A more legitimate literary objection to censorship is its implicit portrayal of a reader as the sort of person who jumps off a cliff when asked. Notions such as “obscenity” or “abasement before the west” make literary language a tool of subversion and ascribe to the novelist the hypnotist’s capacity for making a previously obedient or prudish member of the public throw stones or unzip. In censorship’s official, airbrushed view of the reading experience, dispositions are imposed, not reinforced. As J M Coetzee argued in Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship, “it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue, qua virtue, must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.”
That paranoid logic is the pressure-relief valve that allows nominally liberal-minded people to blithely engage in their own form of censorship. Ambiguous art and unsettling concepts are fine for properly socialized, educated and civilized people like us, of course, but the rabble, well, I’m afraid they just can’t be trusted with them. Misanthrope that I am, though, I somehow have faith born from experience that the masses are not quite the impressionable blank slates that all these clucking mother hens would have you believe. And thus I can only shake my head sadly at Tauriq’s absurd logic here. You know, if we’re going to play this ridiculous “X degrees of separation” game, Nirvana is actually “responsible” for more sexual assaults than Robin Thicke. Why, it’s almost like there’s no clear, linear cause-and-effect relationship between the “message” of art and its effect on the audience.
August 4, 2014 @ 11:04 pm
Can I agree while still agreeing that Mr Thicke is a total creep and not feeling, even though I theoretically should, too much sympathy for his "fate"?
August 4, 2014 @ 11:40 pm
LOL. That is the problem with the media ocean. We feel a need to have an "opinion" about some pampered non entity.
August 4, 2014 @ 11:28 pm
Shrug. I have no opinion whatsoever about him as a person. He's just another trifling symbolitical non-entity as far as I care. In fact, I —
Excuse me. My iTunes shuffle just brought up the Police's "Every Breath You Take", followed by Metallica's cover of the Misfits' "Last Caress", and I now have the uncontrollable urge to go stalk and rape a woman. BRB.
August 5, 2014 @ 2:31 am
Similarly, we convince ourselves that we're going to reverse-engineer society to eliminate sexism and misogyny by…shaming and shunning a pop singer out of public life. It's the kind of staggering idiocy that only makes sense to people who spend too much time in the funhouse mirror environment of social media, where strong opinions about irrelevant trifles are what count as currency.
August 6, 2014 @ 8:05 pm
I see your point, but at the same time, are you saying there should be no consequences? We should just chortle and continue to buy his records as if particularly nasty behavior never occurred? Just smirk and move on?
There has to be a middle ground between "Burn him alive in the town square" And "Snicker snicker, boys will be boys, even if they are creepy boys"
You could extend your argument to EVERY kind of behavior. "Ima gonna vote for Joseph for mayour even though he is the acting chair of the League of the South and thinks that African Americans and women should not have the vote"
August 7, 2014 @ 12:26 am
Well…only words. But then, my League of the South icon may only be spouting words as well. 🙂
August 6, 2014 @ 9:01 pm
What nasty behavior?
August 7, 2014 @ 1:24 am
:).
Not drinking. Minor government bureaucrats are not allowed to have liquid lunches.
As I have never heard, nor will I ever by choice hear a Robin Thicke homogenized musical product placement mechanism*, I will plead ignorance. And confess to trollery. 🙂
* I know, musical snobbery is also verbotten!
August 7, 2014 @ 1:16 am
Buying Thicke's records does not empower him to enact legislation. Your analogy is so astoundingly bizarre I'm wondering if you've been drinking at work today.
But fine: people are, of course, free to buy or not buy music for whatever reasons they want. They're also free to write a thousand idiotic whiny blog posts and tweets urging everyone else to see things their way. As other idiotic SJWs have inadvertently realized, though, when you start personally blacklisting artists for violating your particular code of conduct, you might be surprised at how many of them become verboten.
At any rate, just to spell out the fucking obvious, Robin Thicke has not committed, condoned or encouraged any acts of stalking or sexual assault. He has written a batch of songs which have aggrieved the perpetually-aggrieved types who live to wring their hands over things like this. This is nothing more than yet another case of bluenose busybodies hyperventilating over yet another work of degenerate art which is going to corrupt the moral fabric of society. The only, I repeat, the only interesting thing about this is the excerpt I quoted to begin the post: bluenose busybodies tend to be authoritarians who patronizingly assume that other people are too stupid and immature to be allowed to experience anything beyond G-rated art and entertainment without their expert guidance and, if necessary, their obstruction.
August 7, 2014 @ 9:53 pm
Um, Devil's advocate here. Criticism and censorship are two different things. People are allowed to share their opinions. Hearing Tauriq's and then yours and Brian's is thought provoking. I'm on Brian's side: "Art" that promotes harmful social norms deserves criticism, but not censorship. But thanks for giving me permission to listen to Prodigy ("Smack My Bitch Up"), 'cause, dang it, I like it. (Hangs head in shame.)
August 7, 2014 @ 11:39 pm
Can we just leave it at "so hackneyed and banal this "songwriter" should be laughed off the stage.
I mean, check this shite out.
http://pop.genius.com/Robin-thicke-blurred-lines-lyrics
August 7, 2014 @ 11:17 pm
It's true that criticism and censorship are two different things. My opinion is that I don't trust these moral minority crusaders one bit to just leave it at criticism. I think that their lack of power is (thankfully) the only thing preventing them from engaging in actual censorship. Whether it's religious fundies appalled by Slayer and Marilyn Manson, stuffy white conservatives terrified by Body Count's song "Cop Killer", or the Twitter feminists in this case, they all believe that the music that offends them has a uniquely insidious power to hypnotize and brainwash those who listen to it. Funny how that works — the questionable art I like is fine. The questionable art other people like is dangerous and needs to be quarantined.
"Art" that promotes harmful social norms deserves criticism
"Promotes", in this sentence, is one of those hinge words upon which so much turns. What does it mean to "promote" harmful social norms? Were Stone Temple Pilots "promoting" harmful attitudes toward women with their song "Sex Type Thing", or was the singer merely presenting the perspective of an ugly character from the inside, as he always claimed?
August 8, 2014 @ 5:31 pm
You can have pop music with a feel good factor without relying on this kind of trite junk. There is beautiful pop music out there.
I know, I know, they came for the vile sexist creep and I said nothing because I am not a vile sexist creep, they came for the tittering rape joke comedian and I said nothing because I am not a tittering rape joke comedian. Intellectually, I get that.
BUT
As you yourself have said, we need to choose our battles. Just as the SJWs focus on the trivia of a songwriter like Thicke (and I totally agree with you that this IS trivia), you/we need to avoid focusing on a battle that involves defending creepy people who are ultimately trivial. Even if I find the SJWs tiresome (or worse).
August 8, 2014 @ 1:32 pm
It's almost as if pop music is about the feel-good factor rather than being a vehicle for intellectual persuasion.
August 8, 2014 @ 11:50 pm
"You were already climbing on the Something Should Be Done train"
Nah. Not really. And I was somewhat familiar, and basically indifferent, to Mr. Thicke….on both "sides" of the debate.
"Why do I harp on cases like this? Because that, in my view, is how censorship often does happen. Otherwise liberal-minded people, who take smug pride in not being joyless, grim fundamentalists, who might even proudly identify as supporters of free speech as a general principle, are too willing to start rationalizing their desire to carve out exceptions for the incidents which scare or offend them."
I think you are overstating the "threat" of the SJWs. But maybe that is because I and everyone I know scoff at purist protestations. The public realm is a little more vigorous, perhaps, than we fear. Except among cirtain circles?
(I still think he is a creep…but that's his look, his body language, his "dancing")
August 8, 2014 @ 9:25 pm
Brian, I'm not convinced you actually do get it. Apologies if I've misunderstood something, but looking at the chronology of this thread, it seems to me that you were already climbing on the Something Should Be Done train before you'd even bothered to check out any of the lyrics in question, let alone look for any plausible alternative interpretations of them. And now, you're once again carelessly conflating the man with the lyrics, as if they're confessions from a diary. Does that not give you pause? You seem to have allowed yourself to be swayed by the furor coming from a certain sect who are prone to finding sexual assault in any random splotch of ink, when I would think any casual observer would have learned to take anything they say with an ocean's worth of salt by now.
Why do I harp on cases like this? Because that, in my view, is how censorship often does happen. Otherwise liberal-minded people, who take smug pride in not being joyless, grim fundamentalists, who might even proudly identify as supporters of free speech as a general principle, are too willing to start rationalizing their desire to carve out exceptions for the incidents which scare or offend them.
Again, Thicke has not committed, condoned, or encouraged any acts of sexual violence. The hysteria around this is based on the idea that songs like his may contribute in some vague way to potential crimes in the future. This rests on what I take to be absurdly stupid suppositions, namely that most people not only pay close attention to pop lyrics, but they imprint upon them and take them as a call to action in their own lives. Noting all this is not about "defending" him as a man (as I already said, I have no interest in him as a person), it's about calling bullshit by its proper name.
And once again, the animating spirit of this whole post was and still is affirming the truth of Robson's observation — the patronizing assumption that other people are too impressionable and ignorant to be exposed to the art that scares and offends me, and the reluctance to consider whether this is not, in fact, a near-universal blind spot worth correcting.
August 9, 2014 @ 1:24 am
I don't actually consider them to be much of a threat. I think they're generally too whiny and dysfunctional to do anything other than act like stupid children on social media. And I do agree that the culture at large, if it ever took notice of them, would roll its eyes and tell them to fuck off. Still, their aggressive stupidity and obnoxiousness irritates me, so I make a note of it.
Looking at the lyrics to "Blurred Lines", I am truly amazed at all the hubbub surrounding it, and I thought I was almost too jaded to be surprised by these idiots anymore. It's a typical "Hey baby, let's fuck" song, like 90% of music aimed at teens and twentysomethings. The macho braggadocio is silly, but relatively mild. He's clearly inviting a woman who's dissatisfied with her boring boyfriend to come have rough, wild sex with him. Nothing, absolutely nothing, about the song indicates that he's threatening to force an unaware or unwilling woman to do anything. You'd have to be a paranoid freak to find that message in there, and it’s sad to see Tauriq descend to this level. It's true, no one has a filthier mind than a Puritan.
August 11, 2014 @ 1:37 am
As you yourself have said, we need to choose our battles. Just as the SJWs focus on the trivia of a songwriter like Thicke (and I totally agree with you that this IS trivia), you/we need to avoid focusing on a battle that involves defending creepy people who are ultimately trivial.
Minor clarification: I said that people like you and I have no choice but to limit how much attention we give to the history and details of any particular issue. I'm sure there are still some people making sane, reasonable points on the SJW side of the online atheist schism. However, the balance on the whole, for me, has long since tipped over into "crazy people, complete waste of time". I just don't think any of those lonely voices of reason are going to say anything at this point that will radically change my opinion of the whole, so I don't bother desperately seeking them out. I realize that means that theoretically, I could miss some worthwhile insight. So it goes. If it's really worth it, I have faith that I'll eventually encounter it somewhere, some way.
People who profess to want to change the world for the better are the ones whom I said need to learn how to pick their battles like intelligent adults and stop throwing knee-jerk temper tantrums over whatever irrelevant piece of infotainment floats across their smartphone screen. Waging a futile battle to get everyone to unlisten to a smash hit song would qualify as exactly that type of worthless symbolitical gesture that will change nothing in the world that matters.
("Symbolitical" is my new portmanteau for this sort of thing, in case you hadn't noticed. Attacking harmless, superficial symptoms of much more complex problems in order to give a false, inflated sense of "doing something".)
August 11, 2014 @ 6:48 pm
("Symbolitical" is my new portmanteau for this sort of thing, in case you hadn't noticed. Attacking harmless, superficial symptoms of much more complex problems in order to give a false, inflated sense of "doing something".)
I like this coinage!