An Intertextual Ménage à Trois
Drawing on Kipnis and Taibbi to Discuss Craft in Relation to Punishment, Puritanical Tendencies and the Ideological Functions of Sexual Paranoia
Discretion advised: This post features references to sensitive subject mater.
Long-time journalist Matt Taibbi, an ostensibly on-and-off contributor to Rolling Stone magazine and currently co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast with Katie Halper, recently interviewed author and Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis for his Substack newsletter.
I’m admittedly no dispassionate reader here. I wrote a review of Taibbi’s 2019 book, “Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another,” and prior to that, I reviewed Kipnis’s 2017 book, “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” both of which I enjoyed, even as I found myself in disagreement on a few points each author advanced. You can check out those book reviews if you’re curious about what I found most compelling in the texts or if you’re chomping at the bit to learn about those perspectival points of departure.
At the risk of creating an intertextual vortex of reflections on cultural prohibitions, I’ve opted to engage with “America’s Sexual Red Scare,” the title of Taibbi’s Substack April 5 post featuring his recent interview with Kipnis. I take the phrase in the title of the post to refer to what’s been criticized as the now-popular pastime of wanton canceling of people and ideas. I also understand it to refer to the related cultural trends Kipnis writes so charmingly about.
What I’d like to do is use the Taibbi post featuring the Kipnis interview to, along with other relevant work, reveal how what’s styled (or self-styled) as progressive or even radical can function in repressive, authoritarian, stiflingly bureaucratic and ineffectually asinine ways. In so doing, I aim to show how the attention to craft Kipnis models might mitigate our unhelpful puritanical proclivities and provide us with the intellectual armament needed to call into question the ‘carceral turn’ Kipnis adroitly skewers in her work, along with the concomitant ideological justification for penal authority.
Craft and the Crisis of Communication
Taibbi’s interview with the contrarian feminist professor features an elaborate setup. Taibbi used about 2,500 words within the ~5,100 word piece to introduce his firebrand of an interviewee. In that introduction, he suggests the controversy that in the last few years has surrounded, if not consumed, Kipnis illustrates what the New York Times decried in March as a problem pertaining to open discourse in the US. Doing the Times one better by drawing on Kipnis’s commentary, Taibbi takes the problem to also entail a “crisis of communication and intimacy, compounded by a uniquely American terror of sex that probably dates back to the days of the Puritans” – a restrictive fear “at the core of what Kipnis calls the ‘carceral turn’ in her world of higher education.”
The interview and its accompanying, article-length introduction come in the wake of The Chronicle of Higher Education publishing Kipnis’s latest essay, “Academe is a Hotbed of Craven Snitches,” and the publication of her newest book, “Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis,” available since early 2022.
With respect to the recent essay by Kipnis, Taibbi remarked that his “first question upon reading this disturbing piece was why the excellent word ‘craven’ isn’t used more by writers.” Excellent question. But it’s one that might not come up when attention to the craft of composition takes a backseat to trite and too frequently sloppy, knee-jerk criticism in line with prevailing ideological orthodoxies that have taken hold (in academia, as my experience working as an adjunct professor for several years attests; and also in the broader culture, as any cursory look at critical thinking-averse exchanges on Twitter also illustrate).
In his magnum opus of an interview intro, Taibbi also wrote:
Most Americans don’t know a whole lot about Title IX, among other things because the accused are encouraged/ordered to keep experiences secret. Kipnis’s accusers inadvertently did her an enormous favor here. Not only did they make a colorful writer with a keen satirical bent an eyewitness to a prosecutorial mechanism silly enough in its mindless destruction to have been written by the cast of Monty Python, they also spurred her to look into the case of Ludlow, a once-prominent philosophy professor accused of inappropriate behavior who ended up delivering to Kipnis a literary gold mine.
In the above, he’s referencing what the title of another article Kipnis wrote for The Chronicle referred to as her “Title IX Inquisition.” In that piece, the author gave readers the skinny on the Title IX investigation she endured as a result of writing a provocative essay. And what a Kafkaesque ordeal it turned out to be. The professional-managerial bureaucracy that grilled the author of both “The Female Thing: Dirt, Envy, Sex, Vulnerability,” and “Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation,” came with a heaping helping of awkwardly placed Midwestern manners and customs. Northwestern University campus is in Evanston, Illinois, after all.
To start, the Title IX investigators balked at the professor’s request to be informed of the charges against her prior to interrogation. “Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them,” Kipnis explained. “The term ‘kangaroo court’ came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions,” providing a polite response doing double duty as a dismissive dodge characteristic of cold institutional power peppered with specious congeniality. “I replied that I wanted to know the charges before agreeing to a meeting,” Kipnis continued. “They told me, cordially, that they wanted to set up a meeting during which they would inform me of the charges and pose questions. I replied, in what I hoped was a cordial tone, that I wouldn’t answer questions until I’d had time to consider the charges.”
The cordiality hardly concealed the absurdity of the process. Detailing the question-and-answer session that ensued, Kipnis wrote,
My Midwestern Torquemadas were perfectly pleasant at our on-campus meeting — they’d indeed flown to town to meet in person — so pleasant that I relaxed and became overvoluble, stupidly gratified by their interest and attentions. There I was, expounding on my views about power and feminism; soon I was delivering a mini-seminar on the work of Michel Foucault. Later, replaying the two-and-a-half-hour session in my mind, I thought, ‘You chump,’ realizing that I’d probably dug a hundred new holes for myself. They’d asked endless questions about particular sentences in the essay, the sources for my ideas and claims, and what I’d meant in that fateful tweet. They didn’t record any of it, nor was there a stenographer. One of the lawyers typed notes on her laptop; they’d send me a summary of my remarks, they said, which I could correct or add to, if I chose. I found these procedures utterly mystifying.
In the first graph of a subsequent essay she penned for The Chronicle in 2017, after serving as the faculty support person for a former philosophy professor at Northwestern who also underwent interrogation via Title IX and faced a dismissal hearing, Kipnis noted that “five Northwestern faculty members empaneled to hear the case were striving to make clear that they were neutral and not prejudging anything, which meant pleasant chitchat at breaks or in the ladies’ room, mostly about the food. We were, after all, in the Midwest.” I live in California, but I’m from Illinois and grew up a few hours south of Evanston, so I appreciate the juxtaposition of Midwestern sensibilities with the potentially-career-crushing procedures on display. Attentiveness to real-life irony like that and to similarly notable contradictions is the mark of an interesting thinker – and writer.
Granted, the niceties in those Title IX-related incidents offered more than retrospective irony for readers to relish. They also seemed to add gloss over disconcerting, even draconian practices that have become the institutional norm.
Not be outdone, Taibbi likened the destructive silliness of that “prosecutorial mechanism” to something “written by the cast of Monty Python,” underscoring how inane it all is with a satirical allusion capable of turning frightening layers of bureaucratically-determined discipline into a veritable flying circus, at least in the discursive realm.
Before the transcribed exchange between him and his respondent, Taibbi compliments Kipnis’s style and highlights how her approach to the craft also appears to be the indirect source of much of the criticism she receives:
Kipnis is a fluid, entertaining essayist and skilled rhetorician, which seems to be one of the complaints of a lot of her detractors, who treat writing well like cheating. In Unwanted Advances she talks about the discomfort of briefly becoming a darling of a ‘certain libertarian flange of the right,’ and notes, correctly I think, that the ‘political culture of the moment throws all traditional left-right distinctions up for grabs.’ In Unwanted Advances especially, the divide seems less about right and left than obviousness and nuance, or rigidity and humor.
Those three sentences speak to a number of interrelated issues.
First, the inability of detractors to distinguish irony and irreverence from endorsement and flippant indifference to other concerns raises serious questions – not so much about formal education necessarily, but more so I think about the kind of informal education occurring via popular culture that’s producing critics incapable of, or uninterested in, assuming any momentary critical distance to permit the discernment needed to appreciate the written word when it challenges pre-established frameworks for thought and to recognize the conceptual tools for reframing what’s salient both used and offered up by authors. Likewise, our cultural shortcomings reflect a lack of recognition of and appreciation for the manifold functions of humor, which can arguably include at minimum an iota of conscientization through some disregard for social mores, even and especially the ones otherwise taken to be beyond reproach.
If the Q&A with Taibbi is any indication, Kipnis is keenly aware of why her work seems to have been not-so-well received. In response to one of the questions, she wrote that someone she’d “been friendly with,” “maybe Gen-X-ish,” told her “that young people don’t like irony” and she was too ironic. As an older millennial who literally grew up with and watching The Simpsons – I was about five years of age when the show started, just old enough to enjoy television – this generational shift is hard for me to compute. Kipnis acknowledged being asked about her style. “Part of it just is temperament,” she explained. “I think I do have literary aspirations. The writers who I admire are funny or make points by humor… I like making myself laugh when I’m writing. If I can write a sentence that makes me laugh, it makes me happy.” Kipnis, who was born the same year as my recently deceased mother – not that you look a day over 33, Laura, if you happen to be reading this – clearly uses the right sort of internal barometer to gauge her own writing. Wouldn’t it behoove us all to make ourselves and each other laugh a bit more? This is not to suggest irony itself is enough to make for good writing or that it alone facilitates better thinking to inform struggles for another world I have to hope is possible. But well-executed craft, which includes humorous ironic writing, often makes those struggles bearable and enjoyable. Moreover, arranging words in such a way that invites laughter, even the self-deprecating variety, along with nuanced appraisal of words and the world could go a long way toward remedying the suffering we see and feel, ephemerally and over the longue durée, insofar as the attention to and appreciation of craft promotes resilient persons amenable to individual and social transformation.
Second, Kipnis’s appeal to those seemingly on the other end of the political spectrum is worth considering, as is the common conception of said spectrum. Those on the “libertarian flange of the right” Kipnis referred to might like to think of themselves as “libertarian,” but insofar as they’re perfectly fine with, say, workplace arrangements depriving those who work for wages substantive say in the job-related decisions affecting them, denying freedom of speech in the work spaces where spend much of their waking lives, and compelling submission to the decision-making authority of owners or management acting on ownership’s behalf, the supposed support for liberty seems lacking. That holds true whether there might be other jobs within our existing socioeconomic system not characterized by those predominant arrangements. So long as there’s a deprivation and degradation of liberty found within the overwhelming number of work relations, to not see that as antithetical to libertarianism empties it of practical meaning and conflates what’s called “libertarian” with an ideological position favorable to normalized – and, I’d argue, socially unnecessary – affronts on liberty. For its part, the Libertarian Party in the US also embraced a platform geared toward undermining the few institutions that might enhance liberty for many within the existing sociopolitical framework by offering people some degree of influence over institutions affecting them. David Koch, who died in early April 2022, ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, intent on removing popular participation in public affairs and on gutting protections from private enterprise exempt from such participation. That program sure seems like an impediment to liberty for the millions laboring within the private sector and for those impacted by the externalities that an emphasis on profit and market competition compels the shareholders and executives of businesses to produce, usually with little regard for the effects on community or ecology, lest ethics interfere with the bottom line and the faux liberty afforded only a few at the population’s expense.
The same holds true for the libertarians at universities who might read with interest what Kipnis writes about higher education but who register no dearth of liberty when it comes to academia’s political-economic structures (described below) that stymie free speech, open dialogue and destigmatizing discussions.
It’s also worth considering why more people who see themselves as part of the Left haven’t gravitated toward Kipnis’s writing with the same zeal, and it’s worth contemplating to what extent Kipnis is correct in asserting that the “political culture of the moment throws all traditional left-right distinctions up for grabs.” Are “Libertarian Left” commitments conspicuously absent or largely lacking among campus progressives, organizers and radicals today? What about those involved in ostensibly Leftist politics and organizations outside of higher education? Kipnis adduced examples in her latest essay indicating the former to be the case.
I’ve come across disconcerting evidence for the latter. Take, for example, the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA is one of the most prominent and popular Leftist organizations in the US right now, especially after the folding of the International Socialist Organization, which prior to its dissolution in 2019, hosted an annual and mostly awesome Socialism conference in Chicago. The downside to the conference, which I attended more than once, was the unwavering Trotskyist doctrines repeated there with little room for dissident perspective. As for the Portland chapter of the DSA, in a tweet on February 5, they publicly thanked “everyone who raised concerns about David Rovics,” who was supposed to perform at a rally that day, adding: “He will not be performing. Please join us to support city workers.” Despite decades working as an anti-capitalist singer-songwriter in collaboration with radical labor organizers, social movements and social movement organizations, a concerted campaign carried out by those quick to jump on the bandwagon to sully the bard’s whole reputation over who he’s tried to dialogue with and/or the heterodox views he’s expressed, was enough for the Portland DSA to kowtow and nix the artist’s planned performance.
In response, Rovics wrote a piece that took to task “the anarcho-puritan Twitter trolls,” to borrow his iconoclastic wording. (As an aside, I hope to interview Rovics for Waywards, when schedules align and the timing works out.) Rovics takes that trolling behavior to be “rooted deeply in the Puritan tradition of moral outrage, moral righteousness, and moral purity.” For reasons that are readily apparent, a puritanical approach to social change has a number of drawbacks. It erases the nuance that careful writers like Kipnis flesh out so well. It also ignores the messiness inherent in social relations and intensified in virtually any organizing effort or collective action. A predilection for purity can squelch helpful dissent while feeding the same impulse to extirpate that undergirds the punitive paradigm for addressing social problems that Kipnis also pointed to in her essay and interview responses. The whole issue of people who claim to be on the Left trying to prevent Rovics from playing at gigs bespeaks a puritanical streak even among allegedly anti-authoritarians, which may indeed muddle political distinctions as Kipnis and Taibbi indicated.
Distinctions having to do with structural authority, influence and disparities can clear up some of the political confusion, I think. That’s sort of what John Warner claimed in his article-length rejoinder to Kipnis’s latest essay. Warner, author of “The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing,” wrote a thoughtful rebuttal which, while not as stimulating a read as the essay he responded to, features germane counterpoints. With effusive confidence, Warner wrote the following:
I am certain there are many folks inside and outside higher education institutions who embrace Kipnis’s framework. I’m going to bet dollars to doughnuts that they are also tenured and primarily work at highly selective or otherwise elite institutions. I bet their gigs are quite good by higher education industry standards, but from a personal standpoint, they’ve gotten a little less good over the last 10 to 15 years.
The flak he put forward entreats riposte. If the guy were among the ranks of contingent faculty who now populate the majority of higher education in the US, he might be a bit more circumspect with his betting, even if the wagers are only intended to serve rhetorical purposes. But like an inveterate gambler unperturbed by potential losses and intent on beating the odds stacked against him, Warner in the rhetorician’s role as betting man did not stop there. Instead, he dug in. “I bet that they are used to being listened to,” he wrote about academics who share some of Kipnis’s perspective. “I bet that as professors go, they are (or hope to be) high status. I bet they’re used to acting with great freedom. I bet that freedom feels—often for good reason—constrained by the rising power of administrators.”
Before placing his bets, Warner might’ve checked with the throngs of adjunct faculty making poverty-level wages, cobbling together courses on different campuses to make ends meet and hoping they don’t upset administrators. Given their lack of job security, plenty of adjunct professors also remain wary of irking the shrinking numbers of tenured and tenure-line professors who make decisions about hiring and firing lecturers, and they inevitably walk on eggshells around students who can wield not-insignificant leverage over this part of the professoriate desperate not to lose courses the following term for saying something that could prompt complaints. Students are particularly poised to exercise some power over the employment of the sizable, precariously-employed instructors rendered utterly disposable by higher education’s two-tier system. Adjuncts are viewed as replaceable and so easy to get rid of – deans and department chairs can simply elect not to hire them next term – that for them not to share some of Kipnis’s concerns would be astonishing, given the lived realities of their work experience and conditions. In her interview with Taibbi, Kipnis touched on what Warner neglected, noting “half the professors on campuses now are not tenure or tenure track. They’re instructors or adjuncts, and they’re terrified. They can’t speak up. Also, faculty governance is really declining.”
As co-authors of a 2017 article with experience teaching in an Ivy League school, a community college, and a large research university pointed out, the conditions of contingency that define the two-tier system in higher education today imperil and actively stifle free speech on campus. The many adjunct instructors without benefits and job security are, in the main, the most vulnerable amid the chilling climate for campus discourse and pedagogy created by established institutional arrangements. Clearly they share some of Kipnis’s concerns. Following Warner’s lead, I’d bet most “freeway fliers” – the label for part-time faculty compelled to drive from school to school to piece together enough wages from different institutions to survive – feel “constrained by the rising power of administrators” that’s accompanied and reinforced the system of haves and have nots at colleges and universities.
In response to one of Taibbi’s questions, Kipnis stressed “people aren’t aware” of how Title IX has been used in academia “because so much of it is behind closed doors,” and she pointed out that “people are threatened with their jobs if they go public.” Those threats no doubt hit harder if you’re a tenure-less instructor living, probably quite poorly, from paycheck to paycheck and reliant upon every penny received from your per-course income that’s typically not guaranteed from one term to the next.
Warner also claimed that with her latest essay, Kipnis “dismisses” those involved in a “well-coordinated, well-funded snitching infrastructure aimed directly at minority and female scholars, an operation that results in direct attempts at intimidation and even death threats.” As Warner recapitulated, Kipnis wrote in her latest piece that “to be sure” there exist “right-wing students and organizations dedicated to harassing professors whose politics they object to, but that’s to be expected.” Per Warner’s account, Kipnis then transitioned into chastising “the campus left for embracing a ‘carceral turn’ through the weaponization of social media as a mechanism for bringing collective shame on individuals who do not deserve it.” Warner added he thinks “the rhetorical term for this dodge is ‘weak sauce,’ and if the goal is to actually create an atmosphere conducive to human thriving, forces that are engaging in the very behaviors Kipnis finds damaging cannot be handwaved away as she does here.”
Whoa now. Does every essay exposing or documenting problems within academia have to directly address the coordinated infrastructure Warner alluded to, lest it be rightfully labeled “weak sauce”? If so, The Chronicle is serving up a lot of tepid coulis. Is clever writing that calls attention to those areas in which transformative ideas and practices have been co-opted or hollowed out all that weak? Since when did questioning institutional norms became tantamount to abject betrayal? Kipnis, who (to her credit) stated in the interview with Taibbi she didn’t “want to be doing all that much left-bashing,” offered a number of examples of individuals in the academic world turning to and thereby legitimating administrative authority. In so doing, was she simply treating readers to insipid au jus, as Warner would have it? Or, do assertions like the one Warner made delegitimize desperately-needed, apropos dissent?
Sexual Paranoia and Ideological Justifications for Penal Authority
To be clear, Kipnis did tell Taibbi that she would not want to claim “that there aren’t predators, that there wasn’t a huge harassment problem on campus, mostly having to do with male professors, but also peer sex – that there wasn’t a lot of incredible, horrible, abusive stuff that happens in and out of frats.” I wouldn’t want to suggest otherwise either. What Kipnis and Taibbi both appear to grasp and endeavor to convey is that all that can be true, and there can still be a turn toward neo-puritanism, bureaucracy, policing of speech and retributive punishment. Hence the importance of nuance, as noted above.
Sexual paranoia can still perform functions comparable to the anti-communist ideology that operated throughout the Cold War, well into the 1980s under Reagan, before the end of the Soviet Union. As Kipnis told Taibbi, it was in the eighties that a transition started to occur,
where it wasn’t a communist under every bed, it was a pedophile under every bed. There’s a kind of threat shopping. What used to be the communist threat, became the pedophile threat, and now became — it’s still pedophiles, but also that pedophilia can extend now to targeting grown women, with the same term, ‘grooming,’ being used.
Incipient, generalized sexual paranoia arguably assumed a new ideological function starting several decades ago as anti-communism had one last hoorah under the Reagan administration, notorious for union-busting and for backing murderous anti-socialist regimes and paramilitaries in Central America. By the end of the eighties, or by the time the Soviet Union wholly dissolved circa 1991, the torch had been passed to a new boogeymen, so to speak. In “Manufacturing Consent,” a book by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, and one text that Taibbi has suggested influenced his worldview, the authors identified anti-communist ideology as one of the institutional filters influencing the production of commercial news. In an interview with Andrew Mullen titled, “The Propaganda Model After 20 years,” Herman and Chomsky commented that “anti-communism, as a major theme of media production during the twentieth century, was reflective of the prevailing system of belief in the Western states, and has evolved with the collapse of the Soviet bloc since the first edition of Manufacturing Consent.” They called it a “staple that provided content, narratives, heroes and villains,” adding: “Since 1989, this staple has morphed into an array of substitutes. But the structural role that anti-communism and its
successors have played, namely, the provision of an Enemy or the Face of Evil, remains as relevant as ever.” While in the years after “Manufacturing Consent” was first published anti-communism “receded as an ideological factor in the Western media,” they claimed it’s yet to be full buried and still crops up “periodically to warn against socialism and wrong-headed state intervention,” should citizens get the wrong idea about who the nation-state is supposed to serve. As they also acknowledged in the interview with Mullen, the ideological filter has subsequently assumed other forms (e.g. ‘anti-terrorism’ or the ‘war on terror”; the celebration of the “free market”). Any constructed enemy-other that takes hold within the cultural milieu might offer ideological serviceability.
Richard Wolff, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an original contributor to the Democracy at Work social movement organization, has often pointed out that for decades the anti-communist fervor in the US remained so thick honest critical assessment of capitalism as a system and candid discussion of systemic change capable of improving society was almost impossible to voice or teach because it would elicit knee-jerk condemnation. Anti-communism as an ideology, by turning communists and communist sympathizers alike into the epitome of evil requiring due diligence to extirpate, had the added effect of enabling other left-wing theory and practice to be demonized by broad brush political association. Not only explicit socialist ideas hardly seen as controversial in other countries, but also policies to promote social democracy, support for organized labor as well as public criticism of US backing for brutal client state regimes and forces with strong anti-socialist agendas – including Chile under Pinochet; Guatemala during General Ríos Montt’s reign; El Salvador in the eighties when US-trained counterinsurgency forces murdered civilians with impunity – could all be pronounced guilty by association and villainized as ‘pinkos’ (or what might now be called ‘communist-adjacent’). Those espousing or enacting left-wing and liberatory politics could be painted as too tolerant or, if they fail to emphatically distinguish and denounce, as too insufficiently hostile with respect to the enemy-others and their supposed influences.
Returning to Kipnis’s suggestion that “the communist threat” morphed into “the pedophile threat,” we can consider some of the consequences associated with the advent of a new cultural enemy. In so doing, we can throw light on other largely unaccounted for roots in the political shifts toward punitive retribution that started to take hold in the 1980s, including the increased popular concern with pedophiles. In his book, “Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity,” Loïc Wacquant argued
paternalistic assistance schemes and punitive criminal programs turn out to consistently converge onto dangerous categories in the double register of control and communication: ‘welfare mothers,’ believed to pose a moral threat to the ethic of work and sexual propriety in the domestic sphere (although most public aid recipients work off the books and are on the rolls for short stints), and ‘gang bangers’ and assorted street criminals from the hyperghetto, perceived to represent a diffuse physical menace in public space (even as they primarily jeopardize one another and their neighbors inside the isolated perimeter of the collapsing inner city).
Wacquant identified a third that joined those ranks just prior to the turn of the millennium – the sex offender, or pedophile. Villainization of pedophiles seems to have promoted the myth that sex offenders are treated leniently within the criminal punishment system, explained Wacquant, who also noted the number of prisoners sentenced for sexual assault other than rape actually increased 15 percent per year on average from 1980 to 1995, even as the documented incidence of sex offenses decreased. Time served also increased significantly for those convicted on sex offenses. Yet the moral panic shifted politics away from harm reduction, resource allocation and coordination of non-retributive practices of justice intended to restore, heal and transform people and communities. “Propelled by a vitriolic rhetoric that portrays the fight against crime as a moral battle to the death between good and evil,” Wacquant wrote, “the ‘sexual predator,’ typically portrayed in the colors of a ‘Iowlife’ social drifter, has acquired a central place in the country's expansive public culture of vilification of criminals.”
Major media reinforced the narrative and helped construct the new category of deviant criminal capable of arousing popular ire conducive to the broader ‘carceral turn’ in society. As Wacquant noted in “Punishing the Poor,” Oprah Winfrey launched a campaign against sex offenders on her show in 2003, providing viewers a regularly updated list of “child predators,” and airing segments like, "Secret Lies: When the One You Love Is a Pedophile" and "Kidnapped by a Pedophile.” As Wacquant recounted, Winfrey told viewers that together they would “move heaven and earth to stop a sickness, a darkness, that I believe is the de-fi-ni-tion of evil that’s been going on for far too long.” She pledged to work with law enforcement and award $100,000 of her own money to anyone providing information leading to the arrest of accused pedophiles. Winfrey also established “Oprah’s Child Predator List” featuring “Profiles of the Accused” and details on how to claim that $100k reward.
A few years later, police and an NBC News camera crew closed in ominously on the suburban Dallas residence of an assistant district attorney from Texas, Bill Conradt, as the documentary Shadows of Liberty (2012) reminds dissidence-inclined viewers. Cooperation between law enforcement and media usually takes a less direct form – journalists and editors taking for granted the veracity and newsworthiness of quotes and information provided by authorities, for example. In this case, Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series relied upon overt collusion police. Prior to any due process, let alone any community care work that could facilitate dialogue if/as appropriate to redress harm without cops or incarceration, the corporate media’s collaboration with the local police department led to Conradt taking his own life before any arrest could be caught on camera.
More recent media coverage illustrates continued dehumanization of those accused of sexually abusing children, and the dehumanizing portrayals of those accused make the prison-industrial complex (PIC) appear all the more necessary and really not so bad, all the violent and alienating reality of penal institutions to the contrary. To the point, a close reading of a January 2018 article published by the LA Progressive highlights how criminalization of people castigated as irredeemable and despicable for sex-related abuses comes to somehow be seen as merciful, despite the evidence showing prisons perpetuate rather than reduce harm and even as the criminal punishment system confines huge numbers of people to premature death. The author of the piece understandably focused on the strength of sexual abuse victims in the case of Larry Nassar, the former U.S. Olympic team gymnast sentenced to 175 years in prison for abusing young girls. But the author also claimed that Nassar and Jerry Sandusky, the former college football coach sentenced to prison for abusing boys, have both been consigned to a prison system that “provides them with health care, housing, regular meals and even psychological counseling.” Yet that system has been shown to make health outcomes worse for those who get caught up in it, and it’s a myth that quality mental healthcare is available to everyone who needs it on the inside. The article also fails to mention that incarceration itself tends to be consistently traumatizing. The author of the LA Progressive piece also could’ve mentioned routine sexual assault in the the misleading list of what prisons allegedly provide, given how the bodily searches regularly conducted inside jails and prisons would qualify as sexual assault if they took place on the outside, as Angela Davis has pointed out. But pedophiles and prisoners aren’t considered human, so the omission makes sense.
Cultural construction of pedophiles as the embodiment of evil no doubt colors how media treat their incarceration, which influences how incarceration and carceral punishment are in turn understood. Monsters help justify and whitewash the penal bureaucracy, and the punitive-bureaucratic operation can be easily conflated with justice in the public consciousness vis-à-vis the category of people roundly regarded as deviants deserving of the worst punishment imaginable.
Cultural obsession with salacious sex crimes came to the fore again the year after the publication of the aforementioned article, and even media known for progressive and systemic critique succumbed to the ingrained-yet-ideological equation of justice with punishment. After the sex trafficking charges against a multi-millionaire became headline news, the now-ended but once self-described “most radical political comedy show in America,” Redacted Tonight, a satirical part of the RT network (recently excommunicated from most US-based media platforms), skewered what then-host Lee Camp called “corporate media’s manic coverage of Jeffrey Epstein,” in one July 2019 episode. First, Camp claimed media fascination with Epstein stemmed in part from high-profile hedge fund manager’s relationship with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, and that it might have had something to do with how Epstein “looks like the spokesman for Trivago or some shit.” That was kind of funny. Camp also called attention to major media’s failure to report on how the rich manage to get “sweetheart deals” or avoid prison time altogether. “Practically no one went to prison for the 2008 collapse, which was caused by, you know, millions of predatory loans and other con games,” Camp quipped. “No one from Dow Chemical goes to prison for poisoning us. No one from Monsanto for covering our fields in cancer-causing Roundup herbicide. No one in prison for any of that.” He contrasted all that with “the other justice system,” where those without wealth “can serve years for tiny drug offenses.” But he also told his audience, “Epstein is a sack of manure who should rot in jail,” and given Epstein’s massive wealth, his not-so-stellar reputation and the seemingly instinctual human drive to protect the young and the powerful against abuse, we can begin to understand why the statement would have some appeal. But the statement still assumes the legitimacy of incarceration and equates justice with punishment by way of imprisonment. Notably, weeks after the Redacted episode premiered, authorities reportedly found dead Epstein dead in his cell, raising serious questions about the official narrative and underscoring what virtually all media outlets failed to acknowledge – people find suicide preferable to the torturous social death of incarceration.
Not for nothing did Wacquant claim “the prison is a crucible of violence and daily humiliations, a vector of family disaffiliation, civic distrust, and individual alienation.” He called carceral confinement “a bottomless pit, a hallucinogenic hell that extends the logic of social destruction they know on the outside by redoubling it with personal demolition.”
He also connected the dots. Wacquant wrote that “the accelerating train of measures designed to mark, track, and corral the lurking pedophile and his kind–henceforth treated as if they belonged to a distinct, inherently inferior and incorrigibly dangerous, human subspecies,” can be explained in part by attending to the interplay between communication and control. Combined with media and cultural support, his work suggests sex offender legislation enacted since the 1980s further legitimized and encouraged animosity toward the freshly constructed enemy. That “diverted public attention from the causes of sexual violence toward its symptoms,” and concealed “the fact that such devices of post-prison marking and regimentation have, at best, no effect on the baseline incidence of crime and may even contribute to its aggravation.” Likewise, added emphasis on “security” to protect against pedophiles and other enemies functioned to enable political leaders to reaffirm the capacity of the state to act – in a punitive and controlling fashion – while politicians simultaneously preached about its impotence or irrelevance in efforts to improve social and economic conditions, Wacquant explained. All this, he offered, accentuates “sensitive social boundaries eroded by converging changes in gender relations, sexual practices, household forms. and economic location” and helped “trumpet the resurgent grit of the authorities to patrol the said boundaries.” It’s “at the intersection of the journalistic, political, and bureaucratic fields, and their practical reverberations inside the penal sector of the state,” where the construction of the enemy and elaboration of the category of the dastardly deviant “serve to signal and cement the moral unity of all those who implicitly define themselves through contraposition with heinous sorts of criminals.”
The schema the liberal-left helped gain traction is by now means the sole purview of that political persuasion. Discourse emanating from the side of the aisle that’s historically championed “law and order” also obsesses over sex as much as ever. Recently, Robert Reich wrote about the confirmation hearings in which
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was barraged with questions from Republican senators about her alleged lenient treatment of child pornographers. It was a baseless claim, but that didn’t matter to the Republicans who kept hammering her. In four days of hearings, the phrase ‘child porn’ (or ‘pornography’ or ‘pornographer’) was mentioned 165 times, along with 142 mentions of ‘sex’ or related terms like ‘sexual abuse’ or ‘sex crimes.’
Per Reich’s analysis, the focus is part of the broader “culture war” enabling one dominant political party in the US to imply the other dominant party – and perhaps by extension, to imply those advocating more liberal-progressive politics – “are somehow on the side of sexual ‘deviants’ who endanger the ‘natural order.’” The emphasis, he suggests, also has a particular appeal to the political fringes that in recent years embraced the QAnon conspiracy about pedophile rings and other distractions. Reich also argued the “culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to talk about the real sources of populist anger — corporate-induced inflation at a time of record corporate profits, profiteering and price gouging, monopolization, stagnant wages, union busting, soaring CEO pay, billionaires who have amassed $1.7 trillion during the pandemic but who pay a lower tax rate than the working class, and the flow of big money into the political campaigns of lawmakers who oblige by lowering taxes on the wealthy and big corporations and doling out corporate welfare.”
Just as anti-communist ideology took virtually all collective action to democratize socioeconomic relations as tangentially similar to and thus perversely affiliated with the supposed embodiment of evil, undermining Left-leaning and liberatory politics in the process, the expansion of an ideology geared toward demonizing pedophiles and sex offenders seems to have produced a surplus of sexual paranoia. In the same vein, the amplified fear that’s become tethered to discussions about sex and sexual relations continues to buttress a punitive, bureaucratic framework for addressing harm.
Contesting the Confluence of Forces Contributing to the ‘Carceral Turn’
Responding to Taibbi, Kipnis touched on the severity of sexual paranoia in some circles, noting that individuals, mainly men, in their thirties are now sometimes cast as perverted predators engaged in “grooming” if they express amorous interest in adult persons, predominantly women over the age of consent, only a few years younger. She described the situation in the following way.
The old Freudian model was that children desire their parents. Now you can’t even bring that up. It’s all older people who desire to sexually exploit younger people. All the desire flows from the other direction. For a lot of people, they can’t even imagine or conceive of a relationship that’s not exploitative when there’s more than maybe a five-year age difference. So this idea of power, too, it exacerbates all this anxiety about sexual danger. You’ve got an infusion of this idea of power as malevolent, or that institutional power disparities have this malevolent underpinning to them, such that people — who would usually be younger, female people — are only going to be exploited in those situations. It’s just a big clusterfuck of stuff.
Her implicit exculpation of “institutional power disparities” in the above response is curious considering the issue of administrative bureaucracy agglomerating at the expense of actual educators at post-secondary schools. A more nuanced take on those disparities would account for the conditions I described above, and would attend to other sources and operations of power, like the influence afforded youth and attractiveness, and the leverage the consumer model of higher education affords students over precariously employed professors within the two-tier system. To her credit, Kipnis addressed some of those nuances of power in “Unwanted Advances,” published in 2017.
To complicate matters further, generational trends could also have something to do with the ‘snitching’ on college campuses and the related ‘carceral turn’ toward bureaucracy and punishment Kipnis has drawn our attention to. In the book, “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood,” author Jean Twenge drew on data from nationally representative surveys across time – allowing for comparison of different generations (e.g. Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, Zoomers) – and on personal interviews and apropos sources to paint a portrait of teenagers and young adults today. According to Twenge, those young persons belong to “iGen,” her term for Generation Z that never really caught on. Twenge’s analysis of germane survey data suggests that, generally speaking, those born between ~1995 and ~2012 place greater emphasis on safety and protection than previous generations. Many have or are postponing or avoiding activities associated with maturity and adulthood. Keeping in mind the generalizations apply to a majority but not to every person or community, Twenge noted that the iGen crowd is also more likely to seek outside assistance – from, for example, administrative bodies or police on campus – when interpersonal conflict arises as opposed to mediating and de-escalating conflicts and problem-solving themselves. The reliance on authority might come at the expense of agency and mutual aid among peers. It could also help justify the expansion of penal bureaucracy, and perhaps it helps account for all the ‘snitching’ on campuses that’s concerned Kipnis. Given that many young persons also appear more concerned about racial and gender inequities than previous generations – trends Twenge documents in her book – coupled with the heightened attention to problems of sexual harassment and abuse in the wake of #MeToo, along with the surfeit of sexual paranoia partly attributable to the dynamics discussed above, the whole “clusterfuck” Kipnis alluded to begins to make at least a little sense.
In answering Taibbi’s interview questions, Kipnis highlighted a convergence of several cultural trends that have helped turn sex into “our era’s communist threat,” as she put it with only a touch of stylistic hyperbole. Her comments throw additional light on the ideological inversion permitting policies and politics with regressive characteristics to appear progressive in nature.
I think one of the things that happened is that sex started to be seen as a harm in a way that it wasn’t, after the sexual revolution. It had something to do with AIDS, HIV, and the way sex started to be seen as something that can kill you. There was this shift from sex being seen as something that was fun or good for you, to something that was invariably harmful and traumatizing. With all those shifts came the growth of these bureaucratic entities, on campus and off, like HR offices, but also Title IX. And on the Internet and Twitter, you’ve got this prosecutorial spirit in more informal ways, callout culture or cancel culture, whatever you call it. All of those things seem to have converged.
Let’s expound upon that confluence. For one, following Kipnis, sex is now often associated with harm and trauma as opposed to pleasure and potential liberation or positive transformation. This dovetails with the greater preoccupation with safety and protection, particularly among the Gen z demographic, as well as with the delayed or indefinitely postponed maturation process among a not-insignificant number of young adults and adolescents who are avoiding certain experiences and tasks having to do with growing up and making fewer major life decisions for themselves. Perhaps the peculiar generational fear compounds the manufactured hysteria on the subject of sex, which is one of the transformative activities also associated with maturation. Could it also explain young people’s penchant for seeking protection from more powerful authorities entrusted with maintaining safety? And is all this having disastrous effects on personal and interpersonal agency while simultaneously emboldening bureaucratic entities and carceral institutions?
Those institutions are afforded a veneer of progressive justification. On campuses, as Kipnis argued in “Unwanted Advances,” when young adult women above the age of consent are cast as helpless victims in need of protection from virtually all sexual advances, whether they are verifiably predatory or just presumed to be, the framing risks reinforcing a paternalistic brand of feminism. Rather than aiding in the liberation of women and society, the outwardly-presenting progressive movement insidiously strips women of agency as it confers power upon administrators, external agencies and punitive authorities. Off campus, paranoia surrounding sexual predators and concomitant ideology has served the penchant for repression and control within the state-corporate nexus while generating additional consent for carceral punishment.
Reading Kipnis and Taibbi, one can’t help but wonder if refining and appreciating the kind of craft capable of reframing debates, recasting narratives, calling into question taken-for-granted penal pieties, inserting nuance as needed and adding a dose of humor to discussions regarding sensitive subjects could help fortify and steel those in the trenches trying to change existing conditions as part of liberatory social movements and organizing efforts. Regardless, both writers are seemingly unafraid when it comes to addressing the taboo and unpacking the cultural ‘clusterfuck’ that hitherto has enabled punitive, puritanical practices to appear morally superior and progressive as they adhere to and spread carceral logics. Effectively challenging the retributive framework requires engaging with both reality and ideology, exploring their relationship beyond the banality of totalizing, reductive and pitifully bland dichotomies.