First of all, a reminder of some articles I have had published in the last few weeks: A live review-cum-memoire on Peter Gabriel's recent live show for The Quietus; a dissection of Metallica’s ‘St Anger’, also for The Quietus; and an article on baseball in Poland for The New European.
I am learning all the time. Sometimes it is the sordid things that teach me most. Recently, YouTube's algorithm threw up a tawdry spectacle that made me understand my own work better...
One of the main arguments in my book Denial: The Unspeakable Truth was that denialist forms of counter-knowledge emerge as a covert way of justifying the unspeakable. Genocide, for example, has become almost impossible to openly make the case for in the contemporary world. Genocide denial, by denying that a genocide happened, is therefore a covert way of arguing for the elimination of a particular group (if the Jews had hoaxed the world about a non-existent Holocaust, then they would be worthy of being utterly destroyed). Similarly, inaction on climate change can only be argued for on the basis that anthropogenic climate change is not occurring, since the alternative is to openly accept the untold suffering that will await millions or billions.
My model of denialism is predicated on it being a solution to a problem presented by contemporary discourse, to being unable to openly articulate one’s values. But what if the unspeakable becomes speakable? Towards the end of my book I argue that that is indeed what is starting to happen. What I call 'post-denialism' is a kind of ‘lazy denialism'; it throws out barely credible and mutually contradictory claims with barely any desire to actually overturn an inconvenient truth. Instead, post-denialism points towards a future in which the previously unspeakable becomes speakable once again. Trump, of course, is the best example of a post-denialist. And the movement he inspired is now moving towards a rejection of democracy and a proud infliction of pain on hated others.
I concluded the book by suggesting that the world after denialism might not be something to welcome. Can we really deal with the open justification of genocide and other horrors? My book, therefore, suggests we may soon need to write an epitaph for denialism, whether we like it or not.
It took an unwanted encounter with ‘bikini yoga’ to question my assumptions.
It's probably because the YouTube algorithm knows I am a straight man in his early 50s. Whatever the reason, over the last few months, my feed has started to be populated by videos of female athletes, swimmers and divers, all featuring thumbnail photos of the athlete taken from the back. I don't click on them. Eventually though, my feed upped the ante and served up a thumbnail that looked, frankly, like soft porn and curiosity got the better of me…
I'm not going to share a link to bikini yoga but it's easy enough to find. The channel does what it says on the tin, and more: Young women doing yoga in thongs and the skimpiest of tops. The production values are high (they use a 360 degree camera and the studio is gorgeous) and the woman who leads the sessions appears to be highly trained and competent. In fact, everything about the videos are unexceptional save for the bikinis; and if some poses are highly revealing, that's because many yoga poses are revealing even when clothed.
It would be ridiculous to join in the pretence that bikini yoga has any purpose other than finding a way to get something as close as possible to pornography into YouTube. To make this happen, the company that makes the videos has to engage in something very much like denialism. This is how they describe the channel:
Welcome to the home of the fun and exciting Bikini Yoga fitness videos!
We're here to make fun fitness for the future, and what better way to do that than with the help of our beautiful bikini models?
They'll guide you through challenging yet rewarding yoga poses that will leave you feeling energized, toned, and ready to take on the day.
Our videos are perfect for all levels - whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, we've got something for everyone. Our 360º yoga workout videos are available on any device, so you can get your sweat on whenever and wherever you want.
We believe that fitness should be fun and enjoyable, and that's why we've created a channel that's all about bringing a smile to your face while you work out. Let's make fitness fun again by subscribing to our channel today!
With our beautiful bikini models, fun and challenging workouts, and 360º of positive vibes, you're sure to have a blast. See you on the mat!
It’s true that there are references to the ‘beautiful bikini models’, but the overall tone is one of happy, healthy, fitness. And it is ridiculous.
The question is, why would anyone be interested in bikini yoga? If you have access to YouTube then you also have access to crateloads of porn elsewhere online. It's not as though one's YouTube history is less incriminating than one's porn history. In fact I would guess that even a technologically naïve user would recognise the need to take some precautions when visiting overt porn sites, but such a user may be more careless with YouTube.
The persistence of this kind of denialist quasi-porn titillation doesn't seem to make much sense when viewed through my perspective on denialism. There was a time in ‘western’ countries where porn almost required denialism. The porn industry as it developed in the twentieth century often needed to deny what it was and to cloak itself in the legitimate garb of something else: Naturist magazines, 'life models', 'sex education' videos, 'neck massagers' and so on. Some of this denialism required enormous expenditure and effort. A few years back I saw the film Emmanuel; a huge success when it was released in 1974, it managed to transform illegitimate porn into legitimate arthouse erotica. Today it just seems bizarre; it is laughable as cinema and parsimonious as porn.
However weird all this seems now! Yet the universal availability of porn has not rendered denialism redundant, even though it is unnecessary. Rather, pornographic denialism has changed as old forms have become redundant. And I suspect that the persistence of denialism in porn is not because it is necessary from a legal point of view but because it offers something tantalising - abuse and humiliation of women.
Bikini yoga isn't the worst example of pornographic denialism I have witnessed. The worst thing is something called the Lingerie Football League. Founded in 2009 (and later rebranded as the Legends Football League and then the Extreme Football League) it's a form of indoor American football played by women in extremely revealing uniforms (in fairness, not actually lingerie, but pretty close).
And no I am not going to link to it.
This isn't, of course, the only example of the mandatory use of revealing uniforms in women’s sport. Beach volleyball is the best known example. But there is a difference in both degree and nature with Lingerie Football. Women's beach volleyball is governed by the same body as the men's sport and this makes it possible to campaign for equality and to insist that the game is not reducible to titillation (women’s beach handball players eventually won the right to wear less-revealing uniforms and I suspect that women’s beach volleyball players will eventually force a rule-changetoo). While men's American football of course exists, the Lingerie Football League was not part of any wider federation and was able to take the real desire for a women's game and channel it in a particular direction. As such, the athletes were effectively required to be the most vociferous denialists, insisting on the legitimacy of the game even as the owners of the franchise were framing it very differently.
My suggestion is that the denialism inherent in Lingerie Football, as well as bikini yoga, is an end in itself. The thrill of watching women display their bodies contorted in ways that seem unavoidably sexual, all the while insisting that this is something else, is one that is based on fantasies of domination and abuse. As such, denialist quasi-pornography deserves to be taken as seriously as overt hardcore pornography. And while I wouldn't go so far as to say that hardcore pornography is less problematic or more 'honest', anyone who performs in it is at least aware that their job is to stimulate sexual desire.
If pornography can ever be 'legitimate' or 'ethical' (a bigger debate I am not going to enter into here), it is only through maintaining a cordon sanitaire around it. When porn becomes part of other cultural forms, the result is inevitably abusive. Game of Thrones, for example, included professional porn actors in some scenes. While that might superficially seem sensible and even enlightened in ensuring that at least some sex scenes include actors who were used to them, the end result was the opposite: The 'real' actors who were also required to do sex scenes were rendered as almost-pornstars, their insistence on their status as 'serious' performers became denialism. The pornstars, meanwhile, were also tarred with the brush of denialism, in their apparent pretensions to be 'real' actors. The titiliation in Game of Thrones was about more than naked flesh; it was about seeing women (and occasionally men) being humiliated through the confusion of the boundary between porn and non-porn.
The analogy with the other forms of denialism that I have written about is, I concede, not perfect. What I have learned from bikini yoga though is that denialism can provide sadistic pleasures even when denialism is not necessary as part of a wider political project. We should expect, therefore, that even when climate change's catastrophic effects are undeniable, even when acknowledgement of climate change has become normative across the political spectrum, climate change denialism will still be with us. The spectacle of watching the pain of, for example, climate refugees when faced with denialism, will still be a tempting one for some. Sadism and abuse never goes out of style.