Two Four One: Gallery

There is a question that occurs to me tonight: what are we permitted to desire?

Of course, asking that question immediately leads back to another, more basic one: permitted by whom?

I think the answer is, simply enough, social media. Social media has become the gallery of hooded figures passing judgment on us all. Cancel culture, call-out culture--- whatever the term, social media has become an externalized superego, the external voice of social shame. Twenty years ago, what you did in public could be judged by your friends, certainly, and by the relatively few people who physically saw you. You weren't yet judged by an audience of potentially scores of thousands.

It's possible that a generation ago, guilt meant more than shame. How you judged yourself meant more than what strangers thought--- if only because there were so few strangers who were aware of you or who were physically close enough to see anything you did. And now we've displaced the right to issue judgments to the people who view your social media.

Right now, most of us have some kind of social media presence. Not so much here, mind you, but at places like Twitter or FB, places designed for interaction. Judgment has become much more externalized. Social disapproval, social exclusion--- all that has become much more weighty. There are more voices in your ears telling you that what you think, what you desire, what you do and are is unacceptable and shameful.

Tonight's question is simple: what are we permitted to desire? And more--- how are we allowed to articulate that desire? 

When you look at a potential partner, a potential lover, what are you allowed to want? Here in the age of the gender wars, can you say that you want anything specific? Can you say that you like a particular set of physical or social qualities? Age, height, weight, eye colour, hair colour--- are you allowed to have preferences? Are you  required to justify your preferences? Are you even allowed to justify your tastes? Can you even express desire without being told by angry, unknown voices that you have no right to feel anything at all?

I've said this before, but it feels much harder now than it did twenty years ago to even talk about desire. Once upon a time, discussing fantasies and sharing memories of past adventures would have been part of any enjoyable date, of any courtship ritual. Who can do that now? The ghosts in the gallery are there waiting to call you out, to cancel you--- and they needn't actually be lurking on your smartphone or your laptop. They're on the devices of everyone around you. They're sitting invisibly at your shoulder, waiting for you to make that first mistake.

The ghosts in the gallery have no clear set of standards for judging you. Their point is that doing anything at all is wrong. Being there is wrong. Any choice excludes and marginalizes, they'll say. Any courtship is coercive. Any social time spent together is an imposition on someone's time. Any sexual preference--- positions, places,  fetishes ---is wrong. Physical desire itself is wrong, and certainly coercive to discuss. Pleasure is not just seen as a zero-sum thing demanded of someone else, pleasure is regarded as suspect all on its own, as a concept.

To write about sex and pleasure, to write about courtships and explorations--- that's no longer acceptable. The voices in the gallery can tell you with derision and vitriol that talking about those things makes you complicit in oppression.  Feeling desire is something that must be suppressed, and discussing it must be cancelled. So the gallery voices say.

And right now no one is defending the idea of desire.