Penn Badgley, the Purity Police, and the Joy of Viewing Twitter as Performance Art
Sometimes, you just have to accept that Twitter is mostly nonsense and let it go at that.
Like many (most?) other people at this point of the 21st century, I find Twitter to be one of the most exhausting places on the planet even as, paradoxically, I find myself checking it compulsively during the day. Some of this is, of course, force of habit; perusing social media has just become a part of my daily routine, for better and (mostly) for worse. However, I have to admit that there is also something else motivating my voracious consumption of nonsense that makes its home on Twitter and that, I’m ashamed to say, is my seemingly bottomless and insatiable appetite for outrage.
And believe me, nothing feeds that appetite like Twitter. However, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra it also, paradoxically, makes hungry where most it seems to satisfy. No matter how much I peruse Twitter in the search for something new to upset me, I almost invariably find myself frustrated in my desires because, as I have found, being outraged without a productive outlet for those feelings is a bottomless well into which it is very easy to fall.
Most recently, I’ve found myself caught up in the “discourse” (which is the word we all seem to have settled on for describing what happens in a very small part of the world) surrounding the most recent season of the hit Netflix series You. In an interview with Variety, Penn Badgley, who stars as the sociopathic (yet charming and incredibly charismatic) Joe Goldberg, remarked on his growing discomfort with sex scenes in the shows in which he appeared, stating: “That aspect of Hollywood has always been very disturbing to me — and that aspect of the job, that mercurial boundary — has always been something that I actually don’t want to play with at all.”
Cue the “discourse.”
Very quickly, there were many on Twitter who were saying that they wholeheartedly agreed with Badgley’s point of view, arguing that sex scenes had no place in Hollywood. Noted activist and prominent Twitter personality Charlotte Laws even went so far as to say: “More unpopular opinion: I don't like to see people kissing on the lips in TV shows or movies UNLESS I know the actors are dating or married. I get a gag reflex. And yes, I have embraced my ‘inner prude.’ Ha.”
Of course, to anyone who is terminally online, none of this was especially surprising. For some reason, we seem to be in the midst of retrenchment of conservative sexual mores, to such an extent that, for a particular group of people, sex should be beyond the pale in film and TV. This, at the same time as people (especially younger ones) are having less and less sex, a phenomenon that is no doubt contributing to the epidemic of loneliness that seems to be sweeping across America.
At first, I found myself, like so many others, willing to take up arms against the new purity police. As a queer person–and thus someone whose identity at least partially hinges on sex–this all feels very frightening. It’s a relatively short step from wanting to expunge sex from visual media to decrying queer sex in particular as dirty or perverse or endangering children (see also: the annual discourse over kink at Pride). We live in a world, after all, in which Republican attacks against queer people are on the rise, and it doesn’t take much mental gymnastics to see how the discourse of the right and the left begin to coincide on the issue of sex.
At the same time, any time I find myself getting too worked up over the commentary that makes its home on Twitter, I take a deep breath and remind myself that, however much the social media app seems to have invaded every aspect of our lives it is not, nor has it ever been, real life. Furthermore, I’ve also found myself doubting just how many of the participants in these conversations are even real and how many of them are simply trolls or bots designed to specifically exacerbate already-fraught issues in American society.
To that end, I’ve increasingly come to view Twitter discourse, and those who participate in it, as nothing more than one long (and exhausting) piece of performance art. If one assumes that no one on Twitter–whether it be Trump or someone strongly implying that they would like to see the re-imposition of the Hays Code in Hollywood–is just doing it to gain clicks, it makes it much easier to simply dismiss it and go on with your day, rather than wasting valuable time and mental emotional energy debating with them. Or, frankly, even thinking about debating them. Though such people–the real ones, anyway–might take themselves deadly seriously, there’s no reason that I have to do so.
Twitter was a truly hellish place to be even before Elon Musk took over–it’s one of the things that allowed Trump to rise to power, after all, and it was also a crucial organizing tool for the January 6 Insurrection–but it has become truly unhinged in the months since it came under the domain of its new overlord. I can’t point to specific evidence that this is so, but it certainly does seem as if, these days, it’s the domain of all of the worst sort who, of course, also possess the most passionate intensity.
I know what some of you are no doubt thinking right now. If you’re so perplexed by what’s going on in the Twitter-verse, why don’t you just unplug from it altogether? After all, there’s no real reason that you have to stay part of such a toxic space. Unfortunately, though, there is, at least for the time being. As an independent writer, I rely on Twitter to get the word out about my work, and though I’m not entirely convinced that posting on Twitter has literally any impact on whether people buy my books, I do know that it is at least one place where I can spread the word about things like this very newsletter.
For the near future, at any rate, I’m going to stay plugged into what’s going on in the toxic, messy world of Twitter. There are just enough of the people that I love and care about on there, and just enough viewpoints that I’m genuinely interested in hearing, to continue to make it worthwhile.
At the very least, though, I’ll keep in mind that, at the end of the day, whatever happens on Twitter is, ultimately, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.