Reader Anne sent me the marvelously bull-headed rant from Jared Wilson, who is absolutely sure that his homophobia is so universally shared that I get the impression that he thinks even gay guys think gay sex is gross. He’s predicting that Brokeback Mountain is going to bomb in theaters, not because it looks like it’s kind of a slow-moving drama that drives shallow people who don’t want to think when they go to the movies (people like me), but because gays are Teh Icky.
For all of our modern cultural “enlightenment,” and despite the pervasiveness of gay characters and stories all over American media, and regardless of the success of shows like “Will & Grace” and “Queer Eye,” by and large Americans — blue state, red state, Christian and non — innately find homosexuality repulsive.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I love naked bigotry, since it’s just so much easier to deal with than cloaked bigotry. I find the idea of Republicans fucking inherently disgusting, but you don’t see me agitating to ban Republicans from marriage, though I could easily demonstrate that there’s a very public good to be had from that, which you can’t really demonstrate with bans on gay marriage.
It’s part of our makeup. It’s biological, it’s conscience-born, it’s part of the imago dei. It’s part of a “moral aesthetic” most everyone bears latent.
Which doesn’t do much to explain the enthusiasm for lesbian sex scenes in porn aimed at straight men, the majority of whom in this country who vote “red”. What’s nice about this guy is he doesn’t even try to remember that lesbians exist.
To be blunt, we know anal sex is gross, and we especially know anal sex between men is repulsive. Even for most of those who have no basis for which to call it a sin find the act itself “gross.”
Who you calling “we”, motherfucker? What planet did they beam this guy down from? At this point in history, I’m guessing a lot more Americans rightfully think Big Macs are a hell of a lot grosser than anal sex, and you know how many Big Macs they sell.
It’s there in all the jokes about prison or “dropping the soap” in a locker room. It’s there in the undiminished shock of that infamous Deliverance scene or the one in Pulp Fiction, which continue to provoke nervous laughter and revulsion even while heterosexual rape scenes occur almost weekly on the countless crime shows on television.
Translation: Rape is A-OK so long as the victim’s female.
It’s even there in the homosexual community itself, which, in my (admittedly unprofessional) sociological opinion, compensates for the grotesquerie of male-male intercourse with the ubiquitous and stereotypical “thin, single, and neat”-ness.
Wait a minute! I’m thin, single and neat! And I’m compensating for something else entirely, which is my love of mud wrestling. So there.
Americans like to believe they are tolerant.
Indeed, to the point where you’d never hear anyone brag about something like being “politically incorrect”. Or name a TV show that or something.
Even the convervatives in our country play liberal (or at least libertarian) on this issue, so as long as homosexuals play nice, we are fine with them.
Besides using their civil rights as a political football by creating moral panics and using them to solidify their power so they can start pointless wars to make money for their friends. But other than that, conservatives love gays. Actually, I’ll bet they do. I’ll bet George W. Bush gets on his knees every night and thanks god for gay men, because without the fear that two men might be doing it in your hometown right this very minute, he’d be cooling his heels in Crawford instead of looking for more ways to channel public funds to Halliburton.
And by “play nice,” I mean “play funny.” Like Homer Simpson, we like our homosexuals flaming. So they can joke about sex and they can swish their way from the silver screen to the TV screen, they can even pontificate about their rights and move us to tears with their experienced repression and persecution. We’ll sympathize with them on “Oprah” and laugh at them on “Will & Grace” and appreciate their good fashion sense on “Queer Eye” and nod our heads with the “Seinfeld” gang that there’s not anything wrong with that.
Nothing much to say here, except that he actually has a point. There’s a long history in this country of using oppressed minorities as clowns in our entertainment, so long as they never do anything threatening and stay safely disempowered and desexualized on screen. Gay men aren’t the only ones treated this way, as any cursory glance over the long history of racist stereotypes that pass for “comedy” in entertainment will demonstrate.
Though this whole thing makes me wonder if this was the 50s, if he’d be ranting about how “Amos and Andy” is part of an insidious plot to dismantle his cherished racist beliefs.
But almost none of us want to see them doing the thing that really distinguishes them.
Anal sex makes you a gay man! Who knew? I guess Kurt Cobain was right when he said everyone is gay. This is exciting news indeed. For one thing, gay men are probably a majority now, or close to it. This should change to political landscape significantly, I’d think. For one thing, it’s going to be hard to drum up a moral panic about gay men having sex when such a huge percentage of us are now gay men.
While waiting for another movie to begin a few weeks ago, the trailer for Brokeback Mountain played. At the moment Jake Gyllenhaal, on the verge of tears and bursting with frustration, cried to Heath Ledger, “Why can’t I quit you?”, there was a palpable explosion of tension in the theater. It got dead quiet (which used to be customary in movie theaters). When subsequent scenes showed the two men embracing as lovers, there were gasps, snickers, and tsks-tsks.
Yeah, I’ve been in theaters and witnessed audience reactions like that. The proper reaction to those reactions is to want to die of embarrassment that you’re breathing the same air as these dipshits. I will point out, though, that by Jared’s description of what makes someone “gay”, there’s no reason at all to think that anything gay happened on that screen. Embracing, exclamations of love–these aren’t the magical thing that “distinguishes” gay men I thought. I don’t see that any anal sex happened in that preview, therefore there was no gayness.
Brokeback Mountain may win awards, but it will not have an audience who is not attending either out of perverse curiosity or some sense of liberal duty. The young ladies who are fans of Gyllenhaal and Ledger do not want to see them making out.
Boy this asshole couldn’t be more wrong. The reason I wasn’t planning on seeing the movie is it sounds like there’s a lot of tedious plot and characterization and not nearly enough of Gyllenhaal and Ledger making out. Now if they put out a movie that was basically an hour of that, I’d probably go so far as to pay full price to see it.
The young men who are fans of these actors for other reasons will be naturally repulsed.
Well, maybe some will be. But more and more straight young men are wising up everyday to the side benefits of taking your girlfriend to a movie that has hot young actors naked and panting. (I’m probably hoping for way more than this movie is going to provide, aren’t I?)
And the vast majority of all moviegoers will not sympathize in the least with two married men who must “live a lie” because their “true love” is forbidden.
Yeah, that’s a plot that never goes over well with audiences. It especially is known to do poorly with teenage girls. When will Hollywood learn that people want movies about young Christian couples whose parents approve of their marriage having tepid sex for the first time on their wedding nights and then wondering what the fuss was all about before becoming bitter and writing blog posts about all the hot anal sex that everyone but you is getting to have?
America likes her gay cowboys standing on stage with others in costume, singing “YMCA.” Beyond kitsch, beyond sentimentality, the reality is yucky.
Wow, that’s so hateful it’s hard to really make jokes about, but the one thing that’s really killing me is the idea that only gay sex is coated over with a thick layer of sentimentality to distract from the awkward physical reality of it. Now I don’t got to the movies as much as I used to, but if I recall, most straight sex scenes in them have about as much bearing on reality as one of Bush’s speeches on Iraq. Well, unless I’m crazy. Maybe everyone else does have the music swell and the sheet stay miraculously stay in in place to cover all the goodies while they move in slow motion with the lighting always perfectly glinting off their flawless skin. If so, please let me know your secret. Or not, because that actually sounds kind of boring.
106 Responses to “Wherein a wingnut blogger lets us know we’re all gay cowboys and didn’t know it”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
‘brokeback mountain opened…’
‘what?’
‘you know, the gay cowboy movie.’
‘why didn’t you say so?’
^I think a significant percentage of Americans have experienced this conversation.
‘Regular’ sex is very icky if you think about it when you arn’t in the mood. At least in my experience. Backdoor style is still in the same ballpark IMO.
I think that we should send this guy links to Harry Potter slashfic archives and Library of Moria and other slash sites, some of which have fanart too, and awaken him to the fact that a whole bunch of straight females out there think that m/m is TEH HOTTT!!!1!!
OTOH, it would be evil to do that and not pay for his subsequent counseling sessions…
Woo! *pumps fists*
bellatrys, are we also going to send him mpreg?
Exactly right, bellatrys. I know a whole bunch of straight women who are breathlessly waiting for this film, and who are tremendous fans of (and frequently writers of) m/m slash. As for the movie - haven’t seen it, but I loved the Annie Proulx story it was based on.
Put Jared Wilson together with John Derbyshire and Vox Day, add Ann Coulter, Midge Decter, and maybe that Debbie Schlussel person, mix ‘em up, and maybe they’d self-combust. That’s a whole lot of venom.
Like Homer Simpson, we like our homosexuals flaming.
Right! And we like our black people steppin’ and fetchin’, too! And the womenfolk should be barefoot and pregnant!
I hate it when conservatives miss the satire in pop culture. A generation ago, he would’ve been the kind of guy who loved “All in the Family” because Archie Bunker “tells it like it is.”
“the sheet stay miraculously stay in in place to cover all the goodies while they move in slow motion with the lighting always perfectly glinting off their flawless skin.”
I heard the unrated DVD of Angelina and Antonio’s “Original Sin” sex scenes are teh hot.
And 9 out of 10 women surveyed declare they would jump the fence for Angelina Jolie given half a chance. That kinda blows the whole “gay sex is gross” argument out of the water.
Annejumps, that sounds like a good idea. Particularly the RPS with a pregnant Orlando Bloom.
what I find most intriguing about the rightwingnuts is how they are so completely absorbed in and titillated by the very sins they condemn. I think our little mr jared wilson likes writing about gays fucking because he gets off just thinking about it. and I’m not talking about simple mental masturbation.
this fellow is literally wanking off while writing about gays.
he’s addicted - he keeps doing it and doing it and doing it.
…
It gets worse when Jared leaps into his own comments thread. What a smug, condescending, self-satisfied dick. Though there’s plenty of unintentional comedy when people dare to disagree with him and he’s like, “What makes you think you speak for everybody?” Jeez, Dr. Pot, paging Dr. Kettle . . .
addendum for clarity: please add quote marks around the word sins in my post just above.
“thank you very much.” - elvis
…
You mean that real sex isn’t like movie sex? No wonder all of my partners have complained when I got up to light 750 candles around the enormous bathtub I had installed in my bedroom.
As for me, even if one accepts that men are uncomfortable with male-on-male affection (which is true to some extent, although that’s not particularly flattering to us), that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t go to see a movie with that in it. I was deeply uncomfortable during large segments of American Beauty, don’t agree with half of it, and still thought it was a well-done movie that forced you into its worldview for a while.
That’s art. Sometimes, it might actually make you uncomfortable. From the advance buzz, I can tell you that this straight white male will probably go see this movie–and if parts of it make me uncomfortable, then good. It means the movie’s good.
Remember, only straight young men watch movies, and they account for 95% of the population.
Hollywood sex scenes taught me that during sex a women’s breasts do no move but instead stay perfectly still! They also taught me that sex is a nearly soundless act with perhaps a few bits of moaning here and there. And finally sex has absoluetly no messy side that requires any type of cleanup!
I think my favourite part of the whole thing is where he thinks female Gyllenhaal and Ledger fans don’t want to see those guys make out, revealing that he’s never been within ten feet of a straight woman in his life.
I just love how conservatives like this guy (and, admitedly, a lot of other people) define sexual orientation by what types of sexual acts people engage in, when the fact is that there’s no such thing as “gay sex.” As you pointed out, some gay men have anal sex (but, it should be pointed out, not all); some straight men also have anal sex; some lesbians have anal sex; some straight women have anal sex. Ditto for oral sex, vaginal sex, and just about every other type of sexual behavior you can think of. I wonder if he ignores lesbians because he’s afraid to realize that he does the same things to his female partner that the lezzies do to eachother.
(on second thought, probably not. this guy doesn’t seem like he’d care much about his partner’s pleasure, especially if it involved something gross, like actually touching a vulva).
You mean that real sex isn’t like movie sex?
So that’s why I can never find those cool L-shaped sheets in stores!
The whole debate is about fetishizing masculinity–that’s why lesbians are completely ignored in these tedious discussions about anal sex, STD transmission, monogamy, and same-sex marriage. If we’re going to start condemning things because they’re “disgusting”, why don’t we begin with the 90% of straight-male slobs out there?
Speaking for gay men everywhere, I have to confess only gay sex is perfectly lit with sheets that perfectly cover all the goodies and with no mess at all to clean up. See there’s this special gene that only gay men have - it gives us special sex powers . . . like being able to freak out straight men without saying a word and scaring the sh*t out of closet cases by simply existing. Ah the power!
For more examples of Jared’s thinking, see http://thinklings.org/?p=105.
Read the original post, then work your way down through his comments, if you can stand it. Scary.
anne, I think we should induct him into every mystery there is. Frex, besides MPREG, he crew at Less Than Legendary Journeys have found a lot of the particularly horrid deformity of the Herc/Iolaus subgenre, the Hurt/Comfort fic, in which one of the leads is turned into a weepy parody of a damsel in distress so that they can make the characters act out Days of Our Lives ad infinitum.
After softening him up with this, he’ll be so grateful when introduced to well-written slash he’ll find himself enjoying it before it sinks in that Oh. No. I’m. Enjoying. Stories. About. Gay. Guys. GAHHHH!!!!!
Either his mind will be opened or his head will explode…
larkspur, do you think he realizes that a significant portion of the multiple-viewing fanbase for Pirates of the Carribean think that the wrong couple ended up together at the end? Not to mention the draw of Master & Commander for no small segment of the audience?
“palpable explosion of tension”
Poor Jared is so confused his cliches are getting all mixed, provided he knows the definitions of explosion and tension. That closet door of his better open soon. Let’s hope it implodes.
Might I add, I saw Brokeback Mountain in Telluride, and came to the conclusion that it was the best love story I’ve ever seen. Especially since the story takes place over 20 years, and really is about how Heath Ledger’s character’s love for Gyllenhall’s character affects his life. Everytime I think of the ending I am moved to the point of tears.
Not to mention I saw it right after seeing Breakfast on Pluto and the thought of seeing two movies in a row that would make people like the asshole who wrote that rant squirm is always appealing to me.
Oh, and I’ll add, Jeff Fecke, your first paragraph had me laughing my ass off. Seriously, I have to go look for it now.
My only question is, will there be pudding?
>>Exactly right, bellatrys. I know a whole bunch of straight women who are breathlessly waiting for this film, and who are tremendous fans of (and frequently writers of) m/m slash. As for the movie - haven’t seen it, but I loved the Annie Proulx story it was based on.>>
Depressingest story in a depressing book, but damn, she knows how to write for loneliness and passion.
>>Speaking for gay men everywhere, I have to confess only gay sex is perfectly lit with sheets that perfectly cover all the goodies and with no mess at all to clean up. See there’s this special gene that only gay men have - it gives us special sex powers . . . like being able to freak out straight men without saying a word and scaring the sh*t out of closet cases by simply existing. Ah the power!>>
Not true! Straight people can have sex like that, but only after participating in Satanic masses.
“You know me Marge I like my beer cold, my cofee hot and my Homosexuals FaalllllAAAAAAAMING…”
Homer J. Simspon
Nice post!
It’s funny how the bigots get all hung up on the details, and miss that it’s about love and desire — which is pretty similar, regardless of the particular genitals in question. I also tend to like gay love scenes because there’s that element of the joy of liberation.
My sense is that the bigots are actually bothered by love, desire, and liberation, and cloak this with talk about body parts and physical sensations they don’t like.
Thing is, I don’t want to see this movie because I don’t like westerns, not because I don’t want to see a couple of smokin’ hot guys kissing and pretending to have teh buttsex, or whatever it is they’ll be doing in the film (although I have to admit it amuses me how goddamned focused on teh buttsex these homophobic freaks are). I remain a heterosexual female, all the same.
Actually. I think he’s right. You can be as tolerant of homosexuality as you can be without being gay and still find gay sex between the oposite sex great, but gay sex between two of the same sex icky.
Sorry but it’s true.
No straight man is going to enjoy watching or suggestions about it, even the most tolerant.
They’d either have to be guys who have never been around it from which to gauge how they would react, bi-sexuals and don’t care, or they’re liars trying to score points with those around them.
Sorry.
If you’re two women then “Let it rock!” but if you’re two guys then yuck!
It’s sexist, bigoted, sure. I’m going to admit it.
I don’t care what anyone things. But women who think a that a straight man is a bigot if he doesn’t think sex between two gay men is cool is dumbassery at it’s finest.
So if you’re a straight man on this site and you’re trying to score points then go ahead and say otherwise. Otherwise I suggest you wait until the movie comes out and see what happens first.
MYOB’
.
Jared is only 14 years old, so there’s still hope for him.
Gay sex is inherently gross? Has this guy never even HEARD of slash fiction?
Or even strap-ons?
Besides, most straight guys think vaginas are disgusting, smelly, and swamplike. Frankly, they are the ones with this mysterious compulsion to cram their dicks up something they find revolting. I think he’s projecting.
bellatrys, I think the best thing about Brokeback is the way it’s going to make the Internet spin around and explode. *Everyone’s* going to be having heart palpitations– just, the conservatives for different reasons than the fangirls. Or so they say, anyway.
There’s certainly enough awful, awful slash out there that we could break Mr. Wilson’s poor little brain a few dozen times over without even getting to the mpreg, h/c, or strange Kryptonian mating rituals (oh, Smallville.)
No straight man is going to enjoy watching or suggestions about it, even the most tolerant.
Just like no straight women enjoy lesbian sex. [cough*Xenafen*cough]
And no straight men like women older than 20…
I love it when someone thinks that their squicks are universal. Although in my personal experience most “straight” guys will admit to such a range of desires that I’ve concluded that most humans are closer to bi than not on a continuum of orientation, even if most of them don’t go as far as Mr. Horsely.
Thing is, I don’t want to see this movie because I don’t like westerns,
Unless they really screwed up the Proulx story, it’s not a Western. It’s more a couple of dudes in cowboy hats in the country getting it on.
Is there any Barry White in the soundtrack?
If so, I’m all over like like the wild boar sauce was over my ravioli last week: yum!
—
I remember a time being on tour. I’m in a van w/ four guys. All of us straight. Someone says–it’s a long fuckin drive, probably from Ashland to Redding or Redding to Sacramento–’you ever have sex w/ a dude?’ We’re all, all of us, ‘yeah.’ And we all just cracked up, because it was totally true. Not being a homophobic asshole just makes life, you know, more fun.
The young ladies who are fans of Gyllenhaal and Ledger do not want to see them making out.
>_>
never enjoy watching two hot guys neck. I’m sure they’re all… horrified. Right. Very horrified. No interest in watching hot male movie stars make out at all, no doubt.
….
Has he ever actualy talked to a young woman… in any context?
I went to Reed. I spent four years among various degrees of public guy-on-girl, girl-on-girl, and guy-on-guy action, with varying degrees of nudity. I can honestly say, although I don’t enjoy the man-sex myself, I was not at all bothered by the hot gay sex in Brokeback beyond the embarrassment at viewing characters in their most intimate moment.
Personally, anal sex goes with sports and religion in the file of “things I’ll never understand the popularity of,” but man, did this asshat stick his foot in his mouth. Really, I’ve heard way too many guys talk about how they love anal sex to ever take him seriously. (I suppose all that male-female anal sex in porn in just padding for time, then.) Yes, Jared, everybody thinks anal is icky, just like everyone has sex in the missionary position, every single time.
Also, I don’t know if I’m missing something here, but I thought the movie was a love story, not a porno. I mean, they aren’t going to show Heath Ledger penetrating Jake Gyllenhaal, are they?
…and heath’s ankles will be up around jake’s ears, and heath’l be jerking his… lariat, and there will be a heavy smell of neatsfoot oil and old leather…
uh oh. i think I just ruined a whole lifetime of thinking that slash was for other people.
It’s funny how the bigots get all hung up on the details, and miss that it’s about love and desire . . .
Foolish O–Of course he misses it. Guys like Wilson wouldn’t know love and/or desire if it kissed ‘em on the lips.
Amanda,
If Jarted gets this hyper over “Brokeback Mountain,” I pray he never sees, “Pink Velvet,” one look at Hungarian bombshell “Jo” and her antics in that movie will give the poor man a paralytic stroke.
Then again the two movies are unrelated.
The greater the fuss the wingers make about these shows, the more people go and see them. It is counter productive for wingnuts to harp like this about a movie, which in a way is a “take it-or leave it” sort of contract with the viewer since the viewer will decide on his/her own which movie he/she likes and which they do not like and just resent the living hell out of some wild-eyed moralizing twit shouting and howling at them about “sexual connotation subject matter.”
All of us straight.
See, Karl, that’s why I think that everyone’s a little bit bi (at least a little) and/or “straight” is a meaningless concept.
I know “straight” guys who like to crossdress, too, and worry if that makes them gay. Or if having fantasies about making out with guys makes them gay. Or [insert TMI] here. And I want to say to them, well, you still lust after women, right? you don’t have any problems getting it up, I mean, you’ve got 4 kids with your wife, right? So no, you’re not gay.
–You’re bi!
But I don’t think that would make them feel any better.
I’m waiting for Jared to have this conversation with his spouse/girlfriend/partner:
“Jared! How do you explain this copy of ‘2 Hotttt Vegas Lesbians’ on your computer?”
“Um, all Dells ship with 20 gigabytes of porn pre-installed!”
(w/apologies to Penny Arcade)
bellatrys, it’s less that “everyone is bi” and more “there are countless little kinks along the continuum of fetish, and everyone has their own.”
seriously, can you think of anything sicker than “I have monogomous sex with my wife in the dark. she doesn’t move, I’m on top, and we only do it with the lights out with the stated intention of producing children. and that’s the only way we ever have sex, because that’s all that is any good.”
Jared Wilson:
The syntax is mushy so this could mean one of two things:
1. Jared especially know[s] that male anal sex is repulsive, meaning he has special knowledge of male anal sex, and knows it is icky. Jared has tried it, Amanda, and knows whereof he speaks, so a little respect for his personal reflections on his experience. Your mileage may vary.
Or:
2. While Jared thinks poop chutes are gross, he thinks that women’s anuses are not quite as disgusting. Tighter and more pleasing Jared? Or are the men’s just too hairy? Or is it because women’s shit doesn’t stink?
Remember when you were 20, Jared, and sex seemed gross and exotic? You got used to doing your duty. I know you can broaden your horizons, try starting with this book.
Bell, I don’t know if I’d agree with the “everyone is bi” thing. I’ve had sex with a woman and I identify as straight. I think that occasionally finding someone outside your usual tastes attractive isn’t enough to change your sexual identification for.
Know what I’m waiting for? The Photoshop creations that are going to come out soon, of these two cowboys in an intimate situation, with Dubya’s head on one and Cheney’s on the other.
I’ve already found one with Dubya being fucked (yes, in the butt) by Osama bin Ladin.
That’ll cause some conservative heart palpitations. And possibly a few conservative hard-ons.
I’ve had sex with a woman and I identify as straight. I think that occasionally finding someone outside your usual tastes attractive isn’t enough to change your sexual identification for.
See, this is where all this desire/activity/identity shit gets fun. We tend to conflate it all under a general “sexuality,” and to asume that “sexuality” to be a fairly constant thing. All three of those levels can change throughout the course of a lifetime, and not just along gendered axes. Fun, fun stuff.
The whole bi/striaght/gay thing gets even more complex when you start to consider fetishes as well, sure everyone assumes that a pedophile (feet not children) is a nurture created fetishist, but A) no one knows that for certain atm and B) think about people with scat fetishes, people should, in theory, find feaces and urine biologically gross, there’s a whole range of olfactory sensed chemicals that the human body has evolved to find icky because they’re found in rotting meat and other bad digestibles, but you can take a dump on a faecaphiliac and their sexual NO^2 injector just kicks off.
until the scientists get the protenome read and start doing a few long term studies on the subject, sexuality labels are gonna be wrong alot of the time, either too inclusive for some uses and too exclusive for others.
Which is why I’d not have told your friends that they were bi bellatrys if i’d been in your shoes (eddie izzard for instance is not bi, he’s a shamelessly hetero transvestite), but would have just asked them what they like and then told them “that’s what you like then, now which label are you comfortable identifying with?” because those labels are all about how other people view them not how a person should view themselves, as they can go into detail in their own head that would be TMI if they were explaining out loud (it’s the difference between a heterosexual guy and a heterosexual guy who likes being anally penetrated by women) and they avoid the trap of constantly wondering if this kink or that kink is “straight” or “gay” or “Bisexual BDSM”.
“I yam what I yam,” as popeye used to say, is the golden rule (unless something else is, in which case it can be the platinum rule, or something, maybe)
Aw, he couldn’t take it anymore and closed the comments. He said everyone commenting was coming over from “gay sex blogs.”
I will bet anyone on this website $20 that within two weeks of Brokeback Mountain opening there will be a Brokeback Mountain Fanfic Slash site with some punny title for all the straight women who fetish gay men to upload their hot stories about the guys getting it on. And its not just teenage girls. When I was big into Buffy fandom, most of the Spike slash on BAPS was written by women between the ages of 25-40. Just look around fanfic.net, you’ll find Giles screwing Xander, Draco and Harry in a lurid embrace, and Captain Kirk humping every other male that has ever been in Star Trek.
sure everyone assumes that a pedophile (feet not children) i
Boys and girls, this is what happens when you make the mistake of combining Latin and Greek to create new words. Try podophile or podiaphile (think podiatrist).
SarahS, honey, there already is plenty of Brokeback Mountain slash on LiveJournal
Come to think of it, this same type of guy (and/or male movie producer) is also unfamiliar with the huge Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars fandoms that are all over LiveJournal (and not necessarily slash, just in general) — they are certain that only boys like those movies. When in fact, nearly all of the people I know in those fandoms are female.
I find that straight males like me most object to male homoerotica when they’re in a situation where they’d like to be titillated. I have this reaction the most when I’m trying to enjoy some BDSM-type erotica and run into a “Fem-Dom” story that turns into a male-on-male cocksucking extravaganza (you know, to “amuse” the domme and all that.) I get angry. But is that homophobia, or is that because it’s ruining my buzz?!?
This movie, on the other hand . . . People will go see it knowing full well it’s about gay men. I doubt there will be much outrage.
My, but those hetero guys like Jared find the male sex organ to be the most disgusting thing imaginable, don’t they — all while expecting one half of the human population to be attracted to the very thing they find so repulsive.
Really makes you go hmmmmm…..
But is that homophobia, or is that because it’s ruining my buzz?!?
Little from column A, little from column B? And maybe option A is causing option B.
Heterosexual intercourse and fellatio seem pretty gross to me if I think of them in a detached sort of way. That doesn’t mean they’re not enjoyable, of course.
If my reaction were similar to the straight boys’, I should probably recoil at the thought of pussy. While it doesn’t really turn my crank (or do anything for me), it doesn’t repulse me to the point man on man butt love or cocksucking seems to for straight guys. Hell, some of the hottest erotica I’ve read has been dyke stuff, and there’s no way I’m going to be involved in it, but shit, c’mon, hot is hot.
Two male-male on screen kisses I defy people to tell me weren’t hot:
Liam Neeson and Peter Sarsgaard in Kinsey.
Kevin McKidd and James Purefoy in Bedrooms and Hallways.
MAJeff, I think there’s been enough evidence unearthed in the past couple years to show that a great deal of the negative reaction by the loudly-straight males is actually phobia over the negative social consequences of being thought gay and very few researchers ever seem to bother to try to sort any of this stuff out when they do things like show random students photos of couples of different combinations and try to measure their comfort levels - what social conditioning is involved, before they start with the Evolutionary Biology BS.
I just tend to think that if someone who self-identifies as “straight” finds themselves physically attracted to people of the same-sex, even if it’s only occasionally, or rarely by comparison to het attraction - then it’s kind of like that old Onion story, now isn’t it? “Straight” seems like a meaningless term being used as a way of escaping the pejorative and negative social consequences of having same-sex attractions, kind of like “libertarian-who-just-happens-to-always-vote-R” vs “Republican” or “conservative. (It also reminds me of the “feminists” who insist that they’re feminists, they just can’t stand any of this radical feminism…)
I mean - the whole point of bishonen is that ambivalence and androgyny are themselves a turn-on, for some of us, same as in the 18th century…
I also think it’s wierd that people want to call same-sex attraction a ‘kink” - I thought we were past all that, at least on this side of the aisle!
annejumps:
I’ve been involved in various fandoms over the years, and most but not all are female dominated. The exceptions to that rule for me have been Star Trek and Firefly. Star Trek I attribute to it being on since the 60’s when gender roles for women were very different, and even know it’s more inclusive to women then it used to be.
Firefly was an interesting phenomena because the women all came from Buffyfandom (where women definately have all the control) and the guys came from liking sci-fi in general. Every other fandom I can think of is dominated by women.
So for you non-fandom peoples, that means that all the slashfic where non gay characters have lots of gay sex is written by women. In all the years I did Buffy fandom I can’t think of a single gay male fic writer who wrote slash. It’s all women.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go… I’m indulging in my some Snape slashfic…. the writing is always terrible but I blame the appeal on the fact that no one needs to get laid more then Snape.
MYOB:
No, I don’t want to see it on the screen either. I won’t freak out. I might not even leave….but, no, ick. Sorry, but there it is.
SarahS -
the reason slash exists is because women, as a group, are filthy fucking perverts.
ok, that isn’t true. HUMANS as a group, are filthy fucking perverts. but males are given the cultural excuse of “boys will be boys” and can get outlets in the real world.
so women, to amuse themselves, write novella length stories wherein Spock goes through Pon Farr and they devote 14 pages to a lurid description of Spock tongue-raping Kirk’s mouth.
y’all bitches need to get you a sex dwarf. or 5. because fiction is not a healthy outlet for your sexuality. you end up like that creepy guy who collects anime dolls. and those figures aren’t images of 18 year olds, I don’t care what the DVD box says.
One possible distinction Wilson does not make, which no one has commented on yet, is that between the “active” and “passive” roles in male homosexuality. The ancient Greeks (and US prison populations today, I’m told) actually made this the distinguishing mark of gender identity, rather than simply whether a man had sex with other men or not. If you were a penetrator - whether of women, men, or children - you were still a man. If you were the one penetrated, however, you were something else, something lesser.
This distinction is deep-rooted [sic] in the minds of many men, and may help explain some of the otherwise odd ambivalences expressed. Lesbian frolics — good voyeuristic fun! Male-female anal sex: perhaps odd, but not really icky, since the guy is still the doer, rather than the done-to. Male-male (anal) contacts: O My God Suppose I Was The Catcher Not The Pitcher!! (This, I suppose, is what makes “Deliverance” so disturbingly memorable.) Better to condemn the whole scene than risk thinking about being penetrated (or, worse yet, liking it!).
Others have pointed out that the “revulsion” at gay sex cited is far from universal. This, however, may help explain why it is as widespread as it appears to be, and why it seems to those who hold it so “natural.” To think otherwise, even for a moment, is to open the psychic abyss.
Disclaimer: I base this profound insight not on my own experience (none of your damn business), nor on research (too much trouble), nor on religio-philosophical certainty about human nature (not my field). Rather it derives from random observations, over many years, both of societies in which I have lived and those which I have studied as a historian. Consequently, it seems almost unnecessary to point out: YMMV
because fiction is not a healthy outlet for your sexuality.
Karpad, to paraphrase JDCasteleiro, “you’re ruining my buzz”.
that’s what I do, Garnet. I kill buzzes. WARNING! continuing will absolutely kill your buzz.
You’re going to die, and when you do, you’re going to crap your pants. God is not in heaven, and nothing is right in the world. Your grandparents are having better sex than you are, and that pompous ass Quentin Tarintino is having even better sex than them.
You are never going to find the perfect house or apartment. either you’ll never get married, or resent the hell out of the person you do marry, because rose colored glasses of hazy memory will make you remember someone else you dated as slightly better. You’ll never enjoy your current pets as much as the ones you had as a child. That person you were friends with in grade school you lost touch with died in a car wreck, and you probably have an STD you aren’t aware of.
and you know what’s really fucked up about all that? despite everything wrong with the world, we still have it better than any time period in the history of mankind. The Syssephean hollowness of modern materialist life is infinitely better than dying of a gangrene infected smallpox sore.
now, if you’ll excuse me. I have alot of dead buzzes, and mass graves don’t dig themselves.
Bell, I don’t know if I’d agree with the “everyone is bi” thing. I’ve had sex with a woman and I identify as straight. I think that occasionally finding someone outside your usual tastes attractive isn’t enough to change your sexual identification for.
I’d like to expand on this a bit to say that behavior is not identity. This much is obvious if pointed out; you are, after all, still straight even if you’re not currently having any heterosexual nookie. I am still bi, still poly, still leather, even if I’m single, even if I’m only seeing men or women at some moment. For some people, after a lifetime of some identity, all it takes to cause a reevaluation of self is a single experience, perhaps a single thought with no nookie involved. What it takes to make a person change their self image and identification is a very personal thing; lots of people base their self-identification more on hopes or fears than on any sort of correlation between declared identity and behavior.
And this is where I’d break out some footnotes, make reference to the Lesbian Sex Wars of the 70s and 80s, and quote Pat Califia a few times, but I did that in college already, so take it as read.
People is crazy, words are just hot air. Sleep with people who treat you good and make you happy.
karpad - what about dying today of a botulinus-infected chickenpox sore? Or nearly dying, which did happen to someone I know distantly? Or nearly dying today of an untreated dental infection in a broken tooth that you can’t afford to fix, which happened to me? And that’s in “middle-class” USA. Life is only different from the past for a very small slice of humanity, the wealthiest in the wealthiest place - most of the rest of the world isn’t doing much different, let alone better, at all.
And being hungry and living 1 meal, usually rice, per day today isn’t any better than being hungry in the past, either. It’s always fun when your menstrual cycles go haywire because you’re not getting enough to eat!
because fiction is not a healthy outlet for your sexuality.
(I assume that you’re going to demand that all men get rid of their lesbian porn, too?)
The ancient Greeks (and US prison populations today, I’m told) actually made this the distinguishing mark of gender identity, rather than simply whether a man had sex with other men or not. If you were a penetrator - whether of women, men, or children - you were still a man. If you were the one penetrated, however, you were something else, something lesser.
The ancient Romans were even harsher about it, thinking of being penetrated as one of the lowest, basest things that could happen to someone.
Bellatrys,
I don’t call myself ‘bi’ because there’s a certain amount of oppositional cred that I would get from claiming that term that just doesn’t represent my life. I’m getting married to a woman. I’m divorced from another woman. And it’s been more than 15 years since I got it on w/ a man, and I really don’t see myself doing it again: I did it enough to know it was fun, but not as much fun for me as getting w/ the ladies. So, while I see the value in defamiliarizing erotic/romantic identities, I don’t want to claim as mine something I don’t use and what other people have to fight for to have.
This thread, btw, is cracking me up: there’s the whole ’straight girls like men making out,’ ’slash fiction,’ and ’sexual identities’ thing, all of us at the same time. And no trolls.
I noticed that too, Karl. I think we may have stumbled on a new way to get rid of trolls.
Troll: There is no such thing as rape b/c all women are lying bitches.
Loyal pandagonite: Oh yeah? What about men who have consensual BUTT SEX, you know, IN THE BUTT OF A MAN?
The troll is both aroused and mortified and runs away never to be seen again.
I’ve always wanted to know…how many straight guys know how good it feels to massage the prostate—and it doesn’t make you gay.
“y’all bitches need to get you a sex dwarf. ”
“Sex Dwarf” by Soft Cell
Isn’t it nice
Sugar and spice
Luring disco dollies
To a life of vice
I could make a film
And make you my star
You’d be a natural
The way you are
I would like you on
A long black leash
I would parade you
Down the high street
You’ve got the attraction
You’ve got the pulling power
Walk my little doggy
Walk my little sex dwarf
(Here, doggy, doggy)
We could make a scene
We’d be a team
Making the headlines
Sounds like a dream
When we hit the floor
You just watch them move aside
We will take them
For a ride of rides
They all love your
Miniature ways
You know what they say
About small boys
Sex dwarf…
(Look it’s so huge!)
We all look so good
We’ll knock ‘em cold
Knocking ‘em cold
In Black and Gold
Isn’t it nice
Sugar and spice
Luring disco dollies
To a life of vice
Sex Dwarf…
(We all look so good
We’ll knock ‘em cold
Knocking ‘em cold
In Black and Gold)
I’ve observed that many straight homophobic assholey men also want us to know a lot of stuff about their sex lives, but also never want us to see them doing the thing or things that truly “distinguish them.” Does this mean being a straight homophobic asshole is also disgusting, and no movies based on straight homophobic assholes can be commercially successful?
Re: this plot line not making it and/or hurting actors’ reputations.
I dunno - Velvet Goldmine didn’t seem to hurt the careers of any of the parties involved…
Oh, and re: insertive/receptive roles - IIRC, the first ‘modern’ studies of gays used the same distinctions. Hell, the US Navy used that distinction when purging their ranks and cleaning out the gay brothels of Newport, RI in the 1920s: pitcher==OK; catcher==Nope.
that’s because insertive=”real man,” and receptive=”woman” or at least “not man”
That whole thing of “who penetrates whom” is as old as time itself. In the time of Nero’s sex scandal, no Roman minded that he was having hot butt sex with his servants, what was appalling was that he allowed himself to be penetrated by his servants, and an emperor just didn’t do such a thing.
Oh, and then there was the whole thing about his supposed lusty sex with his Mom. Ahhh Romans. When they had a sex scandal, they had a sex scandal.
The reason I wasn’t planning on seeing the movie is it sounds like there’s a lot of tedious plot and characterization and not nearly enough of Gyllenhaal and Ledger making out. Now if they put out a movie that was basically an hour of that, I’d probably go so far as to pay full price to see it.
I’d pay double, in that case!
Actually. I think he’s right. You can be as tolerant of homosexuality as you can be without being gay and still find gay sex between the oposite sex great, but gay sex between two of the same sex icky.
Sorry but it’s true.
No straight man is going to enjoy watching or suggestions about it, even the most tolerant.
[…]
So if you’re a straight man on this site and you’re trying to score points then go ahead and say otherwise. Otherwise I suggest you wait until the movie comes out and see what happens first.
I saw Rent so I don’t have to wait for the movie. I’m not trying to score points, I honestly could care less if [in movies] there’s gay sex, straight sex, orgies, whatever. I think you might be right about a large majority of people, but that’s more cultural than instinctual.
Sorry but it’s true.
Steve,
I doubt culture had anything to do with it. That goes along with the ‘people choose to be gay’ mode that the biblethumpers use as an excuse to condemn homosexuals. They blame the culture and the role models. Yet they fail to explain the well documented fact that despite strong male and female role models, even in tolerant but strongly religious families, even preacher’s sons and daughters turn out gay from time to time.
So I will have to kindly disagree and say that it is instinctual. But I would not rule out that in some cases the culture does play a large part of it. I was raised in a moderately tolerant family. Certainly open and tolerant of other races and religions. I get along better with the muslims I know than the christians I know. I have gay relatives and both atheist/biblethumper relatives. Yet dspite my tolerance in not really giving a shit about gays and what they do, I do not find gay sex between two men remotely fascinating to watch.
I don’t even like watching straight love or sex scenes. As far as I’m concerned if it doesn’t have a direct relationship to the plot and is important to the story then it’s just gratuitous sex meant to tittilate the audience.
But I cannot agree that it’s cultural(at least nowhere near as large as it is instinctive.)
MYOB’
.
(I assume that you’re going to demand that all men get rid of their lesbian porn, too?)
in the same narrow capacity, yes.
so buffy/willow femslash, or buffy/faith domfemslash or Seven of Nine/Janeway…
you get the idea.
but feel free to enjoy Your Gyllenhall/Ledger makeout/teh buttsecks movie. that’s cool. but a Donnie Darko/Jacob Grimm crossover slash leads to the dark side.
and by “dark side” I mean “dark basement full of weird collectibles, wherein you dwell, for you have no life outside.”
I’ve seen it happen. not pretty.
I don’t get this. I hate men. I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes in the company of one. I certainly don’t want to fuck one, regardless of which of us would be penetrating the other.
And to think my father was worried I was gay (but he’s a liberal, so he wasn’t allowed to do more than agonize over it).
MYOB, speak for your fucking self.
As my straight feminist friends said on Friday night whille sighing over their Lesbian friends making out, “Lesbian, straight, gay, I don’t care. There’s somethign hot about watching two people who are into each other making out”. Extend that to sex. Don’t biologize and universalize your own hangups.
“I don’t want to claim as mine something I don’t use and what other people have to fight for to have.”
Karpad, excellent point. I agree completely, and that’s exactly why I’m often hesitant to claim a minority identity. I’m still careful calling myself a feminist until I get a feel for whether the general opinion in that crowd is that men can be feminists.
Oops, left out the next part, about how men who like to sleep with men arouse no more of my ire/fear/loathing than men who like to sleep with women or who sort on other criteria.
Ghost, that was Karl.
my points so far have been “the world is a terrible place” and “the nerdish hobby that is fanfiction is a dark road to go down”
oh, and bellatrys, didn’t say it was perfect. just that right now is better than 50 years ago, dispite what republicans think, and far better than 100, 200, and so on.
that doesn’t mean it won’t be getting better in the next 50 years, and then after that, 100, 200 years into the future. which it might or might not, depending on how this whole “global war on terror” thing works out. as nuclear conflagration would generally give us a worse state of life than this.
KnifeGhost - I second your point. When I see gay men making out in real life, usually I’m not sexually aroused, but there’s usually a smile on my face to see how into each other these guys are.
For all of our modern cultural “enlightenment,” and despite the pervasiveness of Xtian characters and stories all over American media, and regardless of the success of shows like “Touched by an Angel” and “The passion of Christ,” by and large Americans — blue state, red state, Religious and non — innately find Xtianity repulsive.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Oooh La Oui, Carumba.
but karpad, how is life any better if you’re personally starving/watching your kid die of polio/going blind in a sweatshop/dying from industrial contaminants - the way a majority of humans around the world are? The fact that a few people off someplace else are doing even better than their ancestors were, isn’t going to cut much ice.
Or to put it more directly: the fact that my boss was able to buy himself a new Ford Explorer, and his sister my coworker a new house, while I was working 80 hours a week, fultime at their place and then all the holiday mall retail hours I could get in order to live on beans and rice - and that they were doing so much better than their grandparents had - did not make me feel better about the present state of the world, it turned me into a radical anti-capitalist, who after being laid off due to falling profits - while they went on taking their vacations in Aruba - only restrained myself from doing their place of business material harm because a) I’m a Taoist and b) I didn’t think it would do the Cause politically any good.
–Not because I didn’t know how to make a molotov cocktail (my mother explained how to me when I was seven), or because I wasn’t desperate enough to give a damn.
(I assume that you’re going to demand that all men get rid of their lesbian porn, too?)
Absolutely. I’ll take it off their hands. (Only the good stuff, though!)
bellatrys, word! Taoist anti-capitalism is the shit. I’m glad I’m not the only one.
And karpad, you people are all the same to me. Tell it to someone who gives a damn.
karpad, my buzz is officially killed (thankyouverymuch), but I have to say, I love and enjoy my current pets about 300,000 times more than any of the pets I grew up with. Also, my house is close to perfect, as far as I can tell. Needs a little more insulation in the walls and a new roof, but other than that, it’s perfection itself.
Wait, I think I still have a buzz!
well of course, bell, Capitalism is crap. and this “we” refers not to the whole world, much of which has made no progress, than to specifically first world types.
but you know what we have that the Trotskyites didn’t? indoor plumbing.
That there are people in the country starving, and who don’t don’t get to use indoor plumbing or electicity because they can’t afford it is a sign of how far we have left to go, not a sign that no progress has been made.
And karpad, you people are all the same to me.
anti-semite.
wait. Karl, are you Jewish?
wait. Karl, are you Jewish?
Who, me? Nope.
Or do you mean to be talking to Knifeghost in this inscrutable fight that this thread seems to have fallen into?
–Not because I didn’t know how to make a molotov cocktail (my mother explained how to me when I was seven), or because I wasn’t desperate enough to give a damn.
I know how to make napalm.
Just thought I’d throw that out there. I’m lost, too.
I love and enjoy my current pets about 300,000 times more than any of the pets I grew up with.
The pets you grew up with must have sucked massively — scorpions and cockroaches, or something like that.
[i]inscrutable[/i]
Karl, why do you hate Asians so much?
And by “you people” I meant people whose screen names start with K.
Wait……
Um. I have to admit, I’m a little confused — what’s wrong with text porn (aka slash) as opposed to video/photographic porn? I don’t find photographic porn/erotica arousing for the most part (I go over to Heather Corinna’s and I’m all ‘oooh, pretty’ or ‘oh, that’s hot’ but it’s very clinical and appreciative, like art) but I love me some textporn.
So why is that somehow… um. Worse than “regular” porn?
The pets you grew up with must have sucked massively — scorpions and cockroaches, or something like that.
I had the Scorpions as a pet when I was a kid. it sucked. always blaring hair metal at 3 in the morning.
“Here I am, rock you like a hurricane!”
I bet your shower was always clogged, though.
I think the pictures would be worse, since even the extremely simple can understand them.
On the other hand, I can’t look at the pictures on my office computer.
So why is that somehow… um. Worse than “regular” porn?
Clearly the only people who write slash or textporn are hopeless losers living in their parents’ dark basements, and therefore the very idea of it is anathema.
Which doesn’t really explain why I have this rather large and airy second-floor domocile, but I suppose every rule needs an exception.
…by and large Americans — blue state, red state, Christian and non — innately find homosexuality repulsive…It’s part of our makeup. It’s biological…
But yet the intolerant religious right can continue to insist that homosexuality is just a lifestyle choice?
there’s nothing inherently wrong with written porn it’s just porn + internet anonymity (god bless it) equals HORRORS! UNSPEAKABLE MINDBENDING HORRORS!
An archive of some MST3ked “oscarfics”. Where mere bad writing involving cat/underage hermaphrodite couplings reach a whole zen level of badness.
And that’s one of the better slashfics that should never have been borne, there is worse, for some reason sonic the hedgehog is another thing that has an inexplicably huge pornwriter following.
What did you think was actually in the necronomicon? cthulhu/norden slash of course.
Okay, you can’t try to pin Oscar on slashwriters; that’s like, I dunno, blaming the New Testament for Pat Robertson, or the democractic republic system for Bush. That mother is just evil, and he’d have been creepy and evil no matter what.
Ugh. Just having heard the name makes me need to go and scrub really hard for a few hours. Jibblie jibblies.
Hello!
My name is Daekyung (danny) Kim, a Ph.D. student studying journalism and mass communication in Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I am emailing to ask you to do me a favor. I am now working on my dissertation whose topic is about online news and want to gather information about how and why Internet users are using news Web sites for political information based on an online survey.
This online survey will approximately take 15-20 minutes to complete. After collecting the data, I will draw to pick up 50 respondents among those who complete this survey and each will be given $ 10 gift card.
Would you please spend some time to fill out this survey? http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=594061481532
(please click on the address, OR if not working, copy it into the URL address)
Your experience will be very useful in understanding how politically interested online users are using online news and the consequent effect on traditional news media.
You can withdraw the survey at any time you want. All responses will be kept confidential and only be used for academic purposes. This survey has been reviewed and approved by the SIUC Human Subject Committee. So, there are no questions that may identify personal information.
Thank you very much in advance for your cooperation. Please email me back if you have further concerns or questions