TV Tuesdays 11: Slut-shaming shows, Nazi podcasters, and the truth
It all relates, I promise
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Welcome to the 11th TV Tuesday!
Listen, my sweet sweet babies. The truth is that in the past week I’ve only watched That 70s Show. For a polyamorous person, I’m seemingly a serial (heh) monogamist in my TV habits. So this is going to get a little into that. But I’m also going to talk about sex work, podcasts, truth, and how they all relate.
One thing I’m noticing in Season 2 of T7S is the pervasive, casual slut-shaming. A running joke is what a “whore” Eric’s sister is. She’s not actually a sex worker. Far be it, lol. She’s just promiscuous and also an asshole. The choice to make the only promiscuous woman in the cast a liar and mean person is pretty interesting in and of itself, in my opinion. There’s also Donna denying that she’s “that kind of girl.” There’s the using “easy” as a put-down (only directed toward women, of course).
This relates directly to something that bothered me as a young, Autistic, baby Evangelical with a bent toward all-or-nothing thinking and behavior. How does a person who’s having sex outside of marriage feel entitled to judge anyone else’s sexual morality? Even as an adult, it’s so interesting how Evangelicals, for all their many faults, offer a clear, objective line between moral and amoral sex with a line of reasoning that’s at least internally consistent. Church leaders taught me that God created sex to bind together a man and his wife. Any sex outside of that context is immoral because God doesn’t like it.
But with secular slut-shamers, it’s like, where’s the line? Sex outside of marriage is okay. But not with “too many” different people. Okay, well how many is too many? Oh, right. More than you’ve had, I guess. All this to say I empathize with and understand religious slut-shamers way more than secular ones.
Not that Evangelicals don’t have their arbitrary moralizing. I’m looking at you, “modesty culture.” How much thigh is too much? How about an ankle? How about you fucking kick out any grown men who are having problems with teenage skin? How about that?
Anyhoodle.
I’m left wondering how much slut-shaming is true to the period depicted in the show versus how much of it reflects the slut-shaming of the late 90s, when the show aired. It’s easy, for me and my ilk anyway, to remember the 90s as the era of a nascent (had to look up that spelling, lol) mainstreaming of sex-positive feminism, sex worker rights, riot grrrl, Courtney Love, etc.
Yet it’s been so interesting in the past few years to listen to podcast hosts go back and read the blatant misogyny and slut-shaming in the writing about women like Courtney Love and Fiona Apple in the 90s. That, I had not remembered. And that’s because we don’t notice defaults like slut-shaming and misogyny. We notice the pushback. So in this way I remember the counterculture more clearly than the culture it was fighting.
Speaking of media and podcasts, I’ve been binging The Realignment. One of the first things I want to know about someone is “What is your media diet, and why?” I think it reveals a shitton about a person. I’ve long recognized that my media diet is heavy on progressive sources. My problems finding conservative outlets have been threefold. First, I have a severe aversion to dishonesty. Second, damn do they piss me off. Third, I think I’ve, to an extent, fallen victim to the progressive urge to avoid listening to or associating with Nazis.
It’s funny. In a recent target audience interview the interviewer asked me why I don’t do in-person sex work anymore. And I said one of the main reasons is that many clients are lying to their wives and I deeply dislike spending time with people I don’t trust. Most of my OnlyFans subscribers, by contrast, are single or have wives who are fully supportive of their consumption of my material.
The issue with trust is that I don’t have the time, inclination, or in many cases skills, to fact check really anyone, much less everyone, I listen to.
But lately I’ve been realizing that progressives lie too. For example, many progs have tweeted that the rules Trump killed would have prevented crashes like the one in East Palestine. Well, they wouldn’t have prevented the East Palestine crash, actually. They only applied to larger trains. Which reminds me of the History Chicks podcast episode about a woman who successfully pushed for health and safety rules after a major factory fire.
Well, the thing about health and safety laws is that they often end up creating unintended consequences like higher prices while also, ironically, making people less safe. For example, the laws around staircases in the US make housing more expensive and buildings less safe. Or take the rules around extension cords in Oakland, CA. Inspectors removed the cords from the building to comply with code. So the occupants used candlelight instead, which helped set the building on fire and kill a lot of people.
To be fair, I don’t know that anyone is lying about any of this. They’re probably just mistaken. But that’s the thing as well. I don’t want to listen to people who are mistaken because, again, fact-checking takes time and skills.
But back to the Nazis. I’ve long said that in many ways I respect an honest Nazi more than a person with reasonable beliefs who lies. In some ways this is just an efficiency thing. I can filter everything an honest Nazi says through their Nazi beliefs. But a reasonable person who lies? Where do I even begin? I have to check everything they say against the facts from scratch. Whomst hath the time??
So one of my favorite segments from The Realignment podcast was with someone who represents the Thiel Fellowship. I’ve mostly avoided people associated with Thiel because, well, the man has some very Nazi-ish beliefs and behaviors.
But, listening to the podcast, I started thinking about Thiel’s relationship with the truth. Thiel is not a transparent person. This is the man sued Gawker in retribution for revealing he’s gay. He leaves a lot out. But, as far as I can tell, when he says something it does tend to be true. It’s never the whole truth. But it does tend to be accurate. And I mean, this is also the man who, unprompted, wrote a blog post in which he bemoaned women’s enfranchisement. Contrast Thiel with, say, Bari Weiss, who just flagrantly misrepresents reality as if it were her job. Which, now, I guess it is.
I am trying to move toward listening to people based on their integrity, honesty, and accuracy rather than their ideology. And I think it might behoove a lot of us to do the same.
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As I pretty vividly remember, the 90s *were* a time of blooming sex positivity. However, and this is important, there were massive geographic differences at play. I grew up in the Bay Area, and there was a much larger dichotomy between geographic regions than now. And the decade differed wildly from the beginning to the end. By 1998, slut shaming itself was shamed.
Donna would've banged a couple of douchebags in bad sex in high school and learned how to deal with their shit. Within a couple of years she'd have eaten a few molly pills and made out with girls. At first because the boys liked it, soon after because she truly liked it. By this time, she's exposed to the early internet, Susie Bright, and then starts having great relationships and things are meaningful. But she's still shocked at how the rest of the country can be having some conniption fit over Monica Lewinski.
This is a big reason I am such a Scott Alexander stan: I see him as honest and intellectually careful to a fault. But of course, as with e.g. old fave Conor Friedersdorf or new fave Jerusalem Demsas, I am not the best judge of his actual honesty because my worldview starts out so similar to his.
Thinking about unusually honest folks with very different worldviews from mine, three come to mind immediately: Lyman Stone, Richard Hanania, and Freddie deBoer-- a religious conservative, a militant anti-wokist, and a Marxist socialist respectively. All three can be offputting (Hanania especially I think is gratuitously nasty at times) and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to read them. But I get facts, insights, analyses, perspectives etc from them I wouldn't from anyone else. And it's good to be reminded that honest, smart, well-informed, thoughtful, intellectually careful people can hold all those views.