Oh, I wish I had your optimism! Not that the post-homoerotic-but-still-homophobic world you describe and predict is perfect by any means, but it sounds a lot better than the current one. If nothing else, it would mean fewer "you're so gay, you drink/eat/wear/watch/say X" among my male workmates, where X is never something straightforwardly actually homosexual but, like, salad. Or the wrong brand of beer.

If anyone has any doubts as to whether the "you must be gay, because" culture is alive and well at present, and every bit as pervasive (at least in some places and demographics) as the media would have you believe, I invite you to drop by my university, where the dearest ambition of at least half of the males of my acquaintance is to get an Apatow film made from their lives (which would perhaps meet with more success if they would stop quoting their favorite lines from their Canon [Superbad, 40-Year-Old Virgin, the Big Lebowski, Family Guy, to a certain extent South Park, I believe you get the picture] all the damn time, it's like it's the only way they know how to express fannishness). Seriously, defensive heterosexual performativity is alive, well, and busy accusing all of its friends of being gay at any and all opportunity. (I started a really amusing discussion once by observing that I knew writers of gay porn [best short description I could think of for slashers] who thought about gay sex less than this crowd of supposedly 100% straight men. Because, yeah. Someone had a cake with drizzled clearish white icing on it and all the other guys made gay jokes. I mean, what.)

I'd be curious to see some kind of interpretation of why being mistaken for gay is SOOO HORRIBLE for guys. 'Cos the Sexually Predatory Gay Guy myth comes into play whether his "targets" are presumed gay or not, and worrying about whether they could get girls if the girls all thought they weren't interested would make more sense as a reason if they defended their sexuality toward women at all, instead of completely ignoring women so they can prove they're not gay to all of their guy friends. Is it that they would be excluded from their circle of friends if they were gay? It seems to be a really high level of defensiveness compared to other Faux Pas, like self-identifying as feminist or liberal, or being P.C. thought police &c. What's the deal?

Because gay = girly and girly = bad. *sigh*

Oh yeah, I forgot. It does seem weird that they don't accuse each other of being "girly" near as often, though. Maybe they figure that since there are women around to call them on that, and no (uncloseted...) gay men around to call them on the "you're so gay!" thing, they'll have more moral ground to stand on if someone does try to call them out?--The obsession the mainstream has with gay male sex, with the "who's the wife?" and so on, really reveals more about their attitudes toward women than I think the perpetrators want to admit. (Of course, lesbians don't have sex, except in porn, where they secretly just want to do the pizza delivery guy anyway. Trufax!) As does, in an entirely different way, the "gay guys are scary because they might sexually harass or look at or assault me [, the way I do, or at least expect straight men in general to do, to women]" trope, from the opposite direction. (Apparently in Ye Olden Tymes *handwaves* the soul was often considered to be/portrayed as feminine, so that a Good Christian Man submitted to the ultramasculinity of God/Jesus the same way women were supposed to to their husbands. I cannot help but think that this must have skeeved a lot of Good Christian Men right the fuck out.)

Good on you for that conversation! The "like a girl" thing has not been something I have been fond of for a long time. I remember being offended when someone said I did something "like a girl" (I don't remember what), and at some point my reasoning went to, "wait, why am I offended, I am a girl, so that's just a stupid insult." And I took to telling people they "screamed like a boy", because I have yet to hear a girl achieve the high-pitched shrieking scream boys have (before "made you blink" and "two for flinching" and such train them out of expressing being startled or afraid). (And I tend to handle my brother's assertions of male superiority in the physical realm by offering to beat him up. ...Er, that sounds worse than it is; we mock-fight a lot--whenever he instigates it, perhaps to test whether our relatives' assertions that "when he grows up, he'll be able to beat you in a fight" are true yet--and I win every time, by which I mean he runs away. I don't actually beat him up.)

I remember when I was ten and wiping down tables in the cafeteria I came across some younger boys--third grade, maybe--discussing their favorite colors, and agreeing that they would never like pink because that's a "girl color". So I asked them what colors were boy colors, and they were like "red, and blue, and black, and brown, and--" and named everything not pink, including yellow (which even at the time was considered a girl color, witness Power Rangers) and purple (which now seems to be an acceptable color for girls, judging by television). I was not impressed, and I told them so. Colors don't have gender, wtf. (I hope that by then I'd learned the lack of history of pink = girls, blue = boys, so I really blew their minds, but I doubt it.)

It's really frustrating to see the ghetto-izing of a gender identity held by the majority of the world's population, and to see it start sooo early. It's like, when you're a kid, your parents police your gender identity, and when you're older, other kids do, and then when you're in college apparently other boys (I refuse to consider them men, especially since they refuse to refer to women as women and not as "girls") do, and it's so--people are really missing out when they restrict themselves this way.

But they won't listen even when the Ultimate Dudebro Reward--access to vaginas and boobies, natch--is offered in exchange for embracing new definitions of masculinity. Or maybe they just don't hear all the women of their acquaintance lamenting that all the attractive guys (who can groom themselves! And hold steady jobs! Imagine!) are gay, married, or both over the sound of masturbation jokes and belching contests and discussions about how gay that whole metrosexuality fad is/was. Note to guys: women do not all find dead hooker jokes and rape jokes hilarious and attractive! Nor nose and armpit hair! Nor is it particularly easy to find potential dating partners (who aren't "sluts", i.e., having sex) when you limit your opposite-sex contact to parties where the main goal is to get as drunk or high as possible as quickly as possible!