MTV

by jenks

Objectionable

Our technology is turning us all into objects. And it doesn’t matter how you treat objects, does it?

 

I have been responsible for more selfies than most people.

I didn’t take them. They’re not of me. But I launched an app which allows users to easily create mirrored images. So the leap from this:

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno - Season 21

To this:

Was almost instant.

In the year since our app launched, our users have created over 5 million images. By now you’ve seen this mirrored selfie trend all over Instagram, not to mention throughout the greater popular culture.

To be fair, mirrored selfie-grams are far from the only way people engage with the app. They also use it to create stunningly beautiful, painstakingly crafted, kaleidoscopic works of abstract art:

 

But it’s the selfies — mirrored or otherwise — that have been on my mind a lot lately.

 

Selfies.

Right now, there are 50 million images on Instagram with the hashtag #selfie, and nearly 140 million tagged #me.

“Selfies,” Elizabeth Day reports in the Guardian, “Have become a global phenomenon. Images tagged as #selfie began appearing on the photo-sharing website Flickr as early as 2004. But it was the introduction of smartphones – most crucially the iPhone 4, which came along in 2010 with a front-facing camera – that made the selfie go viral.”

A recent survey of more than 800 American teenagers by the Pew Research Centre found that 91% posted photos of themselves online – up from 79% in 2006.

But the selfie isn’t just a self-portrait, it is a self-object.

“Again and again, you offer yourself up for public consumption,” Day writes. “Your image is retweeted and tagged and shared. Your screen fills with thumbs-up signs and heart-shaped emoticons. Soon, you repeat the whole process, trying out a different pose.”

“The selfie is about continuously rewriting yourself,” says Dr. Mariann Hardey, a lecturer in marketing at Durham University who specializes in digital social networks. “It’s an extension of our natural construction of self.”

But what is it we are constructing our selves into?

 

Porn.

Before we go any further, let’s get this out of the way: unless you are a teenager right now, you do not understand what it means to grow up in a world where porn and Facebook are equidistant — in case you don’t know, that proximity is one click away, and apart. If you’re curious to understand what, in fact, this experience is like — in teenagers’ own words — you should read Nancy Jo Sales’ recent Vanity Fair article, “Friends Without Benefits.” But not until after you’ve finished reading this one because I’ll be drawing on it quite a bit.

If you are, at this moment, older than at least your mid-20s, whatever it is that you think you can draw on to relate to 2013 from an analog adolescence frame of reference, just put that away, because it is not a parallel to what is happening right now. What is, according to Gail Dines, the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, is “a massive social experiment.” Here are some results from that experiment so far:

According to a 2008 CyberPsychology & Behavior study:

  • 93% of boys and 62% of girls have seen internet porn
  • 83% of boys and 57% of girls have seen group sex online
  • 18% of boys and 10% of girls have seen rape or sexual violence

But that was five iPhone versions ago at this point, so, you do the math.

“In the absence of credible, long-term research, we simply don’t know where the age of insta-porn is taking us,” writes Peggy Drexler on TheDailyBeast, but that we are in it, and that it is pervasive, is undeniable.

“What does this do to teenagers,” Sales asks in Vanity Fair. “And to children? How does it affect boys’ attitudes toward girls? How does it affect girls’ self-esteem and feeling of well-being? And how is this affecting the way that children and teenagers are communicating on these new technologies?”

In the the Guardian, Day describes one typical answer to that last question: “The pouting mouth, the pressed-together cleavage, the rumpled bedclothes in the background hinting at opportunity — a lot of female selfie aficionados take their visual vernacular directly from pornography (unwittingly or otherwise).”

“Because of porn culture,” says Dines, “Women have internalised that image of themselves. They self-objectify.”

“The girls I interviewed,” says Sales, “Even if they’re not doing it themselves, it’s in their faces: their friends posting really provocative pictures of themselves on Facebook and Instagram, sending nude pictures on Snapchat. Why are they doing this? Is this sexual liberation? Is it good for them? Girls know the issues, and yet some of them still can’t resist objectifying themselves, as they even talk about [themselves]. As the girl I call ‘Greta’ says, ‘more provocative equals more likes.’ To be popular, which is what high school is all about, you have to get ‘likes’ on your social-media pics.”

 

Spring. 

spring-breakers-poster-2

Harmony Korine’s, Spring Breakers, originally released in March, 2013, “Horrifies and entices in equal measure,” wrote NPR music critic, Ann Powers:

Flattening the hierarchies that separate trash from art, porn from erotica, and moral justice from exploitation by any means necessary, Spring Breakers… embraces and elaborates upon the prevalent suspicion that nobody lives on the stable side of reality any more.

“Pretend you’re in a videogame,” says one of the film’s female anti-heroines as they begin their spree of rampant self-abuse and crime. That’s what Miley Cyrus does, trying on new aspects of performance and sexual self-expression in her new persona. It’s also how the vulnerable models that Robin Thicke ogles [in the music video for his song, Blurred Lines] make it through the gauntlet that the video’s scene creates.

The childlike goofiness Katy Perry expressed with California Gurlz in 2010, or the sweet hope of Carly Rae Jepsen’s smash of last year, Call Me Maybe, have intensified into something more unsettling. In this strange summer of too much heat, so many precariously excessive songs and videos now play on that line between healthy catharsis and chaos.

 

Summer.

The summer would get stranger still. Punctuated in its final days by what may just be the most controversial MTV Video Music Awards performance of all time, featuring a duet by Cyrus and Thicke.

I would write about it:

miley_cyrus_vmas-620x412

From its very first steps, Cyrus’s performance felt, unmistakably, like watching a GIF happen in real-time. The act was speaking the native tongue — stuck all the way out — of the digital age, its direct appeal to meme culture as blatant and aggressive as the display of sexuality. The source material and its inevitable meme-ification appeared to be happening simultaneously. The  Internet was inherently integrated within the performance. It was no longer a “second” screen; it was the same damn screen. All the performances before it had been made for TV. This show changed that.

What I learned from the 2013 VMAs is that owning your sexuality is passé, but owning meme culture by exploiting your sexuality is now. Whatever you think of it, Cyrus’s performance was a deliberate reflection of where we are as culture.

 

A burner had been left blindly on. Something invisible and pervasive had accumulated. Watching the VMAs, a giant fireball exploded in our faces.

We were unprepared.

This, ultimately, would be why everyone freaked out. Cyrus became a highly visible target for embodying this shift on a mainstream stage, and exploiting it to increase her fame and drive her record to #1, but all she was doing was deftly surfing the cultural current.

By the end of August, she was exposing us to the new normal.

 

Fall.

“In news that’s not at all surprising, yet another tech event was disrupted by a sexist joke,” Lauren Orsini wrote on ReadWriteWeb, within days of the VMAs:

“Titstare” was the first presentation of the TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 hackathon. Created by Australians Jethro Batts and David Boulton, the joke app is based on the “science” of how sneaking a peek at cleavage helps men live healthier lives.

The opening salvo cast an ugly shadow over the event, reminding attendees that, just like at PyCon and other technology conferences, “brogrammer” culture is still the norm.

Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that Batts and Boulton presented immediately before Adria Richards, a programmer who rose to the national spotlight after she witnessed sexist jokes at PyCon 2013. Her gall to disapprove of the offensive jokes earned her death threats.

 

In the wake of the VMA article, I kept tweeting over and over, “Everything is changing….but into whatttttt?” By the early days of Fall, the culture had undeniably shifted. I kept kept seeing an escalating, atavistic gender warfare. Why is this happening, I thought.

Why is this happening?

Spinnin-Pioneer

 

Why is THIS happening?

pax

Why is THIS happening??

Susie

That all happened in one day.

That week I was approached to speak at a women’s startup conference and felt, reflexively, offended. The idea that there should be segregated events seemed insulting and damaging — to everyone. I began to feel self-conscious that I had an app startup with a male business partner. I texted him, “What is happening???” and “Can’t we all just get along?” We laughed, but we began to feel like an anomaly.

 

Pretend you’re in a videogame.

“When we listeners find ourselves taking pleasure in these familiar but enticingly refreshed acts of transgression,” Powers writes, “Echoing the Michael Jackson-style whoops that Pharrell makes in Blurred Lines, or nodding along to the stoned, melancholy chorus of Cyrus’s arrestingly sad party anthem, We Can’t Stop, are we compromising ourselves? Or is it okay, because after all, it’s just pretend?”

And when the technology that I, you, and everyone we know use on a daily basis gets developed to the sound of this same, blurry, pop culture soundtrack (figuratively or literally), what happens then? How are the creators of objectifying technology supposed to know it isn’t cool — if all of our technology is used for objectification?

In Vanity Fair, Sales talks to Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus co-directors of Sexy Baby, a documentary about girls and women in the age of porn. “We saw these girls embracing this idea that ‘If I want to be like a porn star, it’s so liberating,’” Gradus said. “We were skeptical. But it was such a broad concept. We asked, ‘What is this shift in our sexual attitudes, and how do we define this?’ I guess the common thread we saw that is creating this is technology. Technology being so available made every girl or woman capable of being a porn star, or thinking they’re a porn star. They’re objectifying themselves. The thinking is: ‘If I’m in control of it, then I’m not objectified.’”

In October, Sinead O’Connor — whose video for Nothing Compares 2 U inspired Cyrus’s look in her video for Wrecking Ball — wrote an “open letter” to Cyrus, beautifully capturing, “in the spirit of motherliness and with love,” the generational disconnect at the heart of the cultural shift. “The message you keep sending is that it’s somehow cool to be prostituted.. it’s so not cool Miley. Don’t let the music business make a prostitute out of you,” O’Connor wrote, not getting it.

The familiar, analog, 20th century relationship in between objectification and commercialization has eroded. In its place, a new, post-Empire dynamic has arrived, built on a natively digital experience that O’Connor and an entire population still able to remember and relate to a world before the internet and mobile technology, can’t wrap their heads around.

“The blurred messages Thicke, Cyrus and others are now sending fit a time when people think of themselves as products, more than ever before,” Powers writes.

In the attention economy, self-exploitation is self-empowerment. We are all objects. We are all products. We are all selfies.

And we can’t stop.

“Social media is destroying our lives,” Sales quotes a girl in Vanity Fair.

“So why don’t you go off it?” Sales asks.

“Because then we would have no life.”

The ubiquitousness of digital cameras and social media platforms to share their instant output has not only turned  the idea that objectification is violation into an anachronism, but self-objectification is now, as Powers, writes “part of today’s ritual of romance.”  Nearly one in three teenagers is sending nude photos, after all.

Like the girls in Sales’ article, who tell her that “presenting themselves in this way is making them anxious and depressed,” but continue to do it anyway, we do not self-objectify because we’re in control. We self-objectify because it is the norm.

We self-objectify to rationalize, to placebo-ize that we had control in the first place.

 

We Can’t Stop.

“Both young women and young men are seriously unhappy with the way things are,” says, Donna Freitas, a former professor at Hofstra and Boston Universities, who studies hook-up culture on college campuses in her new book, The End of Sex  (which Sales suggests, “might as well be called The End of Love.”)

Sales writes:

Much has been written about hook-up culture lately, notably Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men (2012) and a July New York Times article, “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game Too,” both of which attributed the trend to feminism and ambitious young women’s desire not to be tied down by relationships.

But Freitas’s research, conducted over a year on seven college campuses, tells a different story.

She describes the sex life of the average college kid as “Mad Men sex, boring and ambivalent. Sex is something you’re not to care about. They drink to drown out what is really going on with them. The reason for hooking up is less about pleasure and fun than performance and gossip—it’s being able to update [on social media] about it. Social media is fostering a very unthinking and unfeeling culture.”

College kids, both male and female, also routinely rate each other’s sexual performance on social media, often derisively, causing anxiety for everyone.

And researchers are now seeing an increase in erectile dysfunction among college-age men—related, Freitas believes, to their performance anxiety from watching pornography: “The mainstreaming of porn is tremendously affecting what’s expected of them.”

 

Or as ThoughtCatalog writer, Ryan O’Connell, (oh, hey, sup, a dude), put it, “This is how we have sex now:”

Porn has killed our imaginations. We sit and try to fantasize. We shut our eyes tight and think, ‘Wait, what did I used to masturbate about before porn? What image is going to turn me on right now?” But your brain gets tired and your genitalia isn’t used to working this hard so you open your reliable go-to porno and get off in two minutes. Later, you have trouble maintaing an erection during actual sex because your partner doesn’t look like a blow up doll from the Valley.

Our sex lives are having less and less to do with actual sex. Intimacy has morphed into something entirely more narcissistic. What used to be about making each other feel good and connecting is now about validation.

When sex does happen, when we finally make it through the endless hoops of text messaging, planning a date and actually sticking to it and you discover that you like this person (or could like them for an evening), it feels like an old faded photograph that’s been sitting in a shoebox at the bottom of your closet. “This orgasm feels like a vintage ball gown! Is this how people used to do it in the olden days?!” It’s terrifying!

In 2013, our phones are getting to have all the fun. They’re getting laid constantly while we lay naked in the dark, rubbing our skin, trying pathetically to get turned on by the feel of our own touch. We scroll through our camera and see a buffet of anonymous naked photos we’ve collected over the last few months for us to jack off to. Somehow, this has become enough for us. Getting off has become like fast food. It’s accessible, cheap, and most likely going to make us feel like shit after.

We are actively participating in the things that keep us from what we want. Feel good now, feel bad forever later. Stomachache stomachache, junk food junk food.

 

In a pervasively mediated culture, where porn primes our perception of ourselves and others, and our technology reduces us to selfies, objectification is inevitable.

And the trouble is — it doesn’t matter how you treat objects…. It’s not like they’re people.

What people want today is “to hurt one another” and “get back at the people that hurt them,” Hunter Moore, the founder of IsAnyoneUp.com, told Rolling Stone last October.

In a September article on The Verge titled, The End of Kindness, Greg Sandoval writes:

And Moore ought to know. He’s one of the pioneers of revenge porn, the practice of posting nude photos to the web of a former lover in an attempt to embarrass, defame, and terrorize.

While minorities and homosexuals are often targeted, experts say no group is more abused online than women. Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland lays out some of the numbers in her upcoming book, Hatred 3.0. The US National Violence Against Women Survey reports 60% of cyberstalking victims are women. A group called Working to Halt Online Abuse studied 3,787 cases of cyberharassment, and found that 72.5% were female, 22.5% were male and 5% unknown. A study of Internet Relay Chat showed male users receive only four abusive or threatening messages for every 100 received by women.

Moore has sold his site but scores of wannabes are cropping up. A check of these sites shows that victims are almost always women. At Myex.com over 1,000 nude photos and new pictures are added nearly every day. Each post typically includes the name of the person photographed, their age, and the city they live in. The posts come with titles like, “Manipulative Bitch,” “Cheater,” “Has genital warts,” “Drunk,” “Meth User,” “This girl slept with so many other guys,” and “Filthy Pig.”

The Verge contacted several women found on some of these sites, including Myex.com. While all of them declined to be interviewed, they did acknowledge that the photos were posted without permission by an ex-boyfriend or lover. One woman said that she was trying to get the pictures pulled down and had successfully removed them from other sites because she was not yet 18 years old when they were taken (if her claim is accurate it would make the snapshots child pornography). She pleaded that we not use her name and asked that we not contact her again.

If the woman was upset and afraid, she has a right to be, says Holly Jacobs, 30, who has started a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending revenge porn and supporting its victims. Jacobs knows firsthand that these sites are killers of reputations and relationships. Three years ago, Jacobs was studying for her PhD in industrial organizational psychology and working as a consultant at a university when a former boyfriend began posting nude photos of her online. The embarrassment and terror was just the beginning. Jacobs’ ex sent copies of the photos to her boss and suggested she was sexually preying on students. Jacobs’ employers, fearing bad press, asked her to prove she didn’t upload the photos herself. She finally felt compelled to change her name (Jacobs is the new name).

In July The Washington Post published a story about men who post phony ads to make it appear as if their ex-wives or girlfriends are soliciting sex. One man, Michael Johnson II of Hyattsville, Maryland, published an ad titled “Rape Me and My Daughters” and included his ex-wife’s home address. More than 50 men showed up to the victim’s house. One man tried to break in and another tried to undress her daughter. Johnson was sentenced to 85 years in prison. His victim was physically unharmed but these ads can be lethal. In December 2009, a Wyoming woman was raped with a knife sharpener in her home after an ex-boyfriend assumed her identity and posted a Craigslist ad that read, “Need an aggressive man with no concern or regard for women.” Her ex and the man who raped her are both serving long prison sentences.

 

Winter.

While people, trapped as we are by our digital avatars, are increasingly being reduced to objects, our technology seems to be benefitting from a transference of humanity.

Spike Jonze’s new movie, Her, due out in December, is being called “science fiction,” but the “future” depicted in the trailer looks essentially indistinguishable from the reality we all find ourselves in today. In it, a melancholy man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and a Turing test-approved virtual assistant program, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, fall in love.

“Unlike the science fiction of yesteryear,” writes David Plumb on Salon.com, “Her is not about the evolving relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. Instead, Samantha appears to be essentially a human being trapped in a computer. Her thus appears to be about programming the perfect woman who fits in your pocket, manages your life, doesn’t have a body (and thus free will), and has an off switch.”

 

Pretend you’re in a videogame.

 

    



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by jenks

Violate Me

miley_cyrus_vmas-620x412

Here is what I can tell you. When I was in New York a month ago and one night someone suggested we go to an MTV party, the first thought I had was — wait, MTV still exists?

But I guess it does because this week I’ve spent a lot of time talking about MTV. Well, not really so much MTV as the MTV Video Music Awards. Well, not even that, so much as Miley Cyrus’s performance. Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMAs. And so has the rest of America. Not only was a story about her performance the main event on the CNN homepage the next day, I then saw The Onion’s fictional op-ed, ostensibly written by the managing editor of CNN.com, with the headline, “Let Me Explain Why Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Was Our Top Story This Morning” (CNN spoiler alert: ad revenue), retweeted in my feed no less than 9 times in a matter of hours (The Onion spoiler alert: ad revenue).

For a culture that has become desensitized to multi-million dollar celebrity media empires built off the backs of sex tapes, something about Cyrus’s performance nevertheless managed to strike a nerve.

Here’s what we saw:

.

Afterwards, I don’t think any of us were quite sure exactly what had just happened to us.

It wasn’t just the raunchiness or the shock value. This is the VMA’s, after all, where Madonna kicked things off 30 years ago by dry humping the stage in a punk wedding dress; where Britney sang “I’m a Slave 4 u” while dancing in a green version of Cyrus’s flesh-toned 2-piece, with a live python draped around her body, and later where Madonna and Britney and Christina all made out, and then after that, where Lady Gaga hanged herself. The controversial VMA performance is now pretty much a traditional rite of passage in the transition from Disney child star into adult entertainer.

Wait… what?

Anyway, we expect this. We’re  practically inured to it at this point. But this show, Cyrus’s show, got under our skin. And not in, like, a good way.

“It seems everyone hated whatever it was Miley Cyrus was doing at last night’s VMAs,” Neetzan Zimmerman wrote on Gawker.

Whatever it was she was doing…. we couldn’t even be sure. The next morning we woke up in turns “stunned,” “shocked,” “outraged,” outraged by the outrage. From the moment Cyrus first stuck out her tongue, things felt weird. We’re so used to performers adhering to a strict code of conduct of media training — gliding through precise sequences of polished, camera-ready choreography. You want this to wind up being the image that follows you around the internet tomorrow, we thought to ourselves watching Cyrus gag.

Little did we know.

Then the performance began in earnest, Cyrus singing and dancing to her summer jam, “We Can’t Stop,” and we tried to relax. But 90 seconds in, as Jody Rosen writes on the Vulture blog, “pausing to spank and simulate analingus upon the ass of a thickly set African-American backup dancer, her act tipped over into what we may as well just call racism: a minstrel show routine whose ghoulishness was heightened by Cyrus’s madcap charisma.”

Awkward.

And that was all before Robin Thicke got onstage and Cyrus snapped out of her teddy-bear teddy, down to a nude, vinyl bikini, to duet Thicke’s own controversial summer hit, “Blurred Lines,” and the REALLY uncomfortable shit happened. The most disconcerting thing about their performance was Thicke’s consistent lack of….. engagement. While Cyrus twerked all over his body, Thicke seemed barely aware she was there. The New York Times described Cyrus’s behavior as a “molesting” of Robin Thicke. Behind his shades you couldn’t be sure whether he was even making eye contact. Of course, what Thicke was doing was reenacting the Blurred Lines video. Directed by Diane Martel, who’s also responsible for the video for We Can’t Stop, the video features basically completely naked women dancing next to, strutting past, facing away from, and engaging in a host of other activities that in general involve pretty much anything except actually acknowledging the presence of Robin Thicke. Or of T.I. or Pharrell Williams. The non-interactions between the fully-dressed men in the video and naked women seem so unaligned and asynchronous and non-sequitured they might as well be SnapChatting them in. “I directed the girls to look into the camera,” Martel explained on Grantland. “This is very intentional and they do it most of the time; they are in the power position. I wanted to deal with the misogynist, funny lyrics in a way where the girls were going to overpower the men. Look at Emily Ratajkowski’s performance; it’s very, very funny and subtly ridiculing. I find [the video] meta and playful.”

Whether the end result really succeeds in its intention is debatable (“Is meta-nudity a thing? Is there such thing as ‘ironic objectification?'” Callie Beusman asks on Jezebel), but this conceit at least makes sense in the context of a music video — and, by the way, subconsciously speaks to all of us and our modern experience of hyper-mediated, asynchronous connection. But you know where it doesn’t actually work? Live, on stage, as a visual to support a 20-year old former child star’s transformation into a woman claiming her sexuality.

“Performing near-nude on the VMA stage 10 years earlier,” Daniel D’addario writes on Salon.com, “Christina Aguilera was singing an ode to her own empowerment and desire to get sexual satisfaction on her own terms. Last night, Miley was singing a song about how good Robin Thicke is at sex.” And in this context, Thicke’s lack of engagement in the proceedings made Cyrus’s relentless hypersexualization look desperate, or worse yet, depraved. At first Cyrus came across like that girl you knew in college, drunk at a party, looking to fuck for validation. If you happened to stop to factor in the 16 year age difference between Thicke and Cyrus, a whole other kind of psychological issue could, conceivably, have seemed to be spilling itself out all over MTV. But the real cringe-worthy element of the experience was that, in the absence of active participation — and its implicit consent — from anyone sharing the stage with her, Cyrus’s agrosexual zeal very quickly began to look kinda….uhm…. predatory.

In one singular moment, Cyrus appeared to us as victim and predator. The violated, and the violator. No wonder we weren’t sure what we were even looking at. Cognitive dissonance, haaaaaaaay! Miley Cyrus had roofied us all. You could understand why, the next morning, MSNBC’s, Mika Brzezinski would call her “disturbed.”

Perhaps the problem is that “no one has apparently said ‘no’ [to Cyrus] for the last six months,” Jon Carmanica, suggested in The New York Times.

But it sure did  make for some great GIFs tho, amirite?!

ku-medium

ku-medium (2)

ku-medium (1)

From its very first steps, Cyrus’s performance felt, unmistakably, like watching a GIF happen in real-time. On the Atlantic, Nolan Feeney called this “the most GIFable award show ever,” and, indeed, Cyrus’s performance felt like the first one truly made for the age of the Internet. The act was speaking the native tongue — stuck all the way out — of the digital age, its direct appeal to meme culture as blatant and aggressive as the display of sexuality. All the performances before it had been made for TV. This show changed that. The source material and its inevitable meme-ification appeared to be happening simultaneously. The  Internet was inherently integrated within the performance. It was no longer a “second” screen; it was the same damn screen. If you go to watch the performance now on MTV.com, a bright pink button, set in stark relief against the site’s black background, blares, “GIF THIS!”

You want this to wind up being the image that follows you around the internet tomorrow? 

Yes. That was the whole point.

It’s our party we can do what we want
It’s our party we can say what we want
It’s our party we can love who we want
We can kiss who we want
We can sing what we want
– “We Can’t Stop“

Six years before Cyrus was even born, a trio of dudes demanded you had to fight for your right to party. But that’s not what We Can’t Stop is is about. This song is a rallying cry for the right to be your own person. Something the human collateral of the Disney industrial complex, and the daughter of a Hollywood dad, would know something about, no doubt. (“It’s my mouth; I can say what I want to.”) But it’s also something that any adolescent can relate to, especially now.

“It’s like a giant, fucked-up selfie,” Martel said, explaining the concept behind the “We Can’t Stop” video, on RollingStone.com. “She’s absolutely taking the piss out of being in a pop video.” Even if you haven’t had to shoulder the weight of a multi-million dollar entertainment franchise since you were a child, everyone growing up now is saddled with the responsibility of managing their mediated identities. So how do you rebel against that responsibility? How do you subvert the expectation to maintain your put-together, meticulously edited persona? Maybe you have a video of yourself doing a Salvia bong hit at a house party on your 18th birthday end up on TMZ. Maybe you fuck your image up. You don’t try to look good. You grimace and stick your tongue out and take a photo and post that fucked-up selfie for the world to see.

Because if you don’t do it on your terms, the Internet meme hive force will do it for you. Here’s a pic that made the Internet meme rounds in the wake of Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance earlier this year:

Superbowl XLVII - Baltimore Ravens v San Francisco 49ers - Mercedes-Benz Superdome

 

And here’s Cyrus fucking the shot up on purpose, before you could do it to her:

ku-bigpic

If you think Cyrus was trying to look good for you, if you think that no one was telling her “no” as she was putting the VMA performance together, that she herself wasn’t scrutinizing each frame of rehearsal video, and keenly understanding just how wrong it all looked, you’re completely missing the point.

We live in an age of violation. From News of the World hacking the cell phones of celebrities and bombing victims, to PRISM hacking everyone, everything, all the time. From doxxing to TMZ, from Wikileaks to Kiki Kannibal to Star Wars Kid to so many victims of online harassment driven to suicide, to Diana dying in a car crash in a French tunnel while being chased by paparazzi, to “Sad Keanu.”

The meme hive force is the digestive system of our networked world, capable of gleefully devouring its victims — or at least its objects — alive. Cyrus doing it to herself is “disturbed,” but the violating, exploiting meme hive force doing it to her is just another Tuesday on the Internet? And we’re totally cool with that. But, see, Cyrus thinks this is her song. And she can sing if she wants to. Her performance, crass, lewd, uncomfortable, disturbing, whatever, turned the hive force dynamic on its head. The meme object rolled out of a giant teddy bear, landed on stage and screamed, “GIF THIS!” It stuck its tongue out at all of us and belted, FIRST! at the top of its lungs and memed itself. Before anyone else could. The show got the upper hand by turning itself into the object of its own violation.

Because when we’ve already been titillated in every way imaginable, what else is there left to do? Cyrus basically didn’t do anything on the VMA stage that hasn’t been simulated there in one way or another before. So how else is there for a female pop star to traffic in her own sexuality in any new way, except to make us all feel like she was coercing us into violating her?

It was a new one for me. Was it weird for you, too?

“The Internet is fickle,” Martel said on Grantland, “But if a video is strong and entertaining, it is going to get massive hits, so of course strong work is going to have an effect on record sales. As I said, I’m mega-focused on selling records right now, so I’m doing that. I’m only taking jobs where this is a possibility. There is a new generation of kids that are overstimulated as viewers and you have to address that somehow. I’m just paying attention to the audience and their movements.”

What I learned from the 2013 VMAs is that owning your sexuality is passé, but owning meme culture by exploiting your sexuality is now. After all, in the attention economy, self-exploitation is self-empowerment. (Miley Cyrus spoiler alert: ad revenue).

Whatever you think of it, Cyrus’s performance was a deliberate reflection of where we are as culture. Calling it a “commentary” may be an overstatement, but it’s definitely a comment: 

R U NOT ENTERTAINED?????

942064_641_5YfeVAd

 

Oh, and guess what else? MTV, it turns out, still exists.

    



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by jenks

celibacy is so hot right now

It’s pretty interesting that at this year’s MTV Video Music awards the biggest controversy came from Brit comedian, host Russell Brand messing with the Disney-sponsored teen pop boy-band the Jonas Brothers for wearing Purity Rings.

Purity rings, or chastity rings/promise rings originated in the U.S. in the 1990s among Christian affiliated sexual abstinence groups. The rings are sold to adolescents, or to parents so that the rings may be given to their adolescent children as gifts.

It is intended that wearing a purity ring is accompanied by a religious vow to practice celibacy until marriage. The ring is usually worn on the left ring finger with the implication that the wearer will remain abstinent until it is replaced with a wedding ring. Although the ring is worn on the hand, where others can see, its main purpose is to serve as a constant reminder to the wearer of their commitment between themselves and God to remain pure until marriage. There is no particular style for purity rings; however, many worn by Christians have a cross in their design. Some rings contain a diamond chip or other gemstone and/or “True Love Waits”, “One Life, One Love”, or another similar saying embossed somewhere on the ring.

“It’s a little bit ungrateful,” joked Brand, “Because they could literally have sex with any woman that they want, and they’re just not gonna do it. They’re like Superman deciding not to fly, and just going everyhwere on a bus.” The joke became a running theme throughout the night, and at one point Brand even pretended he’d stolen a Jonas Brother’s virginity, holding up a ring in his hand. This, I should mention, got people more riled up than Brand calling George Bush a “retarded cowboy” after pleading, as a citizen of the world, for the US to elect Barack Obama. Eventually, however, he was compelled to apologize. “I’ve gotta say sorry because I said those things about promise rings; that was bad of me. I didn’t mean to take it lightly. I love Jonas Brothers, I think it’s (purity) really good. I don’t want to piss off teenage fans… Promise rings, I’m well up for it, well done everyone…It’s just, a bit of sex occasionally never hurt anybody.”

Coming from Europe, Brand clearly underestimated the dire seriousness with which Americans take their sex. Sure, comedians are supposed to poke fun at people, that’s what they do, but Brand’s delivery had seemed to imply, “Well, surely everyone else must agree this whole purity ring business is silly, right? After all, this is MTV. We’re all groovy Rock ‘n Rollers here, are we not?”

Before Brand issued his apology, American Idol winner Jordin Sparks, herself flossing some finger jewelry, deviated from the telepromptered script at the live telecast declaring, “I just want to say, it’s not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody–guy or girl–wants to be a slut.” And for an 18 year-old, Sparks nevertheless managed to articulate the American perception of teenage sexuality with an astuteness that I would say is beyond her years: Either you’re a virgin or a slut. There is nothing in between.

Under the influence of the Bush administration’s Abstinence-Only approach to sex education, it’s not particularly surprising that there would be such a drastically reduced understanding of sexuality. Even the idea inherent in the whole Purity Ring concept implies that sex is a contamination, exposure to which makes you unpure. In this kind of oversimplified paradigm there’s obviously no room for complex ideas like being sexually responsible, or emotionally prepared, for instance. Of course, it’s not like rockstars have ever been society’s role models for moderation either, but in the past they’ve generally tended to err on the side of hedonism. So what’s happened that the newest generation of pop sensations is suddenly bringing non-sexy back?

Britney Spears was probably the turning point. Not that it’s exactly her fault that 16 years ago New Kid on the Block, Marky Mark was all about letting Kate Moss come between him and his Calvins while pimping underwear, and in 2008 teen stars are sporting accessories for vows of chastity, but she marked the crossroads. Back when she and Christina Aguilera were vying for individual identities to distinguish themselves (“Hit me baby, one ore time,” vs. “I’m a genie in a bottle, you gotta rub me the right way,” anyone?) and Christina went all Dirrty, Britney’s positioning strategy became about branding the singer as virginal as nebulously possible. (And look which one ended up the nutcase!) Even now, as L.A. Times pop music critic Ann Powers writes, Britney’s “still dealing with questions about exactly when she lost her innocence, even after bearing two children.” Before Britney was singing ballads like, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman,” I think the last time anyone would have really cared this much about the status of a pop star’s virginity was back when you couldn’t show Elvis below the waist on TV. Even if there were still any expectations about the issue, you’d figure it would have gotten cleared up, once and for all, by Madonna. But a couple of things have changed in the two and a half decades since Like a Virgin (“That’s like a virgin. Not actually a virgin,” as Brand pointed out at the VMAs) came out.

Alan Ball–who’s no stranger to commentary on contemporary American sexuality, having written American Beauty, and the just-released Towelhead–explained in a recent NPR interview, “In our culture now everything is saturated with sex. Just watching mainstream TV, or going to the movies, or turning on your computer and looking at the images that are on your welcome page, it’s just sex, sex, sex….I think it’s much more in the faces of children now than it was when I was a kid.”  And it doesn’t stop at mainstream entertainment. A 2007 study conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that more than 40% of kids have come across porn online. Two thirds of them weren’t even trying to look for it. By contrast, in a similar study conducted 8 years ago, just 25 percent of all kids interviewed said they’d had unwanted exposure to online pornography.

Meanwhile, in the era of Katy Perry ditties like “I kissed a girl and I liked it. (Hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.)” and “Ur so gay and you don’t even like boys,” teenagers are now also faced with an unprecedented array of options for how to define their sexual identities. In a New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

This past September [2005], when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories. It doesn’t take a Stuyvesant education to see what this means: More girls are experimenting with each other, and they’re starting younger. And this is a conservative estimate, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of human development at Cornell who has been conducting research on same-sex-attracted adolescents for over twenty years. Depending on how you phrase the questions and how you define sex between women, he believes that “it’s possible to get up to 20 percent of teenage girls.”

Of course, what can’t be expressed in statistical terms is how teenagers think about their same-sex interactions. Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

So if all the options for defining your sexual identity are left open, but taking advantage of any of them makes you–as Sparks schooled us–a slut, and at the same time the pervasive sexualization of mainstream  entertainment, and contemporary culture in general, has made sluttiness a pretty much expected default–dude, how the hell are the latest crop of teen pop stars supposed to rebel?

From Details’ The Total Awesomeness of Being the Jonas Brothers:

On a quiet Friday morning in a dressing room at Madison Square Garden, the Jonas Brothers hold out their hands to show off their purity rings. Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas—the teen-pop trio who stand, at this very moment, on the brink of hugeness—wear the metal bands on their fingers to symbolize, as Joe puts it, “promises to ourselves and to God that we’ll stay pure till marriage.” Joe is 18. His ring is silver and adorned with a cross. “It actually ripped apart a little bit, just on the bottom, here, but I didn’t want to get a new one, because this one means so much to me,” he says. Nick, who is 15, says, “I got mine made at Disney World. It’s pretty awesome.” Kevin, at 20, is the oldest of the three, and while a punk-rock purity ring from Tiffany might represent the ultimate oxymoron, that’s exactly what he’s going for. His silver vow of abstinence is covered with studs. “It’s pretty rock and roll,” Kevin says. “It’s getting banged up a little bit because of the guitar.”

For any parent reading this, suddenly getting wildly excited about getting their teenager bling from god, this would probably be a good time to mention that virginity pledges are basically as much a sham as Brand assumed everyone would figure they are. A recent review of a number of independent American studies concluded that abstinence programs “show little evidence of sustained impact on attitudes and intentions,” and furthermore “show some negative impacts on youth’s willingness to use contraception, including condoms, to prevent negative sexual health outcomes related to sexual intercourse” Which is how Sarah Palin’s 17-year old daughter ended up 7 months pregnant, and how yours might too if the republicans have anything to say about it.

All this stuff we’re leaving kids to figure out on their own can be pretty damn charged and confusing and overwhelming. In an environment where the policy on sex ed exemplifies “don’t ask don’t tell,” where 40% of kids are being “educated” about sex through porn–whether they’re looking to be or not, and where the process of defining your sexuality is like a whole new kind of multiple choice exam, it’s actually not all that surprising that some kids might find the concept of a virginity pledge appealing. (At least in theory, if not 100% in practice). In the absence of information or substantive guideance to help them better understand what they’re dealing with, a purity ring offers teenagers a way to simply sublimate the insecurity and pressure that it’s completely normal–basically mandatory–to feel about sex at that age, with a token of self-righteousnessconfidence for simply avoiding it.

Denny Pattyn, an evangelical Christian youth minister, and founder of Silver Ring Thing, which runs more than 70 programs a year for teens, spreading a message of abstinence until marriage, and offering a ring to those who complete the course, appeared on the Today show following the VMAs, and according to MTV News:

Pattyn said he’s been getting quite a few requests from media organizations in the United States and England to discuss the issue. But more important, he ran into John McCain’s daughter Meghan backstage at the show, and the two had a talk that he hopes will soon connect him to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. “We had a long talk about Sarah Palin and her daughter’s pregnancy and them maybe getting more involved when they come to Pennsylvania where I live,” Pattyn said.

“This is a big, big to-do,” Pattyn said of the flap in his community over the Jonas Brothers/ Brand issue. “It’s fantastic for an organization like ours, and we think this will open up some major things.” Pattyn said he gave Meghan McCain one of his group’s rings to give to Governor Palin for her daughter “to let her know we’re supporting her and praying for her.”

I don’t know which is more suspect, that just two years after the ACLU settlement with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a case challenging federal funding of more than $1 million for Silver Ring Thing (which seeing as it is a subsidiary of an Evangelical Church, giving it govt. funding did kinda constitute a major violation of that whole separation of church and state thing) Pattyn’s back innit again as if that never happened, or what exactly this guy was doing hangin’ backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards in the first place?

(Hey, Trojan, have you considered maybe getting involved with the VMA’s for 2009? Might be a good time to think about that.)

Kinsey is probably rolling over in his grave, and so are a bunch of musicians. As Powers writes, “Nobody seems to remember when rockers were supposed to rattle the jewelry of the folks who attend glittery galas. But then, MTV has long trafficked in turning rebelliousness into a commodity. Brand, saying uncontainable things, upset the apple cart. That made him the most old-fashioned presence in a program full of young, aggressively commercial self-packagers, for whom any statement — political or otherwise — is best judged by the number of units sold.”

    



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