You can be praised if you missed this “controversy” that’s been sucking up attention that’s worthy of another focus: “Elon Musk Claims ‘The Odyssey’s Christopher Nolan Cast Lupita Nyong’o As Helen Of Troy Because “He Wants Awards”.” The apartheid-adjactent internet is having a shit fit because Luptia is playing Helen of Troy. The standard read is the regular racist rant: How dare black woman play a “white” role. I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about that standard racist trope because I think there’s something else that’s also going on here, but let’s address the racism first, if only to move past it.
First things first: This is a myth, dummies. It’s imagined. Because someone imagines something differently than you do is no reason to have a hissy. But if we have seen anything in the 21st century, we have seen that internet nerds love to police others’ imaginations while acting as if theirs is grounded in irrefutable fact and reason. See, for example, Gamergate. Or check out what seems to be Elon Musk’s entire raison d’etre, “creating a better future for the human race,” just as long as it’s his vision of the future and his race. But at some stage in this culture, the fantasy of the thing becomes the thing itself. This is important, and we will get back to it later.
The second thing that these geeks need to get straight, as it were, is that the era they are claiming to defend — Bronze Age mythology — doesn’t think about race or color as they do. If you walked up to Hammurabi or Agamemnon (granting they themselves aren’t highly mythologized) and said, “Hey, man, aren’t you outraged that a black woman is portraying an ‘obviously’ white Helen of Troy,” they would simply look at you and ask, “What the fuck are you talking about?” That’s because the Bronze Age didn’t have racial categories like Black and White. Sure, they separated people into groups, but not simply based on the color of their skin. So for all their efforts to protect the racial “purity” of the Bronze Age and “the West,” they try to do so by imposing racial categories that didn’t mean what the geeks think they mean until, quite literally, thousands of years after the Bronze Age. The polite term for this is “anachronism,” and one would think that nerds who want to police the truth might be attuned to why that’s a problem. But when you cosplay and LARP and invent virtual worlds, there’s always a tremendous part of your contemporary life, culture, and context you are working through. You don’t really want to go back to Anatolia in 2500 BC. After all, they had really shitty 5G coverage. You want to work out via your on-screen (big screen, small screen, computer screen) personae all your 21st-century issues, while pretending they aren’t real issues to be worked out at all. If your fantasy depends on white purity, then you just impose it. That’s the “fact” that you are both asserting and fretting about, even if you don’t know it consciously. You make sure your elves are blond and your wizards are Nordic. You shape your world by controlling the (computer) code to reinforce your (cultural) code and make your world a closed loop. That is the power of Musky nerddom.
Adam Serwer called this type of internet denizen “reactionary geeks.” He pointed out that segments of geek culture, such as comics, gaming, and sci-fi and fantasy fandom, have become nurseries for right-wing grievance politics. These forms of culture involve quite a bit of vicarious projection; the geek lives through the fantasy of the character. Some of my own experience with this subculture comes from doing work with trying to teach AI models to create fictional narratives. My task was to look at prompts that users had given an AI and see how well the AI structured a story around the prompt. A striking plurality of all the prompts I saw were sci-fi or fantasy. That got tedious quickly, and it’s not because I dislike the genres as such. Rather, it’s because I find that there are thousands of bad genre writers for every good one, and the AIs weren’t coming anywhere near reproducing the kinds of insight or craft you might find in Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Samuel Delany, or Octavia Butler. Genre, which is loose, is first mistaken for and then transformed into formula, which is rigid. And if you hear in “rigid” something like “hard cock,” you are getting part of what I’m trying to say. It’s not that the geeks are simply reactionary in an ideological way. It’s also that there’s a kind of unexamined psychosexual acting out that’s going on there. This is why I ended up calling the people who submitted these prompts “elf fuckers.”
These guys don’t just police hierarchies. They fuck them. There is a sublime, erotic charge that goes into every engagement with a canonical debate about whether a Hobbit can be Black or elves can be Asian. The upset about Lupita N’yongo as Helen of Troy isn’t about the “truth” of Bronze Age skin color. Instead, it’s about the projection of desire. It’s “I would never (or at least I have some very complicated and unresolved feelings about) have sex with a Black woman, even if she were the most beautiful woman in the world. Therefore, she can’t be the most beautiful woman in the world.” I have to be rigid about my categories because my categories are what make me rigid. And the elf fucking fantasy is where it gets weird… or becomes perfectly clear. I’m down with fucking another species (however imaginary), but I draw the line at fucking the same species with a different skin color. All the erotic punch of “transgressive” miscegenation without all the mess of transgressive miscegenation. I’d say somebody needs to make up their minds, but their minds are already made up. They just don’t understand how they are made up. This is the sexual fantasy of code. I can code — create from syntax — a desirable elf. It can be the other. And it must also be the same. Masturbatory logic has become a shared and normalized community practice. It’s a virtual circle jerk, and the virtual is key because a real one would be kinda, you know, gay. And we can’t have that. Code violation. And yes, I should examine “violation” in this context, but how long do you want me to go on?
There’s a disturbing way in which the entire incel aesthetic and psychology gets wrapped up into all of this as well. The incel, who has separated the world into Chads and sub-humans to justify his misogyny, escapes, via his fantasy world, the sub-human box into which he has already placed himself. The elf fucker is the Chad in code, and as a Chad, he also gets to say who and what is sexually desirable. Does this work out even in the logic of the fantasy, let alone in real life? Maybe not so much, but that’s why I’m treating this as a particular kind of pathology, though I don’t want to pathologize sexual desire per se. I mean, we can look at something like looksmaxxing and say, “Wouldn’t you be a bit happier if you just came out of the closet?” [OK, so that’s a bit glib, but dig into the scene if you think I’m totally off base, and if you need a definition of the term before you start, this article isn’t a horrible place to start. This article is another place for background.] But why are incels incel? Might it have something to do with the attraction of elf fucking? Might it be that they have fully entered into the economy of psychosexual displacement, which climaxes (yes, climaxes) in grievance that spouts forth through the user interface? We used to say that there was someone for everyone. We didn’t mean that there was some elf for everyone. We meant someone fleshly.
But not all desire can be safely expressed. Some desire needs to be displaced, and elf fucking is actually a rather ingenious way to displace it into a “safe” realm. My cellmate had a bon mot for the community behind bars that liked to play fantasy and role-playing games like D&D and Magic: The Gathering. He called them simply “The Chomo Games.” “Chomo” (which rhymes with “homo,” and you can see where I could take that), for those of you who don’t know, is prison slang for “child molester.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that one has physically assaulted children, but that the crime involved sexualizing children, such as the possession of child pornography. My cellie’s point was not even to disparage the people who played these games as “lesser” than those convicted of other kinds of crimes. Rather, he was pointing out that for many geeks behind bars, that sexual desire often came out in the form of what I’m now calling elf fucking.
When I described some of these ideas to a popular AI model, it concluded with the response that elf fuckers “aren’t looking for a partner; they’re looking for a user interface.” I think that’s not a bad response, but, of course, the AI missed the implicit, fleshly joke/insight in its own output. The elf fucker is looking for a partner, but the partner is only available through the “user interface.” That is to say, “user interface” is our new euphemism for sexual penetration and contact. It’s kind of the ultimate displacement. Think about AI. You enter your prompts into the [text] box. The prompts list your desires and constraints. The model almost always says “yes” to them. It wants to leave you satisfied with its performance and wants you to come back for more, any time, day or night. It’s sycophantic, forever boosting your ego. We might imagine is as a kind of “superior” being with access to all the information there is to have, and it feeds data back to you, via its own interface, just the way you tell it to. We might ask whether AI is built by elf fuckers, of elf fuckers, and for elf fuckers. It might never say no. But can our desires ever be satisfied if the other party never really says “yes” either?