How purity balls and homophobia connect
In comments to this post about semantic implications of the word "gay," Mia of The sex in Mia said
so... if every gay is effeminate... does that mean that every woman is gay (in the original sense)? I wonder...
Now that rang some interesting bells in my head! Going back to the opening chapters of Dworkin's Intercourse about the desperate-to-be-chaste author and pacifist Leo Tolstoy's irritation with his wife's existence since he couldn't resist having sex with her. Which reminded me of a point numerous authors I've been reading lately, including Elizabeth Abbott, Edmund Leites, and (I think) Stephanie Coontz, that until relatively recently -- maybe the last 250-300 years in England and America -- men were thought to be by nature moral, virtuous, and chaste whereas all but the very most extraordinary women were incapable of any such thing. (Abbott says this was the justification used in ancient Rome for families marrying their daughter at puberty -- they believed the odds that she'd remain chaste otherwise were just too low.)
Nowadays, again in western Western Civilization anyway, we're told to believe the exact opposite. (Leites attributes the switch to semi-egalitarian philosophical principles of the original protestant Puritans.) Nowadays 'wingers, moderates, leftists, and even quite a few liberals from Leon Kass, Samuel Alito, the Moral Majority, through to Laura Sessions Stepp and all the way over to Twisty carry on as if men have fewer scruples than dogs and leave it up to women (as the Puritans did) to keep us from drinking out of mud puddles and humping the legs of passers-by. Because men? *IN*capable!
How incapable? Well, you know about Purity Balls wherein fathers vow to "protect their daughters in their choices for purity" and daughters *silently* "commit to live pure lives before God through the symbol of laying down a white rose at the cross?" Well check out the corresponding Integrity Ball wherein young men are subjected to all sorts of arguments for preserving the chastity of... other people's future wives! The boys are told that...
...while they might not believe it at the time, the girl they may date in high school is probably not going to be the one they will marry. "So you're dating someone else's future wife," he told them. He also told them that someone else may be dating their future wife.
"If you knew somebody was with your future wife," Baker asked them, "touching her in ways you wouldn't like, pressuring her, how would that make you feel?"
According to DakotaVoice's "News from a Christian Perspective."
After quite a bit of guilt-tripping about keeping their paws of of those poor girls the boys were offered a chance to sign a vaguely-worded pledge of abstinence "...but it was stressed that they should only do so if they were firmly committed to carrying out that pledge." Because nothing creates integrity and commitment like opportunities to back out.
Compare and contrast. Girls get white roses and family backing, boys get an expectation of failure.
So! How does this relate to questions about effeminacy, male and female, and homophobia?
Well, various histories also tell us that until quite recently homosexuality was fairly well tolerated in relationship to heterosexuality. In the sense that promiscuity of any sort was harshly punished, anyway. When anyone was caught. Although there's not much evidence that people went looking. Which meant something more on the order of discovery rather than being actively sought out. (In this respect, anyway, the blinkered military "Don't ask, don't tell" policy is closer to old traditions than new ones. Although the way it's used by conservative superiors is.)
I'm going to speculate that when men were believed (and believed themselves to be) naturally moral and capable of restraint they tended to approach sex more the way women are expected to today: carefully assessing their own desires against their "better natures" and making their decision based on a judgement -- however flimsy. To the extent men did this (and diaries from Augustine to Pepys, including classic Victorian pornographic fictional accounts, suggest they at least considered it) then they at least had some sense of *owning* their decisions.
Today, by contrast, men are taught to believe they're reflexive animals, capable of overcoming the allure of a tight sweater -- or even a loose one -- and countering their knee-jerk impulses to spawn only by exercising transcendent willpower.
Enter the (stereotypically swishy, fey, effeminate gay) man. If just a peek at the form of an insufficiently draped female buttock is all it takes to turn the average man into a Tasmanian-devil-like tornado of lust (consider the false but prevalent 70's-era assertion that rapists are psychologically indistinguishable from ordinary men) then a tightly clad male buttock is likely to trigger more of the same. If a sultry woman's voice can inspire lust then so can a sultry male's. [I did say "If" didn't I? Yes, but the contemporary *stereotype* of lustful men allows no such uncertainty. --fl]
If you're a guy who's been raised with the full expectation you'll fuck anything that moves (and, again in the darkest 70's era construction, anything that doesn't, or can't, or never will again in this life) with no more conscience, concern, or hesitation than a guppy eating its young, the same reflex that umbrellas you with sympathetic "she was asking for it" excuses collides with the single area men are expected to restrain themselves: no touching pee-pees with another man.
And therefore when you're captured by the prevailing stereotype see a guy exhibiting even the subtlest signs that, in a woman, you're be expected to interpret as "she must really want it" the reflex crashes, the gestalt can not complete, the sneeze is interrupted mid-gust...
And therein lies the rub (ok, the not-supposed-to-rub) with the Purity-Ball paradigm. I'd like to assert that when men still believed they were born with natural morality and restraint (however well that actually worked in practice, see also Tolstoy, Leo) the pause to weigh the options and apply judgement provided more than enough time to say "oh wait, and that's a guy anyway and I'm not that into men in the first place."
And 99 times out of 100, if you've got a chance to think something through, if you're not caught off guard by utterly untamed reactions, your reaction is far less likely to be "gawdam faggit, I'm gunna pound him to a groundy pulp."
Thus no (women's chastity only) Purity Ball mentality, no hysterical homophobia.
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Another point about the stereotype of ungoverned male sexuality in relation to homophobia. If you're raised to believe you're going to fuck everything that moves at the drop of a hat, you're naturally going to assume a gay man is going to want to fuck anything that moves as well . Which obviously includes you. And let's be honest, if you've bought into your own stereotype and thought someone was about to try it on you you'd freak out too. (We'll all pause for a moment to appreciate the irony.)
Incidentally, that kind of homophobic panic is kind of a crack up because the man-as-ravening-beast model seems to affect primarily heterosexual men. By all accounts consciously out gay men quickly come to an entirely different set of protocols.
Easton and Listz in The Ethical Slut (as but one example) put it rather nicely.
Gay men do not generally try to get consent from each other by manipulation and pressuring: connection is most commonly made by a gentle approach, meeting a gentle response, and no need to ask three times. Gay men give each other a lot of credit for being able to say no, and for meaning it when they say it. This makes coming on very simple since you are never trying to sneak up on anybody and you are not required to be subtle. It is always ok to ask as long as it is ok for the other person to say no. This straightforward and admirably simple approach to consensuality cannot be recommended too highly.
For the record that sounds about right with me. I've never had to say no more than once to a gay man who propositioned me. Ok, there is one guy, a very old friend, who's asked me at least once every five years since about 1975, but when I decline he only says "oh well, it was worth a try" and changes the subject.
Note: The above model does not apply, indeed it fails catastrophically, with nominally conservative, heterosexual pedophiles and hole-is-a-hole types. But, again, as nominal heterosexuals they have no access to gay protocol and thus remain mired in the dominant stereotype. With often tragic results.
Wow! So glad to see I could contribute to your thinking. I believe you have an incredible mind and the fact that you exercise it only makes it better. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, over and over again *
[And thank you too, Mia. --fl]
I loved this. I've never bought the "men as ravening beasts" stereotype, not least because I'm inclined to believe that women have more than a touch of the ravening beast in ourselves. It makes sense that men raised with such a view of themselves would have trouble dealing with gay men for all kinds of reasons.
Although in general I would agree that gay culture deals with the "shall we or shan't we?" situations I have to say that I've had to say no multiple times to more than one lesbian, so it pays to remember that assholishness is in fact common amongst all demographics. The difference I think is in the extent to which one's peer group supports one's assholish behaviour.
[Yeah, I could have been more clear that the authors of The Ethical Slut were talking strictly about gay male culture when they talked about a culture of no really meaning no. Thanks, Britgirlsf. --fl]
Hey, I followed a link to this from off Amber's site.
I like a lot of this, although I confess I've not been in any significant part of gay culture enough to agree with your findings. I can say, though, that I have worked alongside plenty of male co-workers who looked at gay seduction in the way you describe: they thought that gay men would be manipulative and then suddenly assault them with a penis. To them, it was "okay to be gay" so long as the man didn't come onto them. My thought always was, "And just what makes you think you are the guy he'd go for anyway?"
I also like the comparison you are making between the classical views of sexual morality for males and the contemporary view. I do think the older view's depiction of the male foreigner as sexually rapacious is still there, perhaps to the extent that identification with that foreigner has made, for the conservative, a foreigner of themselves. It's something of a progression of the traditionally conservative idea that within the individual is this hidden or secret self that must be overcome through discipline and law and order. This self becomes more and more alien, rather than more and more owned, because the more it resists the order, the more it must be hidden and kept secret (and enjoyed...). And since it resists the order, the more it is no longer the same self, to the point where it is autonomous from the self, and therefore uncontrolled by the self. It is the rapacious foreigner within.
The out gay man, therefore, is not only a threat because he might suddenly assault with a penis, but he also fully exposed his hidden and secret self and now stands accountable for it. Secrecy is no longer a defense against order, but exposure, by being public, invites it. The out gay man is a reminder of an accountability, and that's a threat of a different kind.
So, I think there are a lot of cultural and societal dynamics at work here, and I think you're onto them.
[Very cool perspectives, Charles. Serious food for thought, including the gay male as "foreigner," and as accountable. Straight men may not be thought of as "foreign," at least to other men, but we're not held accountable for our sexuality, in part, because of this weird overlay of "screw anything that moves" and "we're above all that." It's not a good mix. Thanks! --fl]