By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Tuesday, February
12, 2019
Esquire
magazine launched a series of reported essays this morning with an article
titled “The Life of an American Boy at 17.” It featured a tall, handsome, but
not particularly dynamic white kid from Wisconsin who thinks he’s likely to end
up working at a “water plant.” Thousands of people who don’t subscribe to Esquire, or normally read Esquire, or fit in with Esquire’s target demographic are furious
about the choice of subject. Or at least they are pretending to be. Our future
water-plant worker is just too unbearably privileged for the leading minds of
New York media. He shouldn’t be represented this way. For reasons that aren’t
altogether clear.
The outrage that this article exists in is recursive in
quality. It begins with a presumption that this particular subject, a tall
white teenager who vaguely supports the president, should not be “centered” —
or given attention at all, that he has earned too much attention. Again, these
aren’t Esquire subscribers or regular
readers. The question occurs: “Aren’t you in control of your attention?
Couldn’t you just ignore this article?” Apparently not. And because there is
outrage that he got attention, the controversy itself becomes the cause of
further controversy. The people claiming they don’t want to “center” Esquire’s cover subject draw him into
the center of a hurricane.
Some of the excuses for the outrage are made up. How many
women were in the decision-making process for this article? (The article’s
author is a woman.) “Why are you centering whiteness? Are you defining American
as white and male?” (It’s only the first in a series looking at white, black,
and LGBTQ teen subjects). “Why did Esquire
do this in February, which is Black History Month?” (It’s the March cover
subject). But March is Women’s History Month! Although my favorite complaint is
when people say, “Who thought this was a good idea?” Why isn’t someone an acceptable answer?
Seriously, why can’t someone
be interested in this? Why does a men’s magazine that creates journalism jobs
by selling ad space to luxury brands aimed at men have to cater to everyone but
privileged males? Why should it be having BuzzFeed’s
conversation imposed on it? Like much of the anger directed at National Review, boycotts and canceled
subscriptions aren’t a threat when they come from people who decided they hated
you decades ago.
Most of the critics, if they could read (and we shouldn’t
presume), would find that a great many of their preferred topics and narratives
about the world are subtly represented in the story, which looks at American
society through this young man’s eyes. As he sees it, the world is ready to
lash out at him for being what he can’t help being, for reasons that are
unintelligible to him. The reaction to the article more than proved the point.
And by the way, if it wasn’t Esquire, the outrage would have been about Bloomingdale’s. The
department store stocked a T-shirt with the words “Fake News” on it. If it
weren’t liberals leading the outrage, it would be conservatives, moaning about
the Oscars or something. Because we live in the age of the tattletale.
And worse, we don’t even tattle to the authorities. How
many real attempts at persuasion were sent to Esquire’s editor? Instead, we tattle to the anonymous online mob.
Or, occasionally, we tattle to mega corporations that advertise, hoping that
they see the mob and dole out the real punishment that matters.
You would think that an age of diversity would be less
anxious and vindictive. You’d think that it would privilege institutions that
make judgments and stand behind them, rather than complaints made by randos who
can’t. You would think that the forces that a diverse age called upon would be
reasonable, full of liberality. Instead it’s thousands of idiots, pretending to
be mad, pretending that the March issue is about February, that a men’s
magazine should be about anything other than men, and that a kid destined for
the local plant in Wisconsin is privileged.
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