Track Mangoes

"Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!" 

"Go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present."

A disambiguation, just so we're all on the same page here:

I find it odd when people sport underwear in the sauna. It’s odd that one would enter with the intention of perspiring freely and then decide to wear something to impede it, creating laundry and discomfort. But this, I doubt, is why people cover themselves. When I see someone in the sauna wearing an undergarment I am quicker to assume that they’re doing it to conceal their genitals, for whatever reason. Of course, to conceal one’s genitals presupposes that someone else wants to look at them in the first place.

When it comes to the ethics of “checking out” other bodies in the locker room, my policy is this: to assume that my peers are not voyeurs, to let them know if I feel their behavior suggests otherwise, and to hope that they do the same for me. Unfortunately, I find that my policy pans out successfully, on average, about 20% of the time. For I have found myself in countless situations wherein I have been clearly observed and I have not said anything. But I get over it quickly. The situations that leave me with more unease are those in which I find that I am made to be a voyeur.

Last week, for example, I was sitting in my usual spot when two boys walked in and began discussing the most effective way to trim pubic hair. At first I tried not to eavesdrop, but found that in the quiet of the sauna such a task was impossible. At least, I thought, I can respect their privacy by not glaring at them. But this hope was soon dashed when one of them flipped up their towel and began demonstrating how one performs a testicular self-examination. And this was no isolated incident. The week before I witnessed a boy run his hand over the stomach of another boy, saying “Dude, how do I get abs like that?” to which the other replied, “Protein shakes and medicine balls.” When spectacle confronts me without warning, I find it hard to simply ignore.

There are, of course, those who take pleasure in looking at the male body. Even though I am One of Them, I hesitate to describe the feeling I get from observing these exchanges as “Pleasurable.” “Discomforting” might suffice; for when I am subjected to homoerotic spectacle in the sauna I am made painfully aware that my observation or participation is essentially sexual harassment. The moment a heterosexual male exposes his body in that locker room I am already guilty of lechery.

Whether it be a public sex-act or a car hitting a cat, spontaneous spectacle instantly produces an observer out of people close by. The observer must choose to either bear witness to the spectacle or resist witnessing it. Seeing as the interactions of the Leonard Center boys’ locker room bear remarkable verisimilitude to cheesy gay porn, it might behoove us to ask what observers are being produced, where, and to what ends. I am not trying to argue that Macalester’s locker room antics are “sexy” (quite the opposite, if you want to know), but rather that gay porn probably fetishizes a dynamic that arises the moment a queer body steps foot into a hyper masculine space.

The problem addressed here is not necessarily the spectacle of locker room homoeroticism by itself—the athletic male body is the standard currency of sporting disclosure, constantly on display, at work, being measured and evaluated. Clearly they are no strangers to display. The problem arises when the queer body, or any marginalized body for that matter, is robbed of the opportunity to choose whether or not he will witness something that implicates him in a relationship that carries with it potential institutional punishment.

At the end of the day, the discomfort queer people feel around straight people cannot be explained simply by the privilege of heterosexual male athletes, the privilege to freely display their bodies in spaces Made For Them. My point here is that systemic prejudice is subtle and ubiquitous. True, sometimes bigotry takes the form of an overt hate crime, but it can also take the form of a Speedo, a glance, or a “given” code of “respectful” and obedient conduct. Does this mean that all heterosexual athletes shouldn’t wear a Speedo in the sauna? No. Wear what makes you feel comfortable. Just know that the ability to freely gossip about protein shakes and your dick size comes to you at the expense of our peace of mind. If I traipse into the sauna nude, not thinking anything of it, I will soon realize that there is indeed a protocol for where to look and how to act. I should even be so lucky to step foot in that locker room, seeing as my incurable perversity poses a threat to the Step Forward campaign’s shining stars.

During my junior year a friend of mine decided to erect an OkCupid profile. She asked me to join her and I did so out of solidarity, if not a great deal of curiosity. At first the site piqued my interest. However, this enthusiasm eventually gave way to a visceral feeling of discomfort, one that unnerved me so profoundly that I had to delete my profile and could henceforth never argue in favor of online dating ever again. My friend, on the other hand, went on to find a boy with whom she’s been happily dating for over a year.

In observing my own negative response I was compelled to ask myself why I had reacted so poorly and, when my peers asked me the same question, why I would respond: “I don’t know, it just creeps me out.” It seemed unfair and disrespectful of me to reject, without good reason, a tool that has helped millions of people find a person whom they can love.

On first inspection I thought that my unease had to do with Macalester’s inability to efficiently communicate face-to-face. With the explosive, campus-wide popularity of sites such as LikeaLittle.com, the internet’s ability to open up new avenues of romantic dialog has come under fire by myself and others. What is more, as a child of a hippy mother, I accepted as an article of faith that “authentic” conversation was the only kind. However, I later found that these cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because I spend my life in front of a computer.

The conversation against OkCupid that uses flighty ideas of authenticity is about as jejune as a fear of Craigslist murderers. However, many who have dabbled in online dating will tell you that the discomfort is undeniable despite its being inexpressible. As such, I’d like to propose the following as a possible reason for why one might react poorly to the idea of online dating:

Like most other dating sites, OkCupid uses algorithms to match people based on answers to sets of questions as well as data collected from the correspondences between users. OkCupid’s goal is to stimulate a “three-way”--not a ménage à trios, but a correspondence wherein a user sends a message to his or her potential sweetheart, receives a reply, and sends a follow-up.

It is the nature of OkCupid’s algorithms to limit the number of users that are presented to you. These algorithms are constructed out of raw data gathered from OkCupid users and they can shed light on romantic trends, some of which people would rather be unaware. For instance, according to The Atlantic’s investigation of the site, all races of women respond better to white men than they should based on the men’s looks, whereas black women, as a group, are the least likely to have their missives returned, but are the most likely to respond to messages.

When asked if OkCupid intentionally tailors its algorithms to present users with racially “successful” pairings, co-founder Sam Yagan said: “Imagine we did a lot of research, and we found that there were certain demographic or psychographic attributes that were predictors of three-ways. Hispanic men and Indian women, say. If we thought that drove success, we could tweak it so those matches showed up more often. Not because of a social mission, but because if it’s working, there needs to be more of it.”

How coy. The site that claims it wants to be the “Google” of online dating cannot be
troubled with anything but codes, algorithms, and statistics. However, such staunch focus on statistical data presents OkCupid users with matches that are “compatible” in so much as they are complacent; that is to say that your “match” is only a “match” because he or she probably won’t force you to critically examine your own bigoted baggage. Because OkCupid builds its algorithms based off data collected from a society of people addled with cultural hangups, the site does more to enforce normative cultural values than it does to foster co-mingling amongst people who would otherwise sit at home and whack off.

I say, let them sit. Why do I have to be in support of a dating site created by four dudes from Harvard? Clearly OkCupid was made by rich-white people, for rich-white people, so that they can go on being rich-white, having vanilla sex and giving birth to purebred babies. OkCupid is just eugenics in hip clothing. It’s a site that recapitulates the same cultural ills of networking, the same privileged advantages afforded to us by our college degrees. OkCupid makes skirting around diversity easier. It, in effect, makes cheating easier. And if you don’t believe me, then perhaps you could tell me why the Harvard foursome thought OkCupid the next logical step after their first money making scheme: SparkNotes.

Every year a group of aging hippies throw a massive Halloween party in the secluded hill town of Montague, Massachusetts. The owner of the mansion on said estate offers, among other things, a potluck, a concert, a tree swing, a bon fire and a drum circle. This year, one of the more compelling elements was the candle-lined pathways that led to secluded areas where I found people either smoking kush or having sex.

As I watched an elderly couple scurry out of the woods half clothed I was perplexed and mildly unnerved: I thought these kinds of pagan ritual were only something about which we academics read. I looked on in disbelief at the abundance of people on acid passing joints left and right, the food and drink abounding, and the nymphs hanging from tree vines asking me if I wanted to "come play." At one o'clock in the morning however, party was cut short-as most good things are-by the police.

Why? Someone invited the kids.

They showed up around midnight with beer and brawn. As they poured in through the front gates I could almost smell the text messages heralding the "totally awesome party" spreading through electronic space like a diarrhea in a daycare. These kids did not arrive in costume. They heckled the crowd, partook of the potluck tables without contributing to it, and drank all the booze. As the sound of breaking bottles echoed ominously through the woods it became clear to me that what was once a good thing had been overrun by my own kind-snotty college students.

Normally I would be quick to support the debauchery of my fellow teenagers. They have a talent for underscoring the puritanical sensibilities of "old farts," which has essentially become a semantic stand-in for the more descriptive "bourgeoisie." I observed, that night, a mass of young people take advantage a group of aging hippies (granted: aging hippies with trust funds) and the safe space they had created for the consumption of drugs and alcohol.
Where was the disconnect? Should the hippies have Seen It Coming? Or do we hold the teenagers accountable for being %#$@-heads? And most importantly, is there a preferable mode of partying that we can cultivate at Macalester.

The short answer is, "NO."

The long answer is that there exists a conflation of debauchery with decadence that leads Macalester students astray. We overvalue the hyper-masculine mode of partying, the ones the cops can smell, and this reflects our shallow understanding of ritual. In the case of Montague, it almost felt as though a bunch of hammered jocks had crashed an X fueled love-fest, an experience the more seasoned partiers of Macalester can surly attest to.

But what exactly is the difference between debauchery and decadence? In the first place, both are connected, it seems, to nature. Pagan decadence has been a symbol of the "organic society" as far back as you want to trace it. Theorists such as Baron de Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon would argue that the organic metaphor of decadence became best articulated in ancient Rome.
Smooshing culture and nature together, however, causes major problems. When we apply "the natural" to the specifically "cultural" we get stupid teenagers: I am an animal and so I must drink and party hard enough to behave like one. After Oscar Wilde, a cultural "performer" of sorts, it became clear that decadence was the application of social customs to human necessity. Decadence is, in short, the recognition of that necessity within a universe that might smite us at any moment.

Debauchery is tragic: the drunk-kid breaking a window is essentially the fallen king, shaking his fists at the sky, realizing that he never had any control over his fate from day one. Decadence is comedic: a reconciliation with uncertainty through being fabulous(!).

Decadence, for our purposes here at Macaleser, is a far more complex understanding of "partying." While debauchery is masturbatory, decadence has a purpose in society. Nobody cares about your emotional problems, but everyone loves it when you look spiffy.

When we party at Macalester we shouldn't do it to blow off steam all over someone else's property. We party to cultivate that steam, to rejuvenate the happiness the academy vampirically sucks away. Debauchery only requires that we are sour and lonely and stupid and bitter; anyone can walk into a random party and break things, but it is the genius who uses finesse.

In closing, I'd like to point out the obvious critique that decadence is aristocratic and therefore evil. Again, what a shallow understanding of decadence, for how many wealthy, paternalistic students do you know who take it upon themselves to vandalize property? That's the true aristocratic entitlement. Decadence is just a synthetic fur coat and a box of Franzia.