Humps Intervention

Everyone's all a-titter over Alanis Morissette's cover of the Black Eyed Peas song "My Humps," and her accompanying video, posted on YouTube.

Most seem to believe that this is all-in-good-fun parody.

By contrast, I find it to be Alanis's most committed and genuinely moving performance in years. Whether intentional or not, Alanis has created a brilliant and complex commentary on objectification, femininity and popular music.

The key the performance's brilliances lies in two factors: her plaintive, earnest reading of the song, and the disconnect between that reading and the stereotypical, sexed-up "pimps and hoes" imagery of the video. That disconnect creates a critical space in which the viewer becomes aware of their own position. We hear the lyrics more clearly than we have previously. Alanis implores us to look at her body and consider what we'd do with it, and for the first time, we take the question seriously. We become aware of our own desires and assumptions. What are we going to do with all that ass? What claim do we have to Alanis's body as possessors of the gaze? What power imbalances do or do not exist within that relationship?

Alanis brings two pathologized feminine popular music archetypes -- the weak, emotive singer-songwriter and the hypersexualized pop diva -- into conversation with one another, calling our attention to the ways in which women's bodies and experiences are frequently flattened into one dimension.

Brave New Wha???

I just finished reading Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" for (believe it or not) the first time.

Interestingly (tellingly?), I didn't find it particularly horrifying. The genetic engineering of rigid hierarchy is relatively upsetting, but the lack of sexual moralism (as distinct from morals/ethics, moralism is the casting of judgments and construction of hierarchies based upon sexual behaviors and identities) and the abolition of the "pedagogization of children's sex," as Foucalt would call it, the encouragement of shameless erotic play between children, is rather thrilling. I also have some affinity for the axiom that "we all belong to one another." Additionally, I'm not sure that as a given it would be such a terrible thing to sacrifice passion, creativity, individuality, etc. for a kind of blissed-out, drugged-up happiness, especially if we were to be entirely unaware of the possibility for alternative ways of being. And I kind of really want to go to a "feely." Sythesized sex on a bearskin rug sounds fantastic. The "savage" John's non-stop spouting of Shakespeare and self-flagellating religiosity annoy me as much or more than anything that is a part of the social order itself.

My reaction, particularly my rejection of highfalutin' enlightenment principles of truth and beauty (truth = bah!...spoken like a true Gen Y-er), might illuminate my own position within a transnational mass-mediatized consumer culture that has already progressed toward aspects of Huxley's vision. But I also think it illuminates some of the limitations of Huxley's text, some of which are admittedly attributable to historical context as much as narrowness of vision. I appreciate his analysis of power, which examines the ways in which we "love our servitude," which is distinct from an analysis of power as sheer force and domination, such as that presented by Orwell in "1984." But Huxley's idea of "loving our servitude" more or less boils down to childhood psychological conditioning, to subconscious psycho-social control. I understand that this was a genuine concern for the author.... but it remains a notion of power as "top-down." I tend to be more interested (like Foucalt) in how power functions through our own self-policing, our own accommodation to dominant/accepted norms/values/ideologies. We can recognize the "truth" and still self-consciously choose to believe in, or at least submit to, regulatory fictions. This strikes me as far more interesting than being controlled by voices in our sleep.

Additionally the question emerges -- if we love our servitude, who are we servile to? With the possible exception of class, Huxley doesn't name any specific social hierarchies at work in his dystopia. The "losers" are evidently humanity in general, because we lack art, religion, selfish attachments to one another and our all-precious individuality. Of course the working classes, bread en masse and genetically inferior, have objectively shittier existences. But they are entirely unaware of this shittiness, which although tragic, makes them largely unsympathetic. Huxley's dehumanizing descriptions of the subaltern Gammas and Epsilons, many of whom are people of color (the only characters, aside from the American Indian "savages," who are racially marked), seem to betray his own disdain for and fear of the poor folk of his own time as much as they do the evils of the social system he describes. They frequently function as terrifying images of the society's awfulness, rather than as actual people. Then there's the "savages," the text's ultimate "other." Huxley manages to invoke both the construct of the "noble savage" (through John, who incidentally is White, the child of a "civilized" woman), and cast Pueblo Indians as nightmarishly deprived and backward. The women in the text are the same agency-less, one-dimensional, largely symbolic figures that populate much of the dystopic literature of White men.

In Huxley's world, men (and I do mean men, since that is all we see) who become more conscious of their condition and of their intellectual, creative and relational straitjacketing, are permitted to relocate to islands of other free-thinkers. It kind of reminds me of Imperial Russia's exile of dissidents to Siberia. All the cool kids get to hang out with one another, write masterpieces and brainstorm. (I kind of want to go!) With the rest of the population blissfully unaware of their conditions, I'm not entirely certain I understand, within the terms set forth by the novel (meaning the valorization of individuality, intellectualism, creativity and selfish relationships), what's really at stake.