I'm watching a preview of The Princess Diaries, a 2001 movie about an unliked, uncoordinated girl whose dreams of being a princess get literally fulfilled. And I'm thinking that this is incredibly psychologically damaging stuff. Perhaps the male equivalent is the story of someone who meets a supermodel and falls in love, like that movie with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant (which I also haven't seen). That this is psychologically damaging? It's right there in Fight Club when Brad Pitt tells the men gathered below the bar that they've been sold a bill of goods, that they expected to be rich movie stars and that it's not going to happen.
To some extent, most commercials sell this fantasy -- or, rather, reinforce it by playing off it. Not suddenly finding supermodels throwing themselves at you? Buy this beer -- everyone drinking it gets a beach party full of them. The same is true for pimple creams, cars, "nutritional" supplements, and (of course) perfumes. Even treatments for sexually transmitted diseases do so, much to my astonishment. In the mid-nineties, there was a commercial for an over-the-counter treatment for genital herpes that featured incredibly sexy people laughing, strolling on the beach, and in suggestive situations. I became famous / notorious for responding to this by saying, in mixed company, that I wanted genital herpes because obviously if I got it and treated it, I'd get an incredibly sexy woman. After all, as the commercial pointed out, it's the symptoms that count; "this treatment does not prevent the spread of genital herpes." What a wonderful social message; in a few years, with the way medications are marketing themselves, there'll probably be a similar AIDS advertisement, enticing the public to cover up the symptoms and spread the disease.
The social disease is not just a prevalent consumer mentality but a desire for a fantasy life, for perfect, uncomplicated relationships with perfectly gorgeous people. How many of us have had our relationships ruined by such fantasies? Many women have complained about body typing, about how 99% or so of the female population cannot look like the girls of Baywatch. But it works both ways: 99% or so of men are not going to get a girl who does, and some part of them will be closing their eyes and imagining a lover of exactly the type their lover is incapable of being, leaving her to hate herself for not being so and him to feel disappointed, let down by life, and (if he's sensitive as anybody worth writing about is) hating himself for both imposing this vision on her and for keeping secret how much he wants a girl from Baywatch and has to think of something else when he sees a little extra cellulite on his lover's hips, leaving him at a distance that renders himself a liar and any relationship that requires such concealment (i.e. one with any one not with a model) as fundamentally based on lies and self-deception.
On the other hand, how many women get into relationships convinced they're going to make their man, slowly but surely, into the perfect guy? -- only to find out, of course, that he's not going to change, that he's an adult and set in his ways. To find out that it's too late, that any such chance has passed her by along with those fifteen years or so in which she might possibly have a claim to model-level status.
Oh, yes, we were sold a bill of goods, a fantasy we didn't already have. We don't decide for no reason that we want these perfected figures, these fairy tales; it's taught. I resisted it. Being politically correct with a good liberal upbringing, I wanted to embrace all body types. Women were given a raw deal, and I was more than prepared to find the fattest woman around and treat her like a queen for my entire life to make up for it. As if I'd myself done something wrong. But, you see, I had. Because, like it or not, good intentions or not, I couldn't really imagine having sex with a fat woman. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that I wanted sex with gorgeous women, and in doing so I negated to some degree the good nature that had spurred me to reject that desire. And so one is left knowing one's been sold a bill of goods but wanting it, craving it nonetheless. How many of us would turn down a feature film career if offered, even knowing it's all corrupt ass holes with rare exceptions and that you're infinitely more likely to get addicted to drugs, wind up bankrupt, have your private life invaded, and put a gun to your head as your second-to-final action? How many men would turn down the perfectly gorgeous woman no matter how much we loved our girlfriend or wife? And, gentlemen, how many women would pass on Prince Charming with a pedigree, money, a luxury-filled house in the Caribbean, and a car that costs more than 99.9% of the world's population makes in a year? And both isn't this sick and isn't it true even as we know it's sick? And how many of us can live with the fact that our lover would do the same because, like being invited to attend an ivy league school, you just don't pass on such an opportunity? I sure can't live with that in my lovers. The solution is a relationship of mutual deception, of self-deception (i.e. the death of the soul), or of honesty and resulting alienation.
When in college, I finally got the chance to have sex with a fantastically, unbelievably beautiful woman. That had been my first impression of her, and -- though she was dating a friend, had a limited but to me thoroughly disgusting sexual past, and was clearly insane to boot -- I jumped at the chance (to jump her). And, frankly, it was incredibly good sex. Not because she did anything different sexually; she was willing to please but not as much as others, whose technique had been far superior. Merely because I didn't have to look at that body beneath me and imagine it looked otherwise in the slightest. Seeing that body with its lips around the base of my cock made me feel I had found paradise. But it was a terrible relationship. And I had to compromise my principles (for which I'm quick to sacrifice anything in almost any other situation) in order to get it. I fucked over a friend and got entangled in insanity in the process. It was not a good move. And the worst of it is that I can't bring myself to regret it because, like an ivy league school, you turn down such opportunities at the risk of regretting for the rest of your life.¹
Relationships are sticky business. People have issues, inevitably. You don't just sit on a beach and pitch bottle caps out into the sunny waves. And we learn this through the school of broken hearts, leaving us smarter but with more baggage and a sexual past that thus makes us less desirable for the next failed shot at some limited image of perfection -- i.e. the next learning experience. And this is if there's not pregnancy or venereal disease involved. But in fairy tales of discovered princesses and supermodels, there are no venereal diseases. There are no long-lasting, fundamentally unsolvable anxieties and personality differences. If children come, they're wanted -- and loved unproblematically every minute of every day, with no resulting loss to romance. So we're left thinking that we're bad for not being the ingenious worker and wonderful mother. So we're left broken-hearted when our lover tells us about another, even though what's present at the time can draw little complaints and we've come not to care so entirely much. So we're left trying to either give up, to really give up, on something wonderful, on being the celebrity who can write his own ticket, or feeling inadequate because we're not that celebrity and we're twenty-four and getting old fast. And we're left wanting something we know we'll never have.
It's in virtually every pop song. The simplicity of meeting someone beautiful who understands. It fucks you up. It really, really fucks you up. Pornography, unappealing as 99.9% of it is, is less damaging than this. You want to ruin a person? Don't give them photos of atrocities, of rape camps and Vietnam stories, of electrodes to genitals and people forced to eat the still-warm formerly-electrified genitals of their loved ones. No, not at all. If you want to ruin a person, you sell them on a dream. Switching the pauper for the millionaire for a week and making him believe it's permanent is far worse. Christopher Sly has, in the epilogue that Shakespeare should have written, a worse time in his discovery and for the rest of his life than the person simply physically tortured.² You want to overthrow a people? Build roads through their religious monuments and start selling them Big Macs. Cultural imperialism has always been the name of the game. We've merely mass produced it. And every video, every song, and every movie selling the dream of perfected romance is a bullet shot from a repeating, mechanized gun. Only they wound the soul more directly, and that's a hell of a lot harder to heal.

NOTES

This essay was first made available at persiancaesar.com on 27 July 2001. It was described as "a personal rant on the programming of love."
¹ I should point out, however, that I have subsequently had the chance to sleep with astoundingly gorgeous women, but I should equally point out that I've passed on almost all of these opportunities -- only to regret doing so, or at least to spend far too much time wondering why I did so. A female friend of mine termed me "insane" to do so with one Italian exchange student in particular, one a male friend of mine admitted to being speechless around; both friends are educated on the graduate level and over fourty. [BACK]
² A reference, of course, to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. [BACK]