Mark Foley, Little Miss Sunshine, Anti-Aging Creams, and the Evanescing Commodity

Celebrity has already passed its heyday as our central preoccupation in America. Youth and aging have replaced it. As Baby Boomers are hitting 60, bookstores are filled with books about healthy aging and anti-aging and staying young. We debate whether we should accept aging “naturally” or fight it with science. We talk about youth and aging constantly because we see them as problems.

Of course, people all over the world have wrestled with the fact of mortality for as long as anyone can remember. But for us, the problem of “mortality” is not the problem of leaving a legacy, or of the soul’s journey and the afterlife, or of the passing of one’s earthly power to a younger generation, or even of failing health. For us, the problem of “mortality” is the passage of “youth” defined as the brief window in which one’s sexual appeal and lust for life is supposedly at its most intense. And for us, this "youth" as desire incarnate—that is, peak desirability and desiring—is a commodity.

In his essay “Children of the Revolution” in the latest issue of Harpers, Mark Greif (editor of n+1) has some interesting things to say about sex, youth, and commerce that are pertinent in light of such disparate cultural ripples as the Mark Foley scandal, the beauty pageants portrayed in Little Miss Sunshine, Calvein Klein ads, and the cosmetics industry:

“[Sexual] liberation went astray because another force turned out to have a use for the idea that sex is the bearer of the richest experiences—commerce.

“But why did liberalization turn back to gorge itself on youth? The surprise is not that youth would be desirable but that it ought to be competitively ineffective, since it is universally distributed at the start of life. Yet youth is naturally evanescent, a commodity vanishing every single day that one lives. Youth can be requalified physically as an aspect of memory, for every single consumer, in minutiae of appearance that you alone know (looking at yourself every day in a mirror) even while other people don’t. Beauty is too much someone else’s good luck; we accept that it is unequally distributed. Youth is more effective precisely because it is something all of us are always losing.

“Thus young people in all forms of representation—advertising, celebrity following, advice literature, day-to-day talk—augment the competitive system of youth whether or not they are the 'target market' of any particular campaign. For society as a whole, gazing at those youths who are sexually mature but restricted from the market, sex children become that most perfect grounds for competition, a fantastic commodity unattainable in its pure form.

“It is as if the culture understands it must be ruthless in preventing adults from tampering with real children, just because it is working so hard to promote the extreme commercial valuation of youth. Thus we produce the obsession we claim to resent; the new pedophile is a product of our system of values.”

For a slightly different and funny take, check out Bill Maher’s piece on Salon:

"Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley's penis. He was probably the first fruit those pages ever came into contact with that wasn't drenched in pesticide.

But that's America for you—a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death. They're called military recruiters."

Lest the 12 people who read this blog think I’m defending Foley, let me say I think he’s repulsive, regardless of whether the pages he was harassing were of the legal age or not. I’m simply saying that the scandal has become a lightning rod for a number of cultural preoccupations, and that it sheds light on certain strange, troubling aspects of contemporary American life that might otherwise go unnoticed.