In touch with your inner man

This article on gay men and masculinity is not without some insights:

• Gay men have an ambivalent attitude towards masculinity.  Well I dunno about other gay men, but I certainly do.  I regard some aspects of masculinity as pernicious: inability to express any emotions except aggression and anger, for example.

• One of the ways homophobes misunderstand gay men is in assuming we secretly want to be women.  Not on your nelly.  Or at least, not for this nelly!  I like being male.  I just like others to be male too.

• Growing up, gay boys are sometimes taunted with words like “sissy,” that imply they are deficient in the masculinity department.  Yeah, or the South African equivalent: moffie.  Jeez it hurt.

• Since gay men are attracted to other men – duh – a certain amount of testosterone is inherently attractive to gay guys.  Indeed.  But testosterone plus warmth and compassion -- wow!  

• We gay men wound ourselves when we learn to think of masculinity as something that resides outside of our own selves when we see other men as masculine, but not our selves.   Yeah, but . . . it's hard to set aside decades of negative conditioning. 

• Identifying those aspects of being a man we most value and then cultivate those parts of our selves can lead to a healthier and less distorted sense of our own masculinity.  My lady reckons I am a far better man than most because I have selected those aspects of maleness I admire and tried to discard those aspects I dislike.  Not that it hasn't been a hard, long journey.   

Traditional masculinity is toxic

Well, I've been banging on about this since I first started this blog.  Now it's official:

Last August the American Psychological Association (APA) released its first-ever guidelines for therapists working with men and boys. Nobody paid much attention to these for several months, but they went viral this week. This was largely due to the APA condensing its academic report into a tweet explaining that the key takeaway is that traditional masculinity is harmful and socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage. Suddenly everyone on the internet was an armchair psychologist and conservatives were up in arms about war on men.

Traditional notions of masculinity, marked by stoicism, competitiveness and aggression, are clearly toxic to both men and women. As the APA write in an article accompanying the study: “Men commit 90% of homicides in the United States and represent 77% of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide.” They also point to research that found men who bought into traditional notions of masculinity were less likely to seek mental health support than those who had more open gender attitudes. The guidelines advise psychologists to understand “how power, privilege and sexism work both by conferring benefits to men and by trapping them in narrow roles”.

While all that sounds eminently sensible to me, certain intellectuals on the right have predictably interpreted it as meaning the APA has it out for men. The Fox News host Laura Ingraham, for example, made the compelling argument that toxic masculinity is actually great because she “loves James Bond”. (Please can someone explain to Ingraham that Bond is a fictional character?) Meanwhile Tucker Carlson, that bastion of reason, asked: “What would happen if you told girls the qualities that make you feel female are poison and you must suppress them?” I don’t think he quite understands that feminists have been fighting against poisonous gender stereotypes for a very long time. And, by the way, the APA has a set of guidelines for women.

Despite the right using the APA guidelines as an opportunity for outrage, we should all be highly encouraged by the new guidelines. It’s a great sign that toxic gender norms are being gradually interrogated and dismantled and it will literally save lives.

[From Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian]

Heterosexism

It's something I've always known instinctively: straight men aren't afraid of gay or bi men for the reasons we think they are. Straight men, like gay men, care much more about how other men see them than about how women do. They act macho not to impress women, but to impress men.

To quote Jammie Price, from "NAVIGATING DIFFERENCES: Friendships between Gay and Straight Men",

[Since] "being a man is" highly valued in a patriarchal context, signifying gender with other men becomes one way for men to compete for power privileges and resources. Men come to value self and other men for their ability to be a "man". In any given situation, men assess their masculinity in relation to other men and strategize actions based on those perceptions. Through this process they gain a sense of self-worth and relative standing. Hence, many men see interactions with other men as "character contests", stages on which to assert their masculinity. Those who assert their masculinity the best receive the highest regard, and accordingly, the most power and privilege among the men in the interaction.

The culturally ideal or "hegemonic" way that men signify being men in the United States today is to (1) display an ability to control, compete, and produce relative to other men, particularly at work; (2) subordinate women and reject effeminacy; and (3) express heterosexual desire. Being physically fit and of moderate size also help men to signify masculinity. The better or more a man demonstrates some or all of the above characteristics, the more masculine he seems to himself and others, [while] failure to demonstrate some or all of the above characteristics becomes the ground for men to devalue another man. (Numerous references omitted)

In her fascinating book, the author shows that for very many straight men, a friendship with a gay man is much deeper than their friendships with other straight men, because they are not competing. They can trust their gay friend with things they would never tell their straight friend. For many of the gay men, though, their friendship with the straight man is less valuable than their friendship with other gay men, because for us it is hard to trust straight men. We have suffered at their hands too often.

The book helped me understand why one straight friend regards me as his best friend, while I do not feel the same way about him. He is drawn to me precisely because I am not a real man. And I am not drawn to him because he is.

Face Off

This was a fascinating article from The Economist magazine. The sub heading is that a disease-free society helps effeminate men attract women. I quote:

IT IS not just a sense of fairness that seems to be calibrated to social circumstances (see article). Mating preferences, too, vary with a society’s level of economic development. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Ben Jones and Lisa DeBruine of Aberdeen University, in Scotland, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Dr Jones and Dr DeBruine, themselves a married couple, examined what might be called the Deianira paradox. Hercules, demigod and paragon of masculinity in the ancient world, was indirectly done for by his own sexual prowess—his jealous wife, Deianira, accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render him eternally faithful. Deianira’s predicament is a woman’s ultimate dilemma. In a man, the craggy physical characteristics associated with masculinity often indicate a strong immune system and thus a likelihood of his producing healthier offspring than his softer-featured confrères will. But such men are also more promiscuous and do not care as much about long-term relationships, leaving women to raise their kids alone.

They then go on to show a relationship between the health indicators for a given country and its women's preference for 'effeminate' vs 'masculine' men. The whole article was intriguing, but what interested me more was how they used digital manipulation to adjust more "masculine" faces to make them look more "effeminate". Look at the image. The guy on the left is more "masculine", the guy on the right more "feminine". Now, I knew that without being told. And so probably, did you. Isn't it fascinating that such subtle distinctions should still be so easily perceptible? And matter, too?

Because it also suggests something else to me. I find the guy on the left more attractive, but if I met the guy on the right, I would be more likely to assume that he's gay (cliches, I know). My attraction to the guy on the left shows how deep-rooted my gayness is. I'm responding 'viscerally' if you like to my innate (cultural?) perceptions of maleness. What is interesting about the research is that this innate/cultural attraction is malleable in women depending on the need for 'manliness' in that culture. But why doesn't this apply to gays? Perhaps because we're not going to have his baby. Which implies in turn that it is about something else. But what, exactly? I don't know.

It also points out the absurdity and cruelty of the Christian-Fascist attempts to 'cure' gayness. Something this deep, this 'instinctive', will not be easily altered.

An altogether most fascinating article.

One final point: I think Hercules was as partial to men as women. So where does that fit in?

I Kiss Them Because I love Them

When this paper was reported in our local newspaper it caused a firestorm of criticism, best summed up by the phrase "real men don't kiss other men."   Irate commenters said that they never kissed other men on the lips, because they weren't homos.  And so on and so on.  As if (a) being a real man was some kind of moral imperative* and (b) kissing another man defines you as not a real man.

So first a brief summary of the authors' findings after interviewing 145 varsity and final-year high school men :

• 89% have, at some point, kissed another male on the lips which they reported as being non-sexual: a means of expressing platonic affection among heterosexual friends.
• 37% also reported engaging in sustained same-sex kissing, something they construed as non-sexual and non-homosexual.
• the students understood that this type of kissing remains a taboo sexual behavior, but nonetheless reconstructed it, making it compatible with heteromasculinity by recoding it as homosocial.
• Male-to-male kissing is increasingly permissible due to rapidly decreasing levels of cultural homophobia.

I quote the introduction extensively because it sums up what I have come to see as some archetypal facts about maleness and heterosexuality.

 Heterosexual masculinity has long maintained hegemonic dominance in Western-European and North American cultures (Kimmel, 1994;Rich,1980). Here, it is traditionally constructed against a backdrop of homophobic social stigma. But the stigma associated with men’s homosexuality (as an identity or behavior) reflects more than just the dislike of men having sex with other men: male homosexuality is also disparaged by others because it has been conflated with a perceived lack of maleness and the adoption of feminine traits**. Because of this conflation, both boys and men wishing to be perceived as masculine by their peers must necessarily disengage from those behaviors that have been socially coded as gay. Consequently, homophobia has become a benchmark for masculinity.

Among British youth, Epstein, Kehily, Mac an Ghaill, and Redman(2001) have argued that,‘‘Even little boys are required to prove that they are ‘‘real boys’’ in ways that mark them as masculine, even macho, and therefore (by definition) heterosexual’’ (p. 135). Accordingly, homophobia does more than marginalize gay boys and men; it also limits their gendered
behaviors. Schwartz and Rutter (2000) described this conflation of gender and sexual identities as the gender of sexuality; however, in the context of this article, we refer to it as heteromasculinity. The desire to be perceived as heteromasculine is understandable in a culture that distributes sexuality and gender privilege unequally.

Sedgwick (1990) explored the relationship between the homosocial and homoerotic, arguing that the suppression of emotional behaviors among men facilitated the maintenance of heterosexual power. Furthermore, Bourdieu (2001) posited that suppression of such emotional behaviors maintains the status quo, the subjugation of women. This hegemonic dominance is further accomplished through the codification of same-sex sexual behaviors as being consistent with a homosexual identity (Anderson, 2008; Lancaster, 1988). Almaguer (1991) has suggested that (in an Anglo-American context) same-sex sex historically carries with it, ‘‘a blanket condemnation of all same sex behavior…because it is at odds with a rigid, compulsory heterosexual norm’’ (p. 77). Furthermore, according to Butler (1990), the only cultural model of heterosexuality we have is predicated upon the avoidance of any sexual desire, thought, or action associated with homosexuality***. This is something Messner (2002) described as being‘‘100% straight’’ (p. 422).

Borrowing from Harris’ (1964) one-drop theory of race, in which a dominant white culture once viewed anyone with even a portion of black genetic ancestry as wholly black, Anderson (2008) has argued that a single same-sex sexual experience traditionally renders the public perception of an individual’s sexual orientation as gay. Calling this the one-time rule of homosexuality, Anderson described how, in most Western cultures, this imperative serves as a cultural mechanism to conflate the complex issues of gender, sexual orientations, sexual desires, sexual identities (and the social construction of sexual acts themselves) into the singular polarized identities of gay and straight—simultaneously re-inscribing heterosexual power and privilege through heteromasculinity while erasing bisexuality.

Furthermore, Schwartz (1995) has suggested that the inverse of this rule does not apply to homosexual men: ‘‘We have demonized the power of homosexuality so that we assume it to be the greater truth of our sexual self–as if one drop of homosexuality tells the truth of self,while one drop of heterosexuality in a homosexual life means nothing’’ (p. 12). This one-way application of the one-time rule traditionally creates a double jeopardy for heterosexual men who reveal an experience with any form of sexual behavior socially coded as gay: it both excludes them from achieving the requisites of heterosexuality and diminishes their masculine capital. With few exceptions (cf. Klein, 1993; Reis, 1961), this rule implies that in Anglo-American cultures, men’s socially constructed heteromasculine identities are framed upon exclusively opposite-sex sexual behaviors. Thus, a kiss on the lips has not been part of the historical repertoire of greetings or demonstrations of affection among men for centuries in Britain (Dinshaw, 1994). As Fox (2004) wrote, ‘‘With the possible exception of a father and a young son, Englishmen do not embrace or kiss one another’’(p. 191). In this research, however,we show that this social construction of heterosexuality is currently being contested.

 [The references are to works cited in the article, the emphases are mine]

I find it wonderful to see that the insights I have blindly striven towards are not in fact unique, and that there is a whole academic discourse about maleness and heterosexual self-identity.  I have come to the same place these analysts have reached under my own steam, with my own understandings.  In fact the very first post in this blog was about heterosexism:

It's something I've always known instinctively: straight men aren't afraid of gay or bi men for the reasons we think they are. Straight men, like gay men, care much more about how other men see them than about how women do. They act macho not to impress women, but to impress men.

I also did a couple of articles in Wilde Oats relating to this very topic:  The End of Gay discusses how increasing acceptance of gayness will lead to the strict barriers between heterosexual and homosexual being broken down; while Gay Then and Now discusses how gayness is perceived over the twenty years of Ethan Mordden's Buddy cycle of novels, and how greater tolerance has seen the edges of gayness become less sharp.



The authors of this study make it quite clear that they are talking about a special group here:  university and high school students, not the general population:

Sam suggested that much of the reason there was so much more kissing at the university was because of the liberal environment:‘‘I never kiss any of my friends back home,’’ he said. ‘‘And I can’t imagine it going down too well.’’ When asked about how his friends showed him affection back home, he said, ‘‘Punching and rubbing their knuckles into my head.’’ Comparing the two cultures, he said,‘‘I much prefer a kiss and a cuddle!’’

It's also clear that the kisses are not seen as sexual:

For the young men in our study, this type of kiss has been socially stripped of sexual significance. Whereas kissing a male friend on the lips would once be coded as a sexual act, the symbolic meaning of kissing has been differently interpreted by our informants. Here, kissing was consistent with a normal operation of heteromasculine intimacy. Highlighting this, when Pete was asked about which friends he kisses and which he does not, he answered, ‘‘I wouldn’t kiss just anyone. I kiss my good mates.’’He continued,‘‘You kiss a friend because there is no fear of being rejected; no fear of being knocked back.’’ And when Pete was asked about how he measured who was worthy of being kissed, he said,‘‘It’s not that there is a system to who gets it
or not. Instead, it’s a feeling, an expression of endearment, an act that happens to show they are important to you.’’

A number of other informants spoke of loving their friends (‘‘mates’’), too: kissing became a symbol of that platonic love. Mark said,‘‘They [the kisses] happen because you are the guy’s mate. It’s an, ‘I love you mate’ type of kiss.’’Tim agreed,‘‘Kissing others guys is a perfectly legitimate way of showing affection toward a friend.’’ Ollie, a third year engineering student, added,‘‘You do it sometimes when out having a laugh with your mates, yeah. But I suppose it’s also a way to show how much we love each other, so we do it at home, too.’’

There is an element of deliberate boundary-pushing too.  These men are well aware of the taboos they are breaking, and they do it on purpose:  "having a laugh with your mates".  They could as easily beat up homos to "have a laugh".  They do not.  They kiss each other.  They know exactly what they are doing.  They are being, in the best sense of the word, subversive:

Many of the students said that they also engaged in sustained kissing with other men. Of the 145 heterosexual men we interviewed, 48 said that they have (and sometimes regularly) engaged in provocative [my emphasis] displays of same-sex kissing, which they described as being part of the repertory of jocular banter among friends. This extended kissing may be enacted for shock value, even though our data suggest that this type of intimacy between heterosexual young men is now so common that it does not seem to elicit the desired effect.

I liked this aside:

Of the 25 men who have not socially kissed in our research, none were opposed to it. Ricky joked, ‘‘When I tell my mates what this interview was about, and they find out that I’ve not kissed a guy, you know what’s going to happen? [referring to his belief that one of his friends would kiss him]…I’m not bothered by it,’’he said.‘‘I’ll let you know if it does, so that you can change your statistics.’’ The primary author received a text message from him later that night, reading,‘‘I’m in the majority now.’’

I found this little anecdote rather touching:

Another student, Matt, highlighted how important emotional intimacy was to him, telling a story about breaking up with his girlfriend. ‘‘I was really lonely,’’he said. ‘‘Really depressed. So one night I asked my housemate who is one of my best friends if I could sleep in the bed with him. He looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Come on,’ opening the covers to invite me in.’’ Matt continued,‘‘He kissed me, and then held me. It was nice…. I sent him a text the next day saying, ‘I’ve got the best friend in the world.’’’Matt’s story highlighted not only the intimacy he shared with his friend but that a kiss can also transcend the spatial context of partying.

And, consistent with the view that those who have substantial heteromasculine capital can more easily push the boundaries, more sportsmen (55% or more) have kissed other blokes than non sportsmen (14-22%) 

Finally, despite nearly 90% kissing other men on the lips, only 40% have had a sexual experience with other men.  The 40% is more or less consistent with Kinsey's research:

37 per cent of the total male population has at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age.

 (Quoted in The End of Gay)

None of this implies that lip-kissing is a custom which will inevitably spread to the rest of the population from this group of elite, self-confident young men.  But definitions of maleness are changing, and have changed in the past.  From the Restoration until Victoria ascended the throne, men wore high heels (to show off their calves), make up and wigs.  When I was a teenager, it was considered effeminate and unmanly to wear deodorant.  "The manly tang of honest sweat."  Even homophobes wear deodorant now.  And they probably also use aftershave and conditioner.  How unmanly!  Earrings or earstuds on men were considered a clear proof of effeminacy as well as evidence of "communist" or "radical" tendencies.  So was long hair.

No doubt men kissing other men, on the cheek or on the lips, will in time become as unexceptional and unexceptionable as male deodorant, earrings and long hair.

Altogether a fascinating study.



Footnotes

* I certainly felt that my effeminacy was worse than if I'd been a rapist or thief or murderer.  This is of course the very definition of a taboo:  how could one rationally consider same-sex love or sex as worse, much worse, than rape, theft or murder?

** My own perceptions are that gender dysphoria -- men not acting like 'real men' -- is a much greater taboo than men having sex with other men.   Even within the broad church of gay-shaded men, effeminate behaviour is despised.  "I don't mind gays as long as they act straight".  Et cetera, et cetera.

*** Indeed.  So in reaction (during the decades of maximum homophobia in the first 70 years of the twentieth century) gays in reaction created their (our) own culture:

When Mordden started writing in the mid 1980s, it was the height of the AIDS epidemic.  Gays had won few rights.  Anita Bryant, the orange-juice queen, had in 1977 run a vicious scare campaign about gays “recruiting” our children.  It was only a little over a decade since the American Psychological Association had declared (in 1973) that being gay wasn’t a “mental disorder” (some straight individual psychiatrists and psychologists have yet to come to terms with that).  The noisy and occasionally violent revolution which started after Stonewall, just over 40 years ago now, hadn’t yet delivered the huge advances we’ve gained.  If you were gay or gay-shaded there was a battle on.  Lines were clear.  Either you were with us or you were against us.  Any deviation from the party line was treason.  But this implied that there was a “gay lifestyle”, a “gay culture”.   Gay men weren’t just different from the broad mass of humanity because they preferred sex with other men.  They (we) thought differently.  We dressed differently.  We had good taste.  We were good at interior design and the arts. We had “the Knowledge”.  Once it was enough to call a man ‘musical’ to label him as gay.

(From Gay Then and Now ).

Six Packs Overrrated

This article is interesting. I quote:

Men and women had rated images of slender or slightly chubby masculinity at least as highly as those with well-defined six-packs, said the study leader, Phillippa Diedrichs, suggesting successful [ad] campaigns did not have to portray only rock hard biceps and rippling abs.

My lady can't bear overmuscled men, and I have to confess I find an ordinary bloke's body, even one with a little fat on it, much more attractive and desirable than a muscled hunk. I dunno. Maybe it's insecurity ("Why would he be attracted to me?"); maybe it's the thought that to get there he's had to work many hours and if he's obsessing about working out, where's his space for obsessing about me; and maybe it is just that an ordinary bloke is more, well, real. Less artifice, perhaps.

As Robert Herrick (died 1674) said:

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

The principle applies every bit as much to men as women.

Faces matter more to me, and eyes. Windows to the soul. Sometimes that seems true. I know a straight bloke who is no beauty by the standards of the world but who is very warm and loving. His eyes are beautiful. He has a flat stomach but is not especially muscular, he doesn't work out. He's a dad and a husband and really just a regular bloke. I find him ridiculously desirable. Go figure.

Toxic masculinity

Elliott Harvey blinded in one eye by a homophobic attack (Source)

A man is blinded in one eye in an attack in a Melbourne night club.  Why?

Mr Harvey said he went to the Rubix on Phoenix Street on Friday, May 26, to watch a band. As he was going into the venue "some aggressive young guys" walked past him.

"I think they particularly disliked my hair cut, having my hair up in a fountain like this," he said, pointing to his ponytail.

"All the things they said to me were pretty trivial, just homophobic insults."

The three men, believed to be aged in their 20s, punched him to the ground, and then continued to punch his head and right eye.

"It was cowardly really ... I was on the ground when they punched my eye out," he said.

"I was just wondering where my eye had gone, I couldn't see out of my right eye, that's a pretty alien feeling."

Mr Harvey was taken to hospital in a taxi after the attack and has had several operations since. Nothing has restored his eyesight.

"I had a laceration to my right eye which has been sewn back up," he said.

"A couple of days later they reattached my retina to the back of my socket, which has restored very little sight. It's all just touch and go at the moment."

The injuries mean that Mr Harvey, an environmental conservationist, cannot work.

"It's drastically affected my life," he said.

"I can't work because I can't drive, but also depth perception has a lot to do with walking through undulating forests.

"I can't really go surfing because of the glare.

"A lot of the things that make me happy are pretty sad right now."

[Read the original report here]

 I was blinded in one eye by a homophobic attack at school.  And yes, it makes lots of things very difficult.

Mr Macho Men, so afraid of their own gay leanings that they have to beat up and blind another human being!   Mr Big-Deals, determined that everybody should be like them: homophobic, narrow, conformist.  Mr So-Braves, ganging up, and kicking and hitting (all three of them!) someone when he's down.  Sorry, guys, this is not how real men behave.

I keep on having ppl tell me how much more tolerant ppl are  today.  And yet there are still homophobic arseholes so filled with hatred for gay men that they attack someone, unprovoked, and blind them.  Scum.  I hope they get long prison sentences.

Bud sex

When Did Touch Between Male Friends Become Taboo? (Source)

The original of this article was in Spanish, but I have attempted to translate it.

What is "bud sex"?  Heterosexual men having sex with each other for pleasure.

A somewhat unconventional way to enjoy sex.

Each person experiences their sexuality how they want to and in the most pleasurable form possible.  With the sexual revolution, this terrain is in every case much broader where there is more space for experimentation.

In that framework, for some time now the term "bud sex" has begun to be used.  This expression refers to sex between male friends.  It is used for those heterosexual men who have intimate relations with another male with the sole objective of getting pleasure.

These men are not bisexual, nor homosexual, nor are they even confused in their sexual orientation: they are simply heterosexual guys who look to get pleasure without emotional or sentimental ties with people of the same sex.

The men taking part in "bud sex" can be married and even have children.  The practice is seen as obtaining sexual relief, caused sometimes by circumstances, for example in prisons, where there is no opportunity to share intimate moments with a woman.

Since these are heterosexual males, pre-agreed rules are set up before coitus so that there is no confusion.  Among those: no kissing, caresses, or any other manifestation of affection, nor to meet up with the other person (too) frequently.

I've been banging on about this for years, just like I've been talking about toxic masculinity: when being gay ceases to carry any stigma, then lots of men will have sex with other men.  "Bud sex" is at the extreme end of impersonal sex.  It's just fucking.

But it is equally possible to have what the French call une amitié amoureuse, a loving friendship, where you are not in love but nevertheless are fond of your sparring partner.  After all, how often does one fall in love?  Yet one may be attracted to someone, and what makes them attractive isn't just their bodies but their smile, their sense of fun, their integrity--those thousand things that draw us to other people, whether sexually or not.  In a world where male-to-male sex is no more noteworthy than male-to-female sex, it will be very likely that there will be buddies who do find each other in some sense attractive, and act on that perception.  And I try and show that in my writing.

Footy, Chapter 21

 I won’t go to a bar again. Will made this promise to himself every few months. The most recent occasion had been just six weeks before, after his previous visit to the The Peel. Every time he picked up a bloke, he would feel guilty the next day. He knew his inability to keep away showed how weak he was, what a pathetic failure. No matter how much he enjoyed the sex, he had no easy way to deal with the toxic mix of guilt and desire he experienced.

Yet when he had caught sight of Sean, he had immediately forgotten his doubts. He had guessed from the stiff way Sean was standing that he had never been in a gay pub before. The mixture of toughness and vulnerability in Sean’s face intrigued him. The draw wasn’t just physical, though there was no denying that Sean was handsome, slim and muscular.

Will had a weakness for rough trade. Perhaps it was because he felt that what he did was unworthy, that he wasn't a real man. Real men didn't have sex with other men. Real men were heterosexual. But if you weren't a real man, you could compensate by being tough, by showing a macho front to the world. He never felt that he himself did it convincingly. It always felt to him that he was playing a game, that it was some kind of façade, that he was a fake and a fraud, and that everybody knew it or would discover it one day.

He knew that others probably played these rôles too. But with them, the illusion seemed more convincing. Sean looked like a real man. Tough. Manly. Together. Self-sufficient. To Will it seemed that if he could persuade such a paragon to love him, he would enjoy a vicarious sense of manliness, of validation and self-worth. When a masculine man was screwing him, Will could pretend that he was loved, and that his partner’s masculinity validated his own. Taking a dick deep inside him made him feel manlier, more real. He was far too intelligent not to see the irony in this—but it made no difference to how he behaved. It merely made him despise himself the more thoroughly.

He had almost given up with Sean right after he’d started talking to him. Sean had seemed distant and hostile. Even though this was part of the fantasy, part of what turned him on, Sean had seemed so antagonistic that Will had wondered why the other man was even in a gay pub. For a moment, a cold wash of fear had made his hair stand on end. Was Sean the kind of man who would let himself be picked up only to beat you up later? But when Will had looked into Sean’s eyes, he had seen a need and a vulnerability mirroring his own, and his fears had faded. He had sensed at once Sean's attraction to him, an attraction he seemed to feel despite himself. Sean’s latent aggression became a thrilling spice enhancing their rapport. The sexual thirst and restrained belligerence in Sean made him overwhelmingly desirable.

The surprise came only later, after Sean had fucked him and had gotten up to leave, wordlessly, his face sullen. Bitter at yet another heartless encounter, angry at Sean and sickened by his own needs, Will had rebuked him, and had been startled and touched by Sean's response.

Read the rest of the chapter here.

Compassion

Compassion (Latin cum=with, passion = suffering) or its Greek-derived equivalent sympathy (syn = with, pathos = feeling) shouldn't really have anything to do with right and wrong.  When somebody is suffering, it's irrelevant whether it's their own fault or not.  That's hard to do, actually.  When someone has caused their own strife we are inclined to feel less sympathy for them.  And yet, if we were the ones suffering, wouldn't we still want to be comforted?  Wouldn't we want those we love, our friends and family, to just give us comfort and support, even knowing that our travails are our own fault?  And if we would like that, how can we refuse it to others?

According to Frans de Waal, whose thoughtful, thought-provoking and eye-opening book (The Age of Empathy) I have just reread (for the third time), we are hard-wired to empathy and sympathy.

Some quotes from Professor de Waal:

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures

I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.

Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.


Sympathy and compassion are not weaknesses. They are strengths. They are what makes us human, and allow our vast human tribe to survive.  The hyper-competitiveness of the standard male model is dysfunctional and destructive, both to those who believe in it, and to the rest of us. We--our society--need something better.  I once thought that gay men, having had to come to terms with the fact that they are not (according to society) "real men", would have reinvented masculinity to tone down the selfishness and competitiveness and lonely struggle that straight men have to endure.  Alas, it's not happened.