We’d all be better off if we could at least talk about sex like grown ups. We somehow lose our ability to think in complex or sophisticated ways entirely when the subject turns to copulation. Even after AIDS took out so many and made everybody from Tom Brokaw to the bimbo on the local news comfortable with saying “anal sex” from the anchor’s chair, we’re still not able to speak intelligently about it.
You’d think for a species that almost universally wants it, we’d be far more likely to talk about it. But that may be the problem: sex hits too close to home. It’s intimate for a reason: the act makes people vulnerable both physically and emotionally, and vulnerable isn’t good if you’re an American. Vulnerability equals weakness, and weakness equals being a loser. And if you can be destroyed, for most Americans, you might as well be.
This is also maybe why so many sex crimes and so many hate crimes are linked to men. The American male must, above all, not feel or appear weak. He must not allow his primacy to be questioned because he has been taught early on, through Little League and playground scraps, that life is a competition, a constant struggle for control of the mythical herd, a battle for power, a war for respect. One way to prove yourself manly is to prove others unmanly, and one easy way to do that is to punch a faggot in the face.
Indeed, the whole farcical structure of maleness as we formulate it is threatened by the rise of any class not either subject to it or beholden to it for its existence. A gay man, especially, owes nothing to the traditional struggle for male power. His vulnerability is clear because his sexuality is known, and so his need to protect it, which the system exists to uphold, is obviated. The men on the right wing of American politics feel threatened by gays because their mere existence reveals what the male power structure is based on. Once the fact that it is based on the fear of sexual vulnerability becomes public, the structure essentially collapses.
Equating the Terry Foxes and Fred Phelpses of the world with those who murdered Matthew Shepard may seem a bit harsh, but they all share the same basic fear: that the most vulnerable parts of themselves will be exposed and that the systems they have in place for keeping that vulnerability hidden will break down. This is really what Phelps and his ilk are worried about when they complain about the “homosexual agenda” and whine about the “moral decline of America.” If they were genuinely worried about sin, it would be an individual issue and not a political crusade. And what we don’t say about men’s “locker room” talk is not that it ends there but that it begins there as well. It is coded and controlled; never are unorthodox matters discussed; never are actual feelings involved. Locker room talk is about flaunting power which is why it isn’t meant for “polite company.” That’s also why these sorts of situations tend to break down into hazing and verbal abuse, and, at its worst, killing and gang rape. It is meant to protect the order by curtailing “correct” male thought to power over women, sexual contact as only intercourse and fellatio, and the degradation of gay men. In other words, a fundamentally vulnerable situation is transformed by ritualized language into an aggrandizement and indoctrination into the system of male power.
Like all political rhetoric, it is terribly shallow. It exists to fit the need for the situation, and is seldom based on the realities of even those who engage in it. Those who bash women or lobby for laws against gay marriage may very well be the abusive oafs one would expect in their own homes. They may also be henpecked husbands or even on the submissive end of an S/M relationship. It’s not what we are that keeps the system of power in place; it’s what we project and how strenuously we project it.
This flattening of discourse also prevents a genuine accounting of the subtle and often difficult issues involved in human sexuality. It did not become okay to have erectile dysfunction or even to talk about it except as a pejorative until there was a medication to treat it. The fact that these drugs are more often covered by medial insurance than birth control indicates a more insidious problem: the only “proper” sexuality among the males who run the companies is still their own, actuarial common sense aside.
I’m not entirely sure what to do about this problem. As a straight male, I suppose I have an opportunity to change things. But there’s little indication that the men who need to listen are capable of hearing.