I clearly remember an evening earlier this year when I was walking through the living room and overheard Barbara Walters interviewing Lady Gaga, asking her if she’s bisexual. Not even an hour had elapsed since the end of a somber telethon intended to raise money for people who don’t have access to water, let alone food, let alone medicine, let alone police protection, let alone political liberty, and already we’re in over our heads in the public broadcast of cheap commercialized sexuality. Of course there’s an offered pretense of liberation and empowerment and some bluster about artistic integrity, and it’s all the most transparent kind of bullshit. There’s nothing nearly so noble going on here; she’s dangling sexual bait in front of a culture awash in addicts with the promise of yet another new and tantalizing image of the forbidden to hook them into buying more cheap and vapid product, underwriting the lifestyle of yet another pure celebrity (famous for being famous) and the commercial machine that continues to produce more like her. That Walters would ask the question demonstrates how distant her occupation is from “journalist” and how close it comes to “unreflective shill”, and Gaga’s answers were straight out of a sexual manipulation playbook: up the titillation just enough to be heard above the cacophonous sexual background noise of pop culture.
Our cultural dialog about sex has been turned precisely upside-down. Fornication, adultery, pornography, sodomy, exhibitionism, and general licentiousness are talked about as “liberties” and “rights” which evil repressed men want to take away, when in reality each is a loaded snare just waiting to enslave unwitting passers-by. The important question is not whether young women should be free to flaunt their sexual perversion on television, but why they are doing so with such calculated regularity; even a moment’s reflection makes the answer clear: to get a barbed hook into the brains of people they will never know, to play upon their weaknesses and extract as much money from them as possible.
When someone is an addict, you can respond in two ways: you can love yourself, or you can love them. If you love yourself, you’ll manipulate, feed, and take advantage of the addiction so you can fulfill some want of your own: a codependent enables an alcoholic in order to feel needed, a dealer enables a junkie in order to keep demand for his product up, a media executive dangles an unending stream of addictive sexual imagery before the eyes of the world to keep them hooked and coming back for more. Loving others above yourself demands a wholly different response, and it is a sick world that turns a blind eye to this kind of manipulative selfish greed hiding behind the pretense of “art”.
