I would estimate that much of my time in my life has been spent either gazing at or attempting to gaze at a woman's naked form. I'm not sure what my first drawings were - my parents never even told me the story of how they met, much less considered imparting any anecdotes about my life other than my father once tearfully asking whether I remembered when he would take me to the beach and I would eat sand. ("You'd think he would know," remarked my mother with disgust, "that if you were young enough to eat sand, you probably didn't remember it.") Though I could ramble on about this for the rest of time, constantly departing down rabbit holes of anecdotes that may well be false (remind me to tell you about the preacher and the Saran Wrap), I recently was talking to Katie about erotica, pornography, and the male gaze. Many aspects of erotica and porn are different now than when I was growing up - Katie and I are around ten years apart - and I came up in a time where feminine beauty and sexuality was centered around the male gaze. Additionally, the 1980's were a horny decade, the decade of the rock music video babe. There were babes everywhere you turned in the 1980's. And then came the 1990's, when I started reading superhero comics - and then suddenly, the Comics Code was out, self-publishing was in, and so were Bad Girls. (Let me tell you, I was living.) This is all to say that my personal understanding of what was sexually desirable came mainly from what was available to me as a child (Tex Avery cartoons, Jessica Rabbit), a teen (comic book ladies), and then as a young adult (the back room of the video rental place in the next town, the ability to buy Playboy and Penthouse). We didn't have a Gay-Straight Alliance in high school until years after I graduated (and even then, the creation of a GSA was so panic-inducing that it led the county school board to suspend all club activity in schools). There was very little in terms of queer teen companionship, of any kind of queer elder mentoring, of much community. So there was really no one to tell me how to be queer. I just continued in the way that I knew: looking at babes. Who doesn't want to look at babes, I would think, and I probably still do. Today I was reading The Lonely City and was so struck by this passage. It's an excerpt from Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty: "This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn't produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men - or white men, at any rate - don't have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn't immediately threaten to come off as cruel redundancy." Of course this seems obvious, but it brought with it so many avenues of thought. I have always been so struck by the joy and celebration that I see in the works of gay men, also in gay male porn: the appreciation of the visual, the exaggeration, the fun. Think about Tom of Finland and you'll understand what I'm getting at. Everyone is having a good time, except maybe the occasional woman who shows up in a comic.
One of my favorite stories in Sometimes She Lets Me was about a femme who just wanted anonymous sex, who just wanted to cruise. It was bemoaned that lesbians don't cruise, and I felt that. I also bemoan it, certainly. But it isn't safe. For many reasons. And this passage made me think about what it is to be a sex object, because there's power in that. But it's a fragile power, in a way, because it doesn't mean we can cruise, it doesn't mean we can walk alone at night - it's a different kind of objectification than the objectification of a white male body. Objectification with power, and then the powerless object.
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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