CW: sexual assault
Preface
There’s been a bit of a shitshow (understatement of the year) going on in every aspect of the entertainment industry for a while now. It’s recently boiled up to the surface where everyone can see it— I am, of course, talking about people (mostly men) with power abusing, sexually and physically, people with less or no power. It has been a problem for many, many, many years, only now those who have been at the mercy of the men in power have decided that enough is more than enough and, en masse, they have been telling their stories. And for once, the men in power who have committed these heinous acts are actually being held accountable. They’re losing jobs, contracts and reputation and this time nobody is buying their song-and-dance.
The hope is that what’s happening now will not only lead to some difficult conversations about things like privilege and rape culture taking place — like they already have been for years — but that the intended audience for those conversations will finally get it and take corrective action. One such conversation revolves around media consumption, the concept of “death of the artist,” and being able to separate our feelings of nostalgia for a particular creator from how we handle new, serious information. That’s a conversation I’d like to have as someone who not only consumes, but creates.
Part 1: we already think critically about the content we consume
This is a truism often uttered negatively; artists will sometimes feel that their audience is being too harsh on them, or that they simply don’t “understand” their art well enough to get its genius. Taken literally, however, the truism becomes solid truth: everyone is, in fact, a critic — about every song they hear, book or article they read, and video, television show or movie they watch. Even an opinion as basic as “I like this” or “I don’t like this” is the content consumer thinking critically about what they are consuming. A critical opinion is not the same as an informed opinion, true, but that distinction hardly matters when talking about one’s own basic likes or dislikes.
In other words, you might have good taste, you might have bad taste, but nobody has no taste.
And on top of that, nobody’s taste is made in a cultural vacuum. Your tastes are shaped, focused and sharpened on the social context you live in. Your affinity for, say, sketch comedy may come from a family member who loved performing and took you to small plays or who taped SNL episodes for you to devour. My love for punk music comes from my dad’s affinity for 80s new wave, and while my tastes have evolved away from that, it’s a part of my cultural makeup.
We’re always tweaking our tastes based on new information, too. Your friend didn’t like a particular movie? Now you’re less likely to see it in theaters. You find out your favorite artist donated money to a children’s charity? You’re now more likely to buy their latest album. Taste is complicated, like a particularly intricate math problem, and editing the many different variables that go into that math problem even slightly can change the overall answer drastically.
Why bring this up? And what does this have to do with a discussion on media consumption in the light of dozens of examples of sexual predators in the arts and entertainment world?
Because of a literary concept examined by Roland Barthes in 1967: The Death of the Author.
Part 2a: the creator is dead, and we have killed him
Barthes seems to claim in Death of the Author that art and artist must necessarily be separate. That, like a textile weaver and a copy of an intricate tapestry, a modern writer (or filmmaker, or musician) is merely acting as a “scriptor” of their work, not as an originator. Their psychology or ideological leanings should have nothing to do — to us — with the piece of work they’re making.
Barthes writes:
The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his “confidence.”
According to Barthes, classical literary criticism proposes that writers are the parents of their writing. Where he says this fails is in realizing that contemporary writing exists simultaneously with the writer:
He is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting” (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered.
Ultimately, Barthes theorizes that by decontextualizing written (or created) work, by removing the “Author” (a capitalist and tyrannical concept) from a text, we are actually freeing a work up to be realized in every meaning possible, and that the reader’s interpretation of a given work has actually more to do with their own psychology than it does the “scriptor.”
The unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypo- critically appoints itself the champion of the reader’s rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.
Non-fiction writing and fiction writing are two very different worlds. For the past decade or so I have pretty much exclusively resided in the former. But I have various friends who work in the latter, and from what I can tell, writing for them — as for me — remains a conscious act. No muse inspires our pens or our keyboards to write by themselves. We do the writing with as much intentionality as any other task. But our audiences often disagree with us on what our work means, sometimes strongly, and we’re left without a choice but to let all readers interpret our works in all ways — descriptively proving the validity of the Death of the Author trope.
Dougal McNeill, a professor of postcolonial literature at Victoria University, writes of Barthes’ essay, “Barthes’ polemic is, before everything else, an instance of democratic radicalism, insisting on the productive role of the reader.” Barthes isn’t actually claiming that there can be no context in a written work — instead, he’s saying that readers can, and must, call upon their own sociopolitical contexts to interpret the written work at hand and eschew the insistence that the Author is more important than an examination of the work.
Part 2b: long live the creator…?
Barthes may have been observing a struggle between individual and collective ownership of texts, and his intention may have been to inspire greater critical thinking about texts by readers divorced of authorial intent. But in the years since Death of the Author’s English publication, the opposite has happened. Now, “death of the author” is used to excuse the out-of-text actions of any content creators, dead or, indeed, living.
This goes both ways. Creators duck criticism of their works by claiming certain aspects of social progressivism or innocence in their daily lives — and often there’s a correlation between the questionable nature of their work and their external actions. For example, before it came out that he was steadily cheating on his wife, Joss Whedon dodged commentators’ concerns with his portrayals of women by claiming to be a feminist. Before former Polygon video producer Nick Robinson was fired for sexual harassment, he crafted an entire internet persona around his identity as a harmless “soft boy” character in the videos he produced.
And it works. When a Grammy-winning artist beats his then-girlfriend, we justify still listening to his music because, in our mind, the music didn’t beat her. When an Oscar-winning director molests a child, it’s reprehensible but we’ll still watch his movies because, in our mind, the movies didn’t molest the child. When any number of writers, artists, directors, actors or YouTube celebrities commits some kind of grievous indiscretion they rest easy knowing that their content is safe because their content did not commit the indiscretion, and their content is entirely separate from them as people. It’s “the death of the author” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. At the very least, it’s a “if-I-have-to-go-to-jail-at-least-I’ll-get-royalties” card.
And thus we end up with the half-measure compromise of the “problematic fave.”
The problematic fave is just that — something (or someone) you enjoy despite either its or its creator’s “problematic” nature. Examples of problematic faves (in the context of celebrities) as given by the eminent blog on the subject, include Benedict Cumberbatch, Hillary Duff, and — lo and behold! — Louis C.K. The position of problematic faves in relation to our present issue is that we are still free to like things and people that are problematic. No one and nothing is ever truly unproblematic, and as the meme goes, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” At least insofar as we are all “consumers,” nothing we touch is free from “exploitation” in this sense, and thus we are free to relativistically engage in consumption as long as we’re always cognizant of the price someone else paid for our ability to enjoy whatever it is we’re consuming.
The problem with this can be found in another reading of “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” one more concerned with the transactional aspect of consumption: namely, when we pay for something like music or a movie, we are explicitly supporting the creator of that content and allowing them to continue their work — alongside any “problematic” actions they are taking. When we pay them, we cannot demand that our money not go to the problematic aspect we don’t support. It’s all or nothing.
Part 3: kill your idols
Patriarchy and toxic masculinity are two major aspects of the present problem in the entertainment industry that prevented survivors from speaking out sooner. In a word, the litany of survivors that are coming forward today lacked the power to stand up to powerful men that — sometimes literally — held the keys to their future, and these men knew that society would be wildly skeptical about any survivors’ claims. That’s the nature of rape culture. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to justice these survivors faced was their abusers’ knowledge that they could commit nearly any act short of murder and get away with it. That men who had committed similar brazen acts had done so and faced few consequences. That people would still buy their music, their movies, their books. They’d still watch their TV shows.
After the New York Times ran an article verifying the long-rumored claims that Louis C.K. had indeed masturbated in front of several women, C.K. issued a statement.
“These stories are true,” he wrote. “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.
“I have been remorseful of my actions. And I’ve tried to learn from them. And run from them. Now I’m aware of the extent of the impact of my actions. I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position.”
Immediately many of his fans began to ease up, applauding him for affirming his victims’ claims and responding “maturely.” However, as Ijeoma Oluo pointed out on Twitter, it might all be bullshit: “C.K. [and] his manager were actively working to silence [and] discredit his victims [and] he’s taken absolutely no responsibility for that.”
In fact, rumors and allegations that C.K. had acted inappropriately go back many, many years.
And again, as Jezebel writers Madeleine Davies and Anna Merlan point out, “One of the problems surrounding the Weinstein-adjacent conversation about who knew what when is that journalists are often told things, but then the sources won’t let us print them. Fear of going on the record, in other words, helps powerful people retain their power.” Money and support from fans definitely doesn’t hurt either.
So what can content consumers do?
Stop consuming.
A long time ago I was a fan of a mainstream-adjacent street punk band whose music ended up on various Warped Tour compilations. All through high school, they were part of the soundtrack of my daily life. I drowned out teachers with this band, walked to and from school with this band, and from this band I discovered more and more diverse sounds within the punk milieu. As soon as I got a job, I even spent money on this band’s albums.
Fun fact: Apple doesn’t allow its users to delete digital purchases they have made. Instead, iTunes users have the ability to “hide purchases.” I found this out after discovering that the lead singer of this band that had been instrumental in my life up to this point had raped a fan, maybe more than one, and was actively denying it. The story was unsettling, and after doing some more digging I wanted nothing to do with this band ever again. Even seeing their name made me sick.
And I won’t lie, it was difficult for a time to get used to the absence of this band. But my minor discomfort at having to find a new favorite band was nothing if it meant I wouldn’t be supporting a rapist and rape apologists. Nobody’s taste is made in a cultural vacuum. I’m always tweaking my tastes based on new information. I’ve done this kind of thing more than once across various platforms, and it’s always unfortunate, but I’ve never come across a piece of content — or a content creator — that was so important to me that I couldn’t cease supporting it in the face of something as heinous as rape.
Kill your idols in your head. Nobody’s cultural contribution is so important that they deserve or are owed a permanent spot in the cultural canon. For every shitty mainstream street punk band with a rapist frontman, I was able to find hundreds and hundreds more amazing bands where the frontperson wasn’t a shitty rapist. Stop consuming the work by men in power who think they are exempt from accountability. Spend your time searching for better. Cut off their power supply.