“How the fuck do you know if that’s in your head or not?” Prez Pryzbylewski, The Wire.
Before I even begin to scrawl these admittedly conceptually disjointed thoughts, I realise I could be acting recklessly.
I, in no way, intend to speak in favour of abusers, but such grey areas of consideration must now be forced to bleed either black or white, with the haste of our compressed and high speed swarm-debates transforming everything.
Ultimately, I’m a white heterosexual bloke, and none of us can fully visualise and encompass what we are not when amidst projecting ourselves into this world. Our words and their consequences always have an underbelly that only certain others can see, but rarely we – and perhaps only in then in aftermath. So, if I’m speaking in favour of abusers without knowing so, I apologise beforehand.
The above quote is from an episode of the US drama series ‘The Wire’. After accidentally shooting a black colleague, white cop Prez Pryzbylewski, who consciously doesn’t identify with having racist thoughts, begins to wonder if those very thoughts might be ‘inside him’ on a subconscious level.
I grew up when sex and gender relations were being reconfigured. My formative years were in the 1990s, which was still under the long shadow of the 1960s – specifically the individualism and sexual liberation of that decade. But since then these cultural ideas had merged, and been warped by the combination of individualism with the arch-conservatism that followed it in the Thatcher and Reagan 1980s. To put it crudely, female liberation was bastardised into the transformation from domestically-enslaved Victorian Nora Batty-types into self-empowered sex symbols, with no sense of contradiction. And to young men it looked exciting and enticing and required no self-reflection at all.
I became an adult male in the 2000s—a very important decade to talk about. The 2000s, or the noughties, were truly the last party, an exhausted and decadent last tango to the hedonism of 1960s pop culture.
We all know it ended 15 years ago with the financial crash, almost exactly to the day. Since then, everybody has a smart phone, everybody has an ever-present camera – everybody is tethered to something that we idly call “social media”, mainly because we don’t yet have the distance and hindsight to give better definition to life locked inside this madhouse.
It’s so fitting that Russell Brand, who, not being an actual noughties’s rockstar, but a walking fever-dream through which we recall every indie disco we went to, has finally been ousted for what, if you read between the lines in his earlier YouTube presence, he was already indirectly admitting to and anticipating retribution for. So many of his references to the behaviour of other addicts were also clearly references to himself.
If he is guilty of all that he is accused, like Saville before him, he expressed it all in clear daylight. However, unlike Saville (and the 70s ghoulishness of Saville was infinitely Other to the 00s sex-addiction of Brand), Brand was trying to publicly rehabilitate himself in a cultural moment that eventually he knew would come for him, which is, in my opinion, why he became so conspiratorial – I believe it was a coded (perhaps unconsciously so) series of accusations towards a ‘liberal elite’ that he knew would eventually ‘get him’.
I do not think there’s one man who became an adult in the noughties who doesn’t recall saying, maybe even doing things (minor or major) in that decade that now would be both unacceptable and called out. I think anyone who says otherwise is being creative with their past.
Many of us passively participated in the idea that we should find joy in attitudes towards women and getting laid that in truth felt like disembodied endevours. The weird thing with a dominant culture, such as that of the noughties, is that you perform as if you enjoy it, even if you don’t. Just watch any episode of the noughties comedy ‘The Inbetweeners’ and cringe at what was culturally expected of young men, and then watch the more recent series based around a group of men of a similar age and era, ‘Ladhood’ to see how patriarchal male roles had to be made, often through displeasure and alienation.
Sex is fundamentally anarchic, it is the Mr Hyde to Dr Jekyll, and we daren’t look it in the eyes, because at heart it abides by no laws, no codes of conduct, it exists outside society but inside it at the same time.
However, what we are living in, in the age of #Metoo and the ongoing almost daily celebrity ‘exposures’, is the fallout of the hedonistic ideology of the last 60 years. You could call it a set of ‘implicit instructions’ that one feels rather than knows, and these instructions under the long shadow of the 1960s were that everyone must have fun, and if one isn’t having fun, they best find some fun pretty soon, in whatever form that takes.
Now we are living in an era of schizophrenic temporalities amidst the ruins of any overarching cultural consensus. We simultaneously exist in the aftermath of our current society whilst still living within it. This situation has been created by the collective haste to seek justice that social media generates. We live in a post-patriarchal, post-racial, post-inequality aftermath where justice is dealt out, whilst the aforementioned oppressive structures still exist, arguably stronger than ever.
But our current desire for retribution has a terminal nature to it, the outcome of the progressive energies of a society knowing nowhere to progress towards.
What I mean is ‘we’ (the progressive church of ‘we’) no longer have a future vision. Individual accountability for acts of injustice becomes magnified into a place of hysterical haste, precisely due to the lack of the vision of where collective justice needs to move into.
Climate change, or ‘global boiling’ as one European minister recently called it, is the most symbolical feature of our near future. Indeed, a future without a future that feeds into every aspect of our zeitgeist. This terminalism in progressive energies exists alongside a moral haste to seek justice, and it creates a culture of accountability for its own sake.
This isn’t to say that what is being held to account shouldn’t be, it is built upon strong ethical principles of justice and equality. But a movement without a vision begins to look like an anarchic free-for-all of individual call outs, which, in turn, encourages us to point and call out in fear of being called ourselves. The void in vision and direction is a fuel to the wildfire of holding others to account.
Whether one can blame social media or not, it has certainly produced an online world split between two opposing camps. For all of life’s social, political, and individual complexities, in our social media lives we have to become either one or the other: progressive on all counts or reactionary on all counts.
If we are caught out ‘liking’ a post that is a bit ethically ‘dodgy’ despite being largely progressive in our ideals, there grows a suspicion about our ‘true nature’. We have to be all or nothing. And in truth no human being is 100 percent ethically progress down to the bone.
That Russell Brand is an extreme case of this (a man who, on one hand, publicly supported the Metoo movement, and who deeply supported a fair and more just world, but was haunted by his former lifestyle that was once merely seen as promiscuous hedonism for white blokes with an ability to ‘get away with it’) means that enough people who feel burned and ostracised by the progressive camp already could begin to see in him a martyr,
That legitimately awful people like Andrew Tate and Tucker Carlson are already showing solidarity with him is a warning sign we need to pay attention to. I have friends who are genuinely decent people, but with flaws, with cultural muscle memory that makes them imperfect for the progressive camp, and they are drawn in by such influencers.
I admit that like Prez Pryzbylewski of The Wire, I have been horrified to find out what might be lodged in my own head. I tend to internalise. I self-monsterise, often to the point of seeing my lowly self in big stage celebs who have abused their power to extreme ends. Others, perhaps less hyper self-critical are retreating to the fake safe-houses designed by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, the kind of houses that merely radicalise you as opposed to re-conciliating you with your shadows.
This is why I somewhat recklessly suggest that perhaps we don’t just need a Green New DEAL, but a New Deal for Sex.
I apologise it this is sounds like a flippant suggestion for something so triggering. I haven’t any experience of sexual abuse, which I understand most women alive today have, in some form. But the road we are currently on seems to be only making us more distrustful and divided and, most worrying of all, it lacks any vision of a world beyond this collapsing one.
Our sex culture lay in the ruins of late 20th century lassie faire hedonism, patriarchy, and ideas of equality of justice that are deprived of a cohesive direction forward. Sex is the de-facto Jekyll and Hyde within a species that, unlike other species, is both conscious and unconscious in its search for copulation. We are removed from other animals, but not far enough. This has always been our problem, but most notably when it comes to sex. Unlike racial and political injustice it is much harder to shine the torch of injustice on it and come up with a clear idea of an clear solution of how to do things better.
In it’s anarchic, accused, and paranoid state, the spectre of late 20th century sex hangs over us in a way that requires a debate as big as that about 21st century capitalism and ecological collapse.
Maybe Brand, Weinstein (although I think both cases are vastly different) are mirror images of reckless financiers. Maybe a new social contract for sexual relations, neither harking back to more rigid, straight-forwardly oppressive forms of patriarchy, nor like the hedonist, sexual liberation of the last 60 years, that has often merely allowed those high on power to abuse.
This isn’t a cohesive plan, and I have nothing else to add. But I think something along this line needs to start being debated more often.
Thanks, for reading.
John B Ledger 