Gay culture: a tragedy

In the category of things I wish I had blogged about at the time, some years ago I saw the movie Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy.  It was a film about gay men, released in 2000.  It didn't get exactly good ratings, but we have a lower standard for gay movies.  Roger Ebert gave it 3/4 stars, saying, "It insists on the ordinariness of its characters, on their everyday problems, on the relaxed and chatty ways they pass their time. The movie's buried message celebrates the arrival of gays into the mainstream."

I'm not going to remember the plot details, but what I remember is my overall impression: This movie makes much more sense when read as a tragedy.

The movie portrays a group of friends, and they are absolutely awful to one another.  They should clearly break up.  However, the writer doesn't see it that way, and treats the near break-up of the group as the "conflict" of the story.  In particular, I recall that one of the friends leaves to make new friends--a group of heroin addicts.  Eventually he overdoses, and the friends all come together at the hospital.  They resolve to stay together, not because they are actually good friends to each other, but because gay people need to stick together.

On IMDB, you can find lots of people who liked the movie because it was exactly like their own life.  I get that people are happy to finally see a movie that sweeps away the stereotypes, but what we find underneath is just sad.

The more I think about it, the more this feels symbolic of larger things wrong with gay male culture.  People accept all kinds of abuse, basically because the alternative of leaving gay culture is worse.  And while lots of people know that something's broken, hardly anyone shows self-awareness of how they're part of the problem.

Many specific kinds of abuse are showcased uncritically in the movie.  There's rampant femmephobia, such as a bunch of bad dates, where the date is bad basically because they're too effeminate.  There are the body image issues, encapsulated in this quote:

All of the men in L.A. are a bunch of 10's looking for an 11. On a good night, and if the other guy's drunk enough... I'm a 6.

Perhaps the only thing missing is the constant complaining about how nobody else wants long-term relationships (then where do all these complainers come from?).  But you can find plenty of that theme in other gay movies.

I don't know if I am the right person to make this sort of cultural critique.  I've always been on the boundaries of gay culture, and I've been out of the dating pool for several years.  This is more something that affects my friends, and which pervades discourse among gay men.

On the other hand, when hearing from people who do personally deal with the problems of gay culture, I don't hear cultural critique, I hear self-pitying.  Like the character in The Broken Hearts Club, who complains that he's only a six in attractiveness, but doesn't even think about how he treats other sixes.  Without pointing to other specific examples, I see this theme repeated endlessly in popular gay media--fiction and nonfiction.

Even if capitalism has problems, consumerism is fine

I've heard a few people complain about "consumerism", identifying it as one of the evil consequences of capitalism.  For example of this mentality, see here:

People in consumerist societies live by the influence of advertisements, and often methodically buy things they do not need, and in most cases, cannot afford. This, in turn, leads to greater economic disparity, and despite having the most or latest products, consumerists have a feeling of unfulfillment due to spending a lot of money yet having nothing of personal importance.

Even as I agree that capitalism has some problems, I do not agree that consumerism is one of those problems.  Furthermore, consumerism mitigates economic inequality, rather than exacerbating it.

My problems with capitalism are summarized as follows:

1. Whenever returns on capital exceed economic growth (which is the typical state of the economy), capitalism leads to increasing economic inequality.  That's the thesis of Capital in the 21st Century, one of the most important books of our time.

2. As I've previously observed, even an ideal free market only optimizes for the sum utility as measured in dollars.  In the presence of economic inequality, this skews the market against poor people, who have a lower dollar-to-utility conversion factor.

My understanding is that "economic growth" is a measure of the rate of increase of consumption.  So if people consume more, that will lead to less inequality.  This is easy to understand if you consider the alternative to consumption: investment.  Investing money produces returns, and the people with the most wealth are the people who get the most returns.

It is true that I've previously expressed a desire to consume less.  However, that's partly a matter of personal taste, and it's partly a matter of labor politics.  I advocate reducing the 40 hour work week because I would rather consume my leisure time than have an increased ability to buy status goods.  In other words, I'm just favoring one kind of consumption over another.  Or put another way, I advocate that leisure time is allocated more sensibly, with unemployed people having less leisure (ie by being employed), and employed people having more leisure.

I think people who complain about consumerism might be trying to express a similar sentiment about not buying status goods.  But ultimately I feel they've botched the point with a poor understanding.

The consumption of goods is one of the most fundamental of goods in society.  If it happens to be true that capitalism leads to increased consumption, that would be one particular point in capitalism's favor.

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I just wrote this as a personal reaction to things I heard "on the street".  However a brief google search revealed that many people have said things that are very similar.  I will look into these and post a follow-up if I find anything interesting.