What is the Word "Objectification" Supposed to Mean in Contemporary Discourse?

In modern Western philosophy the term "objectification" refers to what is called the "subject-object separation." What may be important to most here is that (I am trying to make this as simple as I can) the individual "subject" is aware of their own existence as a distinct entity ("I think, therefore I am" as René Descartes had it)--their "Self"--and the fact that the other things in the world are "Not Self." Recognizing this distinction between "Self" and "Not Self"--that is what the matter of objectification comes down in the end.

This may seem bewildering and even underwhelming given how we are likely to hear the word "objectification" used in actual discourse, as if objectification were self-evidently a great evil. After all, how can recognizing a distinction between "Self" and "Not Self" in which "Self" is the subject, "Not Self" an object--which would seem a condition of existence not just for humans but, on the evidence of the "mirror test," even a great many animals, be that?

The short answer is that recognizing the "Not Self" as such, and seeing it objectively, entails assorted possibilities. These include the possibilities of analysis, control, manipulation, use. Doing this, of course, is how humans have survived on the Earth, meeting their fundamental physical needs by figuring out how to acquire food and protection from the elements. However, those same capacities have also entailed the potential for destruction and oppression, not least in the control, manipulation, use of other people to one's ends. One could argue on that basis that objectification has potentials for good and bad and is in itself neutral. One can also argue that especially among humans the subject-object separation is never as tidy as a matter of being a subject or object, as humans are subjects even when to others they may seem objects, while humans can and do learn to recognize each other's subjectivity. (Even reading Francis Fukuyama's bastardized version of Hegel should make that clear, and in the process the extent to which this is not an either/or matter.) However, there is a line of postmodernist thought that all but treats the human self-awareness that makes for the subject-object separation as its equivalent of original sin and the Fall, responsible for all the human-caused calamities of the past and present. (The destruction of the environment? This is in their view a matter of humans having come to see the existence of the natural world in subject-object terms.) Of course, it is again the case that those who see the subject-object separation so negatively have no real alternatives to offer--the idea of stripping humans of all self-awareness and capacity to cognize the world in subject-object terms the stuff of science fiction, not a practical program. As a result what one ends up with, as the parallel with original sin and the Fall in theology suggests, is extreme pessimism about human reason, human nature and the human condition generally, pointedly manifest in its anti-rationalism and irrationalism.

Of course, it will not do to leave the matter at that, because today we are apt to hear complaint about objectification in a very specific context--the matter of gender, with a particular line of feminist thought (I want to stress, a particular line, but also one that within popular discourse has become so widespread that many can and do equate it with feminism generally, often getting themselves into trouble in the process because this is one subject about which mainstream persons are quite ready to split hairs) denouncing "objectification" here. In doing so they draw on the postmodernist's pessimistic view of humanity--but it would seem very, very selectively. By and large those who raise the matter in this way are not concerned with objectification generally, even where there really is an issue of power and exploitation involved. They are not, for example, exercised over the ways in which the worker in the modern workplace is "objectified" by an employer who controls their actions for their own ends, as they dismiss the worker's subjectivity as irrelevant. ("Shut up and do as you're told!" is the rule on the job.) Rather their concern is exclusively with sexual objectification, with all the complications involved in this--given what objectification as described here means, the recognition of a difference between Self and Not Self, and the inextricability of this from the existence of self-awareness, there is no practical alternative (no "sexual objectification" pretty much meaning no sexuality). The result is that if few in the mainstream dare to say it flatly the hostility is less to the "objectification" than to the "sexual," and the criticism directed not at sexual objectification generally but male heterosexual objectification of women almost exclusively, critics of this often having no problem with "sexual objectification" along other lines, and sometimes even celebrating it. (Thus alongside the condemnation of the "male gaze" one sees the celebration of the "female gaze," and indeed the brushing off of any male objection to that.) Again, spelling all this out is verboten in our one-sideist media world, and so is drawing the obvious conclusion--that essentially what one ends up with is the weaponizing of an abstruse philosophical term for political ends obfuscated by said terminology, with a dispassionate observer quite capable of seeing here a demand that women never be discomfited by the existence of male subjectivity (but not vice-versa), a demand which many will hold to be neither attainable nor equitable, with that very fact providing grist to the culture wars' mill and all its loathsomeness.

Colonel Dobbin's Proficiency in Latin: A Few Thoughts

At one point in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair Georgy Osborne remarks to his mother that Lieutenant Colonel William Dobbin "reads Latin like it's English."

I suspect these few words of the rather "leisurely paced" nine hundred page piece of Victoriana I quote are missed by most of even the very few who actually bother to read such things. However, they have their interest as a testament to the remarkable erudition of the very intelligent and intellectual Dobbin (perhaps the only character in the whole book that we can unreservedly admire). By extension it is also testament to just how much the then rather mature "Dob" had honed his mind generally and his competence in the Latin language particularly to a degree far, far beyond what was typical for a graduate of the English "public school" such as he and so many other of the characters were (and one would imagine, far, far beyond what was typical for Osborne's own teachers as well). That the description does that is also of interest as an indicator of just how much facility in the Classical languages even those comparative few who had the "benefit of a Classical education" had two centuries ago at a time when the Classics pretty much were the curriculum. Simply put, undergoing such schooling a student was apt to get some training in reading, and not much more--not enough to, if Coleridge is anyone to go by, to reasonably be expected to think in the language--even if there are those who would have us believe otherwise.

That is something to remember today given just how much snobbery about the Classical languages endures, as seen in how a certain "public intellectual" famous mainly because his wrapping up of the banalities of epistemological nihilism in imagery beguiling to the mediocre middlebrow mind has made him a "rock star" with certain powerful interests publicly shot his mouth off about how no one should ever read anything written about the Enlightenment by someone unschooled in the Classical languages. It was the most brazenly extreme form of gatekeeping, the more obviously so as not only is it the case that very few of even the educated will have had any genuine training those languages in this day and age, but the far from innocent political implications of that statement. Reactionaries such as the individual in question have for centuries preferred to not just cut the hoi polloi out of the discourse, but also to take refuge from the Moderns in the Ancients (Didn't read every last Classic in the original? Then you can't say a word about what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the Constitution!)--all while, of course, making this statement was an assertion of his pretension to intellectual superman status, and all that means for his (and his fans') belief in the obligation of the whole world to bow before his opinions.

So far as I can tell no one remarked his public display of extreme stupidity and its very, very long train of logical fallacies (the genetic fallacy, the appeal to authority, etc., etc.), let alone the obvious problem that for knowledge of the Classics in their originals to really contribute to a scholar's work one has to not just be able to read Greek and Latin but read them at that very high level at which one can actually get more out of the original than they would a well-wrought translation in the (native) language they know best. They might not have to read those languages so well as Dob, but it does mean that very few of even that already very small number of Greek and Latin readers are likely to so benefit--scholars so specialized in their study that many of them may not be writing much about the Enlightenment or anything else, let alone know all those provinces of knowledge that are in fact quite relevant to so vast a subject as the Enlightenment, many of those knowledgeable about which will bring to the conversation much without having any Greek or Latin. After all, in spite of the stupid exaggeration of elite erudition by pop cultural crap the polyglot who can use a sixth language as well as his first is at best an extreme rarity, with the result that even the genuinely erudite scholar who actually can and does read languages other than their own usefully is still likely to turn to translations of even those languages they know a good deal of the time for the sake of efficiency, precision, certainty, not that they are apt to trumpet the dependence. After all, frank humility is not always to be found in this quarter, any more than it is to be found anywhere else, as even those who are not Stupid Persons feel themselves under pressure to live up to the Stupid Person's expectations of a Smart Person in a world where what the stupid think is "conventional wisdom."

"Cultural" Gatekeeping: A Few Thoughts

When we hear the term "gatekeeping" these days we are likely to be hearing criticism of what is called "cultural gatekeeping"--not the gatekeeping of a profession or a career or access to an educational institution permitting social advancement, for example, or gatekeeping a discussion of public affairs, but the arena of culture, with discussion of such gatekeeping today extending even to popular culture.

It seems to me undeniable that this does happen--and that it can be very hard to justify. After all, if gatekeeping is in some degree unavoidable, it is easiest to argue for such gatekeeping when a field has a strong claim to having its own, distinct, body of technical knowledge whose indispensability to understanding and practice has been proven, and which an outsider to the field is very unlikely to possess. This is especially unlikely to be the case in the cultural realm--and so more obviously needless, and more blatantly a matter of "experts" defending their privileged position. Certainly one sees this in the realm of what is tellingly called "higher" culture, with its ostentatious snobberies about certain classics, and the cults it makes of them--such that one is not only expected to know them if others are to take them at all seriously in the "conversation," but hold the "right" opinions about them. (Thus it is not enough to recognize Shakespeare as a hugely important figure in English and world literature and culture. It is not enough to have read Shakespeare, or even all of Shakespeare, and to have done so closely enough to have opinions about him and be able to argue intelligently for them. One is obliged to be a Bardolator who believes him the epitome of literary accomplishment, perfect in every way, unsurpassed and never to be surpassed--seeing him not as a man of his time whose work is in some ways best understood in that time, but a transcendent figure for all time, such that one could almost say anything else is not really worth bothering with, as, for extra points doing what is too much even for such a self-confessed Bardolator as Harold Bloom, one lies about seeing graces and profundities in the trashy edgelordism of a production of Titus Andronicus.)

For my part I do think that it has a pernicious effect on our ability to appreciate art and talk about it, among much, much else (there are distinct political implications in the English-speaking world having as its Supreme Poet a man who died in the seventeenth century, more a Medieval than a modern, paralleling that way in which many have from century to century seen English political evolution as having in many ways come to an end in 1688, leaving the situation frozen ever since--if not going backwards). However, acknowledging that this does happen--constantly--and that it has its consequences--negative ones--is a very different thing from giving the charge of "gatekeeping" a free pass in any and every situation, as we see especially when we are talking about popular culture, where, it should be easy to see, the prestige is lower, but the financial stakes are far, far greater. These days just expressing in public admiration for something which happens to be "old," or dislike of something which happens to be new, is likely to get the charge thrown at you in a reflection of how the media-industrial complex's cynical pushing of stale do-overs of stuff that often wasn't worth doing the first time around lines up with the warped and trivial and insanely overheated cultural politics of today behind its efforts to get the public to pay for its trash. Think there are too many sequels and prequels and remakes and reboots and spin-offs these days? That's just gatekeeping! Think we've had too many superhero movies and it's time to give the form a break? That's just gatekeeping! Think that movies were better off when "they had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting?" That's just gatekeeping! Reactionary, racist, sexist gatekeeping! (And you should be ashamed of yourself for it!)

Indeed, it should be obvious that while many can and do use the past to criticize the present having respect or even affection for a particular artifact of the past hardly makes one a reactionary. In fact, it should be obvious that asking for originality and thoughtfulness in storytelling is not gatekeeping, but actually the diametrical opposite--that it is not the act of one slamming the door in the faces of those who have been unjustly locked out of the discourse in the past, but rather one calling for the gates to be opened wider to them in the most meaningful way. It should also be obvious that gatekeeping really being pervasive, and really being used in "reactionary, racist, sexist" and other unfortunate ways, makes flinging about light-minded and false charges less forgivable, rather than more so. But of course, nuance is not a strong suit of the cultural politics of our time, and of course, not at all desired by those whose manipulation of the situation, if blatant and stupid and blatantly stupid, and uncertain in realizing their ends, is still something they believe to be working in their venal interests, making them determined to "stay the course."

On "Gatekeeping": A Few Thoughts

It seems that one hears the term "gatekeeping" used a very great deal these days. The term refers to the control of access to something--not least to the practice of some activity, or dialogue about some subject. As a practical matter this sees experts assert their domination over some area of life--and exclude others from participating in it--typically in the name of the public good, but not uncomplicatedly so, precisely because experts, and certainly those experts we call "professionals," are hardly immune to pursuing their self-interest in ways that do not necessarily align with that of society as a whole. Like every other group in any way powerful or privileged they are unavoidably concerned with preserving their power and privileges, and upholding the broader status quo in which that power and those privileges make them invested, with the result that many look on gatekeeping with skepticism and resentment, think there is far more of it about than there needs to be, and regard society as suffering as a result.

It is that "more of it than there needs to be" that interests me at the moment. Specifically it seems to me safe to say that the gatekeeping of participation in some field is easier to justify when that field has a strong claim to having its own, distinct body of technical knowledge whose indispensability to understanding and practice has been proven, and which an outsider to the field is very unlikely to possess.

To cite an admittedly easy example consider the practice of medical surgery. One can point to a body of proven, indispensable technical knowledge here that an outsider is unlikely to have. After all, if many people are dissatisfied with the state of medical knowledge, and there is in fact an old tradition of "medical nihilism" to which even doctors themselves have not been insusceptible, few would go so far as to say that doctors really know nothing and have no ability to help in any situation--all as few would deny that one is extremely unlikely to become even a minimally competent surgeon outside a formal medical training. The result is that for all the imperfections of the practice of medicine as we know it, and the associated gatekeeping, few really desire a situation in which anyone can legally hang up a shingle and offer their services as a surgeon. Rather those dissatisfied with the system by which people become licensed surgeons (thinking, for example, that it keeps the supply of practitioners down in the interest of protecting their privileges and their incomes) desire the system's reform, not the elimination of any such system altogether.

By contrast, consider the field of economics. It is much harder to claim for economics than for surgery its own distinct body of proven and indispensable technical knowledge. Many, in fact, question the legitimacy of the process by which what we once called "political economy," a field that acknowledged that economic life and its study is, in fact, political, and so bound up with societal structures, power, choice, into the "economics" of today with its near-hard science claims (indeed, its notorious "physics envy"). Economics simply not so isolatable, nor so objective, a matter, what the field has for orthodoxy is a far cry from the orthodoxy of the natural sciences with regard to coherence, theoretical rigor, or demonstrated usefulness, as shown by just how much contention there is among economists at the level of theory--and the consistent failure of policy rooted in orthodox economic ideas to deliver positive result, such that even some of the most prominent economists in the history of that orthodoxy have confessed to the limits of their theories' utility (Alfred Marshall, for example, remarking in his masterwork itself that one "is likely to be a better economist if he trusts to his common sense, and practical instincts, than if he professes to study the theory of value and is resolved to find it easy"), while those insistent on defending the value of orthodox theory, faced with the dissonance, often go so far as to embrace a pointedly anti-empirical epistemology in favor of other bases for judgment (like "praxeology"). The result is that we have far less assurance that a professional economist "knows what they are talking about." At the same time, given that it is far easier to pick up a knowledge of economics than of surgery outside the formal channels--anyone who can read a book and understand it, and cope with algebra, and puts the hours into doing that, can learn an awful lot here, and perhaps be more likely to consider much that the professional would dismiss contemptuously on the basis of sheer prejudice--we also have far less assurance that the person who is not a professional economist does not "know what they are talking about." And indeed it has been common to argue that the way in which professional economists present their field to the world as if it had a well-established body of rigorous technical knowledge requiring deference from society at large has simply been a matter of pushing market fundamentalism as cover for the economic policies desired by the privileged, to everyone else's cost--a priestly and dogmatic justification of the ways of Capital to Man that does the job rather less well than malt can.

Manosphere: The Hands of Fate

In writing of those online spaces collectively known as the "manosphere" the common tone of the mainstream press is one of moral panic, especially insofar as its personnel identify that manosphere with the guy who used to be a handyman on a '90s sitcom about a radio station who seems ready to listen to anything about the paranormal; a "professor of psychology" prone to ultra-obscurantist ravings that are supposed to have something to do with the work of Carl Jung(?) and the habits of lobsters; and a kickboxer who offers "Big Thinks" about such matters as the comparative "attractiveness" of Hulk Hogan vs. Megan Fox were certain aspects of their anatomies switched who at last count was under investigation for crimes (including human trafficking) by the governments of three countries. However, those offering what they seem to expect us to regard as a slightly more nuanced view of the phenomenon tend to stress the extent to which much of the manosphere mostly seems a venue for "self-help."

In discussing this the implication of most of the commentariat is that this is fairly innocuous, benign, even salutary stuff--reflecting the essentially respectful attitude the mainstream (conservative, conformist, breathlessly aspirationalism-promoting) takes toward self-help--the more in as it hews to a narrative that young men are in "crisis," and need "guidance," by which they mean that the Tragedy of the Age is that too many Eric Formans do not have a Red Forman threatening them with "Foots in Asses!"

They are, of course, displaying a characteristic incoherence. After all, complaining ceaselessly about "toxic masculinity" they would at the same time expect us to think that narrow-minded, intolerant middle-aged men bullying their insecure children with threats of physical violence is something good for them and for society. Moreover, what the manosphere's purveyors of "self-help" offer makes old Red Forman look like the most broad-minded and gentle of father figures as they pontificate about the necessity of cultivating an extreme hardness of mind and body that will lead to "success"--to money, to respect, to women and all else that young men hope to find in this world.

To those at all dubious about self-help crapola all this can only ever have about it the reek of glorified hucksterism exploiting desperate hopes for the good things of life which few of the takers of this advice will ever get, and that in spite of rather than because of that advice, all as this particular flavor of said crapola is the especially distasteful "Pseudo-Macho Bully," which has more than a whiff of the Brownshirts--or rather, the Black Shorts--about it. But of course that is not something that the not-so-good people of the Fourth Estate would ever say. Instead they do their duty as people of their ideological bent would have it by (once again) affirming the bourgeois verities for which self-help culture stands, and shouting down anyone who makes the least reference to there ever having been such a thing as fascism in the world in a manner that makes it very clear that if Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were alive and politically active today in exactly the same fashion they were a hundred years ago they would be penning essays about why they are not really fascists, and anyone who uses the term is a callow ignoramus or ideological fanatic indulging in the sin of "political language" for saying otherwise--as we can confidently say because in Mussolini and Hitler's old stomping grounds (and not just there!) the political elites of the moment are showing us that they "never forgot where they came from" as they stamp out civil liberties, persecute minorities, rob working people and reorient their economies to Weltpolitik-minded rearmament with said media never less than respectful of, and often enthusiastic about, the project.

Likewise never occurring to them as they imagine young men to be seeking this all out eagerly, and grateful for the severity and the sternness when they get it, is the fact that a great many young men have had too much "Red Forman" in their lives--precisely because it runs against the media folks' aforementioned conservative prejudices, which have them preferring to believe the opposite. And so even in the "liberal" New York Times one sees the "liberal" Ezra Klein actually put in a good word for the Big Think-offering kickboxer in trouble with the law, as Mr. Klein's colleagues ignore the reality that contrary to the idea that the manosphere has a powerful hold on the mind of the younger generation very little of said generation may be paying it any mind at all--and a significant portion of it plausibly put off of it by a Message whose unpleasantness extends far, far beyond the ways in which it offends the subtler sensitivities of the identity politics-minded.

The (Not So) Strange Career of Jamie Lee Curtis

For those trying to make sense of the strangeness of a moment in which Sydney Sweeney has time and again ended up at the center of the pernicious and rancid foolishness that is the culture war the trajectory of actress Jamie Lee Curtis' career has its interest.

Remembering Curtis' early work it is common--and not wholly inappropriate--to write of her as having started out as a "scream queen" due to her association with John Carpenter's Halloween series and The Fog. However, it is also the case that, if making quite the contrast with such classically striking contemporaries as Kathleen Turner, Kim Basinger and Michelle Pfeiffer (indeed, those who subscribe to a certain rumor about her have been known to pick apart her looks in search of evidence with which to support their case), and less associated than they with glamorous roles amid that rebirth of old-fashioned glamour that was the '80s, her turns in Trading Places and Perfect, and in less well-remembered films like Love Letters as well, brought her a measure of "sex symbol" status that was important to her subsequent career. After all, even in a film where there was rather less emphasis on her body like A Fish Called Wanda (and the film's measure of sex and nudity played for laughs) the premise that her character could easily seduce any man she meets is central to the plot, while if the impression she makes on audiences in this respect has been more uneven than that of many of her contemporaries this seems to have factored even in her landing roles where that image was quite relevant. Exemplary of this is her part as Helen Tasker in True Lies, where it was key to the story that the film's unlikely sequence of events take her from suburban frump to quasi-Bond girl--in contrast with, for instance, an actress who might never have been convincing as a frump, or at all plausible in the famous hotel room striptease scene--which scene, of course, reinforced her sex symbol image again. (Indeed, the year of True Lies' release the latest installment from the Leisure Suit Larry series "honored" Ms. Curtis by including her in the cast of female celebrity parodies who are love interests of the protagonist in the form of Jamie Lee--well, those who really want to know can easily find out that information.)

Still, even as that sex symbol status would seem to have been hugely important to her career Curtis was also inclined to push back against it from quite early on--with the scene in True Lies itself rating a mention in such a discussion. The original script for the film called for Curtis' character to go fully nude in the scene, but Curtis proposed that the stripping stop at her underwear, and that the scene add an element of slapstick, undercutting the effort at sensuality with humor (producing the version actually to be seen in the film)--all as, of course, just a few years on she was to (giving voice to her daughter's reaction to her consciousness being inside her middle-aged mother's body) stare at herself in the mirror and cry out "I'm like the crypt keeper!" in Freaky Friday. And of course, there has been Curtis' succession of roles in recent years, not least her Oscar-winning part in Everything Everywhere All At Once, what many thought was going to be another Oscar-nominated role in The Last Showgirl--and the sequel to Freaky Friday this past summer. In fairness, it is far from uncommon for actors of all genders and ages to push back against a screen image (a tendency that has always sat awkwardly with the attempt to make actors into Stars with all the larger-than-life one-dimensionality that requires), but it is hard to think of any comparably high-profile performer who so much, and with such gusto, played against a sex symbol image specifically. It also seems impossible to deny the part of the prevailing gender politics in the situation, which have the press loudly cheerleading such efforts. "You've never looked better on screen!" goes the shout-out of respectable opinion to Curtis for her turn as Deirdre Beaubeirdre in "EEAAO" (with, indeed, Google AI echoing the sentiment as it forces its unasked-for opinion upon users of the search engine). Meanwhile, other opinions about the matter (not least the opinions of those who would regard this judgment as so remote from the reaction of anyone with any aesthetic sense at all that this statement can only be hypocritical "virtue-signaling") are not to be found platformed anywhere near a mainstream media outlet, or indeed the existence of such opinion-holders normally acknowledged--such that for those who find it ridiculous that the press expects the whole public to be delighted that an actress "looks like hell" on screen any expression of opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy seems to them like something to celebrate.

The '90s Moral Panic Over Sex on Network TV

Three decades on Seinfeld remains a cultural touchstone, with the episode "The Contest," if not one of its best, at least one of its most notorious for the "show about nothing" devoting a full half hour to the theme of a certain conventionally solitary activity that the conventional wisdom regards "everyone" as doing all as "no one" admits to doing it, with the awkwardness of "admission" quite central to what the episode's script does with that theme. The results, of course, contain their share of "edgy" moments putting many of the protagonists' less seemly traits and tendencies front and center--not least George Costanza's "dutifully" visiting his mother in the hospital in spite of her really, really not wanting to see him just about now (those who have seen the episode are unlikely to have forgotten why) simply for the pleasure of seeing on the curtain separating his mother's bed from her roommate's the silhouette of the attending nurse (the stunning Andrea Parker, just a few years short of her rise to TV stardom with her role on The Pretender) giving a sponge bath to the room's (similarly sexy) other occupant. Still, it is notable that the episode achieves its charge without, indeed in part because of, the extreme obliqueness of its references to the act in question, no character ever speaking any of the formal or medical terms for such activity, or any recognizable proxy for it of a slang or any other nature. Rather the writers put on a virtuoso performance of tap-dancing around them that, even as it appreciably added to the entertainment value of the goings-on, likely left many, due to the combination of shock at seeing this (apparently) the theme of a half-hour prime-time sitcom episode in that era with the aforementioned obliqueness wondering even at the very end "Was that really about what I thought it was about?"

In 2025 that virtuoso performance, and the inevitable blowback from parents' groups and the other usual suspects in these affairs, is a reminder of the tensions, and moral panic, that surrounded the content of American network television in the '90s. This was certainly the case where violence was concerned, as seen in the rather muddled affair that saw the Clinton administration cynically playing the old game of using culture war as cover for class war with pop culture the favored terrain (grandstanding about violence on TV as it brazenly betrayed its supporters by ferociously pushing a neoliberal economic program). However, as the matter of Seinfeld shows this was the case with sex as well as violence, as one remembers when alongside this they recall the furor over ABC's teasing that those portions of the female anatomy considered red lines by the censors would not always be "strategically concealed" when Mariel Hemingway went nude in an episode of her legal drama Civil Wars; the rancor over June Chadwick's actually crossing those red lines in a skinny-dipping scene in the Northern Exposure-in-Hawaii that was Going to Extremes; and the outrage over what the controversial-before-it-even-hit-the-airwaves NYPD Blue was expected to (and did) bring to the small screen.

Of course, many of those shows over which there was such a brouhaha are not even a memory today. (In spite of the sensation surrounding the episodes just mentioned both Civil Wars and Going to Extremes were so short-lived that they never even came close to syndication, seem to have left no legacy of any kind, and are apparently unavailable in streaming or through any other medium.) Others are better remembered, but not for shock value--the enduring affection of fans of Seinfeld and NYPD Blue ultimately having little to do with what shock value they had by '90s-era-network-TV-standards, with the lingering of an episode like "The Contest" in the pop cultural memory after what was shocking at the time of its original airing no longer seemed to be so a testament to its wit rather than its provocativeness. Part of that story was that network TV censorship in such areas did relax somewhat in subsequent years (thus did a decade later Friends devote an episode of its own to a character "getting caught" that addressed the "incident" in much more direct fashion but also with far less outcry). But a still bigger part is the way in which the advent of parental controls embedded in televisions gave the concerned some measure of discretion about what over-the-air content came into their homes--all as network TV became decreasingly central to people's experience of television more generally. After all, the vast majority of the public had cable TV by that point, and a third or more households at least one premium channel airing content that made what horrified parents on a Big Three network look like nothing by comparison (R-rated movies and R-rating-worthy TV shows at eight P.M., Skinemax-type softcore and "documentaries" with full-frontal nudity and unsimulated sex acts like Real Sex and Shock Video before midnight), with all this increasingly absorbing their attention amid the dawning of an Internet that changed the game out of all recognition as der kulturkampf increasingly looked like der kulturbandenkrieg.

HBO's '90s-Era Late Night Documentaries, Again (Shock Video)

The late night documentaries that were HBO's counterpart to the offerings that got its sister network Cinemax jokingly referred to as "Skinemax" have long since passed out of pop cultural consciousness for all but a few, but there does still seem to be something to be said of them and their legacy nonetheless. Certainly in the thinking behind it the Real Sex series, reflecting how what some call "wokeness" is not the novelty that the culture warriors on both sides of the conflict make it out to be but rather part of that long tendency in the cultural politics of the postmodernist era that was known as "political correctness" before it was called "wokeness," inclined toward what can seem a very contemporary attitude in the female-produced show adhering to the principles of what today would be called "inclusiveness," "diversity," "body positivity" and the "centering of marginalized perspectives" in its segments--such that, for much of the audience, it was probably more "sex" than "sex-y."

One might credit its fellow HBO series Shock Video's Turn-On TV with having tilted a bit more in the direction of the sex-y. If not uninformed by the same sensibility, the series also happened to consist of clip shows bringing HBO's viewers bits of sexually-themed television from around the world--stressing not what real people did, but what people looked to for small-screen entertainment, with all its unavoidably speaking to what relatively large audience might be expected to find appealing that way (as promised by that subtitle with its pun, turn-on TV), all as its scripts, breathily read by Ann Magnuson in those years when she was the narrator, tantalized as the episodes presented glances at content from soap operas where the bedroom scenes went rather further than they did on American daytime (or nighttime) TV, to talk shows that presented unpixelated what even Jerry Springer could not present at all, to game shows that would never have appeared on America's over-the-air channels, including the kind of British TV one did not see on PBS (like a '90s-era Denise Van Outen hosting a certain segment for Something for the Weekend that instantly became notorious in its home market).

Of course, just like Real Sex HBO has dropped Turn-On TV down the memory hole. This would seem to have principally been because of the combination of the channel's concern for "image" with the declining potential of HBO's late-night programming to interest an audience due to the easier availability of sexually-themed material generally, but in this case likely also because of how American TV changed--and one might add, also Americans' contact with foreign television. In the still mainly analog media world of the '90s American TV was still dominated by the major networks, which then conformed to a standard of censorship that, if much changed since the Golden Age of Television, was still relatively staid in comparison with the rest of the culture--as the envelope-pushers of the day who caused such moral panic reminded us--while American television was generally thought by Americans themselves to be prudish in comparison with its foreign counterparts (American censors supposed to be less uptight about violence, but more uptight about sex, than their European counterparts, for example). Combined with how that foreign television was for American viewers "terra incognita" to the point that even when there was no sexual or other such sensationalistic edge at all a glimpse of what people were watching overseas (a piece of variety television from the Continent, wacky Japanese game shows) still had some interest, Turn-On TV had its draw. In the years since it may be that the standards for over-the-air broadcast have not changed so much as some might have imagined they would over that time frame, but the cable and streaming booms that for so many have been "where the action is" in TVland (as the singers of prestige TV and streaming never cease to remind us) have meant that American TV's staid image is a thing of the past. Meanwhile, if America's remains a relatively closed market to foreign product it is not as closed as it once was, with vast amounts of television from all over the world to be found in your streaming service's lineup, sometimes in combinations as exotic as they are surprising to North American viewers. (Thus may you be seeing commercials for a whole streaming channel devoted to Turkish soap opera dubbed into Spanish--Pasión Turca!) In short, the world moved on in this respect as well, as the old episodes of Turn-On TV appear a curiosity or a nostalgic memory for those who still remember them at all.

What Ever Happened to HBO's Late-Night Documentaries?

It is a commonplace that the 1990s was a transformative period for television, not least because of (so the story goes) ground-breaking new production by the cable channels, with HBO at the forefront of the movement. In the early and mid-'90s this had TV critics treating HBO's made-for-television films like The Band Played On as cultural events, with the same attitude carrying over to its original series' like, of course, The Sopranos--the critical reception to which was so hyperbolic that the writers of Saturday Night Live satirized the reviewers as having become really and truly unhinged.

However, there were other sides to HBO's original production, like its documentary production, and especially its production of racy documentaries for the late night hours--in the years in which HBO was launching the "prestige TV" revolution with shows like The Sopranos it was also airing shows like Real Sex, and Shock Video: Turn on TV, and Taxicab Confessions. In contrast with its ballyhooed scripted series these are now little acknowledged and have apparently been withdrawn from availability to its subscribers for many, many years, such that the main legacy they seem to have left are scattered comments in Internet fora by people old enough to remember their original airings wondering "What ever happened to that?"

Going by the little I have seen about the matter it seems the managers of that particular media empire think the documentaries best left in the past--trash TV stuff that sits poorly next to their prestigious scripted fare, with this view encouraged by the lack of demand for the material. After all, what was salable in a period in which dial-up Internet was a new thing, and many were also too inhibited to delve into the adult offerings of their cable packages, was not so salable later, the more in as these shows tended toward what might today be called the "woke." As the name promised Real Sex was about "real sex"--what "real" people were doing, with what are now spoken of as "inclusiveness," "diversity," "body positivity" and "the centering of marginalized perspectives" all part of the package, such that when a particular episode promised, for example, a certain type of "party," what the viewer got looked very different from the treatment of the theme they would have found in conventional "adult entertainment."

The prospect of an occasional titillating image or scenario or other bit amid it all was enough to induce many a viewer to tune in anyway back then, but if far from tame it was also poorly positioned to compete in the milieu that quickly emerged afterward, especially when one remembers the misapprehension in the old adage that "sex sells." Specifically it isn't sex that sells, but sex-y, about which matter individuals tend to have very specific ideas, while also having very specific ideas about what may be sex but is also decidedly un-sex-y, a buzz-killer for which they are apt to have very low tolerance, with the marketing of pornography indicative of the fact. In contrast with most sellers of fiction, who face the challenge of enticing a potential audience to buy the product without giving away the surprises that are part of the pleasure of the experience with "spoilers," the sellers of porn (you can even see authors adhere to the principle when selling self-published "erotica" at the big online book retailers) very pointedly explain exactly what is in the product. The least unseemly way to put it may be to say that they spell out exactly who will do what to whom, as retailers of the stuff index their wares so as to make them conveniently perusable by those searching for specific situations, specific physical attributes of the performers, specific acts--finding items containing exactly what they want to see, and not including what they do not want to see. (Indeed, it can seem that where the prevailing feminist-conservative orthodoxy about the subject emphasizes the ways in which pornography is supposed to create tastes of a kind they deem unhealthy or worse, no part of the entertainment industry caters so specifically and minutely to audience tastes as this one, with all it implies about a more complex dynamic between the audience and the industry's products than we usually hear about at the very least.) Real Sex et. al. was thus at rather a disadvantage in the age of Pornhub, all as HBO seemed unlikely to win any plaudits for having from a certain standpoint being "ahead of its time"--certainly not enough of them to compensate for the dissonances with the image the outlet's leadership has endeavored to cultivate the past quarter of a century.

Sydney Sweeney and the Culture War

In addressing the culture war here I would like to be clear that I do not write of the genuine differences in values among the American people, the inevitable arguments over them, or the reality that many of those arguments--like that over reproductive rights--are serious and indeed frequently life and death matters for the public. Rather I address elites' cynical mobilization of the often less thoughtful or principled motives bound up with the arguments as they tie up the disparate arguments into One Big Argument whose conduct on the most narrow-minded and emotional terms possible they encourage relentlessly as they position that One Big Argument to overshadow everything else so as to keep that broad public at each other's throats as they realize their political ends. These most obviously include their making it harder for anyone to discuss anything else, not least those things that the elite truly care about, like the economy or foreign policy, while also warping the discussion of those things when they do come up (like making of the hard science matter of fossil fuels and their effect on the climate a "culture war" issue!).

One may fairly describe the resulting political scene as characterized by associative, symbolic, even magical thinking of the kind anthropologists once called "primitive," tribal loyalties and tribal hates equally describable as primitive, hyperbolic rhetoric, and moral panic in relation to trivia, like the disposable crap of pop culture, all further stoked by accusations made in complete bad faith for tactical ends, and amplified by a lobotomized Internet culture which excels at turning any and every little issue into a three hour tempest in a teacup before all involved forget about it completely as they get caught up in the Next Little Thing. (They tell us that the Internet Remembers Everything. Internet users Remember Nothing.) It is all such that any person with the least capacity to stand back and look at the scene in an objective manner cannot but be overwhelmed not merely by the extreme stupidity of what they see, but the sheer strangeness of many aspects of the situation.

Such as the manner in which Ms. Sydney Sweeney has time and again ended up at the center of said culture war with "tradition"-minded conservatives' embracing Ms. Sweeney as an icon of opposition to "wokeness" (a situation not so consequential, I should think, as the foolishness about fossil fuels and the climate crisis cited above, but if anything even harder for a rational person to work out). After all, Ms. Sweeney is an actress not long ago little known beyond the small minority of people that actually watches prestige TV--with, of course, those who have recently come to be Ms. Sweeney's champions especially unlikely to be among those euphoric about Euphoria and what they could be expected to dismiss as "woke" coastal elite-pandering edgelord crapola. Attempting to explain the situation many have dissected particular episodes in which she has been involved, like Sweeney's guest hosting Saturday Night Live, or her participation in an ad campaign for American Eagle jeans, and argued that the controversy was manufactured. However, even when taking the trouble to argue this they tend not to discuss the cultural context that made it possible for the manufactured controversy to gain traction, above all the particular gender politics that mattered most "in the mix."

Considering those politics one is obliged to look away from the diversity of the political tendencies with which the right is at odds and instead focus on that particular tendency that the mainstream media has fastened on as its orthodoxy, such that this is really the right's direct opponent in the matter--and indeed just those aspects of that tendency most relevant to that particular issue. That tendency, thoroughly "bourgeois," "postmodernist" and "identity politics"-minded, is at ease with and even defensive of the status quo on the whole but ferociously combative in its area of concern, where, standing on its claims for women's subjectivities, by which it sets great store as a standard of right, fairness and need, and to which it expects deference, it assumes a stance of highly categorical and militant opposition to traditional conceptions of gender. Specifically rejecting the old stress on biological sex as the determinant of gender in favor of an emphasis on what it sees as gender's "social construction," this entails on its part a particular rejection of the idea of distinctly male and female qualities, roles, norms and expectations as the imposition of a socially constructed "patriarchy" ("rule by men") which is "structurally" and "misogynistically" oppressive of women. In opposing this construct this tendency goes beyond the idea that people should not be bound by traditional expectations in the area to regarding the very idea of those expectations as threatening, and conformity to them even suspect as endorsement of "the bad old ways," and thus threatening to the progress they want to make (to be found in, for example, the difference between the view that women should have choices beyond the traditional domestic role exemplified by the "trad-wife," and the view that any woman's being a homemaker is in itself somehow pernicious). Indeed proponents of this view, which for lack of a more satisfactory term one might refer to as "woke gender politics," go so far as to hold that women's subjectivities require protection from the oppressions of the conventional, "patriarchal" male subjectivity, which is, at best, something out of which men have to be "educated." This defensive and "educational" effort is manifest in unstinting criticism and correction of what they deem to be "wrong" male thought, speech and action, with a significant dimension of that effort pop culture's constant "role reversal" of the positions of men and women from the standpoint of gender stereotypes, as seen in how even old movie franchises are now reworked to present their female characters as the embodiments of traditionally masculine virtues such as intelligence, strength, courage, and the male characters as stupid, weak figures who, even when not actually villainous, prove helpless or irrelevant as the women dismiss or dominate them (meeting stereotype with "counter-stereotype" as they "masculinize" the women and "feminize" the men to "free minds" of the conventional associations). Meanwhile proponents of this view support the protection of women from men's reactions to a depiction they can be expected to find objectionable. (Thus do they hold a man's characterizing such material as puerile and mean-spirited power fantasy to be illegitimate, and proscribe the use of the term "Mary Sue" on the grounds that male disrespect toward such images of female prowess and power is a patriarchy-affirming threat to women's aspirations.)

Woke gender politics' reading of male identity and subjectivity as an oppressive and misogynistic social construct extends to that most sensitive aspect of traditional male identity and subjectivity, male heterosexuality. Thus proponents of this politics relentlessly turn a "queer theory" focused on the "instability" of (again, socially determined) sexual identity on male heterosexual identity and behavior to the point that they can make male heterosexuality seem merely "performative," a front for a pathetic mass of ugly insecurities, as they replace a "heteronormative" conception of human behavior with a "homonormative" one--and "homophobia" (a choice of term strongly suggesting the aforementioned insecurities as the reason for the prejudice--foregrounding them accusatorily in a way with little parallel among other terms denoting prejudice) with "heterophobia," an attitude which can seem to broadly characterize their particularly extreme scrutiny of (heterosexual) male thought, speech and action in this specific area of life. Thus do they also denounce male (sexual) "objectification" of women, and all associated with it, like the "male gaze," and conventional male valuations of the attractiveness of women (standards of beauty, femininity, etc.), with this having significant pop cultural manifestation in recent years in the Gamergate and Comicsgate episodes; the media's barraging the public with expressions of disgust from famous actresses at the male gaze and the ways in which their careers had made them its object; filmmakers eliding the "male gaze" from even movies of types conventionally aimed at a male audience; a great deal of advertising and such longtime showcases of female beauty as the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue replacing traditional beauty standards with "diversity" and "body positivity"; and (to go by the "CalArts style" controversy) animators even altering the art styles of cartoons to preempt the production of anything a possessor of a male gaze might find "appealing" (!). Rounding out the image, the same tendency treats the thwarting of male preferences and expectations (with the pointedly unconventional casting of particular roles, onetime sex symbols playing against that image on screen, etc.) as victories to be celebrated by all right-thinking people.

Of course, a great many see all this as male-bashing, anti-male, misandrist, and a substitution of one set of prejudices for another, with those inclining to this view finding particular grounds for their position in woke gender politics' numerous double standards, like how in spite of its practitioners' insistence on the instability of sexual identity and the all-pervading nature of patriarchal prejudice they do not apply the (for many men, hostile, deeply unpleasant, often emasculating) scrutiny they do to heterosexual male identity to other gender identities, instead demanding complete respect for those other groups' members' self-identification (evident in, for example, their holding that the view that LGBTQ+ identity is changeable, as assumed by "conversion" therapy, is destructive quackery, in stark contrast with their desire to "change" men). Meanwhile, as the proponents of these politics condemn objectification as a great evil, they take no apparent interest in forms of "objectification" other than heterosexual male objectification of women (not least, the objectification of men that men may plausibly find at least as objectionable as women do objectification of their sex, the more in as they experience that objectification as both an assault on male identity and, often, a piece of conscious vindictiveness against them). Indeed, just as the supporters of woke gender politics celebrate the scrubbing of pop culture of anything reflecting or legitimating the conventional male perspective, they also celebrate the "centering" of other perspectives in the manner exemplified today by TV series' like Bridgerton and Emerald Fennell's films, especially insofar as these are conspicuously at odds with the conventional male preferences (not just reveling in but valorizing their "transgressiveness" against "patriarchal" and "heterosexist" sensibilities).

Proponents of woke gender politics typically regard the critics' characterization of their views as a crude misrepresentation by reactionaries opposed to the progress women and the LGBTQ+ have made toward bringing about a more equitable and inclusive society--in the language of postmodernist-identity theory, a defense of the "privilege" of the "male" and especially "heterosexual male" under the traditional order. Much of that criticism specifically seems illegitimate to them given their premises--for instance, a male's complaining about "emasculation," "feminization," etc. seeming to them to bespeak his attachment to the very understandings of gender that they are quite clear about their fighting against--all as other complaints which may not seem so obviously illegitimate appear trivial. (Thus does it go with male complaints about misandry, proponents of these politics holding this to be, at worst, a problem of individual rather than "systemic" prejudice such as they regard misogyny as being, and so not properly comparable with regard to character or urgency of redress.) There is also the more basic epistemological matter of their demand of respect for women's subjectivities, which makes male questioning as such likely to be fundamentally illegitimate. Reflecting all this there has been a strong tendency in this quarter to contemptuously dismiss any questioning of woke gender politics as a cynical attempt to deflect the address of other groups' proper concerns. However, this has been unsatisfactory to those less than convinced by the justifications for the undeniable ambiguities and double standards involved in that position, with woke gender politics' refusal of every call for consideration toward men on one grounds or another easily making the reasons they give seem like rationalization rather than rationale, the more in as its proponents have combined that stance with great verbal bombast (their use of the word "misogyny" in regard to anything men think, say or do easily seeming to make of it a "scare word" like "Communist"), with all of this extending to the fundamentals of the epistemological premises of those politics. (If one is to speak of women's subjectivity as the measure of their situation, just who is to represent that? Not all women subjectively see things the same way, with the feminist apparently choosing her own subjectivity over the subjectivities of other women not holding the same views. And if subjectivity is the standard of unfair treatment, how can feminists justify their dismissive attitude toward male reactions, which necessarily also means dismissing subjectivity?) Indeed, skeptics of woke gender politics often conclude that their proponents do not defend themselves against their critics' charges because they simply cannot do so, and that remarks such as "Men just don't get it" are a mere "terror of obscurantism" directed at making men acquiesce in a narcissistic demand for the coddling of women's sensibilities as feminists trample with impunity on men's sensitivities, and even interests and rights of greater material consequence (especially post-#MeToo), with expressions of petty vindictiveness of the "Now you know how it feels" type feeding into their worst suspicions, the more in as, again, supporters of woke gender politics decline to condemn such attitudes on even tactical grounds.

Of course, such objections are all but excluded from the mainstream media, where the gender politics discussed here is describable as hegemonic. The result is that a conventionally "hot" actress not lamenting and maligning the male gaze the way so many of her Hollywood peers have so much done in public but rather on the high-profile platform that is a guest spot on Saturday Night Live actually inviting that gaze, welcoming it, validating it, can seem to be performing a revolutionary act, with subsequent episodes like the pun about Sweeney having "good" jeans/genes in the American Eagle ad continuing the pattern. Of course, that said the right's celebration of Ms. Sweeney in this manner can seem dissonant. After all, if the right has historically stood for traditionalism in the area of gender it has not been the party of freer sexuality, heterosexual or otherwise. Quite the contrary, it has been the champion of religion, "family values," and generally bourgeois lifeways which demands the young put away even their most innocent amusements to focus on getting jobs and starting families and generally leading dull, dutiful bourgeois lives whether they want them or not (this is just what it means to "grow up," and no backtalk from you!), and never abandoned that stance, while indeed frequently embracing newfangled gender theory in making this very case. Thus was George Gilder the equal of any "queer theorist" in his insistence on the "instability of male sexual identity" in his '70s-era writing (if using it all in support of traditionalist conservative prescriptions regarding sex, gender roles, work, family), all as there are those in the right-wing press who have denounced how many on the right have presented themselves as champions of indulgence of the "male gaze" and all associated with it. Thus a piece in Newsweek may denounce what the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has become, but in its turn a piece in the Washington Examiner denounce the piece in Newsweek for countenancing the existence of any such thing as a swimsuit issue at all, regardless of the body types displayed in its pages. And thus do the authors of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document call for the criminalization of pornography, with its authors overtly drawing on feminist language and arguments in support of that objective (not least in their denunciation of pornographers as "misogynistic exploiters of . . . women"). For all the contradictions of that stance one may yet imagine that the right's less than perfectly coherent or consistent bid for the support of men annoyed with the media-academic-political complex's ceaseless condemnation of them and their sexuality has been to the right's advantage, and the disadvantage of their opponents--but only within distinct limits. After all, in spite of the most bungled Democratic Party campaign in living memory amid the bitterly anti-incumbent mood created by a situation of genuine economic hardship the advantage it brought the Republicans was not nearly so great as to win for their presidential nominee the vote of the particularly pop culture-attuned (and allegedly reactionary) males of the age 18-29 category in November 2024, or (given the testimony of those who did vote Republican) refute the wisdom that at election time what matters is "The Economy, Stupid."