“Composer Artisan” ISFP. Socially and economically libertarian for reasons having nothing to do with Ayn Rand. Current fields of study:Playboy, A Course in Miracles, building a new life in Humboldt County.
Hollywood, California, is my spiritual hometown. I actually grew up in three other communities in California, but it hardly seems to matter which three. How could my heart take root anywhere under the tyranny of American public schooling?
I don’t have to work for a living. After my father died in December 1997, my family and I won a legal settlement.
The Blog About
Nothing: Sudheer of Hyderabad, India, is a big fan of Playboy and an
even bigger fan of Seinfeld. In this blog, he composes humorous
dialogues for the show’s characters.
Hit & Run: the official
blog of my other favorite magazine, Reason: Free Minds and Free
Markets; winner
of the 2005 Weblog Award for Best Group Blog; “the best
libertarian blog” according to the October 2005 issue of
Playboy.
Scoobie Davis Online: a self-described “filmmaker, surfer, and party crasher” in southern California. He’s also a Playboy fan, a left-leaning political gadfly, and a connoisseur of Jack T. Chick religious tracts.
The Search for
Health in Decadence: poetry and philosophical writings of Will, who has
engaged me in lengthy, good-natured debate through comments on my
blog.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven
Pinker. With stylistic flair, a Harvard cognitive scientist
refutes myths about human nature underlying a multitude of political
beliefs—including many of those that would either favor or
oppose the sexual revolution.
God in Popular Culture by Andrew M. Greeley. A liberal Catholic
priest sees quasi-Christian messages of grace abounding in the
allegedly soulless realm of commercial pop culture. For all I know,
Greeley is not necessarily a Playboy fan. But his
interpretation of Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has
influenced my impression of Playboy. (In case anyone wonders, my religious heritage is Lutheran on my father’s side and secularist on my mother’s.)
Republican presidential candidate John McCain is superficially charming, and he showed admirable courage in his ordeal as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Other than that, don’t expect to hear a good word about him from me. If you like the military misadventures of George W. Bush, you’d love a McCain presidency. Mr. “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran” believes so firmly in preemptive war that this video exaggerates only a little comparing him to the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:
The essential problem with McCain’s philosophy of government is that he loves his country fanatically while failing to understand his country’s distinct virtues. He loves the power of the government, through either military force or the force of law, to muscle its way to public virtue and “national greatness.” But individual liberty, the idea that made the United States a truly grand experiment in world political history, is always expendable for the sake of those goals. In 2006, for the Los Angeles Times, Matt Welch did the research on McCain that most journalists have shirked:
Liberals and conservatives alike fail to truly reflect his views, McCain writes, because “neither emphasizes the obligations of a free people to the nation.” His main governmental inspiration is Teddy Roosevelt, the “Eastern swell who became a man of the people,” whose great accomplishment was “to summon the American people to greatness.” In Roosevelt’s code, McCain writes approvingly, it was “absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.” This is an essentially militaristic view of citizenship, one that explains many of McCain’s departures from partisan orthodoxy. Unlike traditional Republicans, he will gladly butt into the affairs of private industry if he perceives them to be undermining Americans’ faith in government; unlike Democrats, he thinks the executive branch generally needs more power, not less.
“Our greatness,” he wrote in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions.” So, because steroids might be damaging the faith of young baseball fans, drug testing becomes a “transcendent issue,” requiring threats of federal intervention unless pro sports leagues shape up. Hollywood’s voluntary movie-rating system? A “smoke screen to provide cover for immoral and unconscionable business practices.” Ultimate Fighting on Indian reservations? “Barbaric” and worthy of government pressure on cable TV companies. Negative political ads by citizen groups? They “do little to further beneficial debate and healthy political dialogue” and so must be banned for 60 days before an election if they mention a candidate by name.
If his issues line up with yours, and if you’re not overly concerned by an activist federal government, McCain can be a great and sympathetic ally. But chances are he will eventually see a grave national threat in what you consider harmless, or he’ll prescribe a remedy that you consider unconscionable.
McCain is arguably even less libertarian than Hillary Clinton. That’s impressive, but not in a good way.
Welch has done it again for today’s LAT, saying, “The most pro-war presidential candidate in a decade is winning the 2008 GOP nomination thanks to the antiwar vote.”
Six degrees of Playboy: One of the Turner TV networks once had a series called Our Favorite Movies. Various celebrities hosted movies, periodically interrupting them to explain what they especially like about them. If I recall correctly, Hugh Hefner hosted Dr. Strangelove (in which one character is seen gazing at a Playboy centerfold). I wish I hadn’t missed that presentation. Does anyone have a video bootleg?
At Hit & Run, Radley Balko reports that the Federal CommunicationsCommunist Commission has fined ABC $1.43 million for showing an “indecent” episode of NYPD Blue five years ago.
Be sure to consult your physician before viewing this YouTube of the offending portion of the show, in which a woman’s bare buttocks are clearly visible:
FCC indecency investigations begin when the agency receives a viewer or listener complaint about a program and can drag on for months or years. The lightly staffed FCC enforcement bureau must go up against broadcasters, which have more legal and financial resources to battle the proposed fine and have a vested interest in dragging out the proceeding. After the enforcement bureau makes a finding, it must be voted on by the FCC’s five commissioners, who were occupied with cable television and wireless spectrum issues through much of 2007.
Never mind that the FCC is violating ABC’s First Amendment rights under a crypto-Marxist rationale of “public ownership of the airwaves.” Never mind that the government is acting on behalf of a tiny number of Church Ladies to punish a television network for placing adult content in a characteristically adult—and very popular—evening drama. Never mind that the authority of the FCC to impose the fine at all depends shamelessly on a time zone technicality (only ABC affiliates in the Central and Mountain zones are being fined, because that’s where the show ran at 9 p.m. instead of 10). In spite of all this, the public-morality bureaucrats are the underdogs in this fight.
Defenders of the FCC policy seem to fear that, some Saturday morning, TV networks might suddenly replace kids’ cartoons with pornography if they weren’t threatened with fines for indecency. On this particular issue, conservative culture warriors resemble the left-wing Adbusters crowd with their talk of amoral corporate greed. But networks have no more economic incentive to make stupid programming choices than a supermarket does to put wasabi in my milk.
If you’re as pissed tinkled off as I am about the FCC, don’t miss this unforgettable song from Family Guy. (I thank local friend Matt for encouraging me to link to the song here.)
Addendum, January 31, 2008, 9:32 a.m.: Since I’ve placed this post in the “Non-Playboy Hotties” category—and since the scene was obviously shot without a body double—I feel negligent if I don’t mention the name of the actress, Charlotte Ross.
If principled, freedom-loving Californians act quickly, they can register as Republicans in this closed-primary state in time to help Paul become president. On the immigration question, he sinks to panicky pandering, and I disagree with him on the admittedly challenging ethical question of abortion. But he is certainly the best Republican candidate this year.
Unlike Andrew Sullivan, for instance, I’ve never liked John McCain. He has always creeped me out. But I’m certainly glad to see a conservative with Sullivan’s cachet choosing Paul over McCain. If conservatism as a distinct political movement isn’t completely overshadowed soon by Reason-style libertarianism, it will only be because intellectual giants like Sullivan come up with a convincing enough “yes, but” to keep the two philosophies separate in enough people’s minds.
With all due modesty, I’m not even sure he’ll do it, though. We’ll see.
Playboy’s critics are right after all. The magazine promotes superficially attractive bimbos while ignoring those with substantial, inner beauty. But I’m not talking about the models. I mean the presidential candidates it chooses to aid. Fred Thompson doesn’t deserve his three pages of publicity in the November issue (“Straight Talk Expressed”) nearly as much as Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), who, of the two, has much more to offer the sort of voter who reads Playboy.
To be fair, Playboy’s editors didn’t have the benefit of the latest financial news from the race when they compiled that issue: on the Republican side, only the Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, and Ron Paul campaigns have decent cash flow as I write this. But Thompson’s own words from his conversation with Jeff Greenfield show his relative lack of substance:
One time I remember a vote about the legislation to federalize the Good Samaritan law. That law said if you stopped to help someone on the highway, they couldn’t sue you. I thought this was something the states had been taking care of pretty well for 200 years. They have reasons to give partial coverage, no coverage or total coverage, depending on such factors as whether someone was helpful but also unbelievably careless. So my view was that the states should handle it. The vote was 99 to one. I went back to the office, and the staff was battening down the hatches for an onslaught. It never came. I got some positive feedback but nothing negative. So back to the point: If you’re a little risky and do what you think you ought to do and say what you think you ought to say—as long as you don’t get too carried away or say totally stupid things—it’s a good political strategy, if one wanted to make a strategy of it. [p. 96]
Here, Thompson congratulates himself for doing once what Paul does routinely. Paul has earned the congressional nickname “Dr. No” for his habit of saying no to the expansion of the federal government when most of his peers say yes. But never mind that. While Paul can invoke the Constitution to justify most of his legislative decisions, Thompson places sincerity far above any other political virtue:
I decide within 30 seconds whether I like a guy. I don’t know what party he is. I don’t know what his beliefs are. You feel as if you know whether the guy believes what he’s saying, whether he is sincere, whether he’s just another manufactured politician. In the future the person who steps out from all that protective coating will have something special going for him. [p. 98; emphasis added]
Such anti-intellectualism! Thompson may be somewhat earthier and more spontaneous than the average Washington politician, but so what? Almost anyone could have made the banal points about our phony politicians that he makes in his chat with Greenfield. By necessity, monthly magazines are among the slowest of the news media. But even by their standards, this journalistic leftover (from 2005, by its own admission) isn’t news.
A month ago tomorrow, I changed the outgoing message of my phone answering machine, making it even angrier than it had been. It was good for me. I think I’ll keep it.
In a certain manner of speaking, a poltergeist invades my psychic space several times a day. After learning too well the lessons in spinelessness of America’s oppressive public school system, I accumulated countless memories of failing to resist abuses of authority—even at home. Too many memories of one’s own cowardice, and the world becomes a scary place all the time. Minor setbacks and frustrations in everyday life become sources of great terror, confusion, shame, guilt, and rage. When I hesitate unreasonably out of these feelings, I sometimes make horrible new memories of being a coward, too.
In 2007, middle-class Americans are expected to take their unseemly emotions to a therapist’s office. But I say no. In the spirit of my anti-therapy post of yesterday, I reaffirm my right to take my madness to the streets instead. My suffering is not my problem alone. My suffering is the entire community’s problem. Otherwise, a lot of squeaky wheels may never get greased.
Besides the political argument against therapy, I now have an empirical, practical one. This past month, I’ve felt stronger, more effectual, and more capable than ever. I have every reason to believe the trend will continue. As a therapy veteran, I think a therapist who would have endorsed my angry phone message, or anticipated its benefits, before the fact would be hard to find. To paraphrase Dickens, therapy is an ass.
Explaining the virtues of both personal and economic freedom to friends with high-speed Internet connections has never been easier. Reason.tv, the online video department of the renowned libertarian magazine, has opened up shop.
Their first editors’ pick is this YouTube video of ABC newsman John Stossel sharing his libertarian wisdom with an appreciative crowd at the Blue Velvet in Los Angeles:
I just became aware of a potentially embarrassing mistake I made commenting on Reason magazine’s blog, Hit & Run. The potential confusion arises from the unusual fact that my blog’s “About Me” paragraph in the sidebar says something totally different from the equivalent space on my Blogger profile page.
Unfortunately, without knowledge of said unusual fact, some people might get the wrong idea, depending on which link they followed first, from my comment on a post about Rudy Giuliani:
Fox News is unintentionally putting The Onion out of business. Try not to laugh, but roving gangs of armed lesbians are now America’s greatest threat to domestic tranquility:
At Hit & Run, Radley Balko explains what you’ve probably guessed by now about the accuracy of the story.
I wish that everyone smart enough to dismiss this particular panic would follow Balko’s sage advice on another web page and give up all their moral panics. For example, there is no “obesity epidemic,” you fools. Super Size Me is the new Reefer Madness (original title: Tell Your Children).
Radley Balko and Andrew Sullivan have each given The New York Times’ David Brooks a good pounding for his defense of government growth under George W. Bush. Brooks had it coming, but Sullivan has revealed a chink in his own armor. According to a Yiddish proverb, a liar needs to have a good memory. Sullivan reminds me that a non-libertarian needs the same trait to avoid embarrassment about the forms of government meddling that he happens to like.
“I’m a small government Goldwater conservative, but I think compulsory high school education is worth the trade-off of freedom,” says Sullivan in passing. Ah, but of course, someone else’s freedom is always easy to trade off. (For example, the sodomy laws that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down just a few years ago were academic problems at worst for Sullivan’s conservative heterosexual friends.) Federal and state governments conveniently give teenagers only as much autonomy as soccer moms see fit to give them—even though societies where life as an adult is much harder have often considered their members adults at 14. What I’ve said about teenagers may be vulgar, but there is little hyperbole in it, I’m afraid.
Who can predict the outcome when two logically challenged, self-righteous bigots go to war? Thanks to the intrepid correspondence of Hit & Run, this epic struggle has been thoroughly documented.
Orthodox feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, who hates Catholicism and men, was fired from John Edwards’ presidential campaign, thanks in some significant part to Catholic League president William A. Donohue, who hates Judaism and gays. In hindsight, I think I see why Donohue was more likely to win. His Catholic education, complete with the seven deadly sins, probably gave him an edge in worldly wisdom over Marcotte and her doctrine of the noble savage. Not enough of an edge to actually know what he’s talking about, of course. Just enough to win between the two of them. (To be fair, Andrew M. Greeley has been rather well served by his Catholic upbringing.)
As I’ve said recently, American conservatives have a problem with sex while American liberals have a problem with money. Just as sex scandals encourage people who otherwise wouldn’t to talk about sex, any corporate malfeasance (no matter how small the consequences in comparison to government malfeasance) encourages some of us in the free, developed world to make a big show of feeling guilty about the relative misfortune of other parts of the world. As a libertarian, I strongly support the right to self-flagellate. (I should; I’ve done it.) But I resent the implication—as in this elaborate guilt trip from one of Marcotte’s colleagues at Pandagon—that libertarians simply don’t know or don’t care about the children who work in factories to make our clothes. We’re just pure evil, aren’t we?
What do The Atlantic’s Jon Zobenica and National Review’s John Derbyshire have in common? Probably without knowing it, both of them invoke George Orwell’s essay “The Art of Donald McGill” to justify their moralistic views on sexuality. If he knew I existed, Zobenica might think I appreciate his use of that reference to describe Playboy as essentially the lightsaber to Maxim’s blaster. (Star Wars analogies can go surprisingly far here. I recently told an attractive female friend that she has Jedi powers over the weak-minded, i.e. most of us guys.) But on the contrary, I take his essay as an unintended lesson in humility for all us Playboy freaks.
Zobenica wants us to know that he regards his youthful Playboy-ish days with embarrassment:
Looking back, I realize it’s not only the clothes that make me laugh. The restaurants we went to were “classy” at best. And none of us particularly enjoyed those New Orleans strippers (one looked like a rheumy sharecropper’s daughter). But there was, in all of it, a deliberate effort at contemporary maturity, an effort that was encouraged by Playboy magazine. Maturity was the key to that great Playboy Club of life—your all-access pass to the jumping realm of adult pleasures and preoccupations. We may have come of age clumsily, but no one doubted that it was the thing to do.
Where did those days go?
One need not be clairvoyant or trained in counseling to suspect him of misremembering those days. If the clothes, restaurants, and strippers were really as unimpressive then as he now says they were, why didn’t he ditch that scene immediately? Zobenica’s boomer exceptionalism makes Playboy a lonely voice for the inherent moral superiority of “commitment” in a lad-mag wilderness of Peter Pan complexes. He scolds an article in FHM for urging its readers to stay single, naïvely thinking that this message distinguishes the magazine from Playboy. I’m no fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s crypto-Marxist feminism, but I give her credit for documenting Playboy’s original concept as the Maxim of the 1950s in her book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Although I’ve found more aesthetic value in Playboy than in Maxim or FHM, I cannot honestly claim moral superiority for it as a consequence. Oscar Wilde warned against conflating aesthetics with ethics. To paraphrase that brilliant aesthetician, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral men’s magazine. Men’s magazines are well published, or badly published. That is all. However sincere and deeply felt, my wish for Playboy to outsell the competition has no more ethical weight than my support for any given sports team.
Besides, what’s so bad about the pro-bachelorhood message? It may be simply rational for a heterosexual man to put little of his energy into romance these days. In 2007, many American women still see their relationships with men as fixer-upper projects. And isn’t it interesting that both conservatives and establishment feminists find ways to justify this condescension? The preferences of the male of the species are widely presumed wrong whenever they conflict with a female agenda. Thus, for example, are paternity suits not recognized as a hypocritical restriction of male reproductive choice in a society that is slowly learning to tolerate abortion. Women protest to liberate themselves; men whine to avoid responsibility—even though the U.S. hasn’t been functionally patriarchal since 1920.
(Hat tip to Playboy assistant managing editor Matt DeMazza, who made me aware of Zobenica’s article by email.)
Update, 3:23 p.m.: A subsequent email:
Well, you took away from it something a little different than we did (we see it as a nod to our more-mature approach to being a man vs. the frat boys of Maxim/FHM/Stuff, etc.), but hey, any way to get more people to read it is fine with us!
“A number of companies have removed offensive ads in response to your feedback. Keep writing and calling the offending advertisers at their contact information above.”—Ms., Fall 2006, p. 80
The editors of Ms. would certainly deny having anything important in common with the boycott-happy Christianists of the American Family Association. But consider the damning evidence on the back page of every issue. “No Comment” shows miniature reprints of newspaper and magazine ads that supposedly degrade women enough to require angry letters and phone calls. With a few remotely possible exceptions, the outrage reinforces the stereotype of the humorless feminist. An ad can offend merely by associating a product with the sensual appeal of the female form or laughing at the foibles of human sexuality. Some might seem to glorify violence against women—if you’re determined to see that message in them. Does this ad for Royal Elastics shoes, blacklisted in the summer 2005 Ms., encourage men to kick women in the head? Was the “crushed flower” sniffed on one occasion by animated superhero Mighty Mouse actually cocaine, as AFA chairman Rev. Donald Wildmon alleged with about as much plausibility?
In some cases, the offensiveness is as hard to discern as the subliminal dirty pictures Wilson Bryan Key finds in the ice cubes of liquor ads (Key makes Wildmon look like an amateur). In fall 2006, Ms. wagged its finger at American Apparel’s ad with a photograph of an attractive young woman of Indian and Pakistani heritage under the caption “India meets Pakistan.” I wondered and wondered why anyone but the Church Lady would take offense at the very mildly titillating image. It turns out that it contains racism and pedophilia detectable only with specialized lab equipment. AA’s website seems to have deleted its photos of that particular model in response to the controversy. But as I write, it still has the guts to post a similar ad. Kudos.
“No Comment” is not unusual in its “progressive” prudery. The “liberal” battles against tobacco, fast food, and breast implants are waged under the same banner. For further explanation of how moralists (like mystics) all speak the same language, try this article by Radley Balko for the very unpuritanical Reason.
Update, December 29, 2006, 12:26 p.m.:I have answered Pandagon.net’s criticism of this post.
Last night, I spotted an attractive young woman at the bar of my neighborhood Italian restaurant. Since she looked vaguely familiar, I asked her if she was a former employee of that restaurant. She replied that she wasn’t, but that I may have seen her at the “sports bar” where she formerly worked. With encouragement from her friend, she soon confessed that “sports bar” was a euphemism for Hooters. How cute: she was a little bit shy about that item on her résumé.
Americans of some political stripes would see rhetorical opportunity in her shyness. Family-values conservatives like Shmuley Boteach would call it the voice of conscience and self-respect. Left-wing utopians like Pamela Paul and Ariel Levy might suggest that The System is using her by making her ambivalent about her own sexuality. In my view, both sides oversimplify the rich bundle of emotions that drive human sexuality. For Halloween the night before, I had gone to the neighborhood Hooters for the employee costume contest. (As the script of Mean Girls and the text of Miss October 2005’s layout[not work-safe] both attest, decent women have positive sanction to dress sluttily that one day of the year.) Part of the fun was observing my own mild twinges of shame to be seen leering at the scantily-clad babes—which I interpreted as the moral equivalent of the embarrassment some of us feel when first stepping onto a dance floor. Political perspectives that can’t understand these nuanced pleasures don’t deserve our endorsement.
As last night’s conversation unfolded, it turned out that I had never been to the particular Hooters where she had worked. Women have a funny way of looking familiar just when you get interested in talking to them, don’t they?
Andrew Sullivan, among others, has exposed future former Senator Rick Santorum’s profound failure to understand the American way. According to the big-government Republican from Pennsylvania, it’s dangerous to allow individuals to pursue their own happiness. He also misunderstands his opponents on the left: “Their entire agenda is, I should be able to do whatever I want to do as long as no one gets hurt.” As a former Democrat who turned Libertarian in 2003, I only wish his accusation were consistently true. Want to eat at McDonald’s, smoke a cigarette, or get silicone breast implants? Liberals would discourage those evil deeds through sin taxes and class-action lawsuits. Does your family’s limited income prevent you from sending your child to a private school? Liberals think they’re doing you a favor by making you support mediocre public schools through option-limiting taxes. If conservatives aren’t very conservative in the George W. Bush era, liberals aren’t necessarily liberal, either.
By no means do I want to discourage anyone from voting Democrat in the tight Congressional races next week. The more powerful that Democrats become in Congress, the more the libertarian wing of the party can challenge the control freaks without being accused of undermining party morale and discipline. In this instance, the Donkey Ass Party is clearly preferable to the Elephant Dumbo Party.
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,” said François de la Rochefoucauld. Conservative intellectuals frequently use this quotation to defend hypocrisy as a way for morally fallible human beings to pay lip service to the good even when they lack the strength to live it. For example, a congregation is none the less wise to accept the preacher’s advice against stealing when said preacher turns out to have a shoplifting habit. The defense applies to some instances of hypocrisy, but not all. Former Congressman Mark Foley’s instant-messaging scandal is one that, in my opinion, La Rochefoucauld’s argument cannot redeem.
The distinction between “good” and “bad” hypocrisy hinges on whether the act proscribed (and perpetrated) by the hypocrite is truly wrong or merely a target of moral panic. The closet homosexual who beats up known or suspected homosexuals is becoming an unambiguous example of the latter category in the United States. In my last post, I deplored our society’s general treatment of teenagers as children rather than adults. Foley’s online paramour has reached the age of consent in the District of Columbia and most states (but not my home state of California, which doesn’t deserve its reputation for social liberalism). The affair may be somewhat irresponsible because of the interpersonal tension it could generate in a work environment, but it shouldn’t be a crime. And yet it is a crime, thanks to the karmically challenged Foley. At Reason Online, Kerry Howley explains:
If charges are leveled, they’ll likely be based on broad legislation inked by the man himself. It’s a safe bet that any law with a kid’s name in it will overreach, and the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act is no exception. The law, a hodgepodge of a response to MySpace panic, strikes at everything from hawking “date rape drugs” over the tubes to the use of “misleading domain names.” It penalizes the solicitation of all minors—everyone under 18—despite the fact that the age of consent is two years lower in most states. Merely channeling an invitation through the magic of fiberoptic cables is a federal crime.
Bill Clinton was similarly hoist with his own petard: the resurgent feminism that helped get him elected in 1992 also wrote the overreaching sexual-harassment law that later threatened his presidency. One need not be conservative or religious to hypermoralize.
Thanks to Susan Konig at National Review Online, I’ve learned that the regional government of Madrid, Spain, has banned models below a minimum body mass index from its current Fashion Week in order to protect the delicate sensibilities of young women from the temptations of anorexia and bulimia. If you believe Ozzy Osbourne deserved to be sued for recording a song that makes teenagers kill themselves, then the Madrid policy makes sense. But if you’re like me and you don’t ascribe Jedi mind-control powers to songs and fashion shows, it’s pure scapegoating.
Like suicide, anorexia grieves, terrifies, and bewilders friends and family members, who can be forgiven for placing blame somewhat irrationally. Advocates for a “socially responsible” fashion industry generally pay lip service to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But if the media have such voodoo-like powers to make people do things against their will, it must follow logically that those freedoms are too dangerous to preserve. Admit it.
I’m disturbed by the fact that Konig’s article cheers on the policy and its rationale, which was formerly the province of the feminist left and is now endorsed on a conservative web site. As a libertarian, I’ve depended on the left and the right to expose the opposite side’s sanctimonious guilt trips. Are they becoming as indistinguishable as the human and porcine ruling classes at the end of Animal Farm?
Of course, eating disorders demand an explanation of some kind. In order not to leave a complete vacuum, I humbly recommend the work of Judith Rich Harris and Thomas Szasz for clues to the answer. I’m convinced that, taken together, they can do for psychopathology what Copernicus did for astronomy and Darwin did for biology.
Most Americans are culturally deprived for never having seen the British sitcom Blackadder. In the show’s third season (its third “series,” as the Brits say), Rowan Atkinson plays Edmund Blackadder, butler to King George III’s eldest son, the Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie, who now plays the title character on the medical drama House). In one episode, Edmund loathes having to accompany his extremely gullible master to the theater. “The problem is, he doesn’t realize it’s made up,” explains the butler to his assistant. “Last year, when Brutus was about to kill Julius Caesar, the prince yelled out, ‘Look behind you, Mr. Caesar!’” Criticism of the mass media very frequently assumes your critical-thinking skills and mine to be scarcely better than the prince’s.
Pornography incites rape. Violence on television causes violence in reality. Song lyrics can drive teenagers to suicide. Advertising makes us buy things we don’t need. Our government is corrupted by unfettered funding of political campaigns by the wealthy (as opposed to, say, chronic bad judgment among the electorate). All of these notions implicitly take media consumers for mindless dupes. “Liberals and conservatives are as tight as Beavis and Butt-head in agreeing that consumers of popular culture—the very people who make it popular—are little more than tools of the trade,” observed libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie in 1996. “Joe Sixpack and Sally Baglunch—you and I—aren’t characters in this script. Just like TV sets or radios, we are dumb receivers that simply transmit whatever is broadcast to us. We do not look at movie screens; we are movie screens, and Hollywood merely projects morality—good, bad, or indifferent—onto us.”
The Journal of Popular Culture has recently published a fascinating study titled “Tough Women in the Unlikeliest of Places: The Unexpected Toughness of the Playboy Playmate” by University of Louisville sociology professor James K. Beggan and University of Richmond psychology professor Scott T. Allison (vol. 38, no. 5, 2005, p. 796-818). Unfortunately, the Prince Regent Hypothesis influences their analysis:
As counterintuitive as it might seem, Playboy magazine represents a unique means of socializing within the collective psyche of men, a new definition of femininity that includes, as a subtype, the tough woman. Playboy is an especially effective change agent because it appears embedded in an ideology consistent with dominant male patriarchy. As such, it is seen as representing the interests of men. Thus, when Playboy presents images of Playmates with tough elements, it encourages men to assimilate nontraditional images of women. In this fashion, then, Playboy acts as an effective means of altering stereotypes about women. (p. 814)
I don’t deny that I’m potentially capable of leaping to false conclusions about any given woman because of my assumptions about women in general, or that problems for justice can arise if millions of men do this. But Beggan and Allison go too far in describing my mind as a passive receptacle for images of gender in the media. I am not a bimbo! If I don’t believe I can survive a fall from a high cliff just because I’ve seen Wile E. Coyote do it, I should be able to figure out, through my own brainpower, that the Playboy centerfold doesn’t represent most women in physical appearance or temperament.
The remarkably androgynous quality in Playboy’s male and female ideals raises interesting questions for psychology, social history, and aesthetics. Beggan and Allison deserve much credit for describing the androgyny in detail for an academic journal. But their essay would have benefited from acknowledgement of a fact that Gillespie put in italics: “The audience has a mind of its own.”
This is “TV Turnoff Week 2006” according to the leftist crypto-puritans at Adbusters Ballbusters. The other night, Jimmy Kimmel rightly congratulated his viewers for ignoring it.
In my journey from liberalism (in the distinctly American sense of the term) to libertarianism, I’ve learned to my frustration that crypto-puritanism abounds on the left. While many on the right are prone to moral panics about issues like same-sex marriage, emergency contraception, and medical marijuana, various subgroups of the left are prone to moral panics about television, consumerism, fast food, tobacco, biotechnology, cosmetic surgery, alternatives to public school, ethnic humor, or sexual speech in the workplace. All these panics exhibit faulty scientific or political reasoning, and they’re all potentially dangerous. If you’re against genetically modified food, please explain why, on at least one occasion, activists on your side would have preferred to see victims of a natural disaster starve to death rather than receive emergency food shipments.
Since many, perhaps most, of these left-wing moralists aren’t traditionally religious, religion doesn’t deserve all the blame for the human tendency to let moral reasoning degenerate into crude moralism of one kind or another. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in the chapter titled “The Sanctimonious Animal” in his book The Blank Slate, makes an eye-opening argument that humans have a natural tendency to moralize—and that they should make some effort to resist this tendency in themselves. I credit Playboy with encouraging this effort on some fronts, although its justification for the effort has sometimes been flawed by the influence of 1960s romanticism.
From Reuters: “The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday upheld its proposed $550,000 fine against 20 CBS television stations for a stunt involving pop singer Janet Jackson briefly exposing her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl football game halftime show.”
Did all 20 of those stations conspire to tear Jackson’s blouse off? I doubt it. But since the FCC doesn’t operate under the American principles of free speech and free markets, we shouldn’t expect it to honor individual accountability, either.
Every so often, I reserve the right to devote a post not to Playboy itself, but to one of the topics frequently addressed in Playboy’s articles, such as free speech.
The Federal Communications Commission justifies its crusade against “indecency” through a crypto-Marxist theory of public ownership of the airwaves. Conservatives, who ostensibly support free markets and privatization, often endorse this regime and even favor its expansion. But then again, this is not so surprising in the George W. Bush era, when the American right has all but abandoned the small-government philosophy of Goldwater and Reagan. (2005 is a rather depressing time to be a libertarian.)
Some argue that government ownership of the airwaves is necessary to prevent turf battles between broadcasters at the same frequency in the same region. But this is false, as Sheldon Richman of The Future of Freedom Foundation explains:
The spectrum started out as a privately owned, homesteaded resource, as innovators discovered how to use it to satisfy various human wants (information, entertainment, et cetera). Of course, in the early days of radio, broadcasters interfered with one another’s transmissions. But rather than asking the government to nationalize the airwaves, they went to court, just as landowners did in cases of trespass. The courts responded by applying the common-law principles of ownership. As a result, an orderly system of private airwaves was emerging, until it was derailed in the 1920s by the commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, who has an odd reputation as a champion of laissez faire. As historian Murray Rothbard described it, “Hoover by sheer administrative fiat and the drumming up of ‘voluntary cooperation’ was able to control and dictate to the radio industry and keep the airwaves nationalized until he could secure passage of the Radio Act of 1927. The act established the government as inalienable owner of the airwaves, the uses of which were then granted to designated licensed favorites.” In return for licenses, the government imposed various obligations. In recent years, those obligations have been eased or eliminated, but the government still holds the ultimate power to revoke the license of any television or radio station in the country.
Besides, do we really know empirically that indecency harms The Children? “What I’d really like to see is a bit of judicial scrutiny of the dubious notion that there’s some intrinsic harm to kids who see the beast with two backs get made...,” saysReason’s Julian Sanchez. I couldn’t agree more. A beast with two backs is far better than a bureaucratic beast on all of our backs.
Perhaps some readers will take offense at my analogy between the FCC and communism, the latter a doctrine in whose name millions have been murdered and billions enslaved. I refer those readers to this article. It’s about Nazi analogies rather than communist analogies, but the same principles apply.
