“Speak up for decency.”
That was what the bumper stickers said, 25 years ago, when they were trying to run me out of town.
No, that’s a little self-aggrandizing. Nobody really cared whether I stayed in town or not. All they really wanted was for the alternative weekly that I worked for and that they didn’t read to stop selling a certain kind of advertising. Or at least they wanted to advertise that they were the sort of people who didn’t approve of that sort of advertising.
They objected to a sort of advertising that was aimed primarily at lonely men who weren’t terribly well equipped to court affection in socially acceptable ways. They offered these men the opportunity to substitute money for personal charisma and romantic wherewithal, or to simply expedite the process. (Money, they say, does not buy love, but it might obtain its facsimile.)
In truth, I was a little embarrassed about the ads, which seemed tawdry and sad. But they paid well. When we raised our rates on them, they didn’t blink. They kept paying. We never found their ceiling. (Maybe we didn’t try hard enough.)
But aside from feeling a little weird about them, I never paid much attention to the ads in the back of our book. I have always tried to insulate myself from the monetization process; I’m not the guy with the Bluetooth in the club doing deals. I like to sit behind a keyboard and make up sentences, to pretend the world is different than it is, and that I actually have very little to do with the advertising that ultimately puts food on my table and clothes on my back.
I don’t much like to think of all the lonely people, and how their sadness might be converted into consumer goods. I believe that grownups ought to be allowed to do what they want, up to a point, and so long as they don’t cause the rest of us any undue trouble or harm ought to be able to contract with other grownups to try to satisfy whatever desires occur. I don’t think it’s much of our business, or that we have a right to gawk, or that the rules ought to be different for people who have achieved some degree of celebrity.
I remember Hillary Clinton talking about a “sphere of privacy” and agree that all of us are entitled to that, that we ought to be allowed to retain our dignity. Most of us sometimes do silly things. Most of us are lucky that our worst moments don’t occur in public.
I don’t know that most of the people who slapped “Speak Up For Decency” stickers on their cars back then really considered what they were doing. I think they were mostly good people who thought that smutty advertising in the back of alternative newspapers was a symptom of a debased and slipping-down society. (Some of them probably thought an alternative newspaper was itself a symptom of a debased and slipping-down society.) I imagine some of them really thought addressing this symptom was a reasonable thing to do. If they could eliminate the
smutty ads from the back of an alternative newspaper, they would have achieved something positive. And no doubt some of them would have been happy if, by driving the smutty ads out of the back of the newspaper, the newspaper itself went away.
I’m sure none of them ever considered that there might be some utility in those ads.
In the end, the Speak Up For Decency people didn’t have any effect on the alternative newspaper, which went away a few years later because economic conditions changed. The ads never really went away, though they mostly mutated into websites. These days it’s not difficult to find tawdry stuff on the Internet. If you are a sad person looking for comfort—or a perfectly healthy person looking for an uncomplicated transaction—you can find ways to exchange your money for goods or services that make you forget the existential dilemma for a little while.
Some people don’t like that it’s this way, but it’s pretty much the way it has always been. That’s why they call it “the oldest profession.” There’s not much we can do about it. And shaming and stigmatizing what some folks do in private can do a lot of harm.
One of the first lessons anyone prone to making public pronouncements ought to learn is humility. You probably ought not hold yourself out as a shining example of morality, especially if you’re an imperfect human being capable of betraying your own instincts. People are smarter than we sometimes think. They can
tell when a writer knows less
than he pretends, they can sense the hypocrisy in the lawgiver. Even if they enjoy your snark, they understand it’s cheap stuff, easy and ugly and finally indicative of a petty nature. They can chortle at what you say without having any real respect for you.
Josh Duggar seems like a pretty safe target for our scorn. He made a living saying mean things about gay people. He was part of a family that made a lot of money because they were presented on television as especially pious and devout examples of American wholesomeness. Then we found out that he did some things that, in other circumstances, could have resulted in a prison term. He does not seem particularly deserving of our sympathy.
Now he’s apparently been outed as a person who has availed himself of the 21st-century equivalent of those ads that so many of my neighbors got so upset about 25 years ago. Duggar has admitted he has cheated on his wife. Let’s enjoy the discomfort we imagine he feels at these revelations.
Or let’s just say we did.
Let’s consider that what Duggar may have done is not a crime and that his marriage is none of our business. Let’s consider that even people we think are mean and hypocritical may be entitled to that sphere of privacy Hillary Clinton talked about. Let’s consider that Josh Duggar might be a kind of gateway drug—there are lots of people who had accounts with that legal if tawdry service, and that we can invent all sorts of reasons why they might be worth outing. It bothers me that so-called legitimate news agencies are sifting through the dumped data, looking for interesting clues.
That seems indecent to me. I stand against it.
But I don’t want no bumper sticker.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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