Poll: Would anyone here object to or be offended by skimpy outfits on male volleyball team members?

[rrneck]

63. Took a while, but here are my current (probably incoherent) thoughts on the subject.

It seems interesting that liberal ideology can sometimes find its way to alignment with conservative positions. It seems a curious path to tread.

It’s been many years since I read it, but in The Scandal of Pleasure Wendy Steiner argues, as I recall, that the understanding of an image can be informed by one’s political ideology. While liberals tend to deemphasize the relationship between the symbol and the thing it symbolizes, conservatives are much more likely to be literalists and feel that a particular image will result in a given response because there is little distinction between the symbol, the thing it symbolizes, and its meaning to the viewer. Thus, liberals are less likely to be bothered by the burning of the flag, while conservatives may consider its destruction a personal insult. And if the image is confrontational, conservatives are more likely to accept the confrontation at face value rather than an opportunity to deconstruct its content or their response to it.

But it seems that liberals are not immune to literalism, although we are much less likely to indulge in it. From liberal positions regarding the psychological impact of firearms, images of women in popular culture, and religious practice liberals sometimes seem prompted to seek solutions to their perceptions of these problems more suited to our political opposites. The question is how do we create a liberal literalist, which is to say, how do we make a liberal respond to an image like a conservative?

Willingness to submit to authority, or authoritarianism, is ubiquitous and necessary for the proper function of any society. Sooner or later we have to stop asking questions and let somebody call the shots. There is a little authoritarian in all of us. To be an authoritarian in the United States generally means you’re willing to submit to the authority of a white, male, Christian, capitalist. The conservatives attract the attention of the bulk of the most overt authoritarian followers for that reason. But we are no longer bound by the constraints of immobility or isolation from the ideas of others. We can interact with people all over the planet.

Like I said, there is a little authoritarian in all of us. And the impulse to submit to the appropriate authority could, with the miracle of modern technology, be the source of a revenue stream not previously available to the enterprising capitalist. Given a properly developed ideology and sufficient distribution, we can profitably drill for pockets of authoritarianism in places where before it might never see the light of day. And through the miracle of marketing, the promulgators of an ideology don’t have to prove it works in any measurable way, since the object of such an approach is to prompt consumers to submit to the authority of their own opinions (helpfully provided by the producer of the ideology). All you have to do is tell people what they want to hear and attach that message to something that is ubiquitous, simple, malleable, and personally identifiable to the ideological consumer.

We spontaneously fetishize everything around us to one degree or another. Given our tendency to over consume everything from red meat to video games, can our sensitivities to a social issue be excluded from such excesses? All it takes is some purple prose, a few extreme examples, some tangential relationship between the ideological consumer and the individual or group impacted by some socio-cultural situation, and an object or characteristic to fetishize and viola, a movement is born. Those objects can be almost anything it seems, good or bad. So if the above holds true gender, firearms, sexual orientation, the environment, the NRA, religion, atheism, drugs, illegal aliens, raw food, and a host of others offer a focus to objectify our feelings about ourselves and our relationship to others. The object of interest can be good or bad, real or fictional, current or historical, animal, vegetable, or mineral. It doesn’t matter. It is only important that one identifies with issue through the fetish object.

When that identification is secured, the producer of ideology only has to adjust the message for maximum impact balanced against the intensity of identification. It seems that the larger the target market for ideology, the more lukewarm the identification, while at the other end of the scale a cult like following will have a generally smaller market for followers.

So, it could be that the degree of authoritarianism created in the viewer will determine how literal, or right(p.9), is the object of their fetishization. So for example, for the most authoritarian liberal there would be only one way to interpret an image of a scantily clad woman, an AR15 rifle, a grove of trees, a yacht, or any other politically divisive notion in the political landscape. It doesn’t matter if the interpretation is correct or not, for the authoritarian interpreter theirs is the only legitimate one. And it appears that such devotion to that interpretation has less to do with an actual understanding of the issue at hand than with skillful marketing by the producers of ideology.

The Scandal of Pleasure
http://www.amazon.com/The-Scandal-Pleasure-Art-Fundamentalism/dp/0226772241/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1344467820&sr=8-2&keywords=wendy+steiner
Steiner (English, Univ. of Pennsylvania) takes on the Mapplethorpe/Serrano/NEA blowup, the Ayatollah's death sentence on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, the Dworkin-MacKinnon anti-pornography movement, political correctness, and the disparity between the scholarly and political activities of Anthony Blunt, Martin Heidegger, and Paul de Man. Her intelligent, evenhanded presentation of the events and issues involved in each argues against the literalism of the Left and Right, which both see art as identical to reality. Steiner instead emphasizes that art is a virtual reality whose pleasurable enjoyment can enable us to master the difference between fantasy and reality. Her book is calm and rational?qualities in short supply in the current climate of hysteria over the questions she treats. For literature collections.?Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.