Vice and the Will to Offend

I always laugh when I think of Vice Magazine, which despite actually being the arm of an obnoxious international lifestyle marketer* has some fairly interesting content—both political and cultural. Its fiction especially has been quite remarkable, tapping alt.lit and Famous People, sometimes all at once. The current issue has the theme of Women in Fiction, and Vice being Vice, it has prepared some linkbait, specifically a fashion spread of women dressed like famed writers right before they committed suicide. And then Vice took it down after an online fuss. Pseudofeminist site Jezebel is sooooo angry they actually reposted the images and kept them up.

It reminded me of several years ago, when Vice solicited me for a piece of fiction. They explained the magazine a bit—they needn't have, I lived in places where it is available—and the editor (no longer with the magazine) explained that Vice can be offensive, sometimes willfully so. They wanted something in that line.

So I wrote the story Solidarity Forever. As you can see from the link, Vice didn't like it. I even altered the text to make it more palatable, but noooo.** Nor did any traditional horror magazine, of course. I ran it in my own Flytrap column (aside: Flytrap is running a Kickstarter to resurrect itself) instead. I even ran a little contest—basically, the story didn't sell because it offended the wrong people.***

And that's Vice, to a tee. The images are calculated to offend only so many and only so far. Certainly it isn't depicting these writers after their suicides—there would be bloated, ugly faces, and the garments they're wearing would be bloodied, singed, and soiled. Can't sell clothes that way! Plus it would offend the designers, and dead bodies are never upmarket unless stacked like cordwood in the background.

The photos are offensive, I think, but they're also not nearly offensive enough. Were they actually designed to truly offend, they would by definition not be designed to sell clothing, nor would they be so passed around by the various click-cliques of professional bloggers claiming offense. That is, Vice would have offended the designers, the photographers, the models first, and then moved on to the public with the result. But like with my story, they fell short, and then took another step backwards. You can't sell soap to Peoria by offending even this guy:



You must instead use him, and his friends, to offend the midwest into buying the soap.








*It's speciality seems to be selling the "hipster" lifestyle to people who fume constantly about how much they hate hipsters. If Cheers taught me anything, it's that hate isn't the opposite of love, indifference is. Many people who go on about how dumb or ugly or lame hipsters are spend most of their time and money consuming cultural hipster runoff. They live downstream from the hip, sometimes literally.

**The story originally began "This story is dedicated to Bono of the band U2, for all the work he has done."

**The issue boiled down, for many editors, to this: the "white guy" who is contemplating renting a child so as to rape it is killed for "no reason."