Many behaviours are exhibitionistic but they are so harmless that they defy criticism. The practical jokester in a nudist park who visits his dearest friends in the dark evening with his sex organs decorated with different coloured twinkling light emitting diodes because he knows that it will make them laugh and give them a memory that will brighten their lives when life is otherwise sad is an exhibitionist, but he does it to bring happiness into the lives of people he knows will enjoy such amusements. Such people have great respect for the privacy of those who are not comfortable with the nudist lifestyle and many do not even own a trench coat.
The classic flasher is a different matter. Psychologists tell us that he suffers a compulsion to elicit upset from people he can count upon to suffer a phobia at the sight of his sex organs so that through their reaction of distress, he can selfishly experience a confirmation of what I think should be the trivial fact that at least, anatomically, he is a man. The exhibitionist could point out two things in an attempt to justify the aggressiveness of his act. First, it is reasonable that society is afflicted with an excessive phobia of the sight of sex organs. Many cultures are free of such a phobia and this causes no problems. But it still is a form of bullying to set out to use someone's phobia to upset them. Whether or not someone chooses to get cured of a phobia is a matter of their business and that is between the phobia sufferer and her professional psychologist whom she chooses to attempt a cure. Second, the flasher is probably correct to complain that society brainwashed him since early childhood with an unfair and impossible to attain standard to which he must aspire before he can think of himself as a man. There are all kinds of ridiculous ways to define manhood throughout the world of pop or junk culture. One definition claims that if you are over the age of 40 and you have "washboard abs" then you must be homosexual because if you were a true man you would be out getting drunk every night with the boys and your chronic drunkeness would endow you with a colossal beer belly to prove it. (I trust that some of the ladies who suffer to witness such a pot bellied flasher but who suffer no phobia at the sight of his sex organs when he opens his trench coat would throw up at the sight of his behemoth paunch, but his beer gut would probably hang down so low that it would cover his vaudevillian organs anyway.)
Still, the classic flasher is a public nuisence who is unfair to those who are subjected to him and he does have a disorder that should be treated. PBS aired a documentary on a clinic that successfully deprograms flashers and more than one magistrate expressed gratitude at having available this clinic to which he or she could send those convicter of this form of indecent exposure.
I wish to propose to make more abstract the concept of aggressive exhibitionism to those forms of the behaviour that show no sex organs, but are done to create the exact same kind of affront and alarm that classic flashers impose. I submit that the aggressive playing of certain kinds of music the producers and consumer of which know that some people do not want to hear at volumes that force everybody to hear it whether they like it or not, even in forcing people to hear it in the privacy of their own homes is at least as aggressive a form of exhibitionism as that of the public trench coat opener. The pop culture that gives us boom box music have made this aggressive exhibitionism the centrepiece of their culture. Radio stations that play such music tell their listeners to "turn it all the way up" and car stereo manufacturers provide the exhibitionists who identify with that kind of music the kilowatt amplifiers that are designed to to force everybody to hear it in the homes of the neighborhoods through which they cruise. Stereo systems are sold with such ad copy as "Blow out the windows of every house in your neighborhood" with your kilowatts of "mega-bass". It is impossible for it to be that case that the exhibitionists who force expose us to the music we do not want play it at ear splitting volumes because they enjoy the music itself. They do it to dominate and to show who's boss, to prove that they are the ones self annointed to tell us what kind of music we should have in our homes and in our lives and what kind of culture we should live. The music is designed to antagonize and to abuse and probably, those who commit the indecent exposure of forcing it upon the world do so out of a need to prove themselves to be the super-conformists who listen to what they think is considered "cool" the way the man with the trench coat exposes himself to prove that at least anatomically he is a man.
So let the musical exhibitionists with their overpowered stereos be deprogrammed by such creative expedients as judges ordering them to be locked in a room where they are force to hear recordings of kindergarten nursery rhymes so that they will experience what they inflicted upon others. Meanwhile, let the man with the trench coat who, unlike his more aggressive boom box counterpart, wants to be cured, be sent to one of those deprogramming clinics that have proven themselves able to produce more successful corrective results than the less effective prison system.
01 Aug 2010, 7:51 am
