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soon as I got home internet access the sexual spam began: endless
ads offering pills to enlarge my penis, and varieties of black market
Viagra and latter-day rhino horn potions. There was also the occasional
ad offering various means of increasing breast size.
One ad I’ve gotten over
and over cracked me up, and then got me to thinking. It began with
the direct pitch that if you were not a superstud, your woman might
leave you for an Alpha man. Women were insatiable creatures
(so goes this sexual mythology), and only men who could perform
like professionals in bed could hope to keep their women at home.
This was the tease that
initially tickled my funny bone:
“You can be a sex machine.
Finally available to the public. The supplement that made sex stars
famous. Make love to her like no other man can. Over and over again,
All night long!
Before she can catch her
breath, mount her again and again
Pleasuring her AND YOURSELF
orgasm after orgasm after orgasm.”
In the real world, if
Bubba became such a sex machine, his lady would soon show him the
door. And all that goes up must come down. If Bubba wouldn’t come
down in bed, his boss would bring him back to earth, after he crashed
from exhaustion at work in a few days.
But we’re not talking
about the natural order of things here. As this ad says:
“Porn stars shoot an entire
movie in just ONE DAY having sex! Many times with many different
women! THEY WEREN’T BORN THAT WAY!”
You got that right: we
weren’t born that way. But this is only a more direct statement
of a persistent message of our culture: so that “YOU TOO WILL BE
IN DEMAND,” you must buy (into) whatever it takes—pop pills, go
under the surgeon’s knife, subscribe to the latest diet craze, buy
the latest beer or car or makeup that makes us super virile and
super attractive.
This ad made me think
about my son Samuel, who was so fond of his penis as a toddler that
he would grab it and hold it out in front of himself proudly as
he scampered around the house. Leading with his penis, as it were.
Boys-to-men seem to do
this naturally—point their penis at the world and assume that everyone
else will be just as impressed as they are. Or bow down before it.
What is it that drives us to create, or imagine, bigger penises,
bigger weapons, and bigger Gods, in order to keep our women, and
our enemies, from straying from their assigned place?
The personal is still
the political, I thought, while watching the hyper-macho posturings
in campaign 2004. This ad came to mind when a columnist
scoffed at the notion that the media or the Republicans could create
a caricature of Kerry as a Massachusetts liberal: "That won't
work with Kerry. He has actually killed
people in the name of the U.S. government, and has the medals
to prove it." You can’t call me soft when I’ve killed for my
country!
But
the highest honor of all is killing for our God, and in this, the
good Christian soldiers of the U.S. are all too similar to their
enemies. Lt. General William Boykin, a self-described member
of the “Army
of God,” told church groups about the moment he confronted a
Somali soldier. He had the blessed assurance that “my
God was bigger than his.”
Fill in the blank: “My
___ is bigger than your ___.”
I am convinced that all
this phallic inflation links up: big ego, bigger penis, biggest
God, a military erection that just won’t quit, and the size of our
enemies that we keep inflating.
So we’ve got bombs inscribed
“Fuck You Saddam.” Viewers in the propaganda
state were “subjected to a pornographic spectacle, in which
violence was treated like sexuality to enhance the appeal of the
war to TV audiences,” writes Paul Rutherford in Weapons of Mass
Persuasion. It was a morally
repugnant celebration of the penetration and mutilation of
Baghdad as the “ultimate
viagra.”
What do we expect our
underpaid soldiers to do in foreign lands, pumped up with a belief
in American pre-eminence, holding the world’s biggest arsenal, convinced
that the biggest God is on their side, their ears full of the hatred
for foreigners that can be heard from all too many preachers, politicians,
and media bigots? Now we have the photos: American and British soldiers
urinating on their captors, forcing them to masturbate, to simulate
oral and anal sex.
Lest we pass this off
as just a male problem, women got in on the fun too.
This state of affairs
put Kim Antieau to meditating on the “uncomfortable
parallels” between the Bush administration and Islamic fundamentalists.
“They are both fanatical in their belief that they are right, they
are guided by the divine, and those who disagree with them are the
enemy,” she writes. Both sides are “indoctrinating their followers
with their religious and political beliefs--which are one and the
same.” Now our soldiers are becoming like what we hate, torturing
prisoners, and apparently going even further than soldiers of the
jihad, sodomizing
detainees.
When we describe others
out of hate or anger, we often unwittingly describe ourselves. This
is projection—what bothers us about others is something that all
the world can see in us, except we ourselves Thus you have the spectacle
of Donald Rumsfeld condemning Arab media: "We are dealing with
people who are willing
to lie to the world to make their case." Or President
Bush saying resistance to the American occupation comes from people
who “hate freedom”: “It's going to take a while for them to understand
what
freedom is all about."
I am afraid that “many
more will have to suffer, many more will have to die” before a majority
in this super-inflated superpower stop lying to themselves, and
to the world. It may take an environmental catastrophe like that
predicted
by the Pentagon, or dramatized in the film The
Day After Tomorrow, before Americans come to terms with
what freedom costs, when we keep trying to foist our own unsustainable
lifestyle on the rest of the world.
I think about that soldier,
with his weapon in his hand, who imagined that the greatest gift
we could give to the Iraqi people would be to construct shopping
malls and fast food outlets, from
Basra to Baghdad. And I wonder about the self-absorption of
people who do not understand why not everyone wants to live like
we do, or worship God by the same name, or submit to the fierce
urge to mount someone or something over and over again.
“Seek good, not evil, that you may
live,” said the prophet Amos. If we want to live, we must undergo
“a complete
revolution in worldview,” re: our tendency to seek out enemies,
and to live beyond our means. Our survival requires that we “refuse
to be
God,” Camus remarked. We have to learn to “ recognizes limits,”
Robert Jay Lifton writes in The
Superpower Syndrome. The limits of our bodies, and the limits
of the earth we live on, for starters. And at root, to admit the
limits of our understanding of the Creator of this World, who is
certainly capable of revealing His or Her will through more than
one nation, language, or species.
Gregory
Stephens has taught
at the University of California and the University of Oklahoma,
and is currently completing a book called Real Revolutionaries:
Revisioning Kinship and Co-Creation. His writings and radio
shows are available at: www.gregorystephens.com.
Contact: gstephen@email.unc.edu.
Other Articles by Gregory
Stephens
* Heartland
Morality, American Politics
* The
Fiya Burn Controversy
* Interview
with JFLAG's Julius Powell
* Forever
Milking Bob
*
Luciano Retrospective
* Interview
with Sister Carol
* Translating
Juan Luis Guerra's Language of Love
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