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Waldemar Januszczak has a problem with Vanity Fair. “Vanity Fair,” he points out, is a title lifted from W. M. Thackeray’s novel; Thackeray himself lifted the phrase from John Bunyan. It is a phrase coined by Bunyan to describe a carnivalesque world of pleasures inhabited by people obsessed with themselves. Thackeray revived the term for his novel that, similarly, satirized the bourgeois struggles to boost individuals’ social positions in a superficial society.

Does this sound tired to anyone else? “Vanity Fair” is a doddering old phrase, coined in the 1670s, a time when morality tales and allegories featuring characters named Prudence and Vice were all the rage. What critics like Januszczak are crying out for is more art that satirizes society by exposing its vanity and condemning its hypocrisy. That desire is as puritanical as it is adolescent. Its origins lie in a Protestant religious tradition that distrusts anything rich, visual or materialistic (traits aligned with Catholicism, which Protestantism arose to, well, “protest”) in favor of the simple, the verbal, and the spiritual.

Reality is rarely as simple as the division that fuels this atavistic urge to separate things into surface vs. depth, fake vs. real, etc., but that doesn’t stop the majority of the population from hating “superficial” things and equating truth with depth. I imagine that, for a lot of people, these beliefs harden during the teenage years, when kids learn that their parents and role models aren’t infallible beacons of light and goodness–leaders make mistakes, have flaws and hidden pasts, etc. Hypocrisy and fakeness (or, to borrow the favorite phrase of that quintessential adolescent Holden Caulfield, “being a phony”) become the supreme evils, and any artist or writer who satirizes the world by pointing out incongruities between what people say and do becomes a genius. Those who don’t–those who admire or glory in the beauty of a great surface–are panders and sellouts. I’d like to imagine that we all grow out of this, but people’s love of a good hypocrisy tale convinces me that many reasonably intelligent people live their whole lives at the intellectual age of 17.

That’s the ethical history of Waldemar Januszczak’s condemnation of modern celebrity photographers. Let’s take a look at some of his more dubious methods–namely, using sexual disgust to fuel public rage. Exhibit A:

As a trained art historian [GAG], I have the additional thrill of spotting the vague references made here to Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Boucher’s notorious nude portrait of Louis XV’s mistress Louise O’Murphy [ . . . ] I doubt either Leibovitz or Johansson are aware that O’Murphy was 14 when he painted her, and that their recreation celebrates an act of rococo paedophilia.

GASP! But pedophilia is the most horrible sexual act in the whole world, and one that enlightened Western societies are still allowed to hate with all their love-infested hearts! Vanity Fair MUST be awful if it’s associated with pedophilia.

I don’t condone pedophilia, but I also don’t believe it’s as unambiguously morally evil as we like to pretend it is. Pedophiles are people who cannot help desiring individuals of an age that doesn’t happen to be legal wherever the pedophile lives–nevermind that that age, as well as the age of any individual’s sexual awakening, varies widely. (See, for reference: this NYT article on arbitrary age laws, this article on sex offenders forced to live under a bridge, Sylvère Lotringer’s wonderful book Overexposed, Camille Paglia’s essay “The Joy of Presbyterian Sex”…the list goes on.) Pedophiles may be among the last remaining monsters in the West; indeed, we make a sport of hunting them on shows like “To Catch A Predator”. By raising the specter of pedophilia, Waldemar Januszczak diabolically taps a bottomless reservoir of irrational public hatred to back up his aesthetic agenda.

Exhibit B:

Why did Margaret Thatcher sit for the loathsome Helmut Newton, even though he specialised in S&M fantasies?

I understand hatred of pedophilia, although I think we need to reconsider the ways we legislate it. But here we have another alternative form of sexuality–sadomasochism–that’s overwhelmingly practiced by consenting adults in the privacy of their own torture dens. In that form, it’s even legal in several civilized countries. But nevermind–we commonsensical bourgeois find it bizarre and odious, so it will do as evidence against Vanity Fair.

Not content with exploiting our sex fears alone, WJ tosses in a reference to the Nazis. The magazine, he says, has included an image of “Arnold Schwartzenegger posing like a Nazi hero”–why a particularly Nazi-esque hero, we never quite learn, nor does our critic ever consider that this Nazi iconography (if we take his word that that’s what it is) may be just the form of insipid satire he so desperately craves. The Nazi reference only serves to prove that there’s no rhetorical flourish too underhanded to aim at VF.

I will concede one point to our reviewer: naming a magazine that glorifies celebrities “Vanity Fair” isn’t really appropriate. In fact, it’s ironic. It may even be satirically self-deprecating. The thing is, Thackeray was writing at a time when mass media was in its infancy and celebrity culture didn’t really exist. Readers of his novels follow his characters as modern spectators follow the celebrities pictured and profiled in Vanity Fair. If Vanity Fair doesn’t take the easy route and trash them for their public charity and their lavish vices, fine–VF establishes itself as an outlet that chooses to respect the major characters in our contemporary cultural narrative. They get their helping of disdain elsewhere. Great postmodern satire is above the pathetic simplicity of clashing words and deeds or image and depth. My advice to WJ: if you want middling satire that exposes hypocrisy, stick to ninth grade English class. If you want brilliant satire, watch South Park. And if you want glamor–if you want to revel in an invincibly beautiful surface in an otherwise ugly world–read Vanity Fair.

The defense rests.