Leave It to Beaver

It's getting harder and harder out to be a white English-speaking middle-class Christian-raised heterosexual male in America anymore. Sure, you hear about the supposed life of privilege and ease we're supposed to be enjoying but honestly, it's getting harder and harder to see. At the rate our culture is changing, the only claims to socially unbalanced preference left for me are in airport security lines, on bank loan applications and in my ability to browse convenience stores unmonitored. Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes to decide to buy a Kit-Kat. It's nice to know I have the leeway to consider.

Apart from those crumbs and the general, baseline-level of indifference afforded me by law enforcement, I may as well not even be a white English-speaking middle-class Christian-raised heterosexual male. Ever since Will & Grace premiered, it's been an extended horror-show of field-leveling across all aspects of culture: social, political... OK, yes, we still have the economic shades of the spectrum pretty well in hand, but how much of that anymore is just a sham tolerated by our Chinese creditors, a house of dry sticks to burn away in a conflagration of impossible debt at the moment of their choosing?

Even the president isn't One of Us. Technically he's at least half of One of Us, but come on. Nobody looks at him and sees Ann Dunham's boy, do they? It's hard to see our brother in there beneath the wild, anti-colonial Luo-Arabic name and that creamy, burnt-caramel complexion. And then when he speaks, it's an unnerving mixture of populist sentiment and practical realism. Give people hope to raise themselves up and seek a path to help them actually do it? If he's not careful, poor people are going to stop voting for Republicans. Then where will the rest of us be? In the unworkable magic fairlyland of Actual Equality, where people unthinkingly go around applying the ideas espoused for rhetorical effect in things like the Declaration of Independence and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Thank God we still have the Congress. They're the last bulwark against the anarchy of uncritical meritocracy, where all airplane seats are the same size and every restaurant has a salad bar. Try making sense out of a world where all the borders have been erased. Next thing you know I won't be allowed to shower disabled people with infantilizing, condescending pity and freakshow curiosity without getting yelled at. Am I not allowed any hobbies?

And now, of all places, this creeping cultural freeze-out has begun to infect the internet. There's controversy about half-naked pictures of women out there stirring up all kinds of issues about the First Amendment, good taste and the responsibilities concomitant with freedom of expression. What upsets me is less about the content than about the fact that these are pictures of women, fetishized and dehumanized, just like I likes 'em, but... not meant for my consumption at all.

It's these thinspiration pictures, for women and by women, championing anorexia... which has nothing to do with me personally at all. How is there a whole section of popular culture out there uninterested in me? Lady-pictures on the internet were given to us by God to sell us beer, help us masturbate or both. It's not an accident that Bud Light gives me an erection. Bud Light erections are the cornerstone of the American consumer economy, which is to say, America itself.

How can they just ace me out like this, insisting on having a niche all their own? Tyler Perry movies and now this. Once they start making lesbian romantic comedies, all I'll have to entertain me are back-issues of Playboy and sports talk radio. This is it. What was once our world has become a fast-eroding island. All we've got left to ourselves are the Roman Catholic church and Augusta National Golf Club. But between 100% gay population among priests and that Tiger Woods guy, I don't even know how secure I feel in those any more.