The males are not divided between 'males who like men' and 'males who like women.'
Neither is male sexuality divided between 'male sexuality for men' and 'male sexuality for women.'
If at all 'sexual orientation' needs to be configured, male sexuality is divided between:
-masculine male sexuality for men
-feminine male sexuality for men
-masculine male sexuality for women
-feminine male sexuality for women
masculine male sexuality for men and feminine male sexuality don't come into the same category. They are essentially different in nature. The masculine male meets another male as a man. The feminine male meets another male as a woman (in different degrees). When a masculine male is approached by another male, he is approached as a man. When a feminine male is approached by another male, he is approached as someone who is half-male/half-female. Only the feminine male sexuality for men calls for a separate category.
The western world knows that masculine male sexuality for women does not come into the same category as feminine male sexuality for women. So, while the former are part of the straight category, the latter are a part of the LGBT category.
The masculine male sexuality for men and the masculine male sexuality for women come into the same category of men. Instead of being divided over people, these two different forms of sexuality, in nature, form part of the same man, but during different stages. While youth is for sexual bonding between males, reproductive sex is indulged in by many mammalian males in the latter part of adulthood, often without forgoing male bonds. They are both phases a man goes through. Of course, many males do not go through the second phase, but they intensify the first one. That doesn't make these males a part of the feminine males who have the same outer sex of sexual partners.
Likewise, feminine male sexuality for women and feminine male sexuality for men forms part of the same category. In nature, only the feminine gendered male has any long term or emotional 'sexual orientation' for women. With humans, of course, there are other factors than biology that comes into play, in order to heterosexualise the non-feminine males. Feminine male sexuality for men that is exclusive is an exception rather than the rule.
It should also be noted that while masculine male sexuality for men is more oriented towards emotional and social bonding (apart from a deep sexual bonding) and so is much more monogamous and long lasting, even lifelong ... the feminine male sexuality for men (gay) is often promiscuous by nature, limited only to the physical part of it. The feminine male is more geared to form emotional and social bonds with women.
Showing posts with label Universality of man's sexual need for men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universality of man's sexual need for men. Show all posts
Dec 12, 2008
"THOSE FANTASIES": WHY STRAIGHT MEN SOMETIMES FANTASIZE ABOUT OTHER MALES
This article is bad, except that it at least acknowledges the fact that straight men are not exclusively heterosexual in their thoughts. The reasons it ascribes are only partially valid.
By A. Patcher
[A. Patcher is a JackinWorld reader and freelance writer.]This topic is not normally discussed in sex-education literature or in health classes, and probably not among most heterosexual male friends. However, in reality, it's more common than most straight guys care to admit. Straight men's fantasies about other males can be attributed to several factors; some of these are normal and very common, while others are more profound and signal a deeper sexual issue or unfulfilled social need. Note: While reading this article, keep in mind thatfantasies are very different from actions. Straight men may think of other male bodies or even sexual contact with other males while masturbating, but most are not willing or able to perform sexually with another man in real life. Usually, the fantasies remain fantasies and do not predict future actions.
Adolescent events. First are the factors that arise from events during adolescence — the period beginning at the onset of puberty, through the growing years into young adulthood, until total independence from the parents. When the body and mind are growing and developing during this period, it is very common to have fantasies about the same gender during masturbation sessions. Young men frequently wonder if their friends are developing as fast as they are. They may question whether their friends masturbate as well, or if they have had sexual intercourse. New feelings and changes in the body can create quite a bit of curiosity. This is sexually arousing to many people simply because the thoughts revolve around sexuality and sex organs. At the same time, adolescence is a time for the development of a person's identity. When developing an identity, we tend to take a very close look at those around us of the same gender. In doing so, certain males will be more appealing to us than others. The males we would like to be similar to will appear more attractive. Although we may not want to actually have sex with them, at a time in life when just about anything can be erotic, this emotion can manifest itself as sexual arousal.
Male pride. The second factor simpler: Most males really enjoy being male. Let's face it — having a penis is awesome! We all have certain physical features in common with other males. Depending on the individual, this pride of masculinity may cause a varying degree of arousal when a guy looks at another male. Even though we may have no desire for actual romantic or intimate contact with another male, it can still be an erotic image. We may wonder how a fellow male masturbates or how he has sex, because we find these things enjoyable when we do them ourselves. We may think about masturbating while looking at another guy who is doing it at the same time. However, basic admiration or "looking at another guy" can be very far from a desire to live a gay lifestyle with him. Nearly all gay men would agree there is more to homosexuality than that. When considering sexual preference one has to take into account the balance of desire for physical intimacy with the two genders, also taking into consideration the desire for emotional intimacy — love from companion-like relationships. It's important to mention, too, that many people do not develop a strong desire for opposite-sex intimacy (or same-sex intimacy, for that matter) until late in adolescence or even afterward. Overall, predictions cannot be made, because we all have individual perceptions and different feelings that contribute to our thoughts and actions.
The sexual spectrum. Sexuality is not confined to just three little categories of homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual. The "Kinsey Scale," developed by Alfred Kinsey, has been used by sex researchers since the 1950s. The scale ranges from 0 to 6, with a person who is 100% heterosexual being 0 to a person who is 100% homosexual being 6. The original scale took into account only actual physical contact with partners — but updated versions include fantasy, love, and self-identification. This scale is necessary for scientific research, but even a 7-point scale seems a bit too rigid and defined to apply to an individual's complex personal life. (Reinisch, Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex, 1990.)
Preference vs. orientation. To better explain our own personal feelings, we should distinguish between "sexual preference" and "sexual orientation." Sexual preference considers desired sexual actions with a partner, while sexual orientation encompasses all the thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and emotions that cause us to become aroused. Although the population is about 90% exclusively heterosexual in their preference, on the spectrum of orientation most of these people fall somewhere other than entirely heterosexual. Therefore, many of us are bisexual in orientation but not in preference. To complicate matters, according to several findings (including JackinWorld Surveys) close to half of all adult males have had some kind of sexual experience with another male at some point in their life — yet most remain heterosexual in their overall lifetime preference.
Other factors. In some cases strong, recurring same-sex fantasies can indicate a deeper social or sexual need. For example, loneliness and lack of identity can cause an erotic reaction to thoughts of other men. If we are not satisfied with who we are, how we present ourselves, how we look, our degree of masculinity, or even the appearance of our genitals, it is very possible that we can develop same-sex erotic reactions.
Problems can occur when there is a lack of male friends. There's a reason why we normally have platonic male friends: They help us develop and maintain our identity. If they aren't there, a craving can develop. Everyone needs a different amount of this type of friendship and a different level of acceptance from it, and we can never say how much is enough for any particular person, because everyone is different. This is certainly not to say that if you are lonely, unhappy with your identity, or worried about the appearance of your genitals that you are going to end up gay — almost everyone has gone through these feelings at one time or another. Nor is it at all accurate to say that all gay men are gay because they were somehow deprived during adolescence. However, it's never unhealthy to get involved in activities, sports, or hobbies. Unfortunately, many males frequently seek their identity through friends in gangs or drug subcultures because there's a lack of opportunity to be involved in more socially acceptible activities.
Sometimes a "jealous passion" can develop for other males. This is when we desire to actually become another guy. The obsession can then carry over into our sexual fantasy life. Lack of acceptance of ourselves is the issue here. If this is a concern for you, it may help to fantasize about yourself or imaginary people rather than fixating on peers, celebrities, or porn stars.
An unfulfilled adolescent need in adult men can be a factor. Issues such as chemical dependency and alcoholism (either in the individual or the family) can also inhibit some individuals. Nobody has a "perfect" adolescence, and most people can deal with unfulfilled needs in their adulthood. However, these issues affect some more than others. If there is an overwhelming problem with any of these issues, consider seeking out professional therapy.
Sexuality can be thought of as a complex "spectrum of fingerprints." Every individual has a unique sexuality that's different from those of his peers. Sometimes there are things we can do to change our feelings, and sometimes we just have to learn to accept ourselves as the way we are.
Fantasies Of Straight Men: Some Thoughts about Gays in the Military
Warning:
This article uses 'invalid Western terms and concepts', including the following:
1. 'Homosexuality' for sexual desire between men
After decades of bloody battles for the fair and equal treatment of African-Americans, women and other "minorities," how can we still be so obtuse about the basic underlying principles?
Joe Sartelle
Copyright © Joe Sartelle. All rights reserved.Issue #5, March/April 1993
(AUTHOR'S NOTE: The public debate over gays in the military has mainly focused on the tensions between gay men and straight men, despite the fact that the issue is at least as important, if not more so, for lesbians in military service. The following article reflects that bias. While much of what I have to say applies to women as well as men, our cultural attitudes about women's sexuality and homosexuality are significantly different from our attitudes about men's. Detailing these differences would require making an already lengthy essay even longer. Also, I am here discussing American notions of sexual identity; obviously things are different elsewhere in time, space, and culture.)
Perhaps the most appalling thing about the deluge of hysterical fear and outright bigotry triggered by Clinton's proposal to revoke the law banning openly homosexual men and women from military service is the simple fact thatwe have been through all this before and by now we should know better. After decades of bloody battles for the fair and equal treatment of African-Americans, women and other "minorities," how can we still be so obtuse about the basic underlying principles?
Yet it seems that no matter how many times someone points out that the arguments against allowing open homosexuals in the armed services are virtually identical to the arguments used in the 1940s against racial integration of these same armed services, you still have people irrationally insisting that "this is completely different." And actually, despite the fact that the most vocal supporters of the ban on homosexuals are usually reactionary conservatives, I think they've got a point here: the gay issue is a little different. After all, extended intimate contact with black people isn't going to make a white person black; however, the same sort of extended intimacy with gay people just might make a few "straight" people into bisexuals. Maybe more than a few...
Of course, in making a statement like that I realize that I am flying in the face of the orthodox dogma that holds that homosexuality is not a choice, that we can't help feeling these desires, it's out of our control, and so on. Interestingly enough, though, it is generally homosexuals and sympathetic heterosexuals who most strenuously assert this position; the right wing, on the other hand, often displays a more generous evaluation of the fluidity of human sexual desire, as well as an unfortunately much more openly repressive response to that fluidity. Paradoxically (although somewhat predictably), we find "progressives" arguing that individuals are essentially powerless victims of their sexual orientations (the "no choice" position), while the "conservatives" recognize that under the right circumstances, anyone might be seduced into practicing the love that dare not speak its name.
So, for example, we find the Republican Senator from Indiana, Dan Coats, writing an editorial in the San Francisco Examiner against lifting the ban on homosexuals and quoting David Hackworth, "America's most decorated living veteran," who tells us why open homosexuality is such a threat to military discipline. Hackworth says, "During my Army career I saw countless officers and NCOs who couldn't stop themselves from hitting on soldiers. ...The objects of their affection were impressionable lads who, searching for a caring role model, sometimes ended up in gay relationships they might not have sought." While Hackworth is ostensibly talking about sexual harassment here, he also confesses, no doubt unwittingly, that sometimes what can make the difference between a "straight" man and a "gay" man is nothing more than the right circumstances at the right time.
Hackworth's comment also serves as an example of the extremely active imaginations of the opponents of ending the ban on homosexuals in the military. Indeed, a pattern quickly emerged in the public debate on the issue: those who favored lifting the ban supported their position with arguments rooted in the established American tradition of civil rights and equal opportunity (individuals should be judged according to their performance and abilities), while those who favored continuing the ban based their arguments in fantasies of predatory gays menacing innocent young straights. The comments of Specialist Fourth Class Jared Hopkins, quoted in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, are typical of the paranoid scenarios conjured by supporters of the ban. "Out on the battlefield," said Hopkins, "I'm going to have enough to worry about without thinking about the guy next to me. If you're out there a long time, you worry the guy might have sexual feelings toward you, might come on to you."
Now who exactly is it, we might want to ask, who's preoccupied with thinking about the guy next to him? As others have pointed out before me, there's at least one thing that both homosexuals and homophobes have in common, which is an intense preoccupation with homosexual desires. The comments of Specialist Hopkins and others like him assume as a kind of unconscious given that gay men will find the (straight) speaker so irresistible that they will ignore the mortal dangers of battle in order to come on to him. In other words, this particular soldier has evidently already constructed a whole imaginary scenario of attempted homosexual seduction with himself at the center of attention. Perhaps he is just assuming, as so many straight men do, that gay men look at other men the same way that straight men look at women, in which case we can read the hysteria among straight men about serving with gays as a kind of confession of the disrespectful, predatory (hetero)sexuality traditionally encouraged by military culture. On the other hand — and without invalidating or replacing that possibility — perhaps we are dealing with unconscious homosexual desire, conveniently projected onto a fantasized gay man and thus disavowed.
Consider, for example, the approach to the issue taken by Angelo Codevilla, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution who also served in the U.S. Navy. In his editorial in the San Francisco Examiner, Codevilla argues against lifting the ban by reminding us of just how much intimacy with his comrades the average serviceman is already forced to experience: "Moving fast and tired in every state of undress and sometimes full of bloody bruises, he bumps and rubs up against his fellows innumerable times." The homoeroticism of this observation is so transparent that if we didn't have a context for it, we might think we were reading the outline of a scene from a gay porn flick (an impression that is reinforced near the end of the editorial when Codevilla speciously raises the possibility of "the use of taxpayer funds for military hospitals to treat oral gonorrhea or the consequences of such practices as 'fisting' and 'rimming' "). Codevilla goes on to tell us, "Sex is an explosive part of military life. Young men are at the peak of desire. ...To say that the atmosphere aboard ship is sexually charged is an understatement." Since these young men are presumably heterosexual, one has to wonder where so much sexual tension is coming from — of course it couldn't be from all that running around naked and rubbing up against each other, could it?
It seems to me an obvious point to make, that the vicious homophobia typical of military culture must be directly related to the fact that military life is by its very nature incredibly homoerotic. What I am referring to with the term "homoerotic" is the simple fact that, as Eve Sedgwick puts it in her book Between Men, "what goes on at football games, in fraternities, at the Bohemian Grove, and at climactic moments in war novels can look, with only a slight shift of optic, quite startlingly 'homosexual'..." The imaginations, at least, of both Codevilla and Specialist Hopkins seem to recognize this fact, and both are thus concerned with seeing to it that Sedgwick's "slight shift of optic" is suppressed as a possibility. Both men's comments are representative of the conservative fear — also seen in the nervously energetic homoerotics of buddy movies like Lethal Weapon — that the good, clean, sexless and often brutal "normal" homoeroticism of straight male culture might at any moment cross over into the forbidden zone of actual homosexuality. Instead of sexual tension and "accidental" half-dressed bumping and rubbing, guys might decide to simply have sex; as in the case of conservative fears about the pleasures of casual drug use, one thing might lead to another... This is the premise, of course, of an awful lot of gay sexual fantasies. Locker rooms, fraternities and military life are staples of gay pornography because these places are already in some basic sense "homosexual": everyone is the same sex, and there's a great deal of physical intimacy.
So what is quite striking about the debate over gays in the military is that the stereotypical imaginary scenarios of gay fantasy are appearing with such regularity in the paranoid fantasies of straight men who oppose lifting the ban, such as the two men I've already quoted. Opposition to the open presence of homosexuals in the military (or anywhere, for that matter) is grounded in the wish to prevent these scenarios from becoming realities to the fullest extent possible. In other words, in much of the support for maintaining the ban on gays in the military we find straight men defending themselves against their own anxious homoerotic fantasies through the active repression and suppression of actual gay men, who are blamed for their intrinsically disruptive presence, in exactly the same way many straight men blame attractive women. The current controversy about gays in the military has more than a little in common with the ongoing controversy about the sexual harassment of women in the military. For example, both the gay man in military service and the sexy woman in the presence of a group of military men are perceived as "asking for it," the difference being that sexy women are supposedly invitations to Getting Laid, while sexy gay men are invitations to that other time-honored ritual proof of manhood, Beating Someone Up. Fag-bashing, like the sexual violation of women, should be recognized as a form of rape: both are violent physical attacks directed intentionally at someone's sexuality.
However, fag-bashing, despite being an intimately physical experience of sexual humiliation, is not commonly perceived as a sex crime in the same sense as rape, presumably because the fag-bashers are "straight," and "straight" men don't feel sexual desire for other men (that's what makes them different from gays, right?). So fag-bashing, according to this reasoning, is essentially different from woman-raping because there can be no sexual motivation to the attack on a gay man. But at the same time that we as a culture strive to maintain this useful fiction as a kind of "official" ideology about the fundamental difference between hetero and homo sexualities, we also routinely confess to the strong suspicion that fag-bashers are "really" gay themselves, or maybe they're "confused, " and are just, as the saying goes, not dealing with it very well.
Given how often we hear of or know people who have experienced at least some degree of "confusion" about their sexual orientations before settling into their "true" identities, it's amazing that we are still in so much denial — culturally, socially, individually — about the implications of that common confusion. "Confusion" about one's sexual identity can only come from conflicting desires, from feeling varying degrees of attraction to both sexes. What I know of my own experience and others' suggests that such "confusion" is in fact so common as to be a normal aspect of human development, particularly during adolescence.
However, because we live in a culture that teaches us that heterosexual desire is not just natural, desirable, and normal but also completely incompatible with homosexual desire, we are encouraged to regard our bisexual potential as "confusion" rather than a normal human sexual response. Our current "common sense" about sexual identity tells us that a certain degree of homosexual attraction is normal, but that sexual identity is a matter of being eitherstraight or gay, and in either case it's just the way you are, not something you "choose" — so anything else is just "confusion." In my experience, some version of this understanding is shared by most gays and straights alike.
It should be easy to see, then, how an integral part of our "sexual identities," whether straight or gay, is a kind of search-and-destroy program that continually scans for signs of the "opposite" orientation so that these "confusing" impulses can be neutralized through the usual array of psychological defense mechanisms. The "success" of the program is measured by how effectively it blocks conscious recognition of any attraction to the "wrong" sex, attractions that "confuse" our sexual identities. The search-and-destroy mission is especially important, of course, in the construction of "normal" heterosexual masculinity; seen in this light, fag-bashing is merely the outward and visible expression of an interior psychological conflict.
Returning to the specific issue of the debate over gays in the military, we can see now why, in Angelo Codevilla's editorial, an emphasis on the sexually tense and homoerotic atmosphere of military service would quickly yield to warnings about the inevitability of violent attacks against openly gay servicemen. Indeed, this movement has characterized the shifts in emphasis of the larger public debate: first the paranoid fantasies of predatory gays and the "discomfort" of straights at the idea of having openly gay men around them, and then the threats of violent harassment of gay servicemen. Since the fears about how gays will actually behave if they were allowed to come out about their sexuality are easily answered by already-existing codes of conduct that will work equally well — if enforced — for gays as well as straights, the opposition to lifting the ban seems to be left with basing its case on assurances of morale problems (again, no matter that this is exactly what the opponents of racial integration of the military said, too). Straight servicemen will be offended and uncomfortable, and gay servicemen will get beat up.
So we are left with only one meaningful question, which is, what are these guys so afraid of? After all, we're talking about military personnel — rough, tough super-macho guys, men intimate with guns, trained killers. Yet these are the people whose sensibilities are so sensitive that the possibility that they are merely being looked at with sexual interest by another man is supposedly intolerable to them. But why? If a gay soldier, say, were to make an unwanted pass at a straight comrade, why can't the straight man politely and firmly refuse, the way one refuses any unwanted friendly advances? A refusal to take "no" for an answer would constitute sexual harassment, and could be dealt with accordingly. But all that changes, of course, if what is truly intolerable in this situation is the straight man's unthinkable and unspeakable interest in saying "yes."
As I have tried to suggest, the open presence of homosexuals is considered intolerable within the already extremely homoerotic context of military life because it undermines what we might call the "heterosexual alibi," the security "straight" men can feel despite the constant homoeroticism of their lives because of the belief that gay men arefundamentally and identifiably different from themselves. Without that alibi to protect them, the obvious pleasure many straight men get from homoerotic situations (if you doubt this, spend some time in a gym) begins to look too much like what it actually is, a covert and sublimated way of gratifying forbidden "homosexual" desires. Straight men spend so much time nervously identifying and parodying "gay" mannerisms (as in the case of Ollie North's much-publicized recent "joke") in order to reassure themselves and others that they couldn't possibly be gay themselves, since they don't act like that. The heterosexual alibi is perpetuated by any and every insistence that there is an objectively measurable difference between "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals" that goes beyond the specifics of their genital relations — which also means, as I shall discuss shortly, that it's not just straight people who buy into the heterosexual alibi.
Without the heterosexual alibi of the essential difference between straight and gay, heterosexuals are faced with the reality that there are people who seem just like themselves, but who not only openly admit to forbidden homosexual attractions, but even go so far as to act on them with pleasure and satisfaction! If you were someone who had invested a lot of energy in the psychological work of repressing and denying your own homosexual attractions — and in the case of military service, this work would be a full-time job — with all the necessary frustration and unpleasure that entails, you'd probably find the presence of open homosexuals intolerable, too. Who wants to find out that all that hard work wasn't necessary? And if you couldn't get rid of them, you might find a safe outlet for your own frustration — sorry, I mean confusion — in tormenting them, "proving" your own essential difference even as you unconsciously mirror their interest in homosexual arousal.
So finally my point is simply that the opposition to gays in the military is really about trying to preserve the heterosexual alibi. When there are gay men in the locker rooms, so to speak, behaving pretty much just like the straight men do, then suddenly all that innocent, playful homoeroticism — that "typical guy behavior" — might not look so innocent any more, simply because we can recognize its erotic dimensions. And now it's time to confront the fact that the only reason there is any problem here at all is because of the entrenched belief that homosexual desires are unnatural and bad (the more liberal version being that the desires are bad but OK, so long as you don't act on them, but it amounts to the same thing). If we accepted homosexual desire as a normal component of human sexuality that varies in strength in each individual — which is what experience as opposed to ideology tells us — then same-sex attractions wouldn't be a problem, and neither would gays in the military.
Unfortunately, it is not just homophobic straights who seek to preserve and strengthen the heterosexual alibi. The ways in which gay people commonly understand and define our own "sexual identities" are also often deeply complicit with the heterosexual alibi. Partly the insistence upon the essential difference of gay identity has been useful for both our political and psychological survival. If gays are indistinguishable from straights in everything but our sexual practices, then we are invisible, and invisibility leads to isolation, fear and weakness. Adoption of a number of common "markers" of gayness — in the ways we dress, talk, consume, etc. — helps us find each other and thus support each other. However, in my experience gay people are perhaps even more likely than straights to forget that these markers have been attached to our sexual orientation and are not, therefore, necessary functions of our homosexuality. In other words, we tend to act as though we believe, in accord with the heterosexual alibi, that there is an essential and thus absolute difference between gay and straight, which manifests itself in more than just our choice of sexual partners.
If such a constitutional difference exists, it must exist across the board; it must be something common to all gays but absent from all straights if it's going to serve as a reliable indicator of sexual preference. Obviously, this is going to be hard to establish as long as we're dealing with things like a taste for leather or Julie Andrews records, or a knack for interior decorating. What we need, according to the dominant thinking on the subject, is something more scientific, so that we can finally prove the difference! As many of you know, the other big news about gays in the mainstream media recently has been a series of reports about medical research into the question of whether homosexuality is biologically or socially produced.
The most widely-publicized study has been the "gay brain" research conducted by Simon LeVay at the Salk Institute. LeVay claims to have found a meaningful difference in the size of the hypothalamus in gay men and straight men. I am not going to go into the details of his work, or the numerous objections that have been raised about his very questionable methodology — all that has been detailed elsewhere. What I am interested in here are the underlying motivations for his research, which are shared by others seeking to prove that homosexuality is biologically-determined. LeVay, like many others who are committed to this theory, is himself a gay man. The interest in establishing a biological basis for homosexuality, according to public statements from LeVay and his supporters, comes from the wish to help gay people by showing the world that we can't help being gay, that it's part of our biological make-up and thus "out of our control."
While I am sympathetic to the idea that if the straight world would just accept that we do not "choose" to be attracted strongly and primarily to individuals of our own sex, then we stand a better chance of gaining acceptance and toleration, I find the implications of this reasoning to be dangerously self-defeating. For in defending our sexuality by saying that "we have no choice," aren't we implying that if we did have a choice, we both shouldn't and wouldn't choose to be gay? That therefore, in some deep sense, it really is "better" to be straight, and abnormal to be gay? I think that gay people would better serve their interests by insisting, firmly and unequivocally, that there issimply nothing wrong with homosexuality and that therefore all questions of where it comes from are irrelevant.
As I observed near the beginning of this essay, the position that we have "no choice" about our sexual desires is objectionable not least because it is an extension of the victim-oriented logic that currently dominates "progressive" or "liberal" thinking. To say that gay people do not choose their sexual preferences is to make them into victims of their desires; and however titillating it may be to think of ourselves as thralls to our passions, it is hardly a responsible position to take. As victims of repression and oppression, gay people have an obvious stake in expanding our human sexual freedom, not further restricting it by building limitations into our biology.
And it is also the case that arguments which seek to establish a biological basis for sexual preference are fully complicit with the heterosexual alibi, since both are efforts to establish some absolute difference between gay and straight. The theory that one is biologically constituted as either heterosexual or homosexual — that the two are mutually exclusive rather than complementary — is just as likely in practical terms to make it easier for straight people to dismiss their "confusions" and to consolidate their homoerotic-homophobic identities as it is likely to make them more sympathetic to gays. Since the basis of sympathy is some sort of identification, a recognition of one's self in another, I have to say that I think the cause of liberating ourselves as gay people would be better served by liberating the gay potential in everyone (as well as the straight potential in ourselves). Only then would "straight" people come to realize that in attacking us they are attacking something within themselves.
Finally, I do not wish to be understood as arguing that we are all "really" bisexuals. Rather, more precisely I am arguing that we are all, as human beings, potential bisexuals who have been taught, through an elaborate system of social rewards and punishments, to see ourselves as "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals." The fact that bisexuals are in a very real sense the most invisible "sexual identity" makes perfect sense in these terms: the existence of functionally bisexual individuals radically undermines any belief in the exclusivity of heterosexual and homosexual attractions. And as I have also tried to point out, what we know about how human beings actually experience their sexual desires supports the position that bisexuality is the norm, while both hetero- and homosexuality are learned restrictions of that potential.
This does not mean that when either gay or straight people say that they feel like they are "really" heterosexual or homosexual that they are being untruthful. It just means that they have so successfully conformed to dominant ideas of sexual identity that whatever bisexual potential they once had has atrophied, even to the point of its effective extinction. In other words, just because our identities are socially constructed doesn't mean that they aren't, in a very real way, "authentic." However, just because my own sexuality has been crippled by my socialization doesn't mean I want to promote my limitations as the "natural" standard for others, such as the future generations of humanity. I know that it feels like I have no choice in my sexual orientation toward men; but I also know that I am capable of attractions to women that, if they had been handled differently earlier in my development, might have led to my being bisexual rather than homosexual (I doubt I could ever have been "straight").
What I am talking about is a fully human sexuality, rather than the pre-human "sexual identities" that now afflict us. The people we now call "homosexuals" are most likely, seen in this light, that relatively small minority of individuals whose homosexual attractions are so much stronger than our heterosexual attractions as to render those latter feelings almost invisible. In that sense we "have no choice." Similarly, we would expect to find a comparable minority of people for whom the opposite is true, who "have no choice" but to be heterosexual. But I think that in a fully human society, the overwhelming majority of people would fall somewhere in the middle, more or less indifferent to the biological sex of their partners, attracted instead to the qualities of individuals as humans and not as sexes. Of course there would be varying degrees of bisexuality, with some people tending to choose one sex rather than the other. But the important point here is that it would be a choice, and thus an affirmation of our freedom — and freedom to choose is what makes us human.
We are a very long way from such a world, but even if it's a fantasy, at least it's a compelling one, certainly more worth believing in than the ideology of the heterosexual alibi that dominates both gay and straight thinking about sexual identity. For despite everything we know about the complexities of human sexuality, the debate over gays in the military shows us how much we persist in denying that complexity, invested as we all are in fantasies of straight men, perfect heterosexuals uncontaminated by any sexual interest in their fellow men. It may be that the hysteria over gays in the military is really only the last gasp of the old conceptions and attitudes; certainly today's young people are growing up in a sexual landscape very different from what has come before. The ongoing hype surrounding The Crying Game is one sign of this, like the popularity of androgynous styles and the omnipresence of sexually objectified male bodies. Perhaps what we are witnessing, as others have suggested, is the liberation of sexuality from reproduction and thus from "nature" — and along with it the nervous and tentative recognition that once sexual pleasure doesn't have to be tied to making babies, there's no longer any pressing reason to enforce heterosexuality, or to suppress homosexuality. As Marx observes in the third volume of Capital, the realm of freedom begins only where the realm of necessity ends. So long as we insist that we have no choice about our sexuality, whether we define it as gay or straight, we cannot be free, and we will remain something less than fully human.
Joe Sartelle is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and Co-Editor of Bad Subjects.
Oct 19, 2008
Men Holding Hands, and Other Macho Sightings in South India
Men holding hands, and other macho sightings in Southern India
The first time, you are shocked. Eventually, you get used to it. In between, you go through various stages of reaction—puzzlement, wonder, curiosity, disgust, grudging acceptance, repulsion, etc. The sight is a common enough one in these parts--- grown men and teenaged boys holding hands in public like lovers that cannot bear physical separation from each other. This, in the same society where even incidental contact between the opposite sexes is still taboo. But men cannot stop pawing each other. The way they carry on is enough to unleash the latent homophobe in most of us. Do they kiss when we are not watching?
Yet, I suppose I grew up in the same society, and even perhaps held hands with a male cousin or two when crossing a street. I suppose I never gave it a second thought until my overseas sojourn gave me a different perspective on such matters (although I know it shouldn’t, given that some of my adoring public believe that any new perspective gained during nor-residency renders me a traitor to my place of birth). Now, if I were to see a boyfriend grasp my son’s hand, I’m likely to rush out there and break it up before it got too intimate. On the other hand, I find the sight of boys holding girls’ hands, and vice versa, very wholesome, very non-threatening to a traditional way of life. On college campuses, you see these “macchans”, clearly the leaders of the pack, holding their dearest lieutenant in an arm-lock that would not be out of place on a Lovers’ Lane. On the streets, you see these “goondas” engaging in passionate arm-holding and palm-squeezing, even as they prepare to launch a major offensive against the neighborhood tea-shop that refuses to serve them free chai. You see auto rickshaw drivers walking hand-in-hand, comparing notes on 10 best ways to fleece customers. You see professional colleagues clasping hands with a fervor that borders on the obsessive. Once, I saw a guest speaker at a conventions held in a death-grip by the organizer for nearly thirty minutes; he escaped by severing his hand at the elbow. On the beach, it appears as if every male stroller is linked to another by the arm. Why is this male physical intimacy considered natural in a society where pre-marital male/female contact is still stigmatized? It is amazing what men can get away with in India without having their masculinity questioned. And yet, you accompany your wife to one Bharatanatyam recital, and it’s open season on your manhood.
Females, of course, are touchy-feely in all societies, Western or Eastern. I recall reading somewhere that all women are lesbians at heart. I believe that is true at least to some extent. Women are constantly obsessing over other women’s physical attributes. I asked a few female acquaintances of mine the following question: “If a naked man and a naked woman were to appear in front of you, whom would you look at first?” The unanimous answer was that they would examine the woman first, from head to toe, with a few lingering stops in-between. They may spare the man a glance or two, but almost as an after-thought. This may explain why a naked woman, in any form of art, is sexy, whereas a naked man is… comic. Women can spend hours comparing their looks with those of, say, supermodels. You cannot do that unless the interest spills over from the cosmetic to the prurient regime.
Friendship in India takes other strange forms, such as eating off one plate. Heart-warming display of closeness & togetherness, but has anyone considered the hygienic aspects? Friends drink from the same glass of juice, or same bottle of a soft-drink, sipping away with their straws. They take bites off the same fruit. They borrow each other’s hankies. They play kabaddi. They go to movies. For all I know, they probably hold hands there also. I’m not saying that males should not engage in any activities where females are excluded. My point is, why is male bonding appropriate, whereas male/female bonding is not? Because the latter would lead to premarital sex? If that’s the sole reason, why do people gawk at a wife and husband smooching or holding hands? In India, we actively suppress all outward signs of hetero-sexuality, thereby limiting displays of camaraderie to same-sex encounters only. I guess this is less evil than the Western suppression of homo-sexual acts in public, but not by much. Many newly-weds experience needless anxiety and angst because they are not used to being friendly with the opposite sex. They seek out their own sex for friendship and company, to the extent that the holy institution of marriage is reduced to a seal of approval on sex and reproduction. No wonder that in India, after work and on weekends, the hubby goes to play with his male buddies , and the wifey goes shopping with her female cronies. And the children are left to torment Grandma and Grandpa….
The first time, you are shocked. Eventually, you get used to it. In between, you go through various stages of reaction—puzzlement, wonder, curiosity, disgust, grudging acceptance, repulsion, etc. The sight is a common enough one in these parts--- grown men and teenaged boys holding hands in public like lovers that cannot bear physical separation from each other. This, in the same society where even incidental contact between the opposite sexes is still taboo. But men cannot stop pawing each other. The way they carry on is enough to unleash the latent homophobe in most of us. Do they kiss when we are not watching?
Yet, I suppose I grew up in the same society, and even perhaps held hands with a male cousin or two when crossing a street. I suppose I never gave it a second thought until my overseas sojourn gave me a different perspective on such matters (although I know it shouldn’t, given that some of my adoring public believe that any new perspective gained during nor-residency renders me a traitor to my place of birth). Now, if I were to see a boyfriend grasp my son’s hand, I’m likely to rush out there and break it up before it got too intimate. On the other hand, I find the sight of boys holding girls’ hands, and vice versa, very wholesome, very non-threatening to a traditional way of life. On college campuses, you see these “macchans”, clearly the leaders of the pack, holding their dearest lieutenant in an arm-lock that would not be out of place on a Lovers’ Lane. On the streets, you see these “goondas” engaging in passionate arm-holding and palm-squeezing, even as they prepare to launch a major offensive against the neighborhood tea-shop that refuses to serve them free chai. You see auto rickshaw drivers walking hand-in-hand, comparing notes on 10 best ways to fleece customers. You see professional colleagues clasping hands with a fervor that borders on the obsessive. Once, I saw a guest speaker at a conventions held in a death-grip by the organizer for nearly thirty minutes; he escaped by severing his hand at the elbow. On the beach, it appears as if every male stroller is linked to another by the arm. Why is this male physical intimacy considered natural in a society where pre-marital male/female contact is still stigmatized? It is amazing what men can get away with in India without having their masculinity questioned. And yet, you accompany your wife to one Bharatanatyam recital, and it’s open season on your manhood.
Females, of course, are touchy-feely in all societies, Western or Eastern. I recall reading somewhere that all women are lesbians at heart. I believe that is true at least to some extent. Women are constantly obsessing over other women’s physical attributes. I asked a few female acquaintances of mine the following question: “If a naked man and a naked woman were to appear in front of you, whom would you look at first?” The unanimous answer was that they would examine the woman first, from head to toe, with a few lingering stops in-between. They may spare the man a glance or two, but almost as an after-thought. This may explain why a naked woman, in any form of art, is sexy, whereas a naked man is… comic. Women can spend hours comparing their looks with those of, say, supermodels. You cannot do that unless the interest spills over from the cosmetic to the prurient regime.
Friendship in India takes other strange forms, such as eating off one plate. Heart-warming display of closeness & togetherness, but has anyone considered the hygienic aspects? Friends drink from the same glass of juice, or same bottle of a soft-drink, sipping away with their straws. They take bites off the same fruit. They borrow each other’s hankies. They play kabaddi. They go to movies. For all I know, they probably hold hands there also. I’m not saying that males should not engage in any activities where females are excluded. My point is, why is male bonding appropriate, whereas male/female bonding is not? Because the latter would lead to premarital sex? If that’s the sole reason, why do people gawk at a wife and husband smooching or holding hands? In India, we actively suppress all outward signs of hetero-sexuality, thereby limiting displays of camaraderie to same-sex encounters only. I guess this is less evil than the Western suppression of homo-sexual acts in public, but not by much. Many newly-weds experience needless anxiety and angst because they are not used to being friendly with the opposite sex. They seek out their own sex for friendship and company, to the extent that the holy institution of marriage is reduced to a seal of approval on sex and reproduction. No wonder that in India, after work and on weekends, the hubby goes to play with his male buddies , and the wifey goes shopping with her female cronies. And the children are left to torment Grandma and Grandpa….
Oct 6, 2008
Confessions of an American - My Life in a New Delhi Gym
Cultural confusions of a desi gym having non-desi aspirations.
“What’s different about living in Delhi compared to America?” friends back home keep on asking me. It’s one of those questions that leave one unsure where to begin, and even after a year of living here, I’m still not certain how best to respond. The main reason is that a list of differences can quickly devolve into a catalog of gripes and frustrations, as the mention of the USA reminds me of the ways in which, by comparison, Delhi is still very much the capital of a developing country. Yet I find myself increasingly reluctant to reduce my India experience to a list of complaints, because my initial culture shock has given way to a more relaxed curiosity about what is different here. As much as possible, I try to feel amusement rather than annoyance when things don’t go quite as I might wish or expect.
Saying that India is irreducible to a series of neat observations is as obvious to those of us who live here as it is unsatisfying to my American questioners, but another way in might be to give them one snapshot, describing an activity here that they are familiar with at home. And what could be easier for many of my friends to grasp than that favorite Californian urban-suburban pursuit - going to the gym?
Yes, there are gyms in Delhi, I tell them, even though the work-out culture here isn’t as widespread as it is on the coasts of the U.S. I’ve no doubt that Delhi gyms, like their LA counterparts, range from the grungy to the glitzy. LA’s gym culture is well enough developed that there is a healthy competition for members, and while you can pay a lot there to join a more exclusive joint, a membership at a mid-range gym needn’t cost more than the equivalent of about Rs. 20,000 a year. Or you can join a gym in Delhi that is one-eighth the size of my old LA club, and often much more crowded – and for nearly two and a half times the price. I could probably have found somewhere cheaper than my current gym, but I chose it simply because it’s close to where I live. Ease of access is half the battle for those whose motivation is as underdeveloped as their stamina. But more interesting than the painful price differential are the cultural differences that I noticed – some immediately, some gradually – when I started my thrice-weekly regimen.
First, it has to be said that the clientele at my gym does not represent a cross-section of Delhi society. Gym-goers in Los Angeles by definition must have some disposable income, but the steep membership fees at my Delhi club mean that it caters basically to well-off locals, with a smattering of ex-pats like myself. So the people I chat with briefly on the floor or in the locker room are kids whose parents have money, or young professionals, and very occasionally someone (like me) almost old enough to be one of their parents. Everyone seems to be studying finance, aiming for an MBA, or working in the family business. The crowd is not just young but often conspicuously well dressed, whether in their work-out clothes or in the street clothes they change into afterwards. No old shorts, ratty t-shirts and beat up tennis shoes here. This is also the only gym where I’ve ever seen someone working out in cargo pants and a designer tee-shirt and shoes: even the most stylish work-out clothes seem too infra dig for some people.
The class difference extends to locker room etiquette, in a way that was initially rather disconcerting. Many a gym member hands his clothes wordlessly to the locker room attendant, who hangs them up or folds and puts them away in their bag; or the member just casts his clothes onto the bench with the assumption that they will be dealt with. Pleases and thank-yous are clearly not required. Some people do chat cordially with the attendant, but it’s the frequent master-servant attitude that is striking, all the more so because it seems to be accepted by both parties as a given. On my way out of the locker room I usually say “Thank you” to the attendant, regardless of whether or not he’s helped me directly that day. In return, I get a smile that’s hard to interpret: is it friendliness, appreciation – or just a certain amusement that I should cluelessly waste my time and his on a superfluous pleasantry?
Of course, the gym should ultimately not be about what you wear or how you behave, but about what you do, and there’s no disputing that everyone seems pretty intent on having a proper work-out. They’re not there just to show off, and from my position at the upper end of the client age scale, I can’t criticize their energy levels. Perhaps they are inspired by the music, which is usually so loud as to make idle conversation impossible. Or maybe it’s the lyrics being pounded into their brains that energize them: the compilations chosen by my gym include a considerable number of rap and other songs with graphic and vulgar descriptions of sex. I haven’t yet figured out whether multiply-repeated lines like “You already know I wanna fuck you” have the advantageous aerobic effect of making the heart beat faster, or whether to those gym members who are also dance club denizens they’re simply too familiar to be noticed.
The impression I have is that elements like those songs are part of a blasé-seeming attitude towards sex cultivated by the gym to appeal to the majority of its clients: we’re hip, westernized and contemporary, it tries to say. Unfortunately, the façade begins to crack when exposed to a native western pair of eyes. Look at the buff trainers, their biceps and pecs nicely outlined by their tight t-shirts. In their masculinity they’re identical to their American counterparts – until you notice that they can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. The easy physical contact which many Indian males have with their friends reaches its apogee at the gym, whose raison d’être is after all the body beautiful. As they pass each other, the trainers touch each other’s hands or chests, or they walk through the workout area together with their arms slung round each other’s shoulders. By contrast, in the men’s locker room there reigns an almost universal painful modesty about nudity, which leads to much contorted divesting and vesting of underwear from beneath towels wrapped tightly around the waist.
All of these goings-on are gazed upon by ultra-defined muscular males in photos that grace the walls of the establishment, including in the locker room a large poster of a male nude, who is presumably meant to rouse us to greater heights of disciplined exercise. All perfectly normal, one might think, and impeccably heterosexual – except that the pictures are predominantly by Herb Ritts, one of the most prominent gay American photographers. Ritts is known for works that slyly subvert heterosexual conventions by depicting hyper-masculine men in a way that is particularly appealing to gay viewers. In other words, his photos are homoerotic, and several of the ones at my gym are prime examples. It’s probably the case that a lot of Americans don’t quite cotton on to this – Ritts shoots models for the Abercrombie and Fitch clothing catalogs, after all – but I’m pretty sure that an American gym would steer nervously clear of displaying his photographs on their walls.
It seems to me that my gym has adapted some of the trappings of American gym culture without completely understanding the subtle, often blurred lines that define heterosexual and homosexual male identities in the west. Transposed to India, these western traits and affectations mix haphazardly with the very different ways in which Indian men relate to one another in terms of physical appearance and contact. The result is that notwithstanding the pounding macho music, the muscular trainers and the atmosphere of serious intent to exercise, through my western eyes my gym seems very gay!
Male sexual anxiety in the USA still often revolves around wanting to have a good-looking body while simultaneously not being mistaken for being gay. In Delhi, it seems to me that appearing gay is literally inconceivable to most men, who focus on a good physique because it is a component of the social, professional and romantic success that, to judge by their behavior, they feel they’re entitled to. “You already know I wanna fuck you,” they may be singing along in their heads – but only to the woman of their dreams. To my western eyes, however, it doesn’t always look that way. It’s just one small example of how life in Delhi is often confusing – but equally amusing.
“What’s different about living in Delhi compared to America?” friends back home keep on asking me. It’s one of those questions that leave one unsure where to begin, and even after a year of living here, I’m still not certain how best to respond. The main reason is that a list of differences can quickly devolve into a catalog of gripes and frustrations, as the mention of the USA reminds me of the ways in which, by comparison, Delhi is still very much the capital of a developing country. Yet I find myself increasingly reluctant to reduce my India experience to a list of complaints, because my initial culture shock has given way to a more relaxed curiosity about what is different here. As much as possible, I try to feel amusement rather than annoyance when things don’t go quite as I might wish or expect.
Saying that India is irreducible to a series of neat observations is as obvious to those of us who live here as it is unsatisfying to my American questioners, but another way in might be to give them one snapshot, describing an activity here that they are familiar with at home. And what could be easier for many of my friends to grasp than that favorite Californian urban-suburban pursuit - going to the gym?
Yes, there are gyms in Delhi, I tell them, even though the work-out culture here isn’t as widespread as it is on the coasts of the U.S. I’ve no doubt that Delhi gyms, like their LA counterparts, range from the grungy to the glitzy. LA’s gym culture is well enough developed that there is a healthy competition for members, and while you can pay a lot there to join a more exclusive joint, a membership at a mid-range gym needn’t cost more than the equivalent of about Rs. 20,000 a year. Or you can join a gym in Delhi that is one-eighth the size of my old LA club, and often much more crowded – and for nearly two and a half times the price. I could probably have found somewhere cheaper than my current gym, but I chose it simply because it’s close to where I live. Ease of access is half the battle for those whose motivation is as underdeveloped as their stamina. But more interesting than the painful price differential are the cultural differences that I noticed – some immediately, some gradually – when I started my thrice-weekly regimen.
First, it has to be said that the clientele at my gym does not represent a cross-section of Delhi society. Gym-goers in Los Angeles by definition must have some disposable income, but the steep membership fees at my Delhi club mean that it caters basically to well-off locals, with a smattering of ex-pats like myself. So the people I chat with briefly on the floor or in the locker room are kids whose parents have money, or young professionals, and very occasionally someone (like me) almost old enough to be one of their parents. Everyone seems to be studying finance, aiming for an MBA, or working in the family business. The crowd is not just young but often conspicuously well dressed, whether in their work-out clothes or in the street clothes they change into afterwards. No old shorts, ratty t-shirts and beat up tennis shoes here. This is also the only gym where I’ve ever seen someone working out in cargo pants and a designer tee-shirt and shoes: even the most stylish work-out clothes seem too infra dig for some people.
The class difference extends to locker room etiquette, in a way that was initially rather disconcerting. Many a gym member hands his clothes wordlessly to the locker room attendant, who hangs them up or folds and puts them away in their bag; or the member just casts his clothes onto the bench with the assumption that they will be dealt with. Pleases and thank-yous are clearly not required. Some people do chat cordially with the attendant, but it’s the frequent master-servant attitude that is striking, all the more so because it seems to be accepted by both parties as a given. On my way out of the locker room I usually say “Thank you” to the attendant, regardless of whether or not he’s helped me directly that day. In return, I get a smile that’s hard to interpret: is it friendliness, appreciation – or just a certain amusement that I should cluelessly waste my time and his on a superfluous pleasantry?
Of course, the gym should ultimately not be about what you wear or how you behave, but about what you do, and there’s no disputing that everyone seems pretty intent on having a proper work-out. They’re not there just to show off, and from my position at the upper end of the client age scale, I can’t criticize their energy levels. Perhaps they are inspired by the music, which is usually so loud as to make idle conversation impossible. Or maybe it’s the lyrics being pounded into their brains that energize them: the compilations chosen by my gym include a considerable number of rap and other songs with graphic and vulgar descriptions of sex. I haven’t yet figured out whether multiply-repeated lines like “You already know I wanna fuck you” have the advantageous aerobic effect of making the heart beat faster, or whether to those gym members who are also dance club denizens they’re simply too familiar to be noticed.
The impression I have is that elements like those songs are part of a blasé-seeming attitude towards sex cultivated by the gym to appeal to the majority of its clients: we’re hip, westernized and contemporary, it tries to say. Unfortunately, the façade begins to crack when exposed to a native western pair of eyes. Look at the buff trainers, their biceps and pecs nicely outlined by their tight t-shirts. In their masculinity they’re identical to their American counterparts – until you notice that they can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. The easy physical contact which many Indian males have with their friends reaches its apogee at the gym, whose raison d’être is after all the body beautiful. As they pass each other, the trainers touch each other’s hands or chests, or they walk through the workout area together with their arms slung round each other’s shoulders. By contrast, in the men’s locker room there reigns an almost universal painful modesty about nudity, which leads to much contorted divesting and vesting of underwear from beneath towels wrapped tightly around the waist.
All of these goings-on are gazed upon by ultra-defined muscular males in photos that grace the walls of the establishment, including in the locker room a large poster of a male nude, who is presumably meant to rouse us to greater heights of disciplined exercise. All perfectly normal, one might think, and impeccably heterosexual – except that the pictures are predominantly by Herb Ritts, one of the most prominent gay American photographers. Ritts is known for works that slyly subvert heterosexual conventions by depicting hyper-masculine men in a way that is particularly appealing to gay viewers. In other words, his photos are homoerotic, and several of the ones at my gym are prime examples. It’s probably the case that a lot of Americans don’t quite cotton on to this – Ritts shoots models for the Abercrombie and Fitch clothing catalogs, after all – but I’m pretty sure that an American gym would steer nervously clear of displaying his photographs on their walls.
It seems to me that my gym has adapted some of the trappings of American gym culture without completely understanding the subtle, often blurred lines that define heterosexual and homosexual male identities in the west. Transposed to India, these western traits and affectations mix haphazardly with the very different ways in which Indian men relate to one another in terms of physical appearance and contact. The result is that notwithstanding the pounding macho music, the muscular trainers and the atmosphere of serious intent to exercise, through my western eyes my gym seems very gay!
Male sexual anxiety in the USA still often revolves around wanting to have a good-looking body while simultaneously not being mistaken for being gay. In Delhi, it seems to me that appearing gay is literally inconceivable to most men, who focus on a good physique because it is a component of the social, professional and romantic success that, to judge by their behavior, they feel they’re entitled to. “You already know I wanna fuck you,” they may be singing along in their heads – but only to the woman of their dreams. To my western eyes, however, it doesn’t always look that way. It’s just one small example of how life in Delhi is often confusing – but equally amusing.
Aug 18, 2008
Seeing Males Together: Brokeback Mountain and Picturing Men
The Chicago Blog
Publicity news from the University of Chicago Press including news tips, press releases, reviews, and intelligent commentary.
History's fundamental lesson warns those who are comfortable with contemporary social arrangements, as it reassures those who are oppressed by current practices: It hasn't always been like this, and isn't likely to stay this way forever. This lesson is certainly true when it comes to the way that American men today are inclined and allowed to express their affection for each other—whether that affection involves romance, sexual longing, or just profound fondness.
from the book cover
Ang Lee's magnificent film Brokeback Mountain is the sad story of two Wyoming ranch hands whose society severely inhibits their twenty-year-long affectionate and sexual relationship. They express their mutual attraction only when utterly alone in the wilderness, at huge expense to their emotional lives and also their relationships with women. Yet Brokeback Mountain may also be instructively seen as a movie that raises disturbing issues about the ways that all American men feel about the appropriate ways to express their fondness for each other, whether or not that fondness is accompanied by sexual desire. Our culture still so scorns sexual desire between two men that there is a common fear that such desire just might accompany any fondness, as well as a fear that other people might jump to conclusions about the implications of two men's attraction to each other.
Homophobia afflicts all males in our society, both those who genuinely are sexually attracted to each other, like Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain, as well as those whose love or simple affection for each other has no sexual dimension to it. For one man to tell another he loves him, some joking around often trivializes the expression, with all the depth of a commercial for Bud Light; if two men embrace, a reassuring punch is often part of the action. Simply because they are men, gay men—in spite of being sexually drawn to each other—may often be no less free of inhibition in expressing affection than are their straight brothers.
As a historian who has studied the shifting history of American men's various sorts of relationships with each other, I think it is critical to note that Brokeback Mountain's Ennis and Jack were nineteen in 1963, the year they met. (So was I coincidentally.) They were shaped by the culture of 1950s America, a culture that was unusually hostile to male intimacy, as I argue in Picturing Men.
When most American boys learned to fear and despise any suggestion of queerness in themselves, Ennis received a peculiarly graphic lesson: His father made it a point to show his nine-year-old son the sexually mutilated corpse of a rancher whose relationship with the man with whom he shared a home had bothered his neighbors. Jack's dream for himself and Ennis—simply to live together in peace—was a modest one, in contrast to the reasonable dreams of men today who want to marry each other. Yet, living when they did, Ennis could only warn Jack that if their feelings for each other were ever to "grab on to us again in the wrong place, wrong time, we'll be dead." Their intimacy had to remain in the shadows, making Brokeback Mountain a tragic tale of unrealized potential.
Picturing Men shows a different world. The lost world of American men that I depict in my work was a time when men clearly were comfortable with each other, feeling free to physically express mutual affection for all to witness—not hidden away on a Brokeback Mountain, but in front of a camera, wholly without the coldness or the reassuringly exaggerated gestures that would come to mark photographs from a later time. Picturing Men does not argue that the lost world was in every way better than the world of men today, but does surely maintain that the earlier world was different, and that our understanding it, and the reasons for its demise, might improve men's relationships nowadays, with each other and with the women in their lives.
Picturing Men is based on my systematic scrutiny of thousands of everyday photographs of two or more American men together, from the dawn of photography before the Civil War until the early 1950s—both studio portraits as well as the snapshots that became common after the invention of roll film in 1888. The book displays well over a hundred representative images, showing men indoors and out, in homes, dorm rooms, and bunk houses, at the beach and in the work place, soldiers, sailors, and civilians, camping, hunting, and posing for athletic team portraits. The ways men posed with each other changed markedly over the time my book surveys, and my interpretation of those changes leads me to an interpretation of drastic changes in the quality of men's various relationships with each other over a century of American history.
ibson_fig_xiiAs cultural evidence, photographs document certain things, yet are wholly silent about others. In looking at this photograph taken around 1915, we see two men doing something we rarely observe nowadays. I refer not simply to their pose, but to the fact that they had their portrait taken together in a photographer's studio, a ritual once widespread among American men but extremely rare today. Many observers may confidently think they see evidence of romance and a likely sexual relationship in this photograph, but that judgment reveals something only about the observer, not the subjects. Without an inscription, we can actually discern nothing from this image regarding a matter that has come to obsess us about relationships: whether the parties are having sex with each other.
What we do observe in this photograph—and in countless others—is male intimacy, two men who were clearly so comfortable with each other that they felt no need to clown around, to reassure themselves and anyone who would see their photograph that nothing culturally scorned was being displayed. Another of history's critical lessons is that change always brings both gain and loss. Picturing Men maintains that certain losses that American men have experienced in their relationships with each other have been severe. It is not simply fictional ranch hands, and not just men sexually drawn to each other, whose lives today are full of unrealized potential.
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Wow thanks for writing this book. This is an issue that so needs to be talked about. I've noticed this also how men are so afraid of each other. It's cultural so we see every one else acting in the same way and we think it's a normal thing but it's actualy not a normal thing. It's extremely abnormal and disfunctional.
Posted by: God loves you [TypeKey Profile Page] | August 29, 2007 05:11 PM
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John Ibson,
It's a wonderful book no doubt, but at the same time a reminder of the unfortunate state in which men are today, that this book has been featured and reviewed under the gay and lesbian section -- the very concept that has been the greatest tool in wiping off all kinds of open, proud affection for each other from the Western men.
It is primarily because of the concept of sexual orientation, which portrays man's sexual desire for men as straight mainstream, while clubs masculine male desire for men together with those of the feminine/ transgendered/ queer / third sex through ill-conceived and oppressive definitions. It can be easily shown through a study of men and manhood through the history, that men will avoid like hell what is socially ascribed to the third sex. In the beginning before the concept of 'sexual orientation' came, only receptive anal sex was seen as 'unmanly' thing of the third sex. A masculine male's affection for another man was seen as perfectly normal, and sexual affection was seen as a macho vice. After this concept (of 'homosexuality' )was fully established now showing bodily or sexual affection towards men implied that you're not on e of the 'real' (read straight) men but one of them -- the queers/ third gender/mollies/ effeminate/ gays. And this is why men have disowned their sexual need for men. And they'll never accept it again, till the concept of gay/homosexuality/sexual orientation that seeks to isolate them from the men's community into what is clearly the third sex community (even if its not officially defined so) is done away with.
Unfortunately, now this concept is being thrust upon societies like India, where men's spaces and men's affinity is very strong. Soon it will be history when the gay movement is given power and place in the society, with its misleading classification of the society. Unless, we decide to expose what is wrong with sexual orientation.
regards,
Please see:
http://sexual-orientation-is-oppressive.blogspot.com/
http://heterosexualisationofsociety.blogspot.com/
Publicity news from the University of Chicago Press including news tips, press releases, reviews, and intelligent commentary.
History's fundamental lesson warns those who are comfortable with contemporary social arrangements, as it reassures those who are oppressed by current practices: It hasn't always been like this, and isn't likely to stay this way forever. This lesson is certainly true when it comes to the way that American men today are inclined and allowed to express their affection for each other—whether that affection involves romance, sexual longing, or just profound fondness.
from the book cover
Ang Lee's magnificent film Brokeback Mountain is the sad story of two Wyoming ranch hands whose society severely inhibits their twenty-year-long affectionate and sexual relationship. They express their mutual attraction only when utterly alone in the wilderness, at huge expense to their emotional lives and also their relationships with women. Yet Brokeback Mountain may also be instructively seen as a movie that raises disturbing issues about the ways that all American men feel about the appropriate ways to express their fondness for each other, whether or not that fondness is accompanied by sexual desire. Our culture still so scorns sexual desire between two men that there is a common fear that such desire just might accompany any fondness, as well as a fear that other people might jump to conclusions about the implications of two men's attraction to each other.
Homophobia afflicts all males in our society, both those who genuinely are sexually attracted to each other, like Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain, as well as those whose love or simple affection for each other has no sexual dimension to it. For one man to tell another he loves him, some joking around often trivializes the expression, with all the depth of a commercial for Bud Light; if two men embrace, a reassuring punch is often part of the action. Simply because they are men, gay men—in spite of being sexually drawn to each other—may often be no less free of inhibition in expressing affection than are their straight brothers.
As a historian who has studied the shifting history of American men's various sorts of relationships with each other, I think it is critical to note that Brokeback Mountain's Ennis and Jack were nineteen in 1963, the year they met. (So was I coincidentally.) They were shaped by the culture of 1950s America, a culture that was unusually hostile to male intimacy, as I argue in Picturing Men.
When most American boys learned to fear and despise any suggestion of queerness in themselves, Ennis received a peculiarly graphic lesson: His father made it a point to show his nine-year-old son the sexually mutilated corpse of a rancher whose relationship with the man with whom he shared a home had bothered his neighbors. Jack's dream for himself and Ennis—simply to live together in peace—was a modest one, in contrast to the reasonable dreams of men today who want to marry each other. Yet, living when they did, Ennis could only warn Jack that if their feelings for each other were ever to "grab on to us again in the wrong place, wrong time, we'll be dead." Their intimacy had to remain in the shadows, making Brokeback Mountain a tragic tale of unrealized potential.
Picturing Men shows a different world. The lost world of American men that I depict in my work was a time when men clearly were comfortable with each other, feeling free to physically express mutual affection for all to witness—not hidden away on a Brokeback Mountain, but in front of a camera, wholly without the coldness or the reassuringly exaggerated gestures that would come to mark photographs from a later time. Picturing Men does not argue that the lost world was in every way better than the world of men today, but does surely maintain that the earlier world was different, and that our understanding it, and the reasons for its demise, might improve men's relationships nowadays, with each other and with the women in their lives.
Picturing Men is based on my systematic scrutiny of thousands of everyday photographs of two or more American men together, from the dawn of photography before the Civil War until the early 1950s—both studio portraits as well as the snapshots that became common after the invention of roll film in 1888. The book displays well over a hundred representative images, showing men indoors and out, in homes, dorm rooms, and bunk houses, at the beach and in the work place, soldiers, sailors, and civilians, camping, hunting, and posing for athletic team portraits. The ways men posed with each other changed markedly over the time my book surveys, and my interpretation of those changes leads me to an interpretation of drastic changes in the quality of men's various relationships with each other over a century of American history.
ibson_fig_xiiAs cultural evidence, photographs document certain things, yet are wholly silent about others. In looking at this photograph taken around 1915, we see two men doing something we rarely observe nowadays. I refer not simply to their pose, but to the fact that they had their portrait taken together in a photographer's studio, a ritual once widespread among American men but extremely rare today. Many observers may confidently think they see evidence of romance and a likely sexual relationship in this photograph, but that judgment reveals something only about the observer, not the subjects. Without an inscription, we can actually discern nothing from this image regarding a matter that has come to obsess us about relationships: whether the parties are having sex with each other.
What we do observe in this photograph—and in countless others—is male intimacy, two men who were clearly so comfortable with each other that they felt no need to clown around, to reassure themselves and anyone who would see their photograph that nothing culturally scorned was being displayed. Another of history's critical lessons is that change always brings both gain and loss. Picturing Men maintains that certain losses that American men have experienced in their relationships with each other have been severe. It is not simply fictional ranch hands, and not just men sexually drawn to each other, whose lives today are full of unrealized potential.
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Wow thanks for writing this book. This is an issue that so needs to be talked about. I've noticed this also how men are so afraid of each other. It's cultural so we see every one else acting in the same way and we think it's a normal thing but it's actualy not a normal thing. It's extremely abnormal and disfunctional.
Posted by: God loves you [TypeKey Profile Page] | August 29, 2007 05:11 PM
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John Ibson,
It's a wonderful book no doubt, but at the same time a reminder of the unfortunate state in which men are today, that this book has been featured and reviewed under the gay and lesbian section -- the very concept that has been the greatest tool in wiping off all kinds of open, proud affection for each other from the Western men.
It is primarily because of the concept of sexual orientation, which portrays man's sexual desire for men as straight mainstream, while clubs masculine male desire for men together with those of the feminine/ transgendered/ queer / third sex through ill-conceived and oppressive definitions. It can be easily shown through a study of men and manhood through the history, that men will avoid like hell what is socially ascribed to the third sex. In the beginning before the concept of 'sexual orientation' came, only receptive anal sex was seen as 'unmanly' thing of the third sex. A masculine male's affection for another man was seen as perfectly normal, and sexual affection was seen as a macho vice. After this concept (of 'homosexuality' )was fully established now showing bodily or sexual affection towards men implied that you're not on e of the 'real' (read straight) men but one of them -- the queers/ third gender/mollies/ effeminate/ gays. And this is why men have disowned their sexual need for men. And they'll never accept it again, till the concept of gay/homosexuality/sexual orientation that seeks to isolate them from the men's community into what is clearly the third sex community (even if its not officially defined so) is done away with.
Unfortunately, now this concept is being thrust upon societies like India, where men's spaces and men's affinity is very strong. Soon it will be history when the gay movement is given power and place in the society, with its misleading classification of the society. Unless, we decide to expose what is wrong with sexual orientation.
regards,
Please see:
http://sexual-orientation-is-oppressive.blogspot.com/
http://heterosexualisationofsociety.blogspot.com/
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