Cake & Sodomy: Marilyn Manson, Porn, And Moral Degeneracy in The United States

VCR’s and vaseline, tv-fucked by plastic queens
Cash in hand and dick on screen, who said God was ever clean?
Bible-belt ’round anglo-waste, putting sinners in their place
Yeah, right, great if you’re so good explain the shit stains on your face

Marilyn Manson, “Cake and Sodomy” (from: Portrait of an American Family, 1994)

***

It just took six years to go from the celebration of Fifty Shades of Grey and Hollywood’s promotion of sexual sadism into the mainstream until the canceling of Brian Warner from Canton, Ohio for practising that sadism in real life. What happened?

Probably not much, since the American discourse lives fast and dies young, and in a notoriously unintellectual and sketchy way. This month’s reckoning comes about Marilyn Manson, the poor emo man’s Bowie and minister of the Church of Satan. A celebrity guy whose mediocre music lives from sensationalism and shock as he stages himself as a cartoonish antichrist since 1989, and whom a landslide of women now openly accuse of being a sadist and racist, and abusing them sexually and emotionally during affairs, long-term relationships, and marriages. The allegations include S/M practices like bondage and suspension (brought to you by the Betty Page revival and made en vogue by celebrity fashion shootings), verbal humiliation and terror, debasement, sodomy, rape, sleep deprivation, starving, and music-torture. We can assume that all the allegations are true, since Manson admitted to all of it already in 1998 in his autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, where he describes his necrophiliac soul and his countless physical and psychological mind-control and abuse preferences in nauseating detail. In one episode he describes a backstage gang-bang where he and his mates (basically the entire cast of David Lynch’s Lost Highway soundtrack) abuse a deaf girl on a leash while letting her know that „I’ll cum in your useless auricle,” and at the end collectively piss on that girl. Of course, the question arouses why these open confessions didn’t trigger any push-back from the media and industry, or didn’t scare off his future women, all of whom surely must have read their famous lover’s biography. This is not about victim blaming, but the pointing at a moral degeneracy and delusion in the United States, and what Gail Dines calls the “hijacked sexuality of an entire culture“. For the record: I am very sorry for Manson’s victims and wouldn’t object if he rots in prison or spends the rest of his life lonely and abandoned as a bloated guy plastered with swastika tattoos and occult symbols.

There is something deeply unsettling about having a voyeuristic look into the sexual lives and abuse of others, celebrity or not. It’s like people obsessing with pedophilia and consuming stories and images about it to an unhealthy degree where you start to ask yourself if in reality it is not a twisted, hidden pleasure which drives them. Society example: Qanon. Celebrity example: Pete Townshend of The Who, who claimed to have purchased child pornography for “research purposes“. Oh, really? Townshend’s status, by the way: gracing every third classic rock magazine cover that I see.

Nevertheless, the graphic accusations made against Marilyn Manson offer a through ball to address the giant elephant in the room: the systemic moral degeneracy problem in the United States which culminates in its porno-industrial complex that generates at least $12 billion dollars in annual revenue, more than Hollywood, Netflix, the NFL, or the NBA. How do you explain that Manson gets crucified as if he were an anomaly, when there exists a hardcore porn industry that is legally eroticizing and celebrating the very crimes he is being accused of and unleashing it without any restrictions to everybody that has access to the internet- to everybody starting from elementary school students that is. In reality, this means that even children can access these sites and their content once they own a smartphone or their peers do, no matter which precautions you take as a parent. It is a degenerate scenario about which German teachers unsuccessfully try to raise awareness of by sharing their accounts about children under the age of 10 watching and sharing hardcore porn on the schoolyards. Fast rewind to The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, where Brian Warner recalls watching his grandfather masturbating to bestiality porn in his creepy pervert’s basement.

Yes, let’s make one thing clear: if you are an American or European, basically all of porn is free and accessible all the time with no age checks via ID or credit card required on platforms like f.e. youporn.com, tube8.com, pornhub.com, all three of them belonging to the company Mindgeek. Don’t make the mistake to assume that Mindgeek and Co’s content is the ‘old in-out’, some hairy, soft and slightly kinky 70s sex. Modern pornography is rather so-called ‘gonzo-porn‘ which the great Chris Hedges describes as follows: “Pornography and torture inevitably converged. /…/ The violence is not simulated, it’s real: these women are black and blue by the time they are finished. They are constantly going in for anal and vaginal reconstructive surgery because they are penetrated by 2-3 dozen men in the course of an afternoon, knocked around, abused, insulted verbally. It is really sick. The only emotion the women are allowed to express on a porn set is a crave and desire to be degraded physically, verbally, and morally. In the essence, porn is about necrophilia.”

Mindgeek is located in the Greek part of Cyprus, which is a Cayman Islands-style lawless state in the middle of Europe that is providing golden passports for criminal oligarchs but also hardcore and underage porn, inseparably linking porn to global capitalism- venture capitalists, banks, and credit card companies all go to bed with the porn industry and share the goal of the enslavement and exploitation of humans. Feminist Andrea Dworkin nailed this symbiosis down radically: “Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel when the corporations in question, sell cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any man’s pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts.”

Porn is completely anonymized, we do not know the names of the women appearing in the films, or their age. We don’t know where they come from and if they are being trafficked and enslaved, if they are under the influence of drugs, nothing. “Women are being reduced to submissive objects, toys and pleasure dolls who have no identity as humans but have vulgar stage names,” Chris Hedges writes. Few women are known by name, and it seems like these are exclusively American and European women. Some of them are elevated to pop-cultural icons, like Traci Lords, who happens to be a former fling of Manson and started her porn career with 15, thereby making nearly all of her films illegal. Others declare themselves “porn-feminists” who patronizingly wanna make porn about “free speech” and brutal gang bangs about empowerment, by that dismissing all the many sinister and unregulated aspects about the industry. It is the same bunch which uses the cold euphemism “sex-worker” in order to abandon the term prostitution, which evokes more, and necessary, connotations about human trafficking and exploitation.

„The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too,” writes the visionary Dworkin in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, who then was marginalized and accused of helping the right and had problems to publish her work in America. It cannot be denied that the conservative forces were always right about their condemnation of Marilyn Manson and also the porn industry, but the condemnation remains forever hypocritical, since the left and right both built this society and system together. The “vast sadistic graveyards” Dworkin is talking of are expanding on American society and are also to be found in the bipartisan military complex of the Empire. In Abu Ghraib, American soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners with old-fashioned torture methods like a constant exposure to loud music or sleep deprivation, but there was also a new quality to the images that were leaked from Abu Ghraib. Chris Hedges understands that they “could be stills from porn films… pictures of naked men in chains, men piled up on each other like in a gang bang /…/ pictures with forced masturbation and sex between guards in them.” These images in 2019 got reproduced with crude relish in the Amazon film The Report, which is a horrible torture porn with great hybris for most of its part, showing in great lengths how American soldiers, male and female, stuff things and fluids into male Muslim anuses, only to conclude: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say, “see what the Americans did?” And they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence.”
Talk about declaring war while apologizing. If this is liberal America’s twisted version of enlightenment, then I prefer Clint Eastwood.

Another aspect about freely accessible hardcore porn that I never see being discussed is surveillance. It’s just as little discussed as the fact that on the other end of Jeffrey Epstein‘s underage sex trafficking ring there is obviously the blackmailing of rich and powerful men. Today it is easier to watch illegal porn than to follow Julian Assange‘s trial or google the work of shadow-banned authors and journalists who criticize the system. In addition to the formation of completely unrealistic body ideals and the mass-conditioning for cold, mechanical sex and a militarized sexual violence, the widespread consumption of porn has created a class that is fundamentally blackmailable because the NSA monitors their every move and has logbooks about every porn they have ever seen, and every nude picture and sex-message they have ever sent out digitally. As with mass surveillance overall, the personal recognition is subliminal but nonetheless visceral. The result is a society that is being systematically enslaved and kept guilty and ashamed from early youth on, and a collective paranoia that is both very private and very real, and just waits to find its catharsis in conspiracy theories and despotic nihilism.

When Charlton Heston’s character finds the charred remnants of the Statue of Liberty, and with it the truth that the Planet of Apes is actually not an alien planet but post-apocalyptic Earth, he screams: “You finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!” Today, that wrecked image of Lady Liberty could come with suspenders and bonds, and holding up an iPhone. Babylon, you whore ! You can cancel Manson for cosmetic amendments, but there are millions of Marilyn’s and Manson’s growing up among your ranks, some in make-up others in suit & tie, but all paranoid and conditioned to torture and kill, destined to bring you down in the biggest necrophiliac orgy that the world has ever seen.

by Saliha Enzenauer

This article is heavily inspired by Chris Hedges’ article Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like, and his further expansion on the topic in his book America: The Farewell Tour (2019). Also read Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) (link to free pdf)