James's latest effort, The Zealots, is hard to read. Set in Hamburg in the near-future, it tells the story of slutbangers.com, a pornographic website that mostly features user-submitted videos. The story begins as the proprietors of the website stumble upon a delicious discovery: the daughter of a prominent Muslim cleric in the city has become addicted to hard drugs and has left home. The men lure her into their studio, where they induce her to perform in a degrading hardcore video, which they entitle "Muslim Bitch Begs For It." Although their website generally requires viewers to pay by the minute, they post "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" free for all to watch. Soon it has garnered tens of millions of views, and while it has not directly generated any revenue, it has brought thousands of new paying users to the website. Buoyed by their success, the proprietors of slutbangers.com devote an entire section of the website to hardcore videos featuring Muslim women being humiliated. The young Muslim woman (the cleric's daughter) kills herself with a probably-intentional overdose.
But at this point the story takes a dark turn. Two young Muslim men, enraged by the perceived disrespect being paid to Muslim women, storm into the offices of slutbangers.com and kill the proprietors as well as several staff members.
The world is shocked. "Wir sind slutbangers.com!" is the slogan on everyone's lips and on the front pages of all of the major Western newspapers. Political leaders hail the courage and free-speech advocacy of the slain men. It soon emerges that, just prior to the attack, they and their lawyers had been courageously fending off the Muslim cleric's attempts to use German privacy law to force them to remove "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" from their website. This only cements their status as martyrs for free speech.
But soon a split appears in Western opinion. On one side are people who, however much they may dislike pornography and find it distasteful, are unwavering in their support of slutbangers.com. On the other side are people who deny that you can truly support slutbangers.com unless you embrace their mission of producing and viewing hardcore pornography. After all, how can you defend the right without defending the practice? This latter camp (by far the more numerous one) spawns an ice-bucket-challenge-like phenomenon, in which supporters of slutbangers.com film hardcore sex videos and post them online. At the end of the video, the participants can nominate another couple to "take the slutbangers.com challenge," and if the second couple doesn't post a sex tape within 24 hours, they must make a donation to a charity that primarily or exclusively funds projects in non-Muslim countries. Soon there are few athletes, actors, or elected officials under the age of 70 who have not shown their support of slutbangers.com in the most personal way possible.
The story takes another dark turn, though, as George Clooney not only refuses to take the slutbangers.com challenge, but casts the sole vote against "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" for the foreign-language Oscar. All across the internet, thinkers and pundits condemn Clooney's bizarre hatred of free speech. Clooney gives a brief statement, most of which he spends condemning the violent attack on slutbangers.com, before noting his disapproval of the way its proprietors treated the cleric's daughter and his doubts about the merits of the video compared to that year's other nominees. This pivot is pilloried as the "Liar's But," in the sense that everything he said before the "but," before criticizing "Muslim Bitch Begs For It," was disingenuous filler. "Always wrong to resort to violence," "nothing can ever justify," blah blah blah. Obviously Clooney couldn't wait to get to the part of the speech where he slandered the men behind slutbangers.com.
One freelance pornographer who worked for the site goes so far as to suggest that until you've sexually humiliated a Muslim woman on video, you can't understand what the website was all about and you have no standing to criticize it. The feeling that you get, he argues, just can't be conveyed except through direct experience. Many people feel that this particular argument goes too far, but they endorse the contention that slutbangers.com was misunderstood because many people unaccustomed to pornography took the site's "degradation" porn out of context, construing it as extreme, when really it was well within the mainstream of internet pornography.
The book ends happily with George Clooney drummed out of Hollywood and the surviving staffers of slutbangers.com (including the man who, in the video, sodomized the cleric's daughter and then forced her to fellate him) accepting the Oscar award with a tearful speech, as the entire Western world unites in its support of their noble work.
More like, Slutbangers and mash.
ReplyDelete