The Baby, The Bathwater

In my NAMAC panel this weekend, which as I have already mentioned was insanely fun, there was a question asked that stuck in my craw. Not because it wasn’t a good question: it was. It was just that the question was so much more meaningful than we gave it weight at the time, and so much more interesting than any potential answer.

The question—rather, more of an assertion—was this: when discussing potential modes of communication and media-making, we should be careful not to dismiss corporate-created popular culture completely, for fear of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

My vocal response was: I don’t agree. My interior monologue went: Bullshit! But my emotional core was all: oh, crap. Babies.

Because the metaphor here—and it’s a common enough one that it’s never intended to cause damage, right, that’s the thing about language, it’s not supposed to be able to hurt you—equates a system of uniting together to maximize profit and minimize individual culpability with something I am biologically programmed to find so cute and cuddly that my whole body wants to protect it with my very life, even at my own physical expense.

But I am not built that way. I like babies fine, I just think they are probably better off without my meddling, and I’ve always been like this. I’ve never wanted kids. When I had my first abortion (so far the only one, but I’m still holding out hope for another. The experience really was that great!) almost exactly 13 years ago, it was elating. I not only had gotten over a seemingly insurmountable problem with the help of a smart lady doctor and a shit ton of activist agitating by feminists decades beforehand, moreover had exerted control over my physical self and future, but I had chosen a specific and uncharted (and therefore exciting) course for my life, despite the thousands of media and social messages that float across my view every day that urge me to be docile, motherly, heterosexual, stable, house-bound, reproductive, and procreative. As opposed to creative.

So when language is slung at me that assumes I will react the way women are trained to react to it, results are not always predictable.

A decade ago, when I wrote my master’s degree thesis—ah, I got an MA in art history, theory and criticism—on abortion rights imagery in popular culture, I sort of adopted a certain radical point of view that accepts the New Right’s accusation that abortion is baby killing and takes it a step further: that abortion is, in fact, self-defense. Given the gamut of health and emotional problems that can besiege a women even in a healthy, planned-for pregnancy, and separating the fetus that is perpetrating them or causing them to be perpetrated by dint of its existence from the woman housing these events—suffering them—it becomes pretty clear that, well, that’s shit we would not tolerate if a dude in a mask broke into our house and forced us to go through at gun point. Why should we accept it because it’s unseen by others? Because instead of a dude with a gun and a mask, it’s a tiny little speck of cells that doesn’t even have a free will in this situation, just an imperative to survive, even at its host’s expense?

Well, so, you say to me, “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” and I say, “The baby does not work, and now the bathwater smells bad too.” Already I am willing to throw out the metaphorical baby, bathwater or no. I will not be tricked into protecting something because I have been told by popular culture and socialization that my body is supposed to.

But the metaphor in his case is particularly disturbing. There is nothing less natural—and by this I suppose I do mean biological—than corporatization. If anything, it is purely social, but in all the dirty and exploitative aspects of sociality. It is capitalist, clearly, and agreed to by the few to take advantage of the many. It is an intellectual response to current laws mandating social behavior, which can hold individuals responsible for egregious actions but forgives those same actions when undertaken in a business environment. Most significant, it’s a system intended solely to harbor dollars.

Therefore, corporate modes of cultural production are not, under any circumstances, something I can imagine having birthed. Not even after that “South of the Border” frat party I went to in 1989 when after several shots of tequila I ended up naked with that Phi Kap. Oops. They are more alien to me even than regular babies.

Perhaps a more appropriate defense of corporate media modes might be, “Let’s not throw the document out with the application.” This I can respond to calmly, serenely. This I do not feel tricked into answering a certain way, lest I brand myself a radical lesbian babykiller and lessen the volume of those who might otherwise hear my message. This is easy. The application stinks, and the document is therefore useless. Both are tainted with bad motives, communicate falsely, and bleed their own agendas into all who emulate them. It may be true that when you sat down to use that application, before you realized how much it stunk, you accidentally created something amazing and brilliant and fascinating and totally worth preserving—something you’d like to think of as your baby—in which case I cannot advise you. I can only offer this: If you made something brilliant using a bad form, just think of what you can do using a good one.

We must consider, when discussing the problem of corporate influence over culture, and therefore over social justice, that our language for discussion has often been supplied to us through corporate media. It is through a vast expanse of small metaphors that propaganda is effective. We must at every turn identify them, uproot them, examine them, and if we deem them unhelpful: throw them out with the bathwater. There will be other, better babies. When we find them, I will help you protect them.