Okay, we've known it for
a long time — some of us since puberty —
but it's cool to see the
"mainstream" media and academia catching on...
It turns out male sexuality is just as fluid as female sexuality
http://theconversation.com/it-turns-out-male-sexuality-is-just-as-fluid-as-female-sexuality-36189
If women can kiss
women and still be straight, what about men?
Some scholars have argued that female sexual desires tend
to be fluid and receptive, while men’s desires – regardless of whether men are
gay or straight – tend to be inflexible and unchanging. Support for this notion
permeates popular culture. There are countless examples of straight-identified
female actresses and pop stars kissing or caressing other women – from Madonna
and Britney to Iggy and J-Lo – with little concern about being perceived as
lesbians. When the Christian pop star Katy Perry sang in 2008 that she kissed a
girl and liked it, nobody seriously doubted her
heterosexuality.
The story is
different for men. The sexuality of straight men has long been understood
by evolutionary biologists, and, subsequently, the general public, as
subject to a visceral, nearly unstoppable impulse to reproduce with female
partners. Consequently, when straight men do engage in same sex contact, these
encounters are viewed as incompatible with the bio-evolutionary coding. It’s
believed to signal an innate homosexual (or at least bisexual) orientation, and
even just one known same-sex act can cast considerable doubt upon a man’s claim
to heterosexuality. For instance, in 2007, Republican Senators Larry Craig and
Bob Allen were both separately arrested on charges related to sex with men in
public bathrooms. While both men remained married to their wives and tirelessly
avowed their heterosexuality, the
press skewered them as closeted
hypocrites.
Despite the
common belief in the rigidity of male heterosexuality, historians and
sociologists have created a substantial body of well-documented evidence showing
straight men – not “closeted” gay men – engaging in sexual contact with other
men. In many parts of the United States prior to the 1950s, the gay/straight
binary distinguished between effeminate men (or “fairies”) and masculine men
(“normal” men) – not whether or not a man engaged in homosexual sex. Historian
George Chauncey’s study of gay life in New York City from 1890-1940
revealed that through much of the first half of the 20th century, normal (i.e.,
“straight”) working class men mixed with fairies in the saloons and tenements
that were central to the lives of working men.
With sex-segregation
the general rule for single men and women in the early 1900s, the private back
rooms of saloons were often sites of sexual activity between normal men and
fairies, with the latter perceived as a kind of intermediate sex – a reasonable
alternative to female prostitutes. Public parks and restrooms were also common
sites for sexual interaction between straight men and fairies. In such
encounters, the fairy acted as the sole embodiment of queerness, the figures
with whom normal (straight) men could have sex – just as they might with female
sex workers. Fairies affirmed, rather than threatened, the heteromasculinity of
straight men by embodying its opposite.
The notion that
homosexual activity was not “gay” when undertaken by “real” (i.e. straight) men
continued into the 1950s and 60s. During this period, the homosexual contact of
straight men began to be undergo a transformation from relatively mundane
behavior to the bold behavior of male rebels. The American biker gang The Hells
Angels, which formed in 1948, serves as a rich example. There are few figures
more “macho” than a heavily tattooed, leather-clad biker, whose heterosexuality
was as much on display as his masculinity. Brawling over women, exhibiting women
on the back of bikes, and brandishing tattoos and patches of women were all
central to the subculture of the gang.
Yet as the
journalist Hunter S. Thompson documented in his 1966 book Hell’s
Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, gang members also
had sexual encounters with one another. One of their favorite “stunts” was to
deeply French kiss one another – with tongues extended out of their mouths in a
type of tongue-licking kiss often reserved for girl-on-girl porn. Members of the
Hells Angels explained that the kissing was a defiant stunt that produced among
onlookers the desired degree of shock. To them, it was also an expression of
“brotherhood.”
Today, sexual
encounters between straight-identified men take new but similarly “manly” forms.
For instance, when men undergo hazing in college fraternities and in the
military, there’s often a degree of sexual contact. It’s often dismissed as a
joke, game, or ritual that has no bearing on the heterosexual constitution of
the participants. As I document in my forthcoming book, fraternity hazing
has included practices such as the “elephant walk,” in which pledges are
required to strip naked and stand in a circle, with one thumb in their mouth and
the other in the anus of the pledge in front of them.
Similarly,
according to anthropological accounts of the Navy’s longstanding “Crossing the
Line” initiation ceremony, new sailors crossing the equator for the first time
have garbage and rotten food shoved into their anuses by older sailors. They’re
also required to retrieve objects from one another’s
anuses.
One relatively
recent example of the pervasiveness of these kinds of encounters between
straight men was revealed in a report by the US-based watchdog organization
Project on Government Oversight. In 2009, the group released photos of American security guards at the U.S.
Embassy in Kabul engaging in “deviant” after-hours pool parties. The photos show
the men drunkenly urinating on each other, licking each other’s nipples, and
taking vodka shots and eating potato chips out of each other’s
butts.
Individuals often
react to these examples in one of two ways. Either they jump to the conclusion
that any straight-identified man who engages in sexual contact with another man
must actually be gay or bisexual, or they dismiss the behavior as not actually
sexual. Rather, they interpret it as an expression of dominance, a desire to
humiliate, or some other ostensibly “non sexual” male impulse.
But these responses
merely reveal our culture’s preconceived notions about men’s sexuality. Look at
it from the other side of the coin: if straight young women, such as sorority
pledges, were touching each other’s vaginas during an initiation ritual or
taking shots from each other’s butts, commentators would almost certainly
imagine these acts as sexual in some way (and not exclusively about women’s need
to dominate, for instance). Straight women are also given considerable leeway to
have occasional sexual contact with women without the presumption that they are
actually lesbians. In other words, same-sex contact among straight men and women
is interpreted through the lens of some well-worn gender stereotypes. But these
stereotypes don’t hold up when we examine the range of straight men’s sexual
encounters with other men.
It’s clear that
straight men and women come into intimate contact with one another in a range of
different ways. But this is less about hard-wired gender differences and more
about broader cultural norms dictating how men and women are allowed to behave
with people of the same sex. Instead of clinging to the notion that men’s
sexuality is fundamentally inflexible, we should view male heterosexuality for
what it is – a fluid set of desires that are constrained less by biology than by
prevailing gender norms.
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