Open
I’m sore later
but
before
she lay me on my stomach and
tattooed her name on my back
with her nails;
held me down
and whispered obscene endearments,
and then finally,
she slid, KY slick,
into me
and I
parted.(Me, original version published Absinthe Literary Review a few years back)When thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. … Disgust at “that which is below” functions to maintain the power relations between above and below, through which “aboveness” and “belowness” become properties of particular bodies, objects and spaces (Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p 89)So, I was reading
Ariella Drake's blog, because, well, she's linked to here a couple times and cos I'm all deep and that, I tend to read people who link to me. Anyway, she mentioned that her father had told her that "he thinks lesbians are okay, because they're attractive, he just hates gay men and thinks teh buttsex is disgusting. He was slightly perplexed that this didn't really comfort me." Now
that is something I've heard a time or ten, so it kind of inspired me to write a lil something about anal sex and penetration.
The first point I have is that disgust about gay men's sexual practices is decidedly
not neutral (and in this kind of discourse, all men having sex become constituted as gay). As the quote from Sara Ahmed makes clear,
disgust is the functioning of power. Disgust is a visceral thing, a bodily reaction, and it occurs in response to many types of bodies--gay/lesbian/bi, transgender, female, black, indigenous, poor, disabled, and so on. The one body largely exempt from disgust is, of course, the able-bodied, straight, white, middle-class male body that everybody else "deviates" from in medical discourse etc. The intersections between race and sexuality have been made clear by a number of theorists--for instance, Asian men as feminised..
Where the digust in regard to anal sex between men derives from, however, is two-fold--first the "dirtiness" of the anus, and second that anal sex between men necessarily means that one man is being penetrated. It's that second part that implicates the first, that points out that this is an ontological problem, not a literal problem of health and safety. Because, well, hello, douching? But of course, I think homophobes can't quite imagine that other people might actually have their own knowledges about sex and bodies.. Queer bodies are always-already dirty..
The interesting thing is, a lot of straight boys seem really obsessed with having anal sex with women, it's like porn star sex or something. More "dirty," more naughty. That doesn't seem to be a cultural contradiction for some reason, because it's not
men being penetrated.
In my experience as a queerboy-turned-transgirl, a great many queer men don't have anal sex, or at least, that's not the predominant form of activity. I was at an "Arse Class" event for Pride a couple months ago, and it was quite obvious more than a few of the boys there weren't having penetrative anal sex. And the giggles about fisting... *rolls eyes*
Anyway, the point is not that queer men don't have anal sex -
of course they do - but that it doesn't necessarily occur in the way straight people imagine it. I think that, basically, for the majority of straight people, sexual relationships without penetrative sex are unimaginable. "Foreplay" is the prelude to "real" sex, and that's that. Well, that's not necessarily the truth for queer men.
At the risk of stating the obvious, there's a certain kind of phallic/heterosexist logic that's been well theorists by feminists that goes:
male/female
active/passive
penetrator/penetrated
For many straight men, a great deal of the issue with queer sex is that the thought of being penetrated really freaks them out. Being penetrated is just, you know, a bit fruity. Or worse,
like being a woman. Of course, there is no necessarily link between enjoying being penetrated and who you desire--as any lesbian top with a strap-on will tell you.. Some straight men like being fucked up the arse by the girlfriend with fingers or with a dildo (what sex columnist Dan Savage calls "pegging"),. That they might, however, is massively silenced by and large. Weirdest of all, even gay men are prone to the same kind of phallic bullshit. To hear some people tell it, the whole community is made up of 10 inch tops (ie penetrating, not penetrated)..
There was a scene on
Queer as Folk once when Ted was on a three day drug bender, at some party watching home-made porn, and the crowd of boys are chanting something like it "take it, take it" and he's cheering too, and then the camera pans and he realises to his horror that it's him on the bottom. And that realisation is enough to make him get off the drugs... So even the gay community has its issues when it comes to embracing feminised masculinity.
Still, that there is something inherently demeaning about being penetrated needs to be strongly refuted. It's a misogynistic, homophobic concept that constitutes bottoming to the realm of the abject, as the subject of disgust, and that is a construction that effects all queer men, regardless of whether they're a top, bottom or switch. All this comes down to a fear of the feminised man, and of the feminine in general.
Happy holidays etc to everyone who reads this thing. Now let us all gather round the Festivus pole and let the Airing of Grievances begin!
