I thought this album crude and naive at first: "trying to be heroic"? How self absorbed can one be? Having now listened to it many times I appreciate the honesty: he's not saying that he thinks this is how one ought feel, just how he does. The feelings are not unfamiliar to me: of trying to do what's right when what's right is rarely as obvious as one would like; finding that the models (for love, life, value, morals etc) assumed in the contemporary discourse do not fit the realities as closely as one would naively believe in childhood; of feeling ostracised from a 'normal' society that in reality does not exist! Time and again songwriters, and indeed artists of all tacks, with the nerve to open up and bare themselves show that while some will reject them out of deep borne fear and anxiety, many will respond in kind, having felt ostracised themselves, questioning themselves, feeling insane and now - through someone else's expression of the same emotion - no longer feeling so alone and so wrong.
Alas, a Blog - one of my favourites - touch upon this fraudulent, meticulously maintained, isolation through moral righteousness with relation to sex-positivity - automatically associated with perversity and abuse by the indignant preachers of moral certainty and human-to-human hatred. This subject is close to my heart at present for two related reasons: one, in my own life I've been completely re-evaluating my attitudes to sex and relationships; two, I still feel guilty for the preachy discussion of prostitution I wrote on this blog not so long ago, which I am now convinced was very much wrong in approach.
So for the first: I have always had awkward attitudes to sex. Obviously I enjoy sex, as everyone presumably does since their parents obviously did... but being raised in the heart of Daily Mail Britain I felt sex was only to be undertaken with your (future - we've gotten about as liberal as the 50s here) marriage partner. Now what this meant in effect was the first f*ck I had I had to marry. I very nearly did, and we scarcely got on after the first few months of fun. Gradually I've become more an more liberal, but I've still been troubled by jealousy and anxiety around a partner's behaviour, unmitigated anger at those I judge my competition, a distancing of myself from those I find attractive and a long standing mistreatment of one of my favourite people in all the world because she didn't want to sleep with me and I couldn't act like anything other than a toddler about that. How absurd is this? And yet it is the norm: it is what we are expected and indeed encouraged to feel. Your spouse has cheated on you? Chop their balls off! NO! We do not need this moral indignation and standards that no-one ever meets. Which would you prefer: the indignation or actual happiness? Well, I would prefer the latter, and my recent thinking has made it far more possible. I'm not sure the model is perfect, it's not been in my head long and it's not been tested by much, but so far it's made me feel a lot more at ease with the world than the absurdly complex arrangement that I had been working from previously. This is it:
It's so much more fitting. Why would I judge those I love the most the harshest on very specific things? That isn't love. Love should be the unconditional acceptance of another person, with all their complexities: love the person,the underlying judgement maker, and thus all their judgements and thus all their life; love is not taking a person, constructing a narrative around them in your own head and then chastising them for failing to measure up exactly to that narrative when it was never even present to them in the first place.
So broadly this new picture is working out well for me, and has put me at ease. As well as becoming a lot less hasty to judge those around me, I'm less inclined to judge others generally. And thus we come back to my earlier article on prostitution. Now I still think that a lot of people do get abused and that this is obviously a terrible thing that would be best eradicated. Anyone who doesn't think that trafficking, rape, psychological and physical abuse and so on are not vile stains on humanity that we would be so much better off without is presumably psychopathic. The mistake I think I made before is to then blame those who are prostitutes of their own volition for glorifying the trade. Now how absurd is that in retrospect? It was a fairly typical example of some self-righteous, ill-informed idiot displacing their own personal issues via the judgement of others. It is always so tempting to hate most in others what one fears in oneself. So let's take a step back: there is nothing wrong with prostitution; there is nothing wrong with sex; there is something wrong with coercion. Coercion is most prominently the business of money, and this article fantastically reminds me of that:
This moral indignation emanates from people who live comfortably, who are not wondering where their next meal will come from or how to pay doctors’ bills. These moral entrepreneurs do not have to choose between being a live-in maid, with no privacy or free time and unable to save money because the pay is so bad, and selling sex, which pays so well that you have time to spend with your children or read a book, money to buy education or a phone.
More and more I think that all exclusion is tied to money, and that morality - in terms of the theory and the judgemental arguments that litter our media - is little more than a device of the moneyed to distance themselves from the squalid life of the poor - see this post on the Victorian tribute act of Ian Duncan Smith. These judgements allow the rich to console themselves and appease their conscience by a trick: "the poor are poor because of their ill morals, they give this life to themselves"; further, it allows them to feel even more righteous when giving up their time to 'educate' the poor in such noble qualities as 'ambition' and 'self-respect'. That way you don't have to acknowledge that you were born rich and they were born poor and so few change their station in life as to make the notions of 'meritocracy' and 'ambition' entirely vacuous, while feeling heroic in an age of modernity.
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