Garfinkle:
We Americans talk about sex publicly all
the time these days, but it rarely dawns on America’s cultural warriors that
foreigners overhear these conversations. The consequences are not always
trivial.
Yes,
you read that right. We Americans have sex, sometimes, but we talk about it
publicly all the time these days,
especially the kind that tends to dwell at the sloughs of the bell curve of
normality. We generally assume—without letting ourselves in on the assumption
most of the time, so self-absorbed are we—that the cultural conversations we
have on subjects sexual stay in the United States, if not in Vegas. It rarely
dawns on America’s cultural warriors that foreigners overhear these
conversations, and that they also consume our sexually vulgarized popular
culture productions through exported movies and television serials. Some of
these foreigners are Middle Easterners, and the narrative produced by American
writers and readers, producers and viewers, affects the image of American
society—our politics and policies with it—in the region. The consequences are
not always trivial.
I will
discuss what some of these consequences are in a moment. But some table setting
must precede that discussion, so that it may alight in an intelligible context.
All the
American culture-war topics surrounding variable human sexuality—same-sex
rights and marriage, abortion, surrogacy, and, lately, campus sexual assaults
as a sub-category of generic violence against woman—attract great buckets of
ink on a regular basis. Most of these buckets are the property of the
post-bourgeois salon Left, which has rendered the American Left as a whole so
drunk on culture-war juice that it spends almost no effort on the political
economy issues that used to be its raison
d’etre. The country is arguably much worse off as a result.
Let me
put my cards on the table before we go any further: I’m sick of it all,
especially the obsessions of the Sunday New
York Times Magazine, whose editors seem to have great difficulty getting
their heads out of their, or other people’s, crotches. I am unashamedly
old-fashioned: I think public discussion of intimate sexual matters is
unseemly, a word that has become as quaint as outlandish mass-culture fare has
become hideously sexualized. I don’t care if the subject to hand is essentially
heterosexual in nature, or homosexual, transsexual, omnisexual, multisexual,
interspecies-sexual, or all the other kinds of sexual that I’m sure exist but
know nothing about. I could not give a damn what consenting adults do with
their genitalia in private, but I don’t need or want to hear about it in
public—and these days you nearly have to hole up in a mountain cave somewhere
to escape it.
For
similar reasons I don’t like “acclaimed” television shows like Law and Order, because the relentless
focus on pedophilia and other disgusting para-sexual behaviors is coarsening,
just as all the over-the-top, gratuitous violence on offer 24/7 in the American
electronic sewer is coarsening. The late George Gerbner, of the University of
Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications, used to study the effects of
these kinds of mediated displays and came up with the concept of the mean-world
syndrome. Gerbner showed through meticulous empirical research that people who
watched this kind of stuff on a regular basis tended to exaggerate
significantly real-life incidences of crime, violence, infidelity, sexual abuse
and suicide.
By
“norming” such behaviors through ceaseless discussion and fictive depiction,
many people come to believe that they are not only more prevalent but also less
morally deviant. The net result of more coarsening images is more coarsening
behavior; life does indeed imitate art, even very bad art. The corporate
sponsors and fat-cat producers of this fare earn big market-share bucks from
offering the scintillating and the sexually weird, creepy and gross, so they
don’t care. (And to think that there are actually lighter-than-air libertarians
out there who believe that only government can undermine American society’s
moral values….) And nowadays they must
offer it or they will be at a competitive disadvantage with those who have no
qualms at all about doing so.
To this
race to the bottom I have given a generic name: scoundrel cascades. It simply
means that people will do what they know to be improper or harmful by using the
excuse that if they don’t do it, less morally constrained others will put them
at a competitive disadvantage. First only a few people cross over to the dark
side, and are seen to profit from so doing; then the number doubles, then
quadruples, and so on until one has a behavioral cascade within a given market
niche or professional zone. This leads in due course to the decay of
institutions. It is bad.
There
are also virtue cascades. Trailblazers sometimes clean up delimited market
activities, as, arguably, Brahmin Boston bankers did at the end of the 19th
century, and they profit from a reputation for probity, honesty and empathy
that the morally uplifted behavior justifiably produces. In a way, “green” or
organic food producers, by basking in the secular godhead of environmental
correctness, are doing something similar today—they are creating a virtue
cascade within our food supply chain. That is good, whether their reasons and
science are impure or imperfect or not.
This
raises a social science question: Under what conditions do scoundrel cascades
get started, under what conditions do virtue cascades arise, and under what
conditions does one kind of cascade reverse its valance and change directions?
It seems to me that as a matter of public policy generally, we would be wise to
get ourselves an answer to this question.
Alas,
we seem to have no idea. I recently asked a prominent social scientist whose
very métier is the origins and vicissitudes of moral behavior to have a go at
this question for the magazine, and he did not understand what I meant by a
scoundrel or a virtue cascade. When I explained it, and added my sense that we
are witness today to many more scoundrel cascades than virtue cascades (think
offshore banking lawyers and accountants, think big bankers in general for that
matter, think professional athletes and banned substances, think insider
traders, think rock and rap music lyricists, think plagiarism or outright
fabrication in journalism, think lying in resumes, think excessive and
accelerating uses of dangerous hormones in animal feed, and one can go on and
on), he questioned whether in America today there is more morally smarmy
behavior than there was in the past. That stopped me dead in my tracks; I was
flat-out gobstruck speechless—dipped chin, flared nostrils, wide eyes and all.
And despite having left the speechwriting racket more than nine years ago, I am
rarely speechless.
Now, we
have never been a nation of goody two-shoes, to be sure; the brilliant
historian Walter McDougall has rightly insisted that hucksterism is at least as
American as anything noble, or anything resembling apple pie, that we claim as
a heritage. And it’s true, too, that the 1950s and 1960s before the
counterculture set roots were an unusually antiseptic time, what with the Cold
War in gear and piety advancing on the Potomac, and so may not be a proper
comparative base. Still, it beggars belief that America is still more like
Bedford Falls than Pottersville today than it was when Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It
to Beaver, Lassie, and Father Knows Best were the hit
television shows—and no, I am not ignoring segregation and the other high
misanthropies of that era.
Whatever
their shortcomings in tolerating bigotry of various sorts, the gatekeepers were
still at the gates enforcing some
moral order, and hypocrisy still played the critical role that it alone can
play as the homage that vice pays to virtue, as la Rochefoucauld famously put
it. Without hypocrisy we are sunk, for the alternative to high standards is not
low standards; it’s eventually no standards at all—which in matters sexual is
pretty much where we are now, it seems to me. (As Mary Eberstadt argued already
some years ago, we seem to have transferred our moral taboos from sex to
food—as in homosexuality is fine, but transfats are sinful.) If I’m wrong about
all this, if Americans as a whole are as honest and truthful and unselfish and
fidel to their spouses today as they were fifty and a hundred and two hundred
years ago, OK: Show me.
Just in
case you were wondering, I’m no prude. I chased plenty of women in my time, and
even caught a few willing ones back in the day (which is another way of saying
that some of them were kind enough to let me think that I caught them). It’s the
PC salon Left that lately wins the prude prize. Case in point: The amazing law
recently passed in California (where else?) on affirmative consent in sexual
relations on campus.
According
to the NYT, colleges must require
“affirmative conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.”
Moreover, the Times informs us that the law mandates such consent for each
phase of a sexual encounter, without explicitly defining what those phases are:
“Consent to one kind of contact cannot be taken to mean consent to another. So
an encounter that progresses from kissing to intercourse would require not one
go-ahead but several.” The California law stipulates, again without actually defining
it, that consent can be communicated verbally (they didn’t dare say orally) or
through actions, but other such codes in other states require written consent,
which we are told can range from a short statement to up to two pages.
Now, I
understand why college leaders are allowing and even asking legislators for
such codes. On the one hand, they don’t want to be sued out of their endowment
funds, and on the other they may be genuinely alarmed by what they construe to
be an upsurge of sexual abuse and violence, often in tandem with binge
drinking. Given the “mean-world syndrome”, not so speak of the wild
proliferation of internet porn and exhibitionism, there is reason to worry
about a real upsurge and not just a skewed reporting phenomenon going on here.
If the new campus sexual consent codes prove effective in containing and even
rolling back the problem—which probably qualifies as a scoundrel cascade of
sorts, too—then I can tolerate them. If they lead to less pre-marital
intercourse among young people who have barely begun to solve the riddle that
connects sex to love, so much the better. (I freely admit than when I was 23,
as opposed to 63, I probably would have taken a different view.)
That
said, we should recognize such sexual codes, no less than campus speech codes,
for what they are: Efforts by dreary, killjoy social authoritarians to apply
governance to aspects of private life where it doesn’t belong in a society
claiming to esteem liberty. Beyond bringing the spirit of Taylorism into the
bedroom, PC radicals will doubtless abuse such codes in the name of and as a
means to peddle the mindless amorphous egalitarianism that has become the
secular religion of many. We already see some of this, I am informed, in the
way these codes are being presented, with the names of individuals in
hypothetical scenarios being void of gender identification. So it’s always
someone named Jamie or Pat or Sam or Jess, because the ideologically necessary
if bizarre PC presumption is that young women are as likely to sexually aggress
against men as men are against women, and that the problem is by no means
limited to heterosexuals. Maybe; I really wouldn’t know.
There
is of course no excuse for sexual abuse or violence, up to and certainly
including rape. I have never struck a woman, not even my baby daughter’s tiny
butt back in the day when her exuberant kicking made it mighty challenging to
get her diaper on. The whole idea is sickening to me, as it is to my two grown
sons. But that’s not really at issue in these codes, which are not needed for
clear-cut cases of violent abuse. They rather seek to regulate and so need to
routinize inherently ambiguous human behavior that is decidedly foreign to such
impositions. Sexual encounters between young and relatively inexperienced individuals—and
I mean emotionally inexperienced more than I mean inexperienced in
technique—are frequently less than clearly staged (if memory serves me
correctly). Whether slightly inebriated or not, part of the mystique—and part
of the enjoyment—is the sweet uncertainty with which such encounters begin
(never mind the kinds of uncertainties that usually attend their conclusion).
If both participants knew ahead of time where the first sexual opportunity with
a certain person would lead, it would rob the experience of much of its allure.
It would cease being an adventure, which, by its very nature, poses the
possibility of risk and regret as well as of satisfaction and serenity.
I don’t
mean to make light of the dilemma, but when I try to picture the actual
implementation of a multi-stage written sexual consent code, I double over in
paroxysms of laughter. Try to picture Pat and Jess, their clothing loosened and
cast hither and yon, their breathing quickening and audible, their body parts
vibrating to music on the stereo (could it still possibly be Pachelbel’s
Canon?), and their tongues launched on journeys toward salty destinations when,
suddenly, Jess interrupts their romantic embrace and flatly states: “Pat,
you’ve got to sign this paper before I can lick your [fill in the blank……use
your imagination].”
If you
don’t find this hilarious, then I cannot help you. Do the sex code writers
really expect an already consummated couple, so to speak, who met a month
before in English lit class, Jamie and Sam say, to calmly discuss beforehand
the nuance of whether they are going to make love, have sex, or rut like beasts
of the field? Oh, how I long to know what the late George Carlin would have
done with such material, unseemly by nature as it may be and as he often was
(though usually for some redeeming purpose).
But the
PC crowd that thinks up this stuff does not find anything about it the least
bit funny. As best I can tell from a safe distance, campus Big Sister is
totally humorless, thus managing the improbable feat of being unseemly, inane
and tedious all at the same time.
Now
what, finally at long last, has all this to do with the Middle East? The answer
is “plenty”, but I will be brief.
To one
extent or another, all Muslim Middle Eastern societies (to include those of
North Africa, the Sahel and Southwest Asia), Arab and non-Arab alike, maintain
traditional attitudes toward human sexuality and to how that subject in its
various manifestations may and may not be discussed in public. I do not mean by
this that these societies are free from pre- or post-modern sexual perversity;
on the contrary, there is plenty of perversity and arguably no shortage of
sexual neuroses as well from Morocco to Egypt to Pakistan and back again. But
the public optic conveys a very different image, and toleration for what is
defined as deviant behavior is low. This is not hard for Americans of a certain
age to understand, for Middle Easterners’ attitudes toward homosexuality,
out-of-wedlock sex, abortion and so forth are more or less indistinguishable
from mainstream American attitudes a mere half century ago. Take careful note: We are the ones who have changed, and by
normal social-historical criteria, the change has been blindingly rapid.
Middle
Easterners are regularly sideswiped by our mean-world syndrome, both the
sexualized parts and the other parts. But unlike Americans, they lack the
day-by-day encounter with American reality that might leaven their perceptions.
So a female Peace Corps volunteer shows up in a Moroccan village and an 11-year
old boy asks her to show him her gun. In her surprise, she laughs and tells him
that she doesn’t have a gun. He doesn’t believe her because he knows from
American television shows and movies that all Americans carry guns, that all
American women are either prostitutes or victims of sexual predation, that
there are hardly any grandparents or old people in America, and that there are
no families where mothers and fathers live together with their own children. In
short, compared to their own social surroundings, Middle Eastern Muslims see an
America that is the consequence of multiple, protracted scoundrel cascades.
This
raises a weird but telling paradox. Many young Middle Easterners admire
American political institutions but not the wiles and ways of American society.
And they have a point. Their countries’ political institutions are mostly
pathetic or worse, but their societies generally are not. If a foreigner
forgets her cash-stuffed purse in a schoolroom she has visited in Cairo or
Ramallah or Tunis, Arabs will fall over one another to return it to the owner,
cash included. Would the same happen in a reversed situation in St. Louis or
Atlanta or Washington, DC? Maybe, but maybe not. You don’t have to factor in
the mean-world syndrome to guess the answer.
But,
you object, can’t these people distinguish fact from fiction? After all,
they’re neither stupid nor primitive. True, they are neither stupid nor
primitive, but the conventions of what is fictive and how it is produced are
not homogeneous across cultures: Societies can be different without some being
“superior” or “better” than the others. The answer, then, is sometimes a flat
“no”, as in the case of rural Pashtuns who thought a BBC radio serial “soap
opera” skillfully designed to inject “good values” regarding women’s rights and
various hygiene/medical issues was real. When the show ended, some of its fans
wanted to know what had happened to the people, if they were all right, and
where exactly in Afghanistan they lived so that they could extend offers of
hospitality. The answer is sometimes more complicated than “no”, because again,
as Lawrence Rosen points out in Varieties
of Muslim Experience, not all cultures offer up the same mix of raw social
material for fictive, artistic or symbolic manipulation. Suffice it to say, we
should protectively assume that the answer is “no”, they cannot readily
distinguish fact from fiction at the margins, especially when they lack
anything like a reliable reality check about America.
The
favorite rhetorical question asked here after 9/11 was “Why do they hate us?”
The answer to this question is that it was and remains the wrong question. The
typical tradition-minded Middle Easterner does not hate America. But rather a
lot of tradition-minded Middle Easterners are disgusted by America. There is a
difference.
The
rise of “gay rights” discourse and especially of the gay marriage controversy
to the pinnacle of American politics—all the way to the Supreme Court—befuddles
and disgusts most of them. The immodesty and downright salaciousness of
American “low” fashion, especially for women, repels and disgusts them, too.
The manifest disrespect shown to elders and teachers alarms and disgusts them.
The now deeply embedded linguistic obscenity in American culture, whether in
some forms of popular music or just in overheard speech, repulses and disgusts
them. And not that violence against women and homosexuals is unknown to them in
their own societies—again, very much to the contrary—but the casual
pervasiveness of it in Americans’ own depictions of American society shocks and
disgusts them, too.
Above
all, the deafeningly public character of all this—the banishment of useful
hypocrisy, in other words—puzzles and disgusts to the point that many of them
think we have simply gone mad. To figure out why so few Middle Easterners were
won over by President Obama’s famous Cairo speech, and all the other speeches
designed to project American “soft power” into the Muslim world (just check
recent polling data to measure the failure), you need to understand this
backdrop.
There
have been other consequences, as well. It is a disturbing oversimplification to
conclude from all this that al-Qaeda attacked America because a hedonistic
salon Left’s influence on American culture disgusted them to the point that
they could no longer bear it. But it was one element of a multipronged
motivation. And so it remains: Read Sayyid Qutb’s famous memoir of his sojourn
in America, back at a time (1948-50) when America was still Bedford Falls, if
you want to get a better feel for these sensibilities. As a fish is the last to
discover water, most Americans have become jaded to the point of
non-discernment with respect their own cultural circumstances. But Arabs and
Turks and Kurds and Pashtuns and Berbers who come to America to study in their
impressionable youth are not jaded, and they do not all return home as fans of
American culture or society, particularly of the way we conduct ourselves when
it comes to matters sexual.
I don’t
know how California’s sexual consent on campus code will strike Middle Easterners
once they get wind of it. When they learn that the codes are being imposed
because elite young Americans are so often hammered, let alone that on a
regular basis they cavort around their coed dorms like horny satyrs and nymphs,
they will not be surprised. Their default expectation of us is already one of
disgust at our immodesty, disrespect, materialism and impatience. Will they
find any of this as funny as I do? Well, I’m headed back to the Arab Gulf for a
few days later this month, and I intend to ask. I’ll let you know what I find
out.
