By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, January 22, 2021
One of the surprising things I have learned while writing
about the pornography business is that it is not easy to make money in
porn, which is one of the many things that industry has in common with
political journalism.
That wasn’t always the case. Magazine publishers such as
Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione grew vastly wealthy on the skin trade, and less
glamorous film producers and videotape distributors made splendid fortunes in
the heyday of the industry, which modern pornography entrepreneurs still
wistfully describe as the “golden age.” The sweet spot was the years between
the widespread availability of VCRs and the widespread availability of
streaming video: Pornographers peddling VHS tapes might have lost some revenue
to video piracy and the secondary market, but that was more than made up for by
the spike in porn consumption the VCR made possible — it was no longer
necessary to visit a seedy theater or bookstore, and porn boomed.
The Internet changed that. And it did so in almost
exactly the way it changed political journalism: Content became largely free,
and people who had been consumers exclusively became content producers as well.
Selling subscriptions and advertising became difficult or impossible. And so
revenue crashed. The quality of the product may have declined, but that did not
turn out to matter very much to the vast majority of consumers: It might have
had inferior production values, but, being liberated from major media
properties and their liabilities, it was more outlandish and outrageous, which
is what matters most.
There was a change that came before this technological
change — a cultural change.
The allure of pornography resides in part in its
transgressiveness, in the attention it lavishes on the forbidden. Playboy was the first to grapple with
that challenge, as its relatively restrained nudes were made to compete in a
pornography market that took an inevitable turn toward the hardcore. Playboy’s old centerfolds were about as
transgressive as Renoirs compared to what soon came to be available. And so Playboy ended up being the thing people
joked about its being: a magazine one read for the articles, which included the
work of such heavyweight writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and William
F. Buckley Jr.
Playboy’s ethos
was perhaps most perfectly expressed in the public career of Bill Clinton, a
politically progressive, Yale- and Oxford-educated gentleman-hedonist, one who
would have been perplexed by the suggestion that his professed feminism was at
odds with his treatment of women. When Clinton was impeached (just the one
time) as a result of the Monica Lewinsky affair, his apologists lectured his
critics in distinctly Hefnerian terms: Americans were prudish victims of their
Puritan patrimony, unsophisticated when compared to their Continental cousins
who, with a resigned Gallic shrug, judged the private lives of public men
irrelevant to public affairs. Roman Polanski was generally excused, and
sometimes lionized, in Hollywood on the same grounds. Variations on the theme
accompanied the careers of such figures as Warren Beatty and Steven Tyler, who
at one point became the legal custodian of his 14-year-old girlfriend. Harvey
Weinstein seems to have believed that he was operating in an era in which the Playboy ethos stood regnant and
impregnable, only coming to understand the tenets of its successor faith when
he became the Great Satan in its divine cosmology.
Playboy
weathered the new hardcore competition and, to some extent, the decline in the Playboy ethos in the same way: by
becoming an interesting literary magazine. (Today’s new, woke Playboy is a different kind of cultural
creature, thoroughly Millennial, purging from its archives my own name and
work, no doubt among others, as too controversial.) But many other companies in
the smut business were unable to adapt: They had neither the taste nor the
inclination to become the sort of media company Playboy was at its height, nor the ability to compete with the
pornographic Library of Alexandria available to everybody with a computer. Penthouse went from a circulation of
more than 5 million to bankruptcy.
What political journalism failed to learn from the example
of pornography is that it sells — to a limited but significant extent — a
version of the same product: titillation. The titillation is not (usually)
sexual in political journalism, but people get an emotional charge out of
seeing the people they consider their enemies and rivals criticized or insulted
— “owned!” or “destroyed!” in the Internet language of
five minutes ago. And, as with pornography, a non-trivial share of journalism
consumers will seek out more extreme, more outrageous, and more exotic material
in pursuit of the thrill that comes from the same source as it does in
pornography: transgression.
We have seen this play out on the right during the Trump
years. Fox News cannot afford to be as outrageous or irresponsible as Newsmax
or ONAN (I know, I know, but that’s how I’m going to write it), but Newsmax and
ONAN cannot as a practical business matter (or, in some cases, as a legal
matter) offer up the kind of content transgression-seeking partisans can get
online from QAnon cultists, anonymous social-media accounts, message boards,
and the like. A figure such as Sean Hannity can’t do a show like Firing Line, because he doesn’t have
that kind of talent or wit, but he also can’t compete with whatever has
replaced Alex Jones in his feverish media ecosystem.
And so the squeeze is on.
Already, conservative talk-radio networks are trying to
reinvent themselves and their content to compete in the new QAnon-dominated
post-Trump market, and the race to the bottom among right-wing “news” channels
— no, they are nowhere close to hitting it yet — will be very amusing to watch.
The same dynamic is complicating not only journalism but politics proper as
well, as the Republican Party tries to figure out how to be capacious enough to
include both QAnon kooks such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R.,
Ga.) and conservatives such as Senator Mitt Romney and Senator Ben Sasse. Which
way will the balance tilt?
In his famous “House Divided” speech, Abraham Lincoln argued that the Union could not continue to endure half-slave and half-free, and said that he did not expect the Union to collapse but did expect it to become all one thing or all the other. The conservative movement, its journalistic organs, and the political apparatus with which it is associated have a similar choice before them, and these will at some point be all one thing or all the other. This house cannot long endure half-kook and half-conservative.
No comments:
Post a Comment