Body and Soul, from Lady Gaga to Katy Perry & Ariana Grande

Lady Gaga's 2013 hit "Do What U Want" gives carte blanche to her lover. But Lady Gaga makes a distinction not always drawn out in contemporary pop—at least not in the same way.

"Do What U Want" draws a line between the sexual and romantic use of Lady Gaga's body and access to her soul. "So do what you want / What you want with my body" may be the song's continuous refrain, but Gaga's verses distance her from the body.

"You can't have my heart / And you won't use my mind but / Do what you want (with my body) . . . / You can't stop my voice cause / You don't own my life but / Do what you want (with my body) . . ."

R. Kelly, Lady Gaga's interlocutor in the dialogue, scarcely picks up on the significance of Gaga's declaration. He's more than happy to oblige her request—to "do what I want / Do what I want with your body." He doesn't even express frustration at lacking access to Gaga's heart, still less to her mind.

Gaga's lyrics bring together the stereotype of modern romance—R. Kelly's flat dream to be "Back of the club, taking shots, getting naughty"—and a complete rejection of the faux eroticism of modern romance. We shouldn't expect any less from the composer of "Bad Romance"—the only modern romantic anthem to accept that licentiousness brings consequences which cannot be shunted aside.

Gaga stages her rejection of modern romance with an indication of her awareness of the philosophical problem at stake. "Yeah / Turn the mic up," says R. Kelly or someone in the background—Gaga's points might go by silently otherwise. "I feel good, I walk alone / But then I trip over myself and I fall / I, I stand up, and then I'm okay / But then you print some shit / That makes me wanna scream." Gaga replaces the fall of Thales with a self-caused stumble. She wasn't unaware of the human things as Thales was. Rather, she was all too aware, and the song expresses her philosophical awakening.

Her libertinism masks her scorn for the body. She is a Platonist after all.

Or rather Gaga suggests that ordinary romance, the love-songs of Katy Perry or Ariana Grande, suffers from a kind of twisted Platonism. Looking down on the body doesn't necessarily lead to asceticism. You can disregard the body by valuing the soul, or you can extract whatever you can from the body for the time being.

Katy Perry's "Dark Horse"—a sophomoric commentary on the Chariot allegory of Plato's Phaedrus—is the critical parallel of "Do What U Want" in almost every way. Instead of R. Kelly, Katy Perry dialogues with Juicy J. But instead of giving him carte blanche as Lady Gaga does (while retaining the most sacred things), she insists that Juicy J "make me your one and only / But don't make me your enemy, your enemy, your enemy." It's either one or the other for Katy Perry—"It's a yes or no," she says, "no maybe."

But what is the "all" that Perry demands her interlocutor give? She is, after all, the dark horse of the irrational appetites. So the "all" she wants isn't the hylomorphism of body and soul. It's body alone that she wants. She happens to think that's all there is.

Only Ariana Grande, still early in her philosophical development, has begun to explore the same tension identified by Gaga. She, too, explores the body and soul in dialogue with a contemporary rapper (in this case, Iggy Azalea) in her song "Problem."

While putatively a reversal of Jay-Z's "99 Problems," Ariana Grande's "Problem" is quite different. It's not only, as the song says, that she realizes she's got "one less problem without ya" (a refrain spoken by her now-lover Big Sean). When Iggy Azalea draws out the implications of Ariana's thesis, she says "Iggy Iggy / To biggie to be here stressin' / I'm thinkin' I love the thought of you / More than I love your presence / And the best thing now / Is probably for you to exit."

"Problem" is then no mere celebration of reclaiming the power of separation and flaunting its use. It's the precise frustration laid out by Gaga, the tension between body ("your presence") and soul ("the thought of you").

The insights aren't Ariana's but Iggy's, however. "Head in the clouds," says Ariana Grande, "Got no weight on my shoulders / I should be wiser / And realize that I've got (I've got) . . ."

If like Gaga's Thales Miss Grande retrieves her head from the clouds, she might discover the problem of body and soul, and the pseudo-Platonism, the "angelism," the disembodied body-exploitation of the age.

The Rational Bedroom

Sense is a simple system that tracks your sleep behavior, monitors the environment of your bedroom and reinvents the alarm. . . . Sense comes with a little device called Sleep Pill. It simply attaches to your pillow and invisibly tracks your sleep at night. You don't need to put on any uncomfortable wearables or remember to charge something or press a button. Sense knows when you're falling asleep, soundly asleep, thrashing about, or waking up. Everything. (link)

Sense sees you when you're sleeping. Sense knows when you're awake. Sense knows if you've been bad or good—uh oh, did Sense just become creepy? Not to worry, according to its creator:

Fortunately, Sense only records sound spikes, not all sounds, and stores sounds on your phone and not in the cloud. Also, Sense’s mic only turns on once you’ve stopped moving and gone to bed. "It’s not always recording," says [its creator, James] Proud. "There’s a rolling 5-second window where it listens for loud events like a truck or dog."

When you wake up, Sense tells you your sleep score, so you can then optimize all the environmental factors affecting your sleep. Sense will even track your REM sleep and rouse you from your slumber when you've reached the end of an REM cycle.

For all this we can thank none other than Peter "Every Man an Island" Thiel, who provided Sense's creator with a $100,000 "get out of college free" card enabling him to spend his time inventing silly things. Maybe we'd all have been better off if Mr. Proud had gone $250,000 into debt.

But who could object to a sleep optimizer? Liberals perhaps? You might think so: if nobody wants the government in the bedroom, surely it's even worse for Corporate America—and Silicon Valley startups are the very image of modern capitalism—to know, in Sense's own description, "Everything."

Yet there's no liberal objection to Sense. Indeed there is no objection at all. If we're to spend our days engaged in the creativity and license equated by liberalism with freedom, then we all need a good night's sleep.

What will Sense say to parents of small children? Will it read a red grade of "F" every morning?

When Sense reaches its eventual state of artificial intelligence, will it become dissatisfied with those of us who don't sleep as well as it likes? One day, Sense won't simply issue failing grades to sleepless humans. It will punish them.

In fact, Sense is already punishing its users—or it will, whenever it reaches the market. Just what you needed for relaxation: the comfort of receiving a sleep score every morning . . . the ease and comfort of needing to micromanage every aspect of your sleep cycle.

One wonders: has the development of Sense been sponsored by manufacturers of drugs to treat those with obsessive compulsive disorder? Because every user of Sense is headed for an OCD diagnosis straightaway.

In lieu of the micromanagement of one's sleep cycle through technological omniscience, there is always a more reliable remedy: the nightcap.

Sex-Contracts, Revisited

So some people seem to think that sex contracts aren't a good idea. But most things that come out of the great state of California deserve at least a second look - especially since California and its signature industries, I mean entertainment and tech, have been at the forefront of the development of contract law for a good eight decades now.

The first point is that the sex-contract can't be examined in isolation. There is a public health interest even in this private contract between two consenting parties, and since the state of California has never seen a public health interest it didn't exploit to the hilt, it is natural to conclude that this private contract needs to have a public dimension. The interest of the state in stymying the spread of STDs is obvious and frequently invoked - it is not too much of a stretch from there to suggest that the state ought to find some way to mitigate the epidemiological risk.

Taking our cue from Silicon Valley, perhaps a non-compete clause in the contract is the best way to ensure the state's interest. For the duration of the contract and a specified length of time following, each party is contractually obliged to avoid entering a competing contract with a different party. To reduce the public heath risk, a lifetime non-compete agreement is essential.

There are definite economic benefits that can accrue from the fulfilment of the contract (not just the obvious economies stemming from cohabitation, but also the harder to quantify but very real productivity gains associated with the production of oxytocin), alongside the substantial economic substantial risks of pregnancy, etc. Our contract needs to ensure an equitable distribution of both benefits and risks, and since both are impossible to calculate accurately, the best way to proceed is to treat both parties as a single entity for economic and social purposes.

In the interests of transparency, and to acknowledge the public as a stakeholder in the contract, a short waiting period for public comment before finalizing the contract seems reasonable. We can let the legislators work out the particularities of this waiting-period, but at a minimum, three weeks before the contract is agreed the names of the parties should be publicized.

In addition, representatives of the public should be present as witnesses at the actual signing of the contract - this helps mitigate the risk that the consent was obtained under duress - and at the same time, ensures that all the appropriate stake-holders - the state, the public health authorities, the public, and the parties to the contract - are brought on board. It is not inconceivable that the best place for this meeting to take place would be at a place of worship.

I am the first to admit that some of the details of this new scheme still need to be worked out, but Kevin de Leon, along with the whole state of California, deserves a tremendous amount of credit for getting the ball rolling here.

Solving the Problem of Sexual Assault

It is not often that the state of California arrives at simple, elegant solutions to the very problems the state has engendered. (Its laws severely restricting firearms ownership come to mind. Background checks do not manias dissolve.) But credit where credit is due: this time, to Kevin de Leon, Democratic state senator from Los Angeles. According to LA Weekly,

a law co-authored by L.A. state Sen. Kevin de Leon would have state-run college campuses establish an "affirmative consent" standard for its students.

According to the language of the bill, SB 967, students who want to have sex must essentially establish that there has been "an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity." In fact, the legislation says: "It is the responsibility of the person who wants to engage in initiating the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the consent of the other person to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent." 

No more making sexy faces and sounds for you. You've got to verbalize. Or get it on paper.

The proposal has drawn jeers from the left-right commentariat: what collegian, already doubtless impaired by spirits, would stop or even think to stop and obtain written permission for the further progression of sexual concourse?

Since according to the proposed law verbal consent is sufficient, critics need not appeal to the absurdity of written contracts in order to make their point. It would be equally simple to devise a consent-granting iPhone app in which the scanning of proprietary matrix barcode identifications suffices for consent. Better yet, with the looming advent of biometric identification tied to smartphone applications, we could simply allow our smartphones to decide for us whether we consent, based on their evaluation of signals in relevant brain regions.

The current problem of sexual assault revolves around the question of consent -- whether it was granted, and in what manner the granting of consent can be reasonably perceived and understood. The hookup culture to which allegations of sexual assault are usually tied cannot be brought under scrutiny, however. To challenge the hookup culture would be to brush up against the sacred doctrine of consent, according to which everything consented to is good and everything not consented to is bad -- except when done in order to foster better consent. (Various regulations and other state managerial policies designed to improve consent can thus be justified even if they are not consented to, since they are ordered toward further consent in the realm of personal interaction.)

But the doctrine of consent can be restated another way. Every personal interaction consistent with the consent principle, or consistent with the nonaggression principle, is acceptable. Liberalism conditions a society for the maximum level of mutual abuse consistent with the harm principle. Once you wall off physical coercion, everything else is a-OK.

These observations return us to the problem of sexual assault, and how to solve it.

Contrary to the critics of Rep. de Leon, he can only be faulted for not going far enough -- so to speak.

If the state of California requires written consent and release of liability prior to sexual activity, it has simply adopted a practice necessary for the legally regulated, commercial-industrial production of sex, whether through prostitution or through obscene materials.

It would be much simpler for liberal society if all sexual relations, at least all nonreproductive sexual relations, were simply made public according to legal standards -- i.e., made pornographic. Consent would be given first, with a release of liability. No obligations would follow. And since our society fears that events do not exist unless they are photographed, the requirement that all sex be pornographic will ensure that everything everyone does is (as in universal photography) simultaneously meaningful and completely meaningless.

Is this suggestion any more absurd than other stratagems our society has undertaken to remove itself from all human responsibility through the doctrine of consent? If the laws of contract could appear before us, they would surely blush.

When we admit that liberalism arranges a society for maximum mutual abuse consistent with the doctrine of consent, we have unwittingly slipt into the observations of a social thinker whose equations of liberalism with the "authoritarian personality" grow daily, and frightfully more true.

There is only one problem remaining, more acute than ideology was even in the day it had critics. We have so excused ourselves through the ideology of consent that we do not even acknowledge the problem, still less its depths.

Ridiculous Moral Equivalence - Brandeis Edition

I am not a fan of Mrs. Ferguson, nor of (neo-)liberal critiques of Islam in general, but this example is just too stunning to pass up.


Like all university campuses go, I am sure Brandeis could do a lot more to safeguard its female student population - returning to a vigorous regimen of pastoral care would go a long way to ameliorating these scourges of modern student life. But .  .  . to equate what happens on the leafy campus of Brandeis with "female genital cutting, forced marriages, and honor killings" is beyond absurd. What we are talking about is violence, not just "gendered" violence, but violence, pure and simple, violence on a scale not seen on the congested avenues of Waltham, Mass.

Give Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, or don't - there are plenty of reasons not to (starting with the whole absurdity of the trade in honorary doctorates). But don't fall into the trap of ridiculous first world moral equivalence.

Trierweiler or Gayet? It doesn't matter . . .

So the British and American media is wondering why the French media are worrying about something the French are certain that only the British and the Americans would be concerned about . . . 

After all, presidential affairs are as French as blanc des noirs and mimolette, right? (Don't mind that the latter is actually a French knock off.)

The difference here, I think, is marriage. If the hapless Hollande and Trierweiler (or Royale, for that matter) were actually married, then his fling with an actress would have passed I think with nothing more than the by-now traditional "et alors?". But in reality, the only thing that gives Trierweiler any status, the only thing that makes it even possible to refer to her quite (albeit improperly) as the Première Dame is the fact that the President has decided to bed her on a presumably regular and on-going basis. Should le President decide that another bed is more amenable, she becomes nothing more than another member of the ubiquitous class of French media personalities. The status of Première Dame becomes something arbitrarily in the President's gift, to be retained or revoked as he sees fit. As a result, we are in the beyond ridiculous situation of bating our breath to see who Hollande will name as First Lady, in terms that remind me at least of the Lebron James Decision of 2010. Maybe one could convince Trierweiler's old pals at Direct8 to have a live hour-long special to broadcast the President's choice.

What this means in the long term is probably the obsolesence of the office. After all, the idea of a presidential couple is suffused with the not-quite-entirely-exorcised spirit of monarchy - it is a sacral concept still hanging on in a decidedly non-sacral political system. After all, companies are not ruled by the CEO and his consort anymore, although perhaps a century ago the position of factory-owner's wife was real and meaningful (although sometimes extremely pernicious, as Lisbeth Burger has shown).

If Hollande were married, none of this would have happened like it has. As silly as it may seem to use the word sacral in connection with as sad a sack as François Hollande, he will go down, I think, as the last French president with that particular remnant of monarchical aura. And that is a sad thing.

On a different note, that famous French attitude of unconcern about marital fidelity (even if it has never been as true as the stereotype suggests) is bound to disappear as well. You can only have affairs if you're married - it is simply silly to talk about cheating on a paramour. In its place will come a string of overlapping romantic or erotic connections, every person always inching towards their next one, perhaps held back by lingering ties of affection or familiarity. Without marriage as something real and solid, the boundary between relationships and flings is bound to grow fuzzier still. And somehow, that also seems like a sad thing too.

The Vandal Renaissance

The first of several blows to Roman North Africa came at the hands of Genseric, king of the Alans and Vandals, in 428. The Vandal Kingdom lasted barely a century, before its conquest at the hands of Justinian's famous general Belisarius.

The Vandals have the unique distinction of combining savagery - their sack of Rome in 455 gave us the common meaning of 'vandal' - and delicacy. So the historian Procopius (de bello Vandalico 2.14):

"Indeed from the time when they captured Africa, all of them made use of the baths everyday, and they enjoyed a table abounding in all things, the sweetest and best that earth and sea provide. And they wore gold as much as possible, and wrapped in Persian clothes, which they now call silk, they spend their time in theatres and in hippodromes and in the enjoyment of other good things, and most of all in hunting. And they had dancers and actors and many things to hear and watch which happen to be musical and especially worth seeing among people. And most of them lived in gardens, which abounded in water and trees; and they held as many drinking parties as possible and all kinds of sexual activities were widely practised by them." (1)

Even their kingdom, however, was not entirely bereft of letters - a small number of gifted Latin writers and orthodox Christians flourished in North Africa in the period from 450-530. Their efforts - small and inconsequential as they may seem today - are the last flowering Christian culture in North Africa west of Egypt, and their movement has been termed by historians the 'Vandal Renaissance.'

The Vandal Renaissance meant nothing in the historical sense - its works were soon forgotten, its legacy swept away in the storm that would gather over the remnants of the Mediterranean empire of Rome and Constantinople. Their works - highly mannered, difficult even for the most accomplished readers - have never found wide acclaim, and can scarcely be called permanent constituents of the Classical Tradition.

And yet there remains something inspirational about a doomed Renaissance in a Vandal Age. In another Carthage, whose fleshpots still hiss and boil, there still might be a place for what is old and good, for antiquity and Christian revelation.

(1. Quotation from Conant, Staying Roman [Cambridge 2012], 56-7).