On Election Day we sent around these lewd copypastas, the kind that circulate among certain friend groups on major holidays or after particularly seismic political scandals; I made one, of which I was particularly proud, featuring phrases that referenced the Inflation Reduction Act and the FTC’s work on click-to-cancel. We did this, probably, because it meant signaling even though we were obviously voting, we weren’t doing so with the cringe-inducing level of earnestness and sentiment that liberals were — the nice liberals who put Harris-Walz signs in their yards, shop at Whole Foods, send their kids to private school because the publics are underfunded in this northeastern hamlet where the elite university doesn’t pay taxes on its academic property, etc.
When Trump won, I texted friends to ask, How are you holding up and also, can you believe I missed an opportunity to do a pun with SWING states? I did not say: Did we usher in fascism with irony and innuendo? Was there any other way to cope with the dissonance of voting for the cop to try and stop the bloviating rapist?
There are lots of smart postmortems. I’m not really trying to write one. I am tired of trying to be Smart and Good, those liberal meritocratic ideals. The American right wing didn’t win at the Smart and Good contest; but they are better at fantasy. Better at tapping into grotesquerie and fear, better at giving the seductive whisper in the night that the monster under the bed, the peeping eyes at the window, are real. It’s unfair that they pass themselves off as the party of family values and holier-than-thou purity and won’t you think of the children when they are oozing in lewdness. How Foucauldian it all is, repression producing more discourse. They can’t stop themselves. Tying themselves into kinky little knots. What is a party that makes keeping trans folks out of bathrooms one of its platforms but impossibly horny, imagining scenes of inexorable sexual predation and dominance that say more about their own desires than the actual people whose lives they seek to circumscribe?
The boorish libidinal exists in us all, the capacity to fight and fuck and throw our bodies around loud and loose and louche, but the cultural and political milieu of many of the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters — the college-educated — doesn’t associate much social cachet with fighting and fucking (unless it’s thoughtful and intentional and practiced: the kind you go to more school for). We don’t have guns, for God’s sake. (Except for Kamala Harris, who will shoot you if you break into her house.) But the people want fucking and fighting. Over 100 million of them tuning into Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson.
What I hear, in the summertime, when a fellow graduate student wonders aloud, What is the left’s vision for masculinity? is less a deep ideological commitment to gendering (as process and social organization), and more a kind of free-floating lust that has no destination for release. What do you do when you’re in grad school but wear button-up shirts and talk politely at wooden tables in seminar rooms and nod deferentially at one wizened department chair and his comparatively vivacious student-wife (but it was the 80s, you know, a different time) and then nod deferentially at a different, vivacious department chair and her sagacious wife (there have been some wins in the culture wars) and impotently eat cheese and whisper-gossip in the department lounge. In short: how much of liberal elite modernity has been Elias-Civilizing Process style cleansed — through embarrassment and restraint — of machismo and dueling and loudly decrying those who have done you wrong? I happen to think this is a good thing, mostly, I really like living outside the sword. I like this fact: even though both sets of grandparents used corporal punishment on my parents, my parents rarely spanked me, and I hope I never will hit a child. Modernization theory for intimate life! But this still brings us back to the problem of the graduate student, a man who I know does MMA in his free time, and his question of What is the left’s vision of masculinity? Which I hear, because I am also impossibly horny, as How am I supposed to cum?
I say that because I agree with Becca Rothfeld’s point that we should be consistent about our normative guidelines for human beings: if you think men should be X way (kind) or do X thing (lift weights), women and nonbinary folks should too. What, then, is gendering humans for? Aside from (because of?) being an incredibly successful system that convinces a huge population of workers that their unpaid household, gestational, sexual, and emotional labor is their lot in life because of God or biology, gender gets a lot of people off. Pornography’s actors, uber-gendered through the symbols of the body — big big penises, big big boobs. On Instagram, these multiparous tradwives in their chaste yet suggestive maxidresses milking cows! In Grindr chats, men advertising HIV-risky barebacking using the language of impregnation. (Tim Dean writes about this compellingly in Unlimited Intimacies. So does the trans protagonist in Torrey Peters’ book Detransition Baby.) Peters: “With his HIV, had she found an analogue to a cis woman’s life changer. Her cowboy could fuck her and mark her forever. He could fuck her and end her. [...] She first called her PrEP ‘birth control’ at a Chinese place in Sunset Park where he felt safe that none of his wife’s friends would possibly run into him. It popped into her head as a joke, but he looked at her and said, ‘Fuck, I just got so hard.’ ”
When my book club read Ghodsee’s Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, we bemoaned the lack of woke smut in the mainstream; why couldn’t our desires better hew to our politics? There are reluctant schoolgirls and cheating wives and stepfamilies aplenty, but no Getting Railed by My Nonbinary Mutual Aid Group. You can read the thematic tendencies of contemporary pornography and erotica through many different lenses; a psychoanalyst like Avgi Saketopoulou might encourage reading someone’s engagement with something like raceplay as putting trauma into circulation instead of allowing it to calcify. The scholar Alexandre Lefebvre, in his Liberalism As a Way of Life chapter on stepfamilies in porn, reads it as a more straightforward reaction to, and rejection of, meritocracy — he writes that in the stepfamily porn genre, an undesirable male protagonist who has done no work to be attractive (indeed, is often shown lounging around the house in sweatpants) is able to have sex with an attractive woman, often through cajoling or coercion, and that this is a sort of satisfying release for men who are on the outs of an increasingly affective economy — one in which immaterial labor is increasingly valuable because jobs have migrated from industry to service.
It was to this sort of disaffected chap Bill Burr might have been speaking when he went on SNL after the election. I think this invitation might have been borne out of the assumption that Harris would win and SNL would need a white dude wife-joke comedian to soothe whatever Middle American viewership they have left. Burr said,
“Alright ladies, you’re 0 and 2 on this guy. But you learn more from your losses than your wins. Let’s get into the game tape. Ladies, enough with the pantsuits. OK? It’s not working! Stop trying to have respect for yourselves. You don’t win the office on policy; you gotta whore it up a little! I’m not saying go full Hooters. But find the happy medium between Applebee’s and your dad didn’t stick around. All right? You all know how to get a free drink. I know a lot of ugly women — I mean feminists — don’t want to hear this message. But just tease ‘em a little bit! Make a farmer feel like he has a shot. Swing a state over a little bit!”
I dislike Bill Burr’s comedy, but what he correctly implied is that so much of politics is not Do your policies make sense but Do you get me hard? Do you eat big sloppy quantities of red meat because you’re such a big, real man? Do you talk dirty about sluts who should keep their knees shut and sluts having so much sex they want taxpayers to pay for their birth control and women who know one way to get ahead if you know what I mean? Do you whisper in my ear about the drag queens who are are coming for the children to turn them gay and expose them to graphic sex at the public library, and swarthy immigrants who are swarming the border, penetrating America, do you tell me Arnold Palmer’s dick was so big when he came out of the shower reporters couldn’t believe it?
I don’t want a left vision for masculinity, not really. I don’t want a left that is invested in the process of gendering. But I want to know how to tap into the same boorish libidinal that Trump and his cabal of fellow rapists and grifters did, some answer to their pornography of fear. I want to believe that our lust can have a direction that doesn’t wend inexorably towards paranoia and repression. The joke of my Election Day copypasta, what made it and all the others circulating so outlandish, is that anything about a left policy vision could be crude and shameless and sexual. We’re not like that, in our button-up shirts and seminar rooms and lengthy heart-to-hearts with I-feel statements. I want comprehensive sex ed in public schools and universal healthcare that pays for contraception and abortions on demand and everything else, and I don’t know how to write about that in a way that inspires tumescence or, I guess, speaks to anything aside from logos and ethos. When I try to imagine the pleasure of a better world, I ask what it would feel like to live without fear. Do you remember times when that was true? When I was six, I would sometimes go to the backyard and pee in a melamine bowl I kept under the wooden deck. It had a blue faux-porcelain design along the top, Chinese restaurant style. Why did I do this? Maybe just that it seemed fun to do something I was expected to do indoors outside. Children are weird to adult eyes. Freud would say “polymorphously perverse.” Childhood: a time to paint yourself with mud and dandelions, go naked or tutu-clad, become anything at any moment. Might we all be granted (and grant each other) the care that makes such freedom possible.