Looking at Janet Jackson

Rich from Fourfour the very brilliant pop culture critic writes about ageism and sexism in Margeaux Watson’s EW review of Janet’s album. Watson says of the record the following:

If you thought the 41-year-old Jackson, not unlike Madonna and Prince, would drop the nympho shtick and embrace more age-appropriate songwriting and production instead of competing with the Beyoncés and Rihannas of today...you'd be wrong. Fans rejected the childish, soft-core dirty talk of 20 Y.O. ,but rather than see that as a signal to grow up, Jackson scuttles the maturing process and regresses even further to the creepy, X-rated lyrics that weighed down 2004's Damita Jo. ''I misbehaved/And my punishment should fit my crime/Tie me to something/Take off all my clothes/Daddy, I want u to take ur time,'' she coos on the title track, an S&M fantasy that borders on a repressed incest memory, set to an R&B slow jam co-written and produced by Ne-Yo.

Rich says the review is so ageist and sexist that it is “hateful”. He says in part:
The Puritanism runs thick: Janet's "childish," not yet grown up and even regressing for including a song (one! ONE!) about S&M. Watson packs in the qualifications, as though she's trying to divert us from what she's really saying: at 41, Janet shouldn't be talking about sex. I'll up the explicitness and say: bullshit. First of all, don't fetishes tend to develop as a result of extended sexual maturation? I know it's not always the case, but still: in any facet of life, it seems that it takes time to cultivate taste, explore interests and build experience to make experimenting worthwhile. Frankly, I don't want to hear anyone under 40 tackling S&M-- leave the advanced stuff to the grown-ups, thanks. Secondly, I guess by labeling this "shtick," the implication is that Janet's being insincere…
Making this about age is straight-up intolerant. Hateful, even. But at least that makes the sentiment transparent: as is always the case with hate, the problem doesn't come from the hated, but the hater.

I found this exchange very fertile ground for my consideration; you know, like a good jump off point for thinking more about things I was already thinking about. Since reading Michael Warner’s phenomenal The Trouble w/ Normal I’ve been sort of awoken to the fact that gay sexuality has much to teach me about my sexuality. Listen Straights I know it's a trippy idea but it makes complete sense if you, you know, swish it around your mouth a little bit. Gay male adoration of straight female sexuality fascinates me mostly for being the antidote to the self-loathing I and most straight women I know suffer. Most straight women I know would love to think as highly of themselves and their pussypower as the average gay man thinks of both. Another way this works is that in being non-normative sexual beings gay men have basically enacted sexual agency under severe oppression in ways that makes me think we straight bitches should take a page. In reading M. Warner I woke up to the fact that as a subjugated sexual agent all the time I spend having normative sex is time I spend participating in my own subjugation; it’s precisely because my sex “belongs” on the inside and not out there on the periphery that it helps hold up the walls that entrap me. Gay sex and other non-normative sexual practice and condition wide ranging, though perceived as “confined” to the outside and peripheral, in reality routinely bulldoze those same walls that entrap me. One can see how reading that book made it patently clear where I should start paying attention... But to get to an idea central to how this Rich vs Margeaux disagreement plays out for me:

--Rich and Margeaux approach, consume and read Janet’s sexual maturity performance completely differently given their positions vis a vis it. Maybe Margeaux's a hater but maybe much more is going. To put it more polemically, maybe Rich isn't aware of what all else could be going on.

[Disclaimer: I'm doing this (suspect) binary between gay men and straight women here not because I don't recognize I'm leaving out tons of people but because that's the divide Rich and Margeaux represent in my thinking.]

There is a way that women are obviously represented by representative women like Janet—we know this. I think as subjugated sexual beings, we await narrative resolution in those representations. Unlike gay men who choose to project onto some Divas an idea of sexual power that is truly transformative because it's not rooted in experiences of its impossibility that would negate it or diminish it, ultimately, most straight women live real sexual lives that lack the benefits and realities of said power. Most women I know live a long time before sex is really good and even longer before sex is really theirs. And the ones who get to the promised land don't get to just stay there; they are ever vigilant of being overthrown and momentarily thrown back to the age of bad sex, entrapment, unagency. I think when we are honest with ourselves, straight women admit to being very defensive about all that--how could you not be? And we also admit to being very invested in the way our sex symbols are representing themselves and in the ways that they age their sex symbolality. I think we sit in panic that having barely gotten to a place where sex is good and we are in control we would have to rather quickly move into an arena where it could be rendered grotesque by (say) Janet. I think Janet's fetishes (to use Rich's apt phrase) may be hitting too close to the place our memories of a shitty sexual trajectory call home--and I don't mean S&M or violence or anything specific. I mean the simple fact of not evolving. Janet does the same thing over and over and over--it doesn't evolve and we, intuitively knowing that salvation for us sexually very much is about evolution and transformation and growth, we panic.

I can’t really explain how profoundly implicated I have been, how invested I have been for years, on the notion of whether or not Madonna (who is, very much, the icon "of my choosing") would get plastic surgery eventually. On the one hand, hey it’s not that deep that she got it, yada yada yada. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said that was the happy ending I was looking for. It’s tough to be girls, it’s tough to be women, it's tough to love ourselves and our bodies. If any woman was in my eyes the superhero who could show the way to age and be okay with what it did to her face, to me, it was Madonna. The fact that she didn't means something to me I don't think it means to any dude, period.

This whole sexuality thing for us is a pained trajectory fraught with real humiliations and there’s a way in which the entire thing can be tacky so much of the time, hell, maybe we can’t stand to have Janet miss the mark. Straight women have been given so little in the way of experiences of sexual fluency, diversity, texture, risk, discovery and agency, maybe we have become unable to be generous towards our icons. Our icons rightly or wrongly become entrusted with illuminating what is usually a rather dark path for us. The experience of normative straight female sexuality in all that it denies us perhaps creates unfair expectations that someone like Janet would be trailblazing for us. I’m not sure that Janet is not trailblazing by the simple fact of Just Doing What The Fuck She Wants To Do--most likely she is. My point is more that when Rich thinks about What Is Janet Good For, what makes her great, he is not thinking about all the shit I think about when I ponder the same. Or maybe he is, but not in that implicated way I am thinking about it. That way maybe Margeaux is if not explicitly thinking about it, perhaps experiencing it.

Perhaps what’s most fascinating for me is the idea that in an ideal world, Rich would be right, and Margeaux would be wrong. In that ideal world where we roam free and fly the freak flag we wanna fly, Janet doesn’t owe anybody a resolution for the fact that well, they’ve really been "disciplined" into a coma of imagination and courage just being straight women in the world. In that ideal world, she is not the martyr for the straight female condition, after all. In that perfect world it would be one woman, one vagina, to be electoral about it. In the world we do live in though, it works different and in that world, to keep the metaphor alive, we may be dealing with a reality where Janet or Madonna are more like Supervaginas--their judgment can decide the fucking fate of the free world!

I really think that beyond the obvious point that we Straights are wound up pretty tight and get rattled easily about perceived sexual improprieties looming in the horizon (or even the notion that everybody has better sex than we do), there’s lots more at play in Rich and Margeaux's disconnect on the topic of Miss Janet… I am not sure where this whole train of thought of mine goes from here, or that it sustains scrutiny, actually. My own sexuality seems to be insistently dialoguing with notions of homosexuality/queer politics (which I imported wholesale from that Michael Warner book) and I am finding that to be the proper and most instructive breeding ground for its maturation. I think there’s much for me to learn here so I’m going to keep thinking about it.