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-- John Scalzi rescues a lost LJ post from the distant mists of 2007, presumably before the advent of the [NSFW] Guys with iPhones.
I'm going to tentatively claim this one (and the Slate piece purporting to explain "How macho movies get misread as homoerotic" that he's riffing off of) as further support for my theory that we're entering into a post-homoerotic landscape. It's one thing for straight men to protest that they don't see the supposed homoeroticism in, say, Point Blank or 300, or -- as the author of the Slate article does -- take pains to reject or refute a homoerotic subtext. Those are the familiar old-school moves, based on a classic contagion model of the homoerotic. And what are the traditional ways of dealing with contagion? Quarantine and isolation. Separate the healthy and the sick; minimize exposure risk; regard potential symptoms with a high index of suspicion; develop sensitive diagnostics and, ideally, vaccinations. Because everyone's potentially susceptible.
And that's why the Slate author comes across as either old-fashioned or juvenile. Dude, chill out! When you protest, in defense of straight men taking pleasure in narcissistic identification with the "hot, sweaty men" of 300, "Shouldn't a guy be able to do such a thing without being called gay?" -- you're fighting last century's battles (and over a film set in 480 B.C., no less). I certainly wouldn't say that nobody cares anymore, but let's face it, vast swaths of culture and society have moved on. Retro, unironic avowals of heterosexuality? Not hip, not hot. Sure, "no homo" still has currency, but also inevitably oscillates between "straightforward" ritual disclaimer and ironic performativity. (Conversely, people quite earnestly and sincerely profess that when they say, "That's so gay!" they really, really don't mean that kind of gay because they're totally cool with that stuff and homophobia is, like, so lame.)
These days, no self-respecting straight man would protest the homoerotic too much -- at least, not with a straight face. Over the last decade or so -- marked at its outset by the launch of Viagra, and culminating in the ascendancy of Judd Apatow -- straight men all over the country have embraced the possibilities of a masculine heterosexual insecurity all but completely decoupled from the 20th century spectre of contagious gayness and sexual orientation misattribution.
So nowadays, the fight has shifted to cultural status. These men have learned to relax and love the gay, but that doesn't necessarily mean they support same-sex marriage or gays in the military. When Scalzi cites "the present heterosexual male abdication of anything more culturally, emotionally and intellectually resonant than 'Dick in a Box'", do we mourn, celebrate, shrug, or roll our eyes? If the global economic meltdown is accelerating the Death of Macho, will sexual orientation as well as gender determine the respective winners and losers of this world-historical process? But hey, that's politics -- in the meantime, we can all go laugh together at Brüno, right?
Comments
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!