If This Doesn’t Scare You, I’m Not Trying Hard Enough.
March 16th, 2009
Mackinnonese: What Conservatives Would Sound Like If They Wrote Like Feminists.
The spookiest thing I’ve ever read is Catherine MacKinnon’s opening to Only Words (1987), her articulate anti-pornography polemic. MacKinnon is both a Marxist and a feminist, so it makes sense that her rhetoric displays an eerie fixation on victimhood, an obsessive regression reminiscent of the psychological horror conveyed in a classic episode of the Twilight Zone.
The opening paragraphs to the short book form an intense, poetic narrative, a spotlight into the feminist id. They’re marked by overly dramatic language, occasional vulgarity (as MacKinnon is known to use) and disturbing sexual imagery (Which is why I’m not dragging ModCon down with this post). I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to post this, but since I don’t care about being timely anymore, here it is. The first pages of Only Words, if only they were written by a conservative. If this doesn’t creep liberals out, they’re not paying attention.
Imagine that since the start of the 20th century, your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and the intimidation you live with, are unspeakable—improper for serious discussion. You grow up with your peers complaining how insensitive your sincerity is, so an authority figure can punish you using a creative interpretation of tolerance. When you are older, dickless comedians will scour all of your recorded statements for opportunities to embarrass you. Despite the heartfelt vitriol on their end, they’ll insist that you not take them seriously.
You can’t really tell anyone. When you try to speak of these things, you’re told that they didn’t happen; you imagined it; your fathers did it to their fathers for years. Textbooks say this. No textbooks will recall what happened to you. Laws say this. No law imagines what is happening to you, the way it is happening. You live your whole life wondering why a silent echo follows both your most feverish screams and your most articulate pleas.
In this century-plus of silence, pictures of you are made while these things are being done. Every time the pressure of being hated breaks you, making your arguments inchoate, you hear the journalists scribbling and the populists giggling. You always know that your lowest, if still human moments are out there somewhere. Sold, or traded, or passed around a classroom, or archived in a newsroom. In them, your basest and most vulnerable moments are made immortal. Someone, anyone, could see you this way. What they felt as they watched you and used your worst moments to define you and your friends is being done again and lived again and felt again through pictures. Your violation becomes a deep well to draw their arousal from. Your unraveling becomes their pleasure. Watching you is how they get off; with their pictures they can watch you and get off any time.
Slowly, then suddenly, hope emerges; maybe they’ll treat you as a human being—maybe you will be believed. You find a guarded way of bringing it up; maybe, just maybe, the pictures of you are perhaps slander? You find that the pictures, far from recording the way you’ve been betrayed, are fuel, “proof” of your hatred and idiocy. Those who see you being violated only experience their own pleasure. They do not feel your pain as pain any more than those who recorded you being hurt felt it. The pictures, surrounded by a shining halo of false insight and false revolution—false because they’re not intellectual and certainly not unfamiliar—have become the authority on your role in the debate. They are called the record of your experience, a sign for ideology, your ideology itself. In a very real way, they have made your beliefs be what they are imagined to be by those who use you and their images of you interchangeably.
In this way, their images are not so different from the videos and transcripts which came before—but your use for the camera gives the images a special credibility, a deep verisimilitude, an even stronger claim to truth, to being incontrovertibly about you. They happened to you; there they are. You can’t hide it, hide from it, or modify it. Because you are needed for these images, the providers of them will prod and antagonize you just to get new documentation of their imagination of you.
Finally, somehow, you meet other conservatives. Their teachers, friends, and co-workers also saw the images, liked them, beat off to them, and tried to bait your friends into acting out those images live. “Bush is an idiot” the predators would screech over and over, less an expression of what they believe than a way to preserve distance between us and them. They burn your flags, dip your crosses in urine, and insult the contributions of your intellectuals—just waiting for you to lapse and prove that you are what the images say you are. It is only proper for them to look at your conservatism through a paranoid prism—our preachers say “a salt ministry,” and they hear “assault ministry.” The same defensiveness that was forced on you is forced on your friends; the same silent civility you found necessary just to interact with them has also been adopted by your friends. There is, you find, a whole industry producing and selling darkly romantic images of you and your friends. They call it a necessity, acting as if they’re oblivious to your unpopularity, which they’ve worked very hard to cultivate.
When any of your friends tries to tell what is happening, they are told it didn’t happen; they imagined it; they’re acting out of class interests. Your unwillingness to define people according to their race becomes racism. The recordings prove it. See, he’s not ashamed of being against reparations. Besides, they say, why focus on the images, which are only symptoms of your irrationality? Even if you are being wronged, what’s keeping you from defending yourself? It’s not as if you’ll be shouted down by self-righteous students, be ridiculed by passive-aggressive entertainers, or be forced to abandon your livelihood. The images themselves do nothing, they’re just free speech—you taking offense means nothing. Go make your own images, just as long as it doesn’t offend them.
Putting to one side what this progression from isolation to cultural repression does to your sense of reality, personal security, and place within a community, not to mention faith in humanity, consider what it does to one’s relation to expression: to language, speech, the world of thought and communication. You learn that language does not belong to you, that you cannot use it to say what you know; knowledge cannot be what you’ve learned. Information is not made out of your experiences; it can’t be if your conclusions are radically different from theirs. You learn that talking about what has happened to you does not count as dialogue, but as “hate-mongering.” You learn that your reality is postmodern—defined by entertainment media, totally exposed but invisible, screaming yet inaudible, never disproven but eternally “indefensible.” You learn that debate is not an opportunity for you to be heard, but a forum for them to belittle and talk down to you.
Your relationship to politics is like shouting at a movie. “Don’t follow the axe-murder outside!” you scream. The audience acts as though nothing has been said; they keep their eyes fixed towards the front while many feel disturbed and embarrassed for you. The action on screen continues as if nothing has occurred. As the echo of your voice dies in your ears, you feel ashamed about saying anything. Soon even you being to wonder if your experience is legitimate; it has no effect on the world surrounding you.
This is the right-wing version of life imitating art: your life is the left’s text. To survive, you learn shame and how to cover it with rhetorical concessions; you learn meekness, how to make inefficacy seductive, and the habit of only opening up in like-minded circles. You learn how to betray your ideals and substitute others when you cannot stand being put down anymore. You develop a self who is ingratiating (ignoring their ingratitude) obsequious (ignoring their thirst for power) imitative (ignoring their unwillingness to empathize) and reluctantly passive (ignoring their proud hectoring)—in short, you learn how to express conservatism.