation, while today's world appears to permit everything, on the contrary, everything is prohibited. And worse yet, it's prohibited by consumerist society's very imperative to enjoy.
On one level we can look at this as a brilliant business strategy: Do you eat too much chocolate and get constipated? Eat more of this chocolate; it's a laxative. Do you eat too many chips? Eat these chips; they contain olestra. Do you drink too much coffee? Drink decaffeinated coffee. The corrective agent is embedded in the harm itself, and in many cases this means depriving the object of enjoyment of the essential feature that made you enjoy it in the first place. (Caffeine-Free Diet Coke is the real kicker.) Even worse than all this, because the object of enjoyment is missing the essential feature that made you enjoy it in the first place, you consume more of it in a desperate attempt to feel satisfied. (Yes, this includes pornography.)
We can call this the Willy Wonka syndrome. If Willy Wonka grew up in a world without adequate adult supervision, pursued his childish pleasures to the point of childish excesses, suffered real-life consequences from those excesses, and used his brilliant mind to correct the problems he suffered...
We'd have our world.
In my first sentence, I acknowledged the role of Baby Boomers. According to Wikipedia,
By sheer numbers, children toppled mechanisms of parental authority. And as the Willy Wonka example illustrates, without adequate parental mechanisms in place, it's not like the children could mature psychologically on their own: "Give them time. They'll grow out of it." No. We live in a world created and governed by brilliant, but nonetheless Willy Wonka-esque minds. We live in a child's world.
In "The History & Future of Sex," Marty Klein notes one way in which the sheer number of kids castrated the mechanisms of parental control:
This is a time in which the youth not only overturned social mores--free love, orgies, nudist colonies, men with long hair and women with armpit hair...--but also brought the federal government to its knees. We all know about Nixon's vast spying networks that kept tabs on youth groups, but even before Nixon, the federal government saw youth as a potential opposition to power. During the Johnson administration, a member of the FBI who knew my grandparents solicited my mother to spy on all of her classmates, as many of them as she could observe, in the University of Florida's art department. And she had the childlike naivety of civic duty or subordination to authority for her to say "no."
The psychoanalytic term for this childlike freedom in adults is "perversion." Some of you reading this might be clapping your hands right now and saying, "Oooh yummy!" However, it's a mistake to confine our understanding of perversion to associations with sex. Etymologically speaking, "to pervert" is "to throughly turn," and what gets thoroughly turned is the very understanding of authority. It's not that the pervert loses his way from authoritative agency. It's that the pervert never had adequate enough guidance to find it in the first place. And what's worse yet, the pervert engages in a never-ending series of prodding and provoking engagements with the outside world to find it, and becomes riddled with anxiety in the process.
What's the Willie Wonka solution to anxiety? Don't correct the source of anxiety; heap more anxiety onto your life by merely medicating it.
I mentioned that the pervert engages in a never-ending series of provocations to find authority. In A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst Bruce Fink offers a convoluted explanation that I'll paraphrase as follows: The pervert's object of enjoyment is not the true object of the pervert's desire; it is merely a tool that the pervert uses to create an experience with authority (181). Fink offers the following example: "Though the masochist seems to be single-mindedly devoting himself to 'pleasuring' the Other, the Other cannot take it after a certain point: [enjoyment] becomes unbearable, and the partner finally imposes limits on it" (187). I'm sure we've all had experiences with people who won't stop trying to make you happy (offering you food) until it ultimately pisses you off because of their refusal to take no for an answer. This characteristic extends far beyond the perverted hostess. There are plenty of people who are openly distressed because they can't make you as ecstatically happy as they want you to be. They prod and provoke, and are very quick to play the victim--which is what they were aiming for to begin with: They are trying to create a child's blatant experience with authority, which they've associated with victimization. In the case of the person who is addicted to Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, what that person compulsively consumes is an experience with parental dietary restrictions. Whether the person becomes legitimately obese to provoke the victimization, or she develops a distorted body image to do the job, what that person is looking for is a child's dissembled experience with authority. In the case of the porn addict, the computer monitor functions as the very screen of sexual prohibition. In many cases what a person masturbates to would turn off that same person in real life, unless the person can imagine during the real-life scenario that he's watching himself as if he were watching another. Just as an addiction to Caffeine-Free Diet Coke is not really a desire for the object, so too is a porn addiction's object of enjoyment not the real object of desire. The real object of desire hides behind an experience with a prohibitive force, a child's conception of authority. (I'll return to the real object of desire later.)
Although I am confining this article to Baby-Boomer society, this is not merely an American experience. World War II gravely diminished parental figures and grossly proliferated an overwhelming number of children worldwide. Germany is known for shiza porn, and in Japan you can buy used panties from a vending machine.
Perversion does not end with masochism. The sadist has a similar objective, but a different approach: "The sadist believes that it would be [parental authority's] will to wrest the object from him, to take away his [pleasure], if only [that authority] really existed. The sadist plays the part of [that authority] in his scenario in order to make [that authority] exist..." (191). I'm sure we've all encountered those who act as if they were your parents--by attempting to restrict your access to fatty foods, prohibit or at least regulate your smoking.... Contrary to the perverted hostess, such a person doesn't try to provide for you, but rather to regulate and deprive you. And far worse than that, it's in the name of doing something good.
We can call this the Benevolent Dictator, and the Baby Boomers have taken office and passed an inordinate amount of benevolent dictatorial legislation: NYC and California have banned transfats, Mississippi proposed legislation to ban obese people from restaurants, and nearly every community has regulated smoking to near extinction. Just as the Baby Boomers have promoted a masochistic form of consumerism, they've legislated a sadistic form of governance that's on the verge of legitimizing certain forms of torture and undermining the true authoritative agency that comes with civil liberties.
Unfortunately, this social problem does not end with the Baby Boomers. The psychological development of a perverted generation has resulted in a cycle of perversion. According to Fink, Baby Boomers' dissembled experience with authority has led to a predominance of absent fathers and other forms of reluctant parenting (99). When we include the role of perverted governance in influencing society, the problem gets amplified tenfold. Just as child-molesting parents beget children who become the worst child molesters, perverted authority produces more and worse forms of perversion. As a society, we're losing an honest experience with authority.
Up until now, I've outlined only the negative consequences of this epidemic social perversion, but believe it or not, perversion has benefited society as well. It has liberated both women and other social minorities from the limitations imposed by patriarchal authority. However, in some cases, that liberation comes at a cost.
In "Sarah Palin: Operation 'Castration,'" preeminent psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller makes the following observation:
It is this "'castration' card" that firmly places this interpretation in an acknowledgment of the role of perversion in the 2008 election. The difference between perversion and "normality" (I have to put this word in quotations because we no longer know what it is) is the difference between being the object of desire and having it. As I've already pointed out, the pervert's object of enjoyment is not the same as her object of desire; the object of enjoyment is merely a tool for provoking a dissembled experience with authority. The pervert's real object of desire, which I've been avoiding until now, is not even the abject experience with authority. The real object of desire is herself.
The child anxiously struggles with authority to become the object of its attention. If authority does not grant the child the positive reaffirmation she seeks, if it does not recognize her masochistic position as authority's special object (special snowflake) of unending affection--like Madonna during her worst bouts for recognition, the child pursues even sadistically negative attention. Either way, the child insists on being the (positive or negative) object in authority's regulation of desire.
In this sense, perversion has the possibility of merging with what psychoanalysis calls "hysteria." The hysteric tells her partner, "You are not recognizing me," even when the partner is doing everything in his power to recognize her. This strategy has a castrating effect on authority. The claim that authority doesn't recognize her can take a variety of disarming forms: "You've made rules that don't recognize my unique circumstance"; "Your attempt to recognize me misrepresents me"; "You're not acknowledging me for who I am." These petitions don't have to be "whiney," like Sarah Palin accused Hillary Clinton of being during the primaries. They can take the form that Palin has adopted for herself. They can take the form of sadistic defiance.
If the press and other fact-checking organizations ever had any authority, this strategy can reduce that authority into befuddled bewilderment. It then has to tiptoe around this grotesque snow flake to which the laws of fact-finding can never sufficiently apply. As an inversion of the Caffeine-Free Diet Coke addict, the hysterical pervert consumes not dissembled experiences with authority, but authority's own attempt to locate her within its regulatory system. Each attempt by an "authority" (I have to put this term in quotation, because in the face of hysterical perversion, we no longer know what it means)--each authoritative attempt to characterize her identity according to its fact-based regulations falls short, fails to understand, loses what it's after in the process (at least according to her)--and "authority" has to study her all over again.
Just as the "Phone-Sex Era" circumvents actual sex for the experience of sex, the above strategy circumvents the actual Sarah Palin in a preference for the experience of Sarah Palin. Instead of Sarah Palin's consuming an endless supply of Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes, she makes both the press and the rest of us consume a never-ending number of Sarah Palins.
This strategy's connection with pornography finds its strongest representation in the popular depiction of Sarah Palin as a "MILF" (a Mom I'd Like to Fuck). This depiction emphasizes the degree to which she has become the (missing) object circulating in social desire. The American people aggressively masturbate to her (both figuratively and in some cases literally), never finding a real engagement with her, always feeling dissatisfied, and having to return for more. Sometimes our social engagement with her is sadistic. We demand her subordination in order to fabricate ourselves as the authority that we doubt exists. Sometimes we masochistically wish to reify her as a gun-toting image of vice-presidential or even presidential authority, if only we could find a real Sarah Palin to raise over us.
This latter conception is part of why Sarah Palin's role as mother has taken center stage in American politics. The perverted American psyche prods and provokes for an experience with paternal authority. Some associate with Bristol Palin, who from their perspective is the "special snowflake" exception to social conservative values, a transgressor who is loved nonetheless--simultaneously in their moral system and, through her transgressions, external to its limitations; an authentic exception. Some associate with Track Palin, obediently sacrificing his body for his parental authority's values (a castrating effect not unlike submission to a dominatrix). Some associate with Trig, permanently helpless, cradled in his mother's arms as a symbol for parental responsibility (another form of castration). Some associate with her husband Todd, who from their perspective is that now voiceless male authority that willingly gives way to a dominate female who will move him up the social ladder for him (a third type of castration). Each and every association, more than I can enumerate here, is a different experience with authority, which our "Phone-Sex Era" calls for.
The question is, Is there a real authority who will answer the phone? My adivice: If we don't want a Benevolent Dictor to answer the phone for us, we might as well answer the social call ourselves.
For the majority of the Baby Boomers' lives, we as a society increasingly live in what we might dub the "Phone-Sex Era": an era in which technology not only amplifies, but in many cases sustains human fantasies. The list of technological interfaces is not only extensive, but stretches back before the telephone. It ranges from the photograph to the mpg, from the "party line" to erotic text messaging--from the early 20th C medical invention of the vibrator, to the flesh light. No, perhaps technological "interface" is not the correct term. In effect, it's more of a technological sexual "intervention." The strategy circumvents actual sex in a preference for the experience of sex.
Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek has called such technological interventions "sex without sex." He sees these sexual trends as merely symptoms of larger social movements, social movements that produce side effects far beyond sexual preferences. In Zizek's estimation, while today's world appears to permit everything, on the contrary, everything is prohibited. And worse yet, it's prohibited by consumerist society's very imperative to enjoy.
On one level we can look at this as a brilliant business strategy: Do you eat too much chocolate and get constipated? Eat more of this chocolate; it's a laxative. Do you eat too many chips? Eat these chips; they contain olestra. Do you drink too much coffee? Drink decaffeinated coffee. The corrective agent is embedded in the harm itself, and in many cases this means depriving the object of enjoyment of the essential feature that made you enjoy it in the first place. (Caffeine-Free Diet Coke is the real kicker.) Even worse than all this, because the object of enjoyment is missing the essential feature that made you enjoy it in the first place, you consume more of it in a desperate attempt to feel satisfied. (Yes, this includes pornography.)
We can call this the Willy Wonka syndrome. If Willy Wonka grew up in a world without adequate adult supervision, pursued his childish pleasures to the point of childish excesses, suffered real-life consequences from those excesses, and used his brilliant mind to correct the problems he suffered...
We'd have our world.
In my first sentence, I acknowledged the role of Baby Boomers. According to Wikipedia,
In 1946, live births in the U.S. surged from 222,721 in January to 339,499 in October. By the end of the 1940s, about 32 million babies had been born, compared with 24 million in the 1930s. In 1954, annual births first topped four million and did not drop below that figure until 1965, when four out of ten Americans were under the age of twenty.
By sheer numbers, children toppled mechanisms of parental authority. And as the Willy Wonka example illustrates, without adequate parental mechanisms in place, it's not like the children could mature psychologically on their own: "Give them time. They'll grow out of it." No. We live in a world created and governed by brilliant, but nonetheless Willy Wonka-esque minds. We live in a child's world.
In "The History & Future of Sex," Marty Klein notes one way in which the sheer number of kids castrated the mechanisms of parental control:
Until the early 1960s, college administrations were expected to act "in loco parentis"--as substitute parents, making lifestyle decisions for students. For hundreds of years, students had to conform to college rules about dress, religion, sexual activity, and recreation. This arrangement ended in American colleges in the mid- and late-1960s because of the Vietnam War draft. Millions of young people reasoned that if they were old enough to get drafted and killed, they were old enough to run their own lives.
This is a time in which the youth not only overturned social mores--free love, orgies, nudist colonies, men with long hair and women with armpit hair...--but also brought the federal government to its knees. We all know about Nixon's vast spying networks that kept tabs on youth groups, but even before Nixon, the federal government saw youth as a potential opposition to power. During the Johnson administration, a member of the FBI who knew my grandparents solicited my mother to spy on all of her classmates, as many of them as she could observe, in the University of Florida's art department. And she had the childlike naivety of civic duty or subordination to authority for her to say "no."
The psychoanalytic term for this childlike freedom in adults is "perversion." Some of you reading this might be clapping your hands right now and saying, "Oooh yummy!" However, it's a mistake to confine our understanding of perversion to associations with sex. Etymologically speaking, "to pervert" is "to throughly turn," and what gets thoroughly turned is the very understanding of authority. It's not that the pervert loses his way from authoritative agency. It's that the pervert never had adequate enough guidance to find it in the first place. And what's worse yet, the pervert engages in a never-ending series of prodding and provoking engagements with the outside world to find it, and becomes riddled with anxiety in the process.
What's the Willie Wonka solution to anxiety? Don't correct the source of anxiety; heap more anxiety onto your life by merely medicating it.
I mentioned that the pervert engages in a never-ending series of provocations to find authority. In A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst Bruce Fink offers a convoluted explanation that I'll paraphrase as follows: The pervert's object of enjoyment is not the true object of the pervert's desire; it is merely a tool that the pervert uses to create an experience with authority (181). Fink offers the following example: "Though the masochist seems to be single-mindedly devoting himself to 'pleasuring' the Other, the Other cannot take it after a certain point: [enjoyment] becomes unbearable, and the partner finally imposes limits on it" (187). I'm sure we've all had experiences with people who won't stop trying to make you happy (offering you food) until it ultimately pisses you off because of their refusal to take no for an answer. This characteristic extends far beyond the perverted hostess. There are plenty of people who are openly distressed because they can't make you as ecstatically happy as they want you to be. They prod and provoke, and are very quick to play the victim--which is what they were aiming for to begin with: They are trying to create a child's blatant experience with authority, which they've associated with victimization. In the case of the person who is addicted to Caffeine-Free Diet Coke, what that person compulsively consumes is an experience with parental dietary restrictions. Whether the person becomes legitimately obese to provoke the victimization, or she develops a distorted body image to do the job, what that person is looking for is a child's dissembled experience with authority. In the case of the porn addict, the computer monitor functions as the very screen of sexual prohibition. In many cases what a person masturbates to would turn off that same person in real life, unless the person can imagine during the real-life scenario that he's watching himself as if he were watching another. Just as an addiction to Caffeine-Free Diet Coke is not really a desire for the object, so too is a porn addiction's object of enjoyment not the real object of desire. The real object of desire hides behind an experience with a prohibitive force, a child's conception of authority. (I'll return to the real object of desire later.)
Although I am confining this article to Baby-Boomer society, this is not merely an American experience. World War II gravely diminished parental figures and grossly proliferated an overwhelming number of children worldwide. Germany is known for shiza porn, and in Japan you can buy used panties from a vending machine.
Perversion does not end with masochism. The sadist has a similar objective, but a different approach: "The sadist believes that it would be [parental authority's] will to wrest the object from him, to take away his [pleasure], if only [that authority] really existed. The sadist plays the part of [that authority] in his scenario in order to make [that authority] exist..." (191). I'm sure we've all encountered those who act as if they were your parents--by attempting to restrict your access to fatty foods, prohibit or at least regulate your smoking.... Contrary to the perverted hostess, such a person doesn't try to provide for you, but rather to regulate and deprive you. And far worse than that, it's in the name of doing something good.
We can call this the Benevolent Dictator, and the Baby Boomers have taken office and passed an inordinate amount of benevolent dictatorial legislation: NYC and California have banned transfats, Mississippi proposed legislation to ban obese people from restaurants, and nearly every community has regulated smoking to near extinction. Just as the Baby Boomers have promoted a masochistic form of consumerism, they've legislated a sadistic form of governance that's on the verge of legitimizing certain forms of torture and undermining the true authoritative agency that comes with civil liberties.
Unfortunately, this social problem does not end with the Baby Boomers. The psychological development of a perverted generation has resulted in a cycle of perversion. According to Fink, Baby Boomers' dissembled experience with authority has led to a predominance of absent fathers and other forms of reluctant parenting (99). When we include the role of perverted governance in influencing society, the problem gets amplified tenfold. Just as child-molesting parents beget children who become the worst child molesters, perverted authority produces more and worse forms of perversion. As a society, we're losing an honest experience with authority.
Up until now, I've outlined only the negative consequences of this epidemic social perversion, but believe it or not, perversion has benefited society as well. It has liberated both women and other social minorities from the limitations imposed by patriarchal authority. However, in some cases, that liberation comes at a cost.
In "Sarah Palin: Operation 'Castration,'" preeminent psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller makes the following observation:
We are entering an era of postfeminist women, women who, without bargaining, are ready to kill the political men. The transition was perfectly visible during Hillary's campaign: she began playing the commander in chief and, since that didn't work, what did she do? She sent a subliminal message, one that said something like: "Obama? He's got nothing in the pants." And she immediately took it back, but it was too late. Sarah Palin is not only picking up where she left off but, being younger by fifteen years, she is otherwise ferocious, slinging feminine sarcasm like a natural; she overtly castrates her male adversaries (and with such frank jubilation!) and their only recourse is to remain silent: they have no idea how to attack a woman who uses her femininity to ridicule them and reduce them to impotence. For the moment, a woman who plays the "castration" card is invincible.
It is this "'castration' card" that firmly places this interpretation in an acknowledgment of the role of perversion in the 2008 election. The difference between perversion and "normality" (I have to put this word in quotations because we no longer know what it is) is the difference between being the object of desire and having it. As I've already pointed out, the pervert's object of enjoyment is not the same as her object of desire; the object of enjoyment is merely a tool for provoking a dissembled experience with authority. The pervert's real object of desire, which I've been avoiding until now, is not even the abject experience with authority. The real object of desire is herself.
The child anxiously struggles with authority to become the object of its attention. If authority does not grant the child the positive reaffirmation she seeks, if it does not recognize her masochistic position as authority's special object (special snowflake) of unending affection--like Madonna during her worst bouts for recognition, the child pursues even sadistically negative attention. Either way, the child insists on being the (positive or negative) object in authority's regulation of desire.
In this sense, perversion has the possibility of merging with what psychoanalysis calls "hysteria." The hysteric tells her partner, "You are not recognizing me," even when the partner is doing everything in his power to recognize her. This strategy has a castrating effect on authority. The claim that authority doesn't recognize her can take a variety of disarming forms: "You've made rules that don't recognize my unique circumstance"; "Your attempt to recognize me misrepresents me"; "You're not acknowledging me for who I am." These petitions don't have to be "whiney," like Sarah Palin accused Hillary Clinton of being during the primaries. They can take the form that Palin has adopted for herself. They can take the form of sadistic defiance.
If the press and other fact-checking organizations ever had any authority, this strategy can reduce that authority into befuddled bewilderment. It then has to tiptoe around this grotesque snow flake to which the laws of fact-finding can never sufficiently apply. As an inversion of the Caffeine-Free Diet Coke addict, the hysterical pervert consumes not dissembled experiences with authority, but authority's own attempt to locate her within its regulatory system. Each attempt by an "authority" (I have to put this term in quotation, because in the face of hysterical perversion, we no longer know what it means)--each authoritative attempt to characterize her identity according to its fact-based regulations falls short, fails to understand, loses what it's after in the process (at least according to her)--and "authority" has to study her all over again.
Just as the "Phone-Sex Era" circumvents actual sex for the experience of sex, the above strategy circumvents the actual Sarah Palin in a preference for the experience of Sarah Palin. Instead of Sarah Palin's consuming an endless supply of Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes, she makes both the press and the rest of us consume a never-ending number of Sarah Palins.
This strategy's connection with pornography finds its strongest representation in the popular depiction of Sarah Palin as a "MILF" (a Mom I'd Like to Fuck). This depiction emphasizes the degree to which she has become the (missing) object circulating in social desire. The American people aggressively masturbate to her (both figuratively and in some cases literally), never finding a real engagement with her, always feeling dissatisfied, and having to return for more. Sometimes our social engagement with her is sadistic. We demand her subordination in order to fabricate ourselves as the authority that we doubt exists. Sometimes we masochistically wish to reify her as a gun-toting image of vice-presidential or even presidential authority, if only we could find a real Sarah Palin to raise over us.
This latter conception is part of why Sarah Palin's role as mother has taken center stage in American politics. The perverted American psyche prods and provokes for an experience with paternal authority. Some associate with Bristol Palin, who from their perspective is the "special snowflake" exception to social conservative values, a transgressor who is loved nonetheless--simultaneously in their moral system and, through her transgressions, external to its limitations; an authentic exception. Some associate with Track Palin, obediently sacrificing his body for his parental authority's values (a castrating effect not unlike submission to a dominatrix). Some associate with Trig, permanently helpless, cradled in his mother's arms as a symbol for parental responsibility (another form of castration). Some associate with her husband Todd, who from their perspective is that now voiceless male authority that willingly gives way to a dominate female who will move him up the social ladder for him (a third type of castration). Each and every association, more than I can enumerate here, is a different experience with authority, which our "Phone-Sex Era" calls for.
The question is, Is there a real authority who will answer the phone? My adivice: If we don't want a Benevolent Dictor to answer the phone for us, we might as well answer the social call ourselves.
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