For a little while now clinics offering cosmetic surgery have been advertising on the billboards of the tube, and high-spirited citizens have been defacing these adverts with stickers that say things like “don’t buy this SEXIST SHIT”. Which is all to the good. It’s a pity really that there’s no safe and effective form of penis enlargement surgery, because I think it would be salutary for men to have to endure the constant public insinuation that what’s really missing from their lives is a few extra inches of cock (“It’s all about confidence…knowing that you’ve got it where it matters…”). No doubt the day will come.
The latest sticker slogan I’ve noticed says “You are normal. This is not”. The implication here is that cosmetic surgery is about feeling that there’s something wrong with you that needs correcting, that you won’t ever fulfil your potential (a usefully vacuous expression) until you get the boobs God should have given you. The sticker’s urging you not to let yourself be made to feel that way, to accept and cherish your body as it is. Fine: but hypersexuality is not about being “normal”; it’s about positional advantage, standing out from the pack. I remember a conversation between two characters in a Love and Rockets strip where one was asking the other about his new girlfriend: “What’s she like? Is she smart?”…”Well, average, I guess”…”Average? Man, average is dumb”. Normal? Normal is unattractive, mediocre, undeserving of attention. Normal is a 5, and you need to be at least a 7.5 to be anything at all. Of course, it’s assumed that a standard of measurement exists. That is how competitive normativity works.
The trouble is, under the regime of competitive normativity you could pretty much use “you are normal - this is not” as the slogan for a car advert (the template: ordinary family guy takes wife and kids on mountainside adventure). I don’t imagine that Katie Price has ever been under the impression that it is “normal” to look like Jordan. She seems, rather, like someone who decided fairly early on that she deserved considerably better out of life than it looked like she was going to get. The core assumption of celebrity culture, which advertising reinforces, is that the purpose of life is to realize your fantasies: to become what you dream of being. We’re supposed to endorse this ambition wherever it arises, and whatever form it takes: to want something is to deserve it, and the proper role of others in one’s life-story is as enablers and facilitators in one’s journey towards success (although one remains personally responsible for the “hard work” needed in order to finally make it).
One of the tacit goals of education, “higher education” especially, is to seduce students away from their fantasies: to introduce the problem of truth into their psychic lives. In this way, the universities have largely taken over what used to be a function of religion - a neuroticising function, to be sure, but one which also constitutes a line of defence against the exploitation of media-conjured aspirations (what church people, gratingly to my ears, often call “materialism”). The role of churches and universities is not to act as enablers and facilitators in projects of fantasy-realisation, but to derail such projects with awkward questions. All too often, of course, they do so in order to bind the subjects they have thus disorientated to their own authoritarian vision of truth. But the authority that liberates you from fantasy thereby gives you the means to liberate yourself from authority: the freedom, that is, to never be normal again.