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One of the things that worries me about perverts clamouring for acceptance is the risk that we suffer the same fate as the homos and the trannies have already endured - that we are simply swallowed up by an ugly "normality," and that our poor beautiful Eros is prostituted to a crass consumer capitalism. Naked Attraction is surely one of the most deeply repellent products of our degraded culture. ("Our", in this case, unfortunately meaning "British," though it seems no popular abomination is too execrable for our erstwhile enemies to imitate -- a savage and fitting revenge for the Baedecker Raids.) It is so utterly - I am tempted to say nakedly - contemptible that it may as well be propaganda for the Frankfurt School cell of al Qaida. And yet... wouldn't it be nice, in a way, to be a part of it? Believe me, I can totally see the attraction of capitulating to the Spirit of the Age. It certainly would be titillating to see a clutch of unfledged stiffies bobbing about in plain sight on Channel 4 while Anne Richardson pompously appraises their diminutive merits. But do we really want this? Is this truly what we would wish for ourselves, much less for our boys? If we perverts have anything at all, it's a power of refusal: a refusal of the erotic logic of Naked Attraction and Tinder and OnlyFans and everything else that has gone so desperately wrong with human desire in the era of late capitalism. We are lucky. We stand apart from the erotic calamity of our times, and we can stand in judgment on it. This is quite a privileged position to be in: the position of the prophets and the puritans, the scholars and the terrorists. Would you really trade all that for a bit of visible boy skin on post-watershed TV? |