Corporate power and consent

This one-two punch of insulting the reader then attempting to shock him will be familiar to the many readers of The Last Psychiatrist. In short-form blog format, it can genuinely both entertain and inform. Left unanswered, for the moment at least, is whether or not the same guerrilla-warfare style that makes a 3,000-word blog post memorable can sustain a book the size of Moby-Dick. Perhaps that is why Sadly, Porn begins in such unpleasant fashion — it weeds out the less than committed. He sighs, “Well, there’s my whole introduction. I fully agree that it is completely useless, but since it’s been written, let it stand. And now to business.”

If you make it through the first 10% of the book, you’ve ignored what the author later calls “a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign, written in cat,” and now we can get down to business. Of a sort, anyway, what follows is half an Oedipus Rex explainer and half a diatribe about how Sigmund Freud allowed himself to be manipulated by a female patient, leavened by a little bit of imaginary dialogue with the Sphinx. Unbound by editorial restraint or concern for the audience, “Edward Teach” is then free to ricochet through: The Devil Wears Prada, The Matrix, multiple Greek plays, Indecent Proposal, Rebecca, Frankenstein, college date-rape scandals, why Mormons were at the forefront of the suffrage movement, The Bostonians, the distinction between mercantilism and capitalism in A Christmas Carol. 

Things go on like this until the part where the subject of study becomes what the author describes as “the 2020 straight-to-video-clips sex comedy Confirmative Assent,” which centers on “a party, where the game of the night is Four Second Rule.” The exhaustive nature of the analysis performed on this film sent many of Sadly, Porn’s early readers to the internet, where they discovered that “confirmative assent” does not, in fact, exist. This whole massive section of the book, with its pornographic excerpts, odd plotting, and occasionally feverish diatribes, amounts to a cautionary tale about trusting the validity of secondary sources — except you need the “secondary source” of the internet to realize what’s happened.

Next up: Bible verses that may or may not be correct, a truly caustic take on The Giving Tree, complete with allusions to other Shel Silverstein cartoons that, as far as I can determine, are also made up by the author, and an attempt to show how the math in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking-Horse Winner probably didn’t add up.

So what’s it all about, as Burt Bacharach might ask? Quite a bit, obviously, but there are a few recurring themes requiring attention. To begin with, this truly is a book about pornography — but not just in the “sexy wife” or “sorority house” sense. Rather, it concerns itself with the slippery slope of societal transformation in America from the active to the passive voice.

The original purpose of pornography, least controversially explained as visual or imaginative aid to self-gratification, has been overwhelmed by its current purpose as a tool of mental reprogramming for our society. Why is “cuckold porn,” in which a wife or girlfriend is violated by a third party, now such a popular form of pornography? The author suggests that it is because men once acted on their desires but now act in such a way as to be desired, coupled with their last remaining desire, which, of course, is to deny satisfaction to others. The wife in this scenario is degraded because the men with whom she cuckolds the husband have no particular regard or affection for her — they are “only out for one thing,” which they obtain from her while giving very little in exchange. The power of the cuckold is that he does not truly want his wife himself. He only wants to be amused by her. But she desires him, at least as a partner, so she, in turn, is forced to perform for his amusement with men who want her on a very limited basis.

Compare this with traditional romance or fantasy, where the man desperately wants the woman while she both knows this and is gratified by it: “The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.” Cuckold pornography frees the man from that desire, thus depriving the woman of hers as well.

Similarly, the modern “balance of power” in the workplace has taken power away from the big, bad white men who were the all-purpose villains of Marxist folk tales, but it has not given it to women or minorities, who still feel powerless and subject to external, oppressive whims. The power, as with the desire previously expressed in a pre-pornographic world, has simply vanished. 

Or has it? The author notes, “There is a curious fact about college sexual assault cases that has no analog in any other kind of violation: in none of the publicly reported cases of campus sexual assault do you ever hear from or about the parents of the woman, despite the fact that they’re paying the tuition. The story cannot include them. It’s not because she’s an adult. It’s because her owner is the college.”

So the problem of date rape is solved not by stopping it nor by discouraging it — but by giving extrajudicial powers of punishment to the institution, which was the point in the first place. Similarly, the power that has “leaked” from the old white men in corporations hasn’t trickled down to women in minorities. Rather, it has been safely assigned to the bureaucracy of the corporation, now residing in the thousands of rules and guidelines and “best practices” that can claim no particular author nor origin but seem to be omnipresent in our business environment.

If we accept both of the above premises, then it seems obvious that the “desire leakage” caused by modern pornography has accumulated elsewhere. Where? The answer is about three-quarters of the way through Sadly, Porn in a discussion of the lamentable 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon. There’s little actual pornography in that book or its successors, but there is endless attention paid to the “contract” signed by both billionaire Christian Grey and his “submissive.” The contract is not tangential to the action, it is the point:

“The 50 Shades demo wants power to shift away from men, but democratic power has failed them, ‘men’ can still circumvent it. The only reliable source of power, the kind that everyone obeys, is corporate power. … Changes in the workplace may have been motivated by a desire for gender equality, it may have been at the expense of male chauvinist employees but the changes could only have been permitted by those men if power increased for someone other than women and men they know: the corporation. The women made the same deal. Corporate power became nearly inviolable.”

And that is where the desire went: the same place as the power. It went into the corporation. We have been taught to desire in terms of brands, and we have been taught that the corporation is the final arbiter of what is permissible. The literal-minded idiots who bray about “freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences” have missed the point. Virtually all power is corporate now. No, they won’t throw you in jail for using a word that was commonplace 10 years ago but is now verboten. Instead, you will be punished at the corporate level. You will become an unperson.

In Blade Runner, the policeman Rick Deckard is threatened thus: You’re not a cop. You’re little people! In the real future, police are “little people” themselves. Only “corporate people” have any money, any power, any agency, in America. It is telling that the most severe punishment the detractors of The Last Psychiatrist could come up with eight years ago was to “doxx” him — in other words, to force his corporate self to own up to his internet samizdat, in particular, a piece called “Who Bullies the Bullies?” This led to eight years of radio silence before the publication of this book and another one on a more limited topic — namely classical Greek drama, something that is also omnipresent in Sadly, Porn. 

Is there an alternative to a world in which all power, all desire, has leaked to corporations? There is, but you probably won’t like it. Specifically, it is Russian President Vladimir Putin telling an oligarch to sign a document and then return the pen he has been lent, both actions being undertaken on pain of death should the oligarch refuse. The only power stronger than the “soft power” of the liberal-corporate complex is the “hard power” of strongmen. Does “Edward Teach” think we should choose that direction instead? In nearly 500 dizzying pages of blunt statements, such a sentiment is too risky, too problematic, even for him. Forget setting the bar to the sky. To wish openly for a monarchist-style destruction of corporate power is, even among the “independent thinkers” of the intellectual dark web, equivalent to setting the controls to the heart of the sun.

Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver, and he has been the “Avoidable Contact” columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines.