There's just one more point I want to make regarding Michael Jackson before we resume other musical matters. To put it mildly, much has been made over his longstanding interest in children's company and his lack of apparent adult sexual relations. I may be very much in the minority on this, but I am willing to give MJ the benefit of the doubt that his interest in kids was companionary and nonsexual. It does me no good to speculate on predatory possibilities, and I have no stake in the rumors either way. But I do wish to bring up a hypothesis that no one talks about at all.It may well be that Michael Jackson was, at the end of the day, asexual. Asexuality is a rare topic to hear about; on some levels, it elicits even more of a "what's wrong with you?" reaction than homosexuality or bisexuality. It can be a difficult and embarrassing thing to try to explain; little wonder that few try. Kinsey and others have estimated that about 1% of the population is essentially asexual - not to be confused with being celibate, which is a choice. Asexuality is an orientation, one which few openly claim for themselves. (I learned in the process of making this post that Edward Gorey was asexual. I hope he acknowledged this with no sense of shame.)
There's a reason, you know, that so many celebrities came to Michael's defense over the years and so few disavowed him outright. Maybe money's involved. Or maybe Michael really was that rare creature whose closet was not that he had kinky predilections or a minority orientation but that he had no orientation at all. Our society remains so afraid of sexuality that we can’t even talk about the absence thereof as a concept. American society would truly benefit itself by getting over a few hang-ups and having some honest national (and local) conversations about sex and sexuality.
"In the Closet" wasn't one of Michael's better records. As happened increasingly through the '90s, he got lost in his own mix, burying his quavering words beneath overproduced New Jack beats and effects. It's one of many cases where he forgot the joy that could be found in singing a simple song and sought with his producers to craft a many-handed epic instead. And it's so abstract that it fails to be erotic. But it grooved enough to hit #1 R&B and make the pop Top 10 in 1992 as Dangerous's third single, and it's worth revisiting for a moment this week to see, yet again, how the conflicts and contradictions in Michael Jackson's life unfolded in his songs, sometimes despite himself.
Farewell, Michael. We hardly knew ye.
10 comments:
I think you may be right. Thanks for helping me see MJ in a new light. I think, like you have suggested, it would be much harder to explain asexuality than homosexuality.
I wonder if Michael knew he was asexual (assuming that this was the case) and I wonder if he knew there were others.
Let's assume he was asexual . . . a sexual innocent. It must have seemed insane and terribly unjust that he was charged with sexual assault.
It could destroy a person, bring him to his knees and the nasty world of narcotics.
Yup, we hardly knew MJ.
RIP --- You're beautiful.
as someone who is coming to a point where I at least secretly identify as asexual, I too prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt.
I've had a lot of awful experiences and done a lot of stupid things as a result of pretending (to myself and later, others) that I felt sexual attraction/feelings that I didn't actually feel... it confused me for a long time, and things are still very hard, because there's not a place for asexual people in our culture (especially when you're a young female).
I know many people (freud most of all) think that asexuality, if it exists, is the result of trauma; but for me, the real trauma came from not being able to admit the way I actually felt.
so it makes sense to me that michael jackson would be frustrated and pained by having a certain kind of sexuality so relentlessly foisted upon him--by oprah, even... (although I'm not surprised).
Fakegrape - it's precisely for people in your situation that I wrote this post. Thank you for confirming that the orientation is out there. I applaud and admire your quest to admit how you feel and live as you are. May you always be so honest with who you are. May I as well. May we all.
Very interesting. I tried to understand Micheal through a speculated deep trauma:
http://www.itwaslost.org/2007/04/special-report-is-michael-jackson.html
But seemingly you can loose you intrest through mild traumas? fathers beating, intimidation and yarky groupees, burn out from work can be enough to lose the most powerful of male urges? hard to imagine for me (as a man without bad experiences).
Even more interesting that this can occur without any trauma. @Fakegrape: how old are you? Asexual feelings for girls under 16/18/20 are pretty common.
PS: please tell me that 'Fakegrape' is no pun!
(this is long--mostly for my own benefit)
I'm a 27-year-old female with no memory of trauma, no conscious memory at least; and to reassure you, "fakegrape" was a poor attempt to copy off my sister's code name (handle? whatever it's called), "cherrycoloring."
I read your post on iwaslost, and I thought it was really fascinating. I share your thoughts, although I hadn't managed to articulate them to myself the way you did.
pop argot, I found your blog while searching "michael jackson" and "asexuality" to see if anyone had written about it. thanks for your kind words and your willingness to explore this subject. a lot of people react to it with hostility.
I'm not certain there's not something (hormonally?) wrong with me, or wrong with me according to freud. it's hard to know. freud, of course, would say of course I forgot the trauma, because I successfully repressed it.
what I do know: I find people aesthetically pleasing, but have no desire to act on it. I desire emotional intimacy, but view sex only as a means to that end (and have engaged in it as such--not a good idea).
when I was around 17 or 18 I realized I should be kissing people, so I started doing it, but I never felt right doing it. I always felt like I was faking it, like I was imitiating people I'd seen in movies and that's it. I felt nothing. I didn't realize that other people felt differently than I did.
when I had sex, I thought that all the good things would finally happen, the things that makes people want to have sex, but they didn't, so I was forced to reconsider what was going on with me.
I was born early and lived in an incubator for a month ... sometimes I think that's why.
other things: I guess I look young. someone once suggested to me, half-jokingly, that I have that disease where you don't age? ... I read a lot and always have. I tend to avoid doing things that I'm afraid of/that require an acquired skill set (sex, driving, cappuccinomaking, etc). I was really shy when I was younger. I'm still shy, but not unsociable. I'm naive in certain ways, and whimsical, I guess, if that counts as childlike.
so.... I don't know. the only reason I'm rambling about all this is I want to clarify to you what my experience of my (a?)sexuality has been. it bothers me, and interests me on some level, and as I said, my own experience makes me interested in speculating about michael jackson's.
I'd like to think that if people were more willing to acknowledge that it's possible that some people don't have any sexual desires at all, or were at least more willing to view sexuality on a spectrum, without needing the language of trauma etc to explain deviations from the norm, then maybe some of michael jackson's behavior would've been more easily understood? a stretch, maybe, but still.
anonymous, I'm trying to figure out the general organizing premise of your blog. care to summarize?
by the way, although I'm insecure just like everybody else is, and very self-conscious besides, I've not suffered from a lack of suitors, just in case you're tempted, as I might have been, to assume that I developed a very elaborate defense mechanism to counter the fact that I wasn't getting any, or something.
"burn out from work can be enough to lose the most powerful of male urges?"
Well, that's just it: it's not universally the most powerful of the male urges. At root, sex drive is a matter of biochemistry, and like all biochemical elements, it's going to be distributed along a curve, with a few people having an excess of it, a few having little to none, and most people in between.
I agree with PA that MJ certainly could have been asexual, but I had to disagree with a bit of his analysis: our society finds asexuality disturbing not because it is afraid of sexuality, but because it is obsessed with it. We in the Western developed nations live in the most sexually open societies in all of human history. In our era, sex is tied with money as the ultimate value. Naturally, its absence is disturbing. Sex is so tied in to most people's worldviews and self-identities that the asexual person seems alien. Usually people deal with by assuming the asexual person is either gay and in denial or possessed of much darker urges-such as, in MJ's case, pedophilia.
-D*
Thank you all for such an interesting conversation! Certainly gives added resonance to MJ's 1978 song "That's What You Get (For Being Polite)," which I just heard for the first time today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lacrOxfkP0Q
Hello,
I hope you still answer comments concerning this blog post but ...I'm interested:
How do you interpret "That's what you get (for being polite)" now?
I never ever thought this song is about..someone being asexual, I've always thought it was just about being sad about the world and lonely because nobody understands....
I'd really like to see your thoughts on this song. Very much appreciated.
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