“The domesticated monster” sends me immediately to “My Pet Monster,” the blue stuffed toy that wore bright orange manacles. If you pulled its arms apart, it would break the chain. The manacles came off so you could wear them as well, and it feels like the obvious joke is to say it was a gateway to light BDSM for a generation of children when the appeal clearly was the power fantasy, having the ability to break something without getting in trouble.
The toy came out in 1986 which means it was prevalent and popular in 1987, a year I keep returning to. I’d had an idea for a story set in the 80’s about a group of Tipper Gore-ish mothers accidentally summoning the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse and, as Illuminatus puts it, “immanentizing the eschaton.” It comes down to their kids and other children this group of moms has bullied to summon the devil and try to save the world.
When I started doing research and thinking about the story more, it immediately led me down the path of the Satanic Panic, the PMRC, and everything else. I started looking more and more at the year 1987. I think deciding to move to Korea pointed me in that direction.
Anyway, I’m getting way from monsters, or so it seems. Although I wasn’t seeing it mentioned in any of my readings about the Satanic Panic, one of the underlying fears was a gender panic—ambiguous masculinity married to unbridled sexuality. It’s not an accident that what set Tipper Gore off was Prince: a figure of ambiguous masculinity who is unabashedly sexual… and Black! While the censorious actions of Gore and the PMRC started as a response to the counterculture rock of metal and punk, they didn’t ascend to the height of their power until they targeted “gansta rap.” Racism is where it started and racism is where it ended.
I was interested in that idea of the Satanic Panic being a reactionary movement against queerness though. You even had a cottage industry of “boot camps” promising to “de-punk and de-metal” your children, and what is that if not proto-conversion therapy? And this is happening during the rise of the AIDS pandemic, something the fascist Reagan administration allowed to run unchecked, calling it a “gay plague.” 1987, by the way, was the year of the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights—aka “The Great March”—which was the site of the first major action by ACT-UP.
1987 was also the year of the campaigns for the 1988 presidential primaries. Bush was gunning for the Republican nomination but was being stymied by his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. The Democrats were pushing for Dukakis, but he was facing a real challenge from party outsider Rev. Jesse Jackson (who was running on a platform to the left of Sanders’ 2020 campaign). Meanwhile, Korea was preparing to host the 1988 Olympics which pro-democracy activists used as an opportunity to force the military dictatorship to finally allow promised democratic elections. The government was using the Olympics as a way of showing how stable and advanced the country had become and so couldn’t use its typical tools of violence to silence dissent this time.
To put it simply, 1987 felt like a tipping point for hope, a moment where real change was possible, where the monsters would be defeated.
We know how that went: Dukakis went full-bore against Jackson and then didn’t campaign against Bush, the pandemic was allowed to run unchecked and used to justify further discrimination against its victims, and in Korea, elections were finally held with the winner being the man the dictator had already tapped as his successor. Just like with My Pet Monster, we could break our chains, but only the ones made to be broken so that we wouldn’t break anything else.
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