Is Luigi immorally hot?
On why it's supposed to be immoral to ogle a criminal and how absurd humor makes visible the invisible absurdity of justice.
“no lube, no protection, all night, all day, fro.m the kitchen floor to the toilet seat, from the bathroom sink to the shower, from the front porch to the balcony, vertically, horizontally, quadratic, exponential, logarithmic, while I gasp for air, scream, and see the light, missionary, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, doggy, backwards, sideways, upside down, on the floor, in the bed, on the couch, on a chair, being carrier, against the wall, outside, in a train, on a plane, in the car, on a motorcycle, on the back of a truck, on a trampoline, in a bounce, in the pool, in the garden, bent over, in the basement, against the window, having the most toe curling, back arching, leg shaking, dick throbbing, fist clenching, era ringing, mouth drooling, ass clenching, nose sniffing, eye watering, eye rolling, hip thrusting, earthquaking, sheet gripping, knuckles cracking, jaw dropping, hair pulling, teeth jitterbug, mind blogging, soul snatching, overstimulating, vile, sloppy, moan introducing, heart wrenching, spine tingling, back breaking, atrocious, gushy, creamy, beastly, lip biting, gravity defying, nail biting, sweaty, feet kicking, mind blowing, body shivering, orgasmic, bone breaking, world ending, black hole creating, universe destroying, devious, scrumptious, amazing, delightful, delectable, unbelievable, body numbing, bark worthy, can't walk, head nodding, soul evaporating, vulcano erupting, sweat rolling, voice cracking, trembling, sheets soaked, hair drenched, flabbergasting, lip locking, skin peeling, eye widening, pussy popping, nail scratching, back cuts, spectacular, brain cell devolving, hair ripping, show stopping, magnificent, unique, extraordinary, splendid, phenomenal, mouth foaming, heavenly.”
Chamaquito about Luigi Mangione on lspg.com
Oh well, this newsletter is now devoted to shirtless men. Yes, you guessed it: We need to talk about Luigi, or rather, those who look at Luigi.
Before we get into it, a disclaimer. I know better than to place my trust, hopes, and dreams in a hot, rich, white man, and I’m not interested in projecting anything, either virtuous or immoral, onto this one.
Instead, I want to talk about ethics and aesthetics and how we use one as a proxy for the other. In other words, is there something immoral in finding someone morally dubious… hot? What is our eyes’ job in terms of ethics?
From this very serious question, I’ll explore what has been missing in most of the “analysis” of the swooning over Mangione’s appearance: humor. I’d like to make the case that displacing an ethical question (should a person kill another one?) onto an aesthetic one (is it hot enough to get away with it?) should be interpreted as absurdist humor making a political point.
So let us dive into the intersection between aesthetics, ethics, looking hot, being wrong, no lube, no protection, all night, all day.
Looking hot = Being right
As a child, when I was doing something wrong, like breaking something in the house, my parents would berate me by shouting, “Booo, you’re ugly! Go hide yourself!”. So I would scurry away to hide in shame. When I tell this story to my friends in Canada today, I’m met with perplexed looks and concerns over French parenting strategies, which is… fair. However, the most striking thing in this story is the association between the ethics of doing something wrong and the aesthetics of looking ugly.
We’re used to thinking of this association in terms of causality, whereby a moral failure causes ugliness. I learned that doing bad things made me ugly. The flip side is that we constantly interpret aesthetic signs to infer morality. Fat activists have long pointed out how fatness is often interpreted as a moral failure, a sign of laziness or lack of will, for example, even if that’s completely absurd and unfounded. Visual cues are a shortcut to making moral judgments about people, and these shortcuts are steeped in longstanding cultural stereotypes. For the ancient Greeks, beauty was always a sign of virtue, and antagonist figures like Medusa, the Minotaur, the Harpies, etc., were necessarily ugly.
We are socialized to “look” for ethical cues, and often, our moral judgments are more visual reactions than logical reasoning. When we see something immoral, we know it because it is hard, even impossible, to look at. Looking at the images of the horrors of Auschwitz or Abu Ghraib is painful not because of some rational, well-thought argument against cruelty, but instead, as Umberto Eco wrote in his book On Ugliness: “We all know perfectly well that such things are ugly, not only in the moral but in the physical sense, and we know this because they arouse our disgust, fear, and repulsion[…] in such cases we unhesitatingly recognize ugliness, and we cannot transform it into an object of pleasure.’ Looking away, in this case, is a moral action. It condemns by refusing to partake in the spectacle. Conversely, this also means looking and even more so looking with lust, desire, or amusement, is a form of moral endorsement.
So what happens when this positively charged form of looking, this morally approving gaze, turns toward otherwise immoral actions or people? When we find ways, as Eco put it, to “transform [them] into an object of pleasure,” well, it strikes a sensitive chord, as we have seen in recent weeks.
The popular forum LPSG (do not google what it stands for), where countless gay men routinely objectify male celebrities —in often impressive feats of internet investigation to unearth any arousing visual material— is a privileged site to study such tension. As I’m writing this, the Luigi Mangione thread is 363 pages long. An admin note on the thread's first page says: “A number of users have reported this thread and requested it be removed. LPSG is a discussion forum. If this thread bothers you, please avoid it.” In the thread, the lascivious posts are interspersed by disapproving ones: “Fawning over a murderer is absolutely disgusting.” This type of comment points to an ideal moral compass, at best removed from aesthetics or at the very least aligned with it.
But even in condemning the ogling of an alleged murderer, some cannot refrain from partaking in the aesthetic evaluation as a form of moral judgment: “1.) wtf is wrong with people 2.) he’s not even that attractive” writes Xbishop98. “Completely average looking. Regardless of his "reasoning" - still a murderer.” adds Jasen824. In other words, “Booo, you’re ugly! Go hide yourself!”
Aesthetics and ethics have an intimate relationship, and various forms of looking, like ogling, admiring, gawking, glaring, etc., are moral activities. What Mangione’s looks have achieved is to make explicit the usually implicit relationship between aesthetics and ethics. But what is happening with Luigi Mangione's stans (do we still say “stan”?) is going a step further. The humorous absurdity of leading the moral discussion of Mangione’s actions with his looks achieves a political disruption of our status quo to ask: what is, if not aesthetics, our moral compass?
The absurd and the visible
Over the past few weeks, the media has analyzed the swooning over Mangione’s looks in the most literal ways. Every article points to a more hyperbolic diagnosis of our society’s moral decay backed by a gloomy cast of criminologists and psychologists, one more serious than the other. USA Today laments that “We live in a world where notoriety eclipses morality” where killers are celebrated; for the BBC, an expert worries the online reactions are "a catalyst for the normalisation of political violence that was once confined to extremists on the fringes"; and The Independent diagnoses the dark, terrifying “condition” that is hybristophilia, i.e., finding criminals hot.
It’s not surprising that traditional media is frightfully literal in its analysis of popular culture, and it’s part of the tradition to refer to any internet phenomenon as a dark underbelly of our society. But chances are, if you’ve encountered the memes and swooning over Mangione’s appearance, part of you found it… funny. Because it’s meant to be. Ignoring the campiness of the memes and the absurdity of the tweets —and what they achieve politically— is to be sorely tone-deaf. “Why so serious?” Another hot villain would ask.
Online fans have reframed the debate in absurdist terms by embracing Mangione for his looks and choosing aesthetics as a ground for morality (“If the guy is fit, you must acquit”). By humorously considering hotness as a moral compass, we are forced to reevaluate the absurdity of our established norms that tacitly approve of corporations making profit from a fundamental human right and individuals being punished when they call it out. The collective ogling of Mangione asks a very serious question: In a country where profit is the compass to decide who lives or dies and corporations can kill thousands every year without raising concerns, how is hotness more of an absurd base for our justice system?
Such absurdist humor has been a powerful tool for shedding critical light on the status quo forever. Studying the use of absurdism during the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, political scientist Umut Korkut wrote “By appealing to the truth generation value of absurdity, the individual realises the civic impact of demonstrating the falsity of the authoritarian system and its incapacity to live up to the truth of its ideals [...]” Displacing debates about justice and morality onto aesthetics and looks has had a powerful effect on drawing people to have more discussions about ethics in the past month than they usually have in a year. Korkut continues: “Humour can be the tool to befool docility, quash sterility and promote activism. It has a transformative impact through its expression.” On LPSG, after most of Mangione’s pics were found, the rest of the thread essentially turned into a philosophical and political discussion. Answering someone’s question as to why anyone would lust over a criminal, one user explains:
“Seven reasons:
1. The CEO is responsible for leading his insurance company through acts of cartoonish evil. Refusing people nausea drugs when on chemotherapy, denying procedures, threatening to stop covering anaesthesia part way through surgery, and for what? They've got a near-monopoly in parts of the USA and make obscene profits through ridiculous mark ups and disgusting practices that destroy lives - some of the stories of children living without their mother because United obstructed life saving care are truly heartbreaking and never should have happened. Every cent spent on that man's funeral was made on someone else's. And neither the Republicans nor Democrats have any political appetite to address it as they both receive donations, the regulatory agencies have been captured, protests and campaigns are ignored and have no impact. What exactly was left to do?
Claiming the CEO wasn't directly responsible and was just another cog in a huge system is the banality of evil.
After Luigi did what he did, suddenly health insurance agencies started reversing their disgusting policies and pausing rejections. I cannot condemn him for that.
2. His actions lead to cross-partisan unity that I haven't seen in over a decade.
3. That jawline
4. That smile
5. That body
6. Let's be real, he's almost certainly got a massive dick.
7. I have a theory that although he's straight, I bet he's at least a little bit bi and has fooled around with other guys.”
Unlike the diagnosis of media shallowness or social pathologies, thinking of the current moment through the lens of humor shows that far from being immoral, the crowds of online oglers are indeed making a moral point we shouldn’t ignore.
Justice, we are told, is supposed to be blind. As I’ve discussed before, this image was originally a satire, with a fool blindfolding Lady Justice to illustrate the arbitrary and silly nature of the justice system. Of course, justice is not blind; neither is the internet crowd which has been so quick to support a white suspect above anyone else.
But in this “society of the spectacle” controlling the visual aspects of a news event has often been, and still is, the privilege of the state and the media, who have tried to play their cards as they could to control Mangione’s image. From a carefully choreographed perp walk with the NYC mayor analyzed by
to the New York Times photo editors setting a visual taboo on Luigi’s face obtained by , making crime and criminals visible or invisible is a delicate dance.Conversely, the absurd focus on Mangione’s good looks has mobilized our implicit connection between aesthetics and ethics to bring to the foreground the absurdity of a usually invisible phenomenon: In the US, a person dies every seven minutes because of inadequate health care access. It’s easy to discard this collective swooning as superficial, but when it comes to ethics, justice, or politics, paying attention to who looks and how, can reveal a lot.