Qui totum vult totum perdit

The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888. Alma-Tadema.

For several years now, the subject of pride parades and proximity of kink around the physical event has garnered controversy, to put it diplomatically. People tend to lose their proverbial shit about the subject.

Every summer, the same template is generally repeated: a photo shows a young child near members of the LGBT community in BDSM apparel. The ensuing debate takes on mainly two sides. One that is concerned with the purported hedonism of the rally and this group’s expressed need for — at the very least — taking the spectacle down a few decent notches and making the event a little family friendly.

The other side rarely gives a defense of the subculture — and I have a spicy theory as to why that is (for later) — but they will instead passionately insist — without definitive psychological proof — that if you don't give your enthusiastic approval to seeing children and people with dog leashes on in the same vicinity, you are somehow a “repressed” Pecksniffian moralist. In some highly amusing examples, I have seen former colleagues and vague acquaintances insist that you most likely hate gay people if you have even the most mild criticism of overt displays of public sexuality at a pride rally. Another wobbly rebuttal from this camp is that people don’t mind if straight people do the same, therefore this is undeniable you-hate-the-sexual-minorities data. This is not particularly true and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The latter group will also have a roughly libertarian defense of speech and assemblage here, which I can almost support philosophically. Their argument seems to go something like this: “These rights were won with minorities’ blood and sweat. We have gone through hell to get here. We have a constitutional right to express speech and gather a crowd for the celebration of our victories. If you don’t want your child exposed to the varying degrees of sexuality at these parades, stay home with your kid.”

In response to this almost legitimate statement — the path that led to securing LGBT rights in this country is indeed a devastating one and the constitutional right to speech and assemblage is hard to fight against unless you’re in the mood for war (and who doesn’t want war with libertarians who seem to consistently fail on any subject matter related to children but that’s salvo for another day) — you might see the other side retort, “But I want my child to be accepting of diverging lifestyles. I want to attend the event with my kid by my side. Can you perhaps conceal your ass?”

The back and forth goes on for the better half of June until this parade is replaced with that rally, and we’re onto another tedious parley.

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I’m not particularly invested in the minutiae of what is right and wrong around pride rallies. To me, this is a microcosm of a much larger issue and that larger issue is much more important than ball gags and latex masks. It’s an issue that endlessly fascinates and frustrates me because it directly exposes how little patience, stomach, and courage the culture currently has when it comes to discussing morality at a social and public level. I like to call these pro-hedonism people the members of the church of total libidinal excess.

I initially assumed that this is the logical product of excessive secular tolerance for anything and everything. But I’m beginning to think that the problem is much deeper than having no inhibitions about constant subversiveness, omni-nudity, and disregard for any order. I mentioned earlier that the most passionate advocates of the most unrestrained "artistic" displays of graphic sexuality will claim that you are “repressed” if you don’t clap and cheer for these visuals.

None of these people, however, have been able to provide any defense of why a society needs to consume constant decadence. In reality, the most repressed people I have encountered in my life — be it platonically as friends or the rare misfortune of ever having dated them (briefly, thankfully) — are people whose complete social existence was aggressively regulated by the artificially manufactured fear of having any kind of reasonable judgment about hedonism.

These people were repressed and subsequently unhappy due to their near religious devotion to crushing any naturally arising trepidation within themselves about the wildly libertine activities they found themselves in or around. I’m thinking of many polyamorous people, quite a few artist types, abolish-the-traditional-family grifters, parents-are-an-oppressor-class whiners (you probably remember the sage who claimed this on Twitter), and an increasing number of people who won’t even consider why someone who is happy to support LGBT rights (such as myself) is, at the same time, not so excited about exhibitionist thrills. It turns out that the crowd that demands tolerance for everything is a surprisingly intolerant crowd.

I mentioned in my previous Substack post that the culture war is not between immutable characteristics like race or sexuality (in the way that some hyper-woke or juvenile e-Nazi types seek it). In this second Substack post, I add that the culture war is operating between those who view sexual desire as a natural aspect of human existence which is — like it or not — subject to our discerning moral calculations and those who completely submit to total libidinal excess and firmly believe that all desire is law and any questioning of it is, at best, indicative of "repression" and at worst, proof of "violence" against a protected class. The second group has gained considerable ground in the culture war. It’s why you can’t casually turn to your friend — a social category that one relies on and should be able to trust with one’s most plausible thoughts — that kink at a pride parade can go a little too far. You risk injury to your social standing.

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I empathize with parents and generally anyone slightly worried. I can’t help but recall what historian Christopher Lasch wrote years ago:

As the chief agency of ‘socialization,’ the family reproduces cultural patterns in the individual. It not only imparts ethical norms, providing the child with his first instruction in the prevailing social rules, it profoundly shapes his character, in ways of which he is not even aware. […] He develops an unconscious predisposition to act in certain ways and to re-create in later life, in his relations with lovers and authorities, his earliest experiences.

Lasch also notes that American culture is not governed by authoritarianism but a cult of narcissism. Such a personality carries traits such as:

wary of intimate, permanent relationships, which entail dependence and thus may trigger infantile rage; beset by feelings of inner emptiness and unease […] preoccupied with personal ‘growth’ and the consumption of novel sensations [emphasis mine]; prone to alternating self-images of grandiosity and abjection; liable to feel toward everyone in authority the same combination of rage and terror that the infant feels for whoever it depends on; unable to identify emotionally with past and future generations and therefore unable to accept the prospect of aging, decay, and death.

Of course, most parents and concerned people won’t quote Lasch to explain why the culture of libidinal surfeit unnerves them. They’ll probably say something like, “Put some clothes on.” In most settings, I personally never truly discussed my criticisms about shows like Cuties or how certain leftists derive a sadistic delight in spitting on any norms, and I certainly never discussed this with former coworkers at content and op-ed farms and factories because I was acutely aware of how little tolerance the pro-tolerate-everything tribe had.

Although I called kink-at-pride discourse a microcosm of a larger subject around morality, it is one of the most heated terrains where this battle of norms is happening. I know parents who exercise caution when they want to criticize certain Folsom-Street-tier spectacles at pride rallies. I also know that these parents support LGBT rights and are afraid of being ostracized for merely saying something as simple and well-founded as “I worry about exhibitionism, regardless of its sexual orientation. Am I a bad person for not applauding licentious behavior?” If you still doubt you’ll receive backlash for a simple position like that, express it on social media or among your activist-leaning friends. See what happens. The last time I shared my two cents, I was called a “right-winger prude.”

The members of total libidinal excess will certainly admonish this hapless parent for having a sensible concern and will probably call them Hitler (Godwin’s law, as you know it). They will possibly and baselessly add that you want gay people erased or something to the effect. If you are not part of the LGBT group, you are in bigger trouble because you don’t have the “right” to talk about the issue since the quasi-religious standpoint theory dictates that you require the lived experience to have any say in the matter. And if the person expressing this very same criticism is part of the LGBT community, they will be labeled an “assimilationist,” “tenderqueer” as a prominent Instagram account replete with postmodern bile puts it, or some form of a traitor for not obeying the in-group.

None of this is surprising. But it has an unmistakably deleterious effect on social cohesion and public conversation. Constant shock value emanating from art, culture, and politics dulls the senses and blunts moral refrains, which are necessary mechanisms for public hexis and habitus. It turns absolutely natural worries about excess into punishable offenses. This is, of course, bound to happen. After all, when you submit to being governed by passions alone, you will automatically despise any well-grounded call for a moral code.