NFTW
By Paul Klemperer

So I was driving by the megachurch in my neighborhood and the giant cross-shaped electronic marquee flashed an ad in huge, glowing red letters (Why red? I always ask myself: so lurid, so venal, so naughty!) announcing that MISS AMERICA would be appearing at OUR CHURCH.  Okay, I thought, trying not to veer into oncoming traffic, this is just another one of those quirky juxtapositions of different realities that happens all the time in America.  After all, that's what makes our country great, right?  A nation where a B-movie actor can grow up to be president, where Hollywood health clubs teach classes in pole-dancing, and the best-rated TV shows feature celebrities eating buckets of live maggots.  Simply put, we live in a culture that thrives on entertainment.

Which got me thinking… Why are our most celebrated cultural products so visceral, so anti-intellectual?  We make generals and millionaires our presidents, not poets or scientists.  Why are generals and millionaires more appealing?  Are they smarter?  Doubtful.  Better able to view the whole picture?  Nope.  Sexier?  Hmmm.  Now we're onto something.  It's no secret that sex sells (in fact sex sells pretty much everything these days), but what makes something sexy?  To dig deeper into that question, we open the door to fetishism.

Now we don't have to get overly Freudian, but there are some basic ideas which come our way via anthropology.  The term "fetish" is generally understood to mean an object believed to have magical powers.  Every culture has its fetish objects, from rabbit feet to crucifixes to football jerseys.  No big revelation there.  But the more current (and murky) meaning of "fetish" is an object invested with sexual powers.  The magical power becomes sexual energy.  You got your shoe fetish, of course, and your underwear fetish; tame stuff by today's standards, but back in the 1950s and 60s they were considered pretty kinky.  Nowadays, thanks to mass media marketing, it's hard to think of an object that hasn't been fetishized.  My latest bete noire of advertising is the Hummer ad: they are pimping civilian Hummers in sexy colors like canary yellow and cobalt blue, with sexy models driving them.  I guess a Hummer can be sexy, in the same way a tank, a scud missile, or a death star can be sexy.  Sure, why not?  Think BIG!

But this raises a simple question:  Isn't a sexual fetish supposed to be an actual object, which you actually need in order to satisfy your actual desires?  It's hard to fit a Hummer into your bedroom.  Expensive too.  I suppose Arnold Schwarzenegger can do it, but for the rest of us we must rely on our imaginations.  So we must distinguish between actual fetishes and virtual fetishes.  When we think in these terms we can see that much of our daily life is filled with virtual fetishes.  The term "virtual reality" describes more than just computer simulations.  How much of your daily life involves perceiving and thinking of things which aren't physically there, and yet which evoke an emotional/sexual response?

Want an example?  Okay, all the carnivores out there raise your hand.  Most of us get enough to eat, here in the land of plenty.  Yet we are bombarded by food ads, especially meat ads.  Juicy steaks, plump hamburgers, crispy fried chicken!  Mmmm… are you salivating yet?  My point is that it's not just when we are hungry that these food objects stimulate our pleasure centers:  The food itself has been fetishized.  We get stimulated by the mere picture of a big mac, just as we get stimulated by a picture of a Playboy model (or a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio, whatever).  So a fetish can be the object itself, or simply a representation of the object.  If a hamburger makes you horny, a picture of a hamburger may do so as well.  It's a double fetish: the fetish itself, and an image of the fetish.  What a wacky world.

Meanwhile Miss America is appearing at the megachurch.  How does this all fit together?  Well, if we weren't such a fetish-driven culture, we wouldn't be affected by all these roving icons and the media engines that promote them.  Miss America, Hummers, even Big Macs would affect us less than the squawking of the grackles in the trees overhead.  But these cultural icons do resonate with our inner needs, so we pay attention to them.  We imbue them with fetishistic power, believing at some level that they will magically make us happy.  We aren't totally nuts, of course, so we tuck that fetishistic belief in magic into a back corner of our psyches, and cover it with the label "entertainment," which makes it safe.  Thus, all these icons dancing around on our cultural stage are merely different forms of entertainment.  When they are doubly fetishized, reduced to glossy photos or visual bursts on TV, they further distract and entertain us without opening the door of the libido too wide.

But this safe form of fetishism does a disservice to entertainment.  It turns things like music, dance and drama into recreational activities, not life-changing experiences.  In times past, people could be moved to tears by a poem, could fall in love with a singing voice.  Nowadays, if you become so emotionally involved with art (and you're old enough to buy cigarettes) you must be a Trekker, a stalker, have a prescription for the latest mood-stabilizing pharmaceutical, or all of the above.

Since Miss America is a "safe" sexual icon, she can be allowed in church.  Her fetishistic attributes will draw parishioners like flies to shitake mushrooms dipped in honey, but will not unduly disrupt the judeo-christian moral balancing act.  Contrast this, for example, with the fetishistic qualities of Britney Spears, whose move towards soft-core status in recent years makes her an unsafe icon.  What makes a sexual icon safe?  I suppose the main thing is that the icon projects a simplified version of sexuality.  Miss America is supposed to project traditional American values--apple pie, the girl next door, middle class innocence.  To preserve this idealized sexuality, the icon is rendered anti-intellectual, not in a "dumb blonde" sense, but in the sense that one is meant to idolize the object without thinking about it too much, without attaching ideas to it which could make it ambiguous in meaning.  The controversy surrounding Miss America, first brought to the table by the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, was precisely about the meaning of Miss America as a cultural icon. 

Cultural icons become ambiguous when too many conflicting ideas are associated with them.  Rock Hudson was a sex symbol of the 1960s.  Michael Jackson was a sex symbol of the 1980s.  Their status as icons with fetishistic power became lost as the realities of their lives got in the way, and conflicting meanings became associated with them.  The media industry expends vast amounts of time and money trying to turn people and products into icons with fetishistic powers.  Hence the Hummer.  The recent brouhaha over whether SUVs contribute to terrorism because they guzzle gas is on one level an ideological fight over the iconic meaning of the SUV, and its barbarian king the Hummer.

Some icons increase in fetishistic power precisely because they accrue conflicting meanings.  For example, what has given Madonna such longevity as an icon?  Her musical and acting talent?  Methinks not.  Rather it's because all the different phases of her showbiz projections add to her image, from streetpunk virgin to s&m diva.  Perhaps her greatest talent has been her ability to stitch together fetishistic aspects of American sexuality into her public persona.  She has withstood repeated attempts to deconstruct, redefine and explain her.  She's just Madonna.

Finally, how do these ideas of fetishism in entertainment relate to the music industry?  We can see obvious examples in the molding of pop stars, but I think there are ways to apply this analysis to the music itself, to the construction of musical styles and particular hit songs.  I welcome any feedback/ideas on the subject and I'll delve into it further next month.  In the meantime, keep your fetish dry.