by Rachel Hills
But for most of the last century in the English-speaking West, male homosexuality and femininity have been considered one and the same. The stereotypical gay man is a fashion-conscious, clean Lady Gaga fan who is more femme than most women—think the “flamboyantly feminine” Jack in the popular ’00s sitcom Will and Grace, or fashion stylist Carson Kressley on the Bravo reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. These stereotypes emerged hand in hand with what American sociologist Eric Anderson calls “homohysteria”—a state of panic about homosexuality that casts gay men as deviants and predators, and all men as potentially gay.
In his book Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities, Anderson uses photographs of men’s sports teams to show how perceptions of masculinity and appropriate male intimacy have evolved over time, from the 1890s to the present day. Prior to the 1920s, he writes, teams were photographed smiling, hugging, and draping their arms around each other, this kind of physical contact perfectly compatible with their status as men. But soon after, the men in the photographs began to keep more distance from one another: first arranged in rows with their hands by their sides and later, in the hypermasculine 1980s, not touching or emoting at all, posed sitting with their arms crossed and blank looks on their faces.
Homohysteria requires two things to thrive, argues Anderson: an awareness of homosexuality as a sexual orientation, and a fear and disapproval of its existence. In the photographs from before the 1920s, the men were permitted to touch each other because it was assumed that they were straight. Hugging another man was a sign of friendship, not desire. By the 1980s, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, even being remotely affectionate with someone of the same sex was considered suspect. To be a “man” meant distancing oneself from even the slightest hint of homosexuality.
The belief that masculinity and homosexuality are incompatible is starting to erode, though. Along with looking at photographs of men’s sports teams in the past, Anderson watched male athletes posing for portraits in the present as well—among them a group of (gay and straight) male cheerleaders. Anderson observed how the men’s first instinct was to pose with their arms by their sides, and how the photographer—a man in his forties—encouraged them to fold their arms across their chests instead. “They have worked hard for those muscles,” he told Anderson. “They should show off their masculinity.” When the team’s captain learned what the photographer had said, the young men rebelled, throwing their arms around each other instead. Such changes, Anderson argues, reflect broader changes in masculinity as homophobia has declined.
For the past decade, Anderson has been interviewing and observing men in conventionally masculine environments, like sports teams and fraternity houses, across the United States and United Kingdom. Some of his results have been surprising—and controversial. In a 2008 study published in Sex Roles, Anderson argued that the “one-time rule of homosexuality” (which dictates that even a single same-sex experience is indicative of a hidden homosexual orientation) was on the way out, with 40 percent of the sixty-eight straight-identifying men surveyed confirming some kind of same-sex experience. In another study, published in 2012, Anderson and his co-researchers Adi Adams and Ian Rivers reported that 89 percent of young British men have kissed another man on the lips—not as an expression of sexual attraction but of friendship.
The straight-identifying men I spoke with did not report anything close to the same levels of same-sex experience that Anderson’s men did. But much of what they told me did support his assertion that the relationship between masculinity and homosexuality is changing. As Tom, twenty, put it: “It’s a lot more acceptable to be attracted to a guy than it was before. I think it’s become a little more okay to try it out.” Michael, the thirty-two-year-old London call center worker we met in chapter 3, was blasé on the subject. “I have kissed guys before,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter to me.”
Most of the time, when the straight guys I interviewed reported kissing other men, they did it for the same reason they told stories about the women they had sex with—to get a laugh. Max tells me that where he lives, in small-town Ohio, only a very small percentage of guys “will engage in any kind of homosexual behavior.” Max’s friends, though, are more relaxed on the subject. “We joke about it a lot more,” he says.
One of the ways in which Max’s fraternity brothers “joke about it” is through a game called gay chicken, in which men compete with each other to see who can withstand the highest threshold of man-on-man sexual behavior. Young men in other countries do this, too. Will, a twenty-five-year-old living in the north of England, told me: “It’s like, ‘I bet I can run fastest’ or ‘I bet I can get highest up this tree,’ except it is a test of how ‘gay’ you can get without squirming.” By demonstrating that he is willing to be more “gay” than other men—by holding hands, touching thighs, and even kissing—a man shows that he is not concerned with proving his heterosexuality (and therefore, ironically, shows that he is less gay than other men).
Max says that the game “feeds into the whole new masculinity thing, where it’s more masculine to be okay with homosexuality”—and he’s not wrong. But the humor at the heart of gay chicken isn’t as progressive as it might seem. “The only way you can kiss another guy [without people questioning your sexuality] is if you can prove yourself to be otherwise hetero,” Australian masculinity researcher Clifton Evers tells me. “It has to be a particular context. There is a very fine-tuned awareness of when you’re allowed to kiss and when you’re not allowed to kiss; when you are allowed to hug and when you’re not allowed to hug.”
In other words, it is easier to embrace new standards of masculinity in one arena if your identity as a man is already being affirmed in another. Men whose masculinity is not so readily affirmed—men who are poorer, less educated, or indeed, even gay men—might be more inclined to keep their behavior within the bounds of conventional gender roles.
Yusuf, whom we met in chapter 2, grew up in the working-class western suburbs of Sydney, in a devout Muslim family where liking boys was not an option. When he came out at the age of nineteen, his best friend didn’t speak to him for months, afraid that Yusuf might hit on him. Yusuf buoyed himself with fantasies of his future life, in which he “was going to be beautiful and extremely masculine and hot”—and have regular, exciting sex with a rotation of equally hot guys.
Yusuf’s teenage self would be pleased with the way his life has unfolded since then. Now twenty-six, Yusuf lives with a friend in Bondi, a beachside Sydney suburb famous for its body-beautiful residents. With his tall, muscular build and striking features, Yusuf fits right in. Yusuf is what is known in gay online dating circles as a “straight-acting gay man”—a man who has sex with men but who otherwise embodies conventionally hetero-masculine traits. He speaks in a low, broad Australian accent and drinks beer. His car is a mess, filled with empty drink cartons, books, and random pieces of paper. He moisturizes and exfoliates, but he couldn’t care less about fashion or pop music. Combined with his dark skin and masculine physique, these traits have made him a sought-after commodity in Sydney’s same-sex dating market.
“A lot of gay guys don’t like ‘gay guys’ very much,” Yusuf observes. “They’re trying to set themselves apart from a way of behaving that they see as very trashy, very low, very effeminate, very something . . . [They’re] trying to redefine being gay as something that is also very masculine and identifying more with straight men than with gay men.”
He’s not proud of himself, but Yusuf admits that sometimes, when he and his friends are walking down Sydney’s famously campy Oxford Street, they will make fun of the more feminine guys they see. He describes men who receive rather than give anal sex as “dirty little bottoms.” Yusuf’s physique means he is usually assumed to be a “top”: the guy who does the fucking, rather than the guy who gets fucked. It is internalized homophobia, and he knows it. But “masculinity and femininity are portrayed as these two opposites, and you kind of feel you ha
ve to pick a side,” he explains. And in that particular binary, Yusuf has chosen masculinity.
Yusuf’s comments are reflected in findings by University of Oregon researcher C. J. Pascoe, who argues that the epithet “faggot”—popularly thrown around by high school boys across America—is now employed less as a comment on a boy’s sexuality than on his masculinity. “While it is not necessarily acceptable to be gay, at least a man who is gay can do other things that render him acceptably masculine,” Pascoe wrote. “A fag, by the very definition of the word . . . cannot be masculine.”
It is a message that Yusuf has taken to heart. “If you’re not completely polarized,” he says—if, for example, your identity as a man’s man is compromised by the fact that you like to have sex with other men—“then you’re going to feel insecure.”
Yusuf wasn’t the only gay man I spoke to who felt this way. “In the media, you’re either a flaming queer or a raging straight person,” says Scott, a twenty-three-year-old music writer with a slim build and fine facial features. But Scott feels he sits somewhere in between: a man who has sex with men, but who is no more defined by his sexual preferences than he is by his love of indie music and hip-hop.
Scott runs with a liberal crowd of punks, artists, and writers—the kind of people “who think ambiguity is cool,” he says. But although his friends are happy to experiment with same-sex encounters, most of them identify as straight. “Half the reason I’ve had so much trouble in my life is because to me the ideal guy is a straight guy,” he says. “And that’s fucked up, but it’s what is in my head. I’m, like, searching for the guy who is as un-gay as possible.”
A preference for “straight-acting” gay men is not necessarily an indication of homophobia, internalized or otherwise. Nor is it a recent phenomenon. In a 1992 paper on gay masculinities, the acclaimed sociologist Raewyn Connell noted the tendency for gay men to identify as “very straight” when it came to their gender identity and performance. And this should come as no surprise. As Connell observed: “The choice of a man as a sexual object is not just a choice of body-with-penis; it is a choice of embodied masculinity. The cultural meanings of masculinity are (generally) part of the package. In this sense, most gays are ‘very straight.’ ”
But Yusuf’s and Scott’s comments demonstrate that while having sex with men is no longer antithetical to “being a man,” men who have sex with men—whether they identify as straight, gay, or bi—are still expected to compensate by meeting the masculine ideal in other ways. A gay man can now be a “real man,” but a “fag” still cannot.
Removing the Masculine Straitjacket
The conventional parameters of manhood don’t just lock out the men who flagrantly defy them—men who are gay or bisexual, men who do not have high sex drives, men who are emotionally sensitive or otherwise effeminate. They also limit the choices and behavior of men who, on the surface, appear to meet the conventional standards pretty damn well. Orthodox masculinity teaches men that they can’t say no to sex, be physically or emotionally close to other men, or display any kind of vulnerability without putting their status as “men” at risk.
The stoicism and deliberate self-assurance required by conventional masculinity also make it difficult for men to speak about their experiences with sex and relationships without the cushion of protective humor that underlies Nate’s hookup stories, Andrew’s refrigerator rating system, and Max’s accounts of “gay chicken.” Christopher recalls the sex-education classes at his Catholic high school in Texas. “You never wanted to ask questions, because you always assumed that everyone knew more about sex than you did,” he says. “I was fifteen and curious about what my girlfriend’s parts looked like and how they worked, but I would never ask that question for fear of social rebuke.”
A 2008 study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality found that men actually have a narrower spectrum of acceptable sex and gender behavior than women do. Men were more likely than women to be considered “abnormal” if they fantasized about being intimate with a member of the same sex, if they dressed in clothing associated with the opposite sex, if they were celibate, if they didn’t masturbate, if they enjoyed receiving pain during sex, or if they were aroused by being urinated on. The only behavior that was considered more unusual in women than in men was voyeurism.
There is evidence that young men are beginning to challenge these standards, throwing off the orthodox masculine straitjacket in favor of a masculinity that is more inclusive and accepting of difference. In a 2012 opinion piece published in the New York Times, University of Massachusetts researcher Amy T. Schalet wrote that American boys were becoming “more like girls” when it came to sex, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control that shows that today’s teenage boys are having sex later than their counterparts in the late 1980s were, as well as her own interviews with teenagers in the United States and the Netherlands. And it’s not just men’s experiences of gender that are evolving, either. As we will see in the next chapter, women’s sexual ideals are changing, too.
But it will take more than a shift in gender roles to combat the idea that a guy’s manhood is a product of what he does with his penis. Our belief in the physically dominant, sexually insatiable man reflects more than just our investment in “men being men” and “women being women.” It is a reflection of our desire to believe in sex as a transformative force—one with the power to overcome our old selves and make us new.
* * *
I. Not their fraternity’s real name.
6
Femininity: The Madonna/Gaga Complex
As a high school freshman in rural Illinois, one of Brit’s favorite ways to spend a Sunday afternoon was curled up in her friend Jessa’s bedroom, eating Girl Scout cookies and reading Cosmopolitan. The two would sit together on Jessa’s twin bed, surrounded by stuffed animals and Backstreet Boys posters, and flip through the pages of the magazine, exchanging notes on how the content therein stacked up to their own nascent sexual knowledge, and laughing over the illicit and sometimes outlandish nature of their reading material.
As teenage girls go, Brit was not particularly “girly,” and nor did she want to be. Introverted and bookish, with dark hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, she found the traditional femininity that was celebrated in her tiny Midwestern community left her cold. In a school where there were only fifteen girls in her grade, she felt like the odd woman out, a lone wolf in an ark full of platonic pairs.
But those evenings she spent sitting in Jessa’s bedroom, talking about sex, gave Brit a window into a world that was as intimate as it was rebellious, and as transgressive as it was conformist—what Brit describes as “that space between girlhood and womanhood that seems to be designated by sexual acts.”
Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and one of the chief ways in which girls learn womanhood is through their engagement with sexuality. As Brit puts it, “When you had sex, you were a ‘woman,’ whether you were ready for it or not.”
“A lot of it was just reading magazines and giggling,” Brit, now twenty-three and living in New York, recalls. “But it was also about having a space to speak openly about sex—to say, Oh, I’d do that, or That’s totally nuts.”
Conversations like the ones Brit describes above are more than just a clumsy adolescent attempt at playing grown-up. They are an exercise in the learning and creation of gender, a drawing of the boundaries not only of what it means to be an adult, but of what it means to be female.
And just as men are taught that their masculinity is contingent on their sexual prowess, so too are women taught that being “feminine” means being sexual in particular ways. It is a process that begins long before puberty, manifest in everything from the plastic baby dolls and pink beauty kits that dominate the designated “girls’ aisles” at most toy stores to the inevitably heterosexual happily-ever-afters that conclude fairy tales and Disney movies. Years before we ever have sex, sexualit
y is as much a part of the toolbox through which we are taught to communicate and decipher gender as the clothes we wear, the amount of space we take up when we sit on the train, or the length to which the hairdresser intuitively goes to cut our hair.
The symbolic and symbiotic relationship between sex and gender was apparent in the conversations I had with young women every place I traveled. Heather, a shy twenty-four-year-old from Geelong, Australia, told me how her boyfriend’s lower sex drive and reluctance to experiment sexually had left her feeling like she wasn’t “a good enough woman.” Brooke, a college student from Montreal, talked about the responsibility she felt to “pleasure” her partner, saying, “[If] I don’t live up to certain standards of attractiveness or sexiness or availability, he’ll leave me for someone who does.” Stephanie, the high school senior we met in chapter 4, referred to Margaret Atwood’s reproductive dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, using its term “unwoman” to articulate the link between “doing” femininity right and doing sexuality correctly. “If you are labeled a whore, you’re ‘unwoman.’ If you’re not fertile, you’re ‘unwoman.’ If you refuse to have sex, you’re ‘unwoman,’ ” she explained.
Like boys and men, the ways in which girls and women are taught to be sexual are changing. Once being a “good woman” meant being passive and “pure”—refraining from sex until you were married or in a serious relationship, for example, or engaging in it as an act of service while ignoring your own sexual needs. But today’s “good woman” takes as much pleasure from sex as any man does. For the modern young woman, sex is no longer something done to assuage others but an expression of identity and empowered self-determination. Being sexually active has become a means through which women demonstrate and exert control over their sex lives.