18 September 2011

tone it down

For the moment, let's turn our focus on the notion of a person being "attention-seeking."  This is the concept we draw on when we sigh "he just wants attention, ignore him", or sneer "shut up, you attention whore."  We might describe Lady Gaga this way, or Louis Spence, or a small child--anyone shrill or grating.  It's a catch-all term of abuse for anyone whose behaviour is outré in a way that people consider otherwise unjustifiable.  This is a term of discipline, meant to evoke shame.

This first started niggling at me when I was seventeen.  My high school's yearbook committee had planned a page devoted to photos of couples kissing (which was dumb), and administrators had excised a photo of a pair of my lesbian classmates from the final product while preserving the rest of the page (which was dumber).

The message was clear: the school didn't see our relationships as valuable or meaningful in the same way as our heterosexual classmates, but rather as obscene. The administrators advanced two arguments in their defense: first, that the young ladies involved would benefit from not having a permanent record of a relationship they might later characterize as a youthful indiscretion (a courtesy not advanced to a straight couple who had vowed on the page that they would be "still together ten years from now" but who had broken up between the taking of the photo and the yearbook printing); and second, that any further debate over the fairness of this decision would distract other students from their important studies.

Naturally, we organized a kiss-in.  That is to say, we called up the local newspaper and tv news and told them that all the high school students would be kissing each other in a variety of gender permutations out on the school lawn one afternoon.  The form of this protest was considered.  It held up as ludicrous the idea that being photographed kissing your girlfriend might be shameful, and demonstrated that failing to value us queers as students was going to be more distracting than just treating us like everybody else.  It referenced the golden era of American protest, and it had a hook to draw in the media (hot teen sex lawn).  We did get a good amount of coverage, and although we had to add our own lesbians to the yearbook that spring, they made damn sure to acknowledge the existence of queer students in the following years.  It was also, incidentally, the first time I ever kissed someone.  A successful protest all around, I would say.

So it was with some dismay that I read a letter in the paper (an early form of online commenting!) the next day, admonishing the editors for deigning to attend the protest, grousing about all the "giggling bisexuals" on the local news, and generally complaining that it was clear that all the protestors wanted was attention.  Well, yeah.

The more I considered it, the more of a mystery it became to me.  Attention seems like such a Maslovian need--would we sigh "ugh, what a food whore" when we see a starving man?  "She's only doing that because she's looking for a sense of security and belonging in a group."  Attention is how we understand ourselves to have a reciprocal social connection with others.  Not being attended to frequently by people in your life fucks with your sense of self.  Ask a homeless man, charged with the task of soliciting permission to survive from every passerby, how dehumanizing a lack of attention can be. 

Then I started looking at whom the epithet was directed--first, children and reality show subjects.  Second, trolls and bullies.  And thirdly, women in the public eye, queers of all stripes, and people of color who complained of institutionalized racism.  People it's not applied to include parents, reality-show creators, the owners of sports franchises, and straight men in general (hard to be attention-seeking when your gaze is constantly subjectified). 

So.  The framework that's being encoded in the pejorative use of "attention-seeking" is that some people have an excessive desire for our finite attention, like small children, and that ignoring them will serve both to punish them for their bad behaviour and to help them grow up into strong, capable straight white men who dress conservatively.  This is untenably paternalistic, and I reject it.

There is, however, one instance in which I support the diabolization of attention-seeking, and, spoiler warning, it's when corporations do it.  I am profoundly annoyed whenever I see a corporate blog post end with an exhortation to "join the conversation!" or "tell us what you think!"  It's a lazy and useless attempt at online community-building, one which attempts to shunt all the work of fostering a discussion space onto commenters.  Moreover, it's one part of a creeping systemization of creatives working for free (not, as I wrote initially, "pro bono") to make profits for corporate stockholders--regard the ads you see regularly nowadays which ask you to produce content for more advertising campaigns, presenting this as a fabulous creative opportunity rather than a pure scam.

It's really getting to the point where capital is in such a strong negotiating position that it can demand years of free service from a worker before paying him, that he may prove a faithful and uncomplaining employee.  We can fight this, but we need one thing.  Workers of the world: get attention.