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Via DemFromCT of Daily Kos, Kevin Huffman of the Washington Post says

On Sunday, as I hunker down with family and friends for the Super Bowl, I can rest easy knowing that CBS is working hard to defend my heterosexual sensitivities. On the surface, heterosexuality doesn’t seem like a particularly distinctive trait or one in need of broad institutional protections, but many seem to believe that we heterosexuals are delicate souls.

The media, the government, the military — all are ready to head off potential sightings of gay people.

In the case of the Super Bowl, CBS has refused to broadcast an ad by the gay dating Web site ManCrunch.

He said it here.

Sometime soon I’m going to have to write a post about “privilege,” which while technically accurate as it gets, and also glaringly obvious to those who don’t have it, is also nearly-by-definition, completely invisible to those who have it. That said, I like the way Huffman’s point illustrates a really huge problem with the invisibility of being the “normal” against which all else is “other.”

What I really wish people would get is that heterosexuality is as real and durable an orientation as homosexuality. I mean, it’s a peculiar condition of imagining one’s self “the norm” that it’s hard to understand you’re the way you are for exactly the same reasons others aren’t. You’re that way by accident of birth a.k.a. nature.

And by not getting that you’re also going to miss that you’re not “normal” temporarily, you’re not “normal” by whim, you’re not “normal” because you were exposed to the “right” or “wrong” social influence, and you’re definitely not “normal” by choice.

Any more than any given sexual “the other” is.

And that’s the thing. Being gay isn’t a choice! And one of the coolest things about getting that is that if you just thought about it you’d get that your heterosexuality wasn’t a choice either.

And if more people got that they’d get that they really don’t need the media, the government, the clergy, U.S. Marines and the Canadian Mounties, and, especially, various posses of gay-panic-stricken vigilantes to protect their heterosexuality. Or anyone else’s.

I’m in the monthly rotation for the popular “Wise Guys” column at Em & Lo. This week’s question for their rotating panel of single, and married straight men and married or committed gay man was “What’s the deal with manscaping? We’re talking both genitals and chests.” Here’s how I answered it.

Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): Great question! It’s a great irony to me that, at least in Western Civilization, we don’t think anything of the original “manscaping” — men who shave their faces. For instance, you never hear debates about how shaving makes grown men look “prepubescent” even though technically that’s exactly what it actually does. As for the recent trend in straight men trimming or shaving pubic hair, I think you could make a case that it’s driven, at least a little bit, by the same things that drive women to do so: porn and advertising. The two come together in a recent razor manufacturer’s ad campaign with shaved kiwi fruit and hints about the “optical inch” of penis length that comes from trimming away an inch of pubic hair.

There’s also the point that it just feels nicer being kissed on bare skin than on hair… and, for many partners, it feels nicer kissing bare skin than hair. As for men grooming hair on the rest of the body, I think there are two big reasons. First, because it makes us look younger. Not so much “prepubescent” but, since body hair increases with age, not middle-aged or older. Second, because when it’s long it can be itchy both to ourselves and to our partners. Of course the other side of all that is first that a lot of women and/or men think body hair on men is very sexy, and second that stubble can be even pricklier than if we left well enough alone.

I said it here.

No sense analyzing my own writing (heck, I can’t even proofread my own writing!) so I’ll point out that the quality of comments is pretty different on the post at Em & Lo’s vs. their reprinted version at Yahoo Shine.

A number of Yahoo commenters are pretty down on manscaping because they see it as one kind of unmanly or another. Which makes the “Gay Engaged Guy,” Joel Derfner‘s answer priceless

I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter, because manscaping is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Gay men are manscaping less and less each year, which means that in a few years straight men are going to be manscaping less and less each year, and then our national nightmare will be over.

Yup, just let straight America get the notion that not shaving is Teh Gay!

Gillette and Schick stock will skyrocket and we can all go home. Oh wait! Scratch that last bit about stocks. Nearly all American men already own shaving products.

But getting back to the shaving makes you look less manly bit. Shaving makes men look less manly? Which is a riot because of course beginning to shave one’s face is often one of the first outward acknowledgments of manhood for boys.

Which makes the cultural perception gradient even weirder: shaving is supposed to make men look more womanly, meanwhile shaving is supposed to make women look more child-like. If there was any logic to gender conventions, since shaving is one of the first signals of manhood shaving ought to be seen as making women look more manly! I get so confused!

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Gender-neutral rhetorical question: do shaved armpits make everyone look pre-pubescent?

Late last month Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon wrote

G.D. wrote a post about how “Mad Men” deals with overt misogyny and not racism because the writers realize that you can sell a likeable misogynist more easily than you can sell a likeable racist.

She said it here.

Just the other day Yonmi of Feminist SF unearths another instance version of the general effect, this time for homophobia.

I have never been sure how Orson Scott Card justifies his homophobia to himself: I know he loathes being identified as a homophobe, because he would rather think of himself as a normal person with a normal distaste for and hatred of gay men who normally wants gay men to be kept in the closet, and chemically castrated or otherwise punished if they fail to keep themselves out of sight.

Read the quote in context here.

I’ve read very little of Card’s work. I put down “Ender’s Game” when I realized the situation (approvingly!) involved authorities having a very small child conduct a planet-slaughtering war by telling him he was just playing a video game. Whether the author suffered from cynicism, callousness, or naivete that kind of moral, ethical, and religious/spiritual lapse was a enough for me to turn my attention elsewhere. But if I’d read more of his work, Yonmi says, I’d have run into more of his homophobia including the proper degradation and death of otherwise patriotic, heroic, and war-effort-contributing characters who turn out to be gay.

Yonmi’s post includes a long pean to real-life British World War II cryptography hero, and computer-theory godfather, and mathematician Alan Turing who was outed for homosexuality, persecuted out of his job, and finally driven to suicide. Based on his body of fiction and non-fiction work, Card, nominally a science advocate and certainly a beneficiary of contemporary computer technology, believes the world would have been better a better place without Turing. (I’m sure a few surviving unreconstructed members of the Luftwaffe would agree.)

Anyway, yeah, racist is an awful word to use against affable people who just blanket hate people of other races. And misogynist is just such an awful label for likable guys who think the highest compliment you can pay a woman is to say “she’s going to make a wonderful mother for someone’s children someday.” And homophobe is an awful word to use against a guy who thinks it ought to be normal rather than disgraceful to hate gay people.

And I can see their point. Calling someone a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, or other kind of bigot just makes it harder to see they’re affable, likable, NiceGuys™ who just think they should be given jobs they’d deny to others, who should enjoy rights they’d deprive others of, who should benefit from the misery they’d rain down on others. Oh, and who, like Card, think they should get paid to pen scenarios where adults imperil small children’s immortal souls to advance their strategic interests.

Update: And from the Couldn’t Make This Up department of irony, according to the Wikipedia entry for Ender’s Game, the implacable alien foes children are recruited to fight are called “buggers.” What. Ever.

Update #2: From reader comments it sounds like if I’d continued reading I’d have discovered that Ender regrets his participation in planetary genocide and that Card spends multiple award-winning volumes dwelling on Ender’s redemption. They evidently don’t redeem Card’s homophobia though.

How come tabloids spatter all manner of gossip about celebrity women’s same-sex relationships, really brief ones, but you never hear about celebrity men’s same-sex relationships, even when they’re really long-term?

It could just be I don’t read the right gossip-magazine covers in the grocery store checkout lines. I don’t think it is. And it could be that there’s some sort of “unspoken code” not to discuss male celebrity relationships. But since they seem pretty ready to speculate about different men’s sexuality I don’t think it’s that either. Or it could be that gossip almost by definition is about enforcing widely agreed upon narratives and so the idea of men (gay or straight) in relationships that aren’t mediated and maintained with the enormous Cosmo-style effort of women just don’t exist.

The other possibility is I don’t know about them because they really don’t exist. But since I only know what I read on gossip magazine covers in checkout lines (ok, ok, I’ve also skim the firehose of posts from Jezebel.com in my newsreader) I have no independent way to verify so it’s all guesses.