editors’ note
the Exposed, erotic seam of mtv’s “the challenge”

Meg Cook, Fecund co-editor

How to become exposed—to ourselves, to each other? Exposure of course can mean a few things—trench coat flasher, social media virality, sunburn—but, in essence, I think it connotes an almost pathological honesty; a truth that by its nature can’t be moralized, or simply theoretical. An urgent and unavoidable present. Thus, exposure is a truth that’s inherently erotic: In The Pleasure of the Text (1971), Roland Barthes writes that “Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.” 

Even before “these times” (ugh), I’ve noticed a depressing turn toward the theoretical (theory-as-praxis rather than theory begetting praxis). There’s a distinct move away from the erotic seam Barthes talks about and into a place of safe black-and-white; we’re staunch in our concrete conclusions about how life is or should be, and we feel protected when we come to clear, morally succinct conclusions on things. This makes me so nervous—who in their right mind agrees with conclusions they made years, months, even weeks ago? 

This quick turn toward easy moralizing only makes sense—we feel helpless when truly exposed, or when life is exposed as what it is: mostly benign, indifferent, “unfair,” real, gray. We want to believe a greater (more important) portion of our lived experience is internal—malleable depending on our needs, and self-sufficient—and that “the discourse” can be easily manipulated, refracted back out, protecting us from...what? Being cancelled? 

The simulacrum makes us believe we can become immortal by becoming “informed,” turning away from spontaneity, and moralizing our way to redemption. This theoretical realm is frustrating and antithetical to the exposure I’ve been seeking out, exposure that has nothing to do with my own specific lived experience—and, in fact, necessarily separates me from it. 

My point is: Where is the pleasure; the exhilarating gratification of Barthes’ seam! I don’t need an excuse to grow eternally inward, and definitely don’t need an excuse to lean more into the theoretical. I suppose it is with this acknowledgement of, and hunger for, the salve of exposure’s truth (my own, sure, but others’, more likely; it’s more fun to rubberneck others’ moments of exposure, to catch them in that erotic seam)—that led Ian and I to start bingeing MTV’s The Challenge this summer. 

The Challenge is a reality competition show that originally aired on MTV in 1998, a spinoff from MTV reality hits The Real World and Road Rules, and later, Are You the One?. Alumni from these respective shows are brought together to compete in physical challenges, with the bottom two teams from each week competing in a culminating weekly challenge. The losers go home. More often than not, competitors act in teams that are strategically assigned by producers based on past relationships or previous Challenge season dynamics (think: Battle of the Exes or Rivals), and sometimes competitors act as single units (Free Agents). There is, of course, a cash prize. 

The Challenge presents exposure, pleasure, and Barthes’ erotic seam in one: it’s all action. In the B-roll footage, the moon is always full, creating in everyone the most werewolf version of themselves: a pure instinctual amorality. Everything that happens on The Challenge is cancel-able.

Barthes notes that culture—true, erotic, pleasurable culture “recurs as an edge: in no matter what form.” Some might say that “culture” is antithetical to a competition-based reality show of which there are thirty-plus seasons; a show on which society’s most inherent and dogmatic impulses—physicality, misogyny, bingeing/purging, racism, sex, homophobia, pranks—are not only divulged but reiterated, even strengthened. But because The Challenge resists the theoretical, it’s unafraid to lay bare these most base-level societal influences and erotics. To own up to them.

Sometimes these ideologies are loosely moralized for the sake of the show’s production and longevity—I’m thinking particularly of a season 26 Battle of the Exes II episode wherein thumb-sucking Nia calls overconfident Jordan a faggot while mockingly grabbing for his genitals and is (rightly and quickly, to the producers’ credit) dismissed from the competition and made a lesson of (“If you or anyone you know has been a victim of anti-LGBTQ hate speech…” reads a mid-episode on-screen pop-up). 

More often than not, however, the purely carnal strategy of The Challenge’s contestants epitomize the bliss of Barthes’ erotic edge: “Another bliss (other edges): it consists in de-politicizing what is apparently political, and in politicizing what apparently is not. —Come now, surely one politicizes what must be politicized, and that’s all.” 

De-politicizing the political and politicizing and non. I like that, on the show, “politics,” unlike in the heinous modern reality we occupy, is a verb. There’s the action of politicking that is a constant necessity at each day’s end, back at the house; the physical challenges that the contestants have borne throughout the day are only one half of the show’s brute strategy. During the day you compete, but at night, you have to manipulate, get drunk (but not too drunk!), socialize, and win over. Strategy is a version of physical strength in The Challenge, not an analytic component of the show’s main physical competition. It is the competition.

Is there still power in this kind of pure strategy? I’m talking Sun Tzu style strategy, where every action in war necessitates a reaction—thinking ahead, acting to react, no time to theorize what could happen. There’s no time. Barthes writes: “Rather, one might be astounded by the housewifely skill with which the subject is meted out, dividing its reading, resisting the contagion of judgement, the metonymy of contentment: can it be that pleasure makes us objective?” 

Everyone on The Challenge is a bitch, a loser, a cuck—not because they are morally or ethically assigned as such, but because these terms become disconnected, objective identifiers that are useful to employ within each contestant’s greater strategy. Thus, just as politics becomes an action for survival—equal to swimming, balancing, or eating quarts of spicy squid soup as fast as one can—so too do the means of achieving political gain become an objective necessity, not necessarily a personal vendetta to hash out. 

Veteran Challenge favorite Wes Bergmann is not physically the biggest or strongest, but as the show’s master politicker, he is feared as greatly as the more obviously roided-out dudes—perhaps even more powerful, as he can manipulate even those men to his will, without them noticing. Take, for instance, this Bergmann quote from Battle of the Exes II: “Leroy pulled the trigger. Leroy loaded the gun. I just showed Leroy how the gun works.” It’s not personal, it’s politics. Wes is simply exposing the wanton survival strategies that exist within every Challenge contestant, laying bare simply because he’s the most adept. Wes’s role is to expose, which is probably why I’m so drawn to him (he’s also super hot). 

Theorizing, rather than strategic action, lends itself to a malleability of reality that isn’t useful in this competition; internality is not rewarded. The analytical realm is not only not erotic, it’s inherently incorporeal: there’s no seam to traverse because nothing can be truly exposed. Theory has no carnality, no body. In The Challenge, we’re constantly reminded that the only moment is now, all that matters is the next move, the next play. It’s an erotic return to the body. 

I myself don’t operate in this mode naturally, so being forced into each episode feels like a quick sprint: one physically can’t think of anything else in the moment, because all that matters is the body’s response to its immediate stimuli. What can I do to survive? I appreciate being reminded that corporeality is the only reality, but recognizing that necessitates an exposure that’s scary and vulnerable. (The contestants all wear matching Under Armour-sponsored athletic gear that strips them of the protections offered by personal identity and personal style; there is still so much sex and sexual tension, but it’s urgent and carnal despite these de-sexualizing identifiers, not because of.)

Barthes, again: “The pleasure of the text does not prefer one ideology to another. However: this impertinence does not proceed from liberalism but from perversion: the text, its reading, are split. What is overcome, split, is the moral unity that society demands of every human product. We read a text (of pleasure) the way a fly buzzes around a room: with sudden, deceptively decisive turns, fervent and futile: ideology passes over the text and its reading like the blush over a face (in love, some take erotic pleasure in this coloring); every writer of pleasure has these idiotic blushes … in the text of pleasure, the opposing forces are no longer repressed but in a state of becoming: nothing is really antagonistic, everything is plural. I pass lightly through the reactionary darkness.”

What brings someone down in The Challenge  is precisely what Barthes refers to “reactionary darkness” (i.e. liberalism)—our current theoretical and “logical” cultural inflections that dismiss the more chaotic pure living state as epitomized by the competition. The frenetic buzzing of the competition keeps us coming back for more, more, more. The Challenge resists what Barthes refers to as the “moral unity that society demands of every human product.” 

We blush idiotically in the moments where we’re freed from the moral unity always imparted on us (by social media, the news, peer shaming), and are finally able to take pleasure in simple existence as we pass over it, traverse the erotic seam, run the fastest, jump the highest. When we can be exposed to ourselves, and the whims and actions of others—not in a debasing or morally competitive manner, but through pure action (or, watching pure action happen on TV)—there exists an honesty that is just so pleasurable.