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Dr. Jane Ward on Sex Between Straight Men
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Music by Ross Mintzer
Graphic Design by Kaitlin Weinman
Edited by Moxie Peng
Produced by Moxie Peng, Matt Loomis, Alex Boyd, and Rob Cohen
A transcript of this episode is available at www.TwoBiGuys.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Recording Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Rob, and thanks for discovering Season 1 of Two Bye Guys. We hope you enjoy it. So in Season 1, we recorded everything in person. It was pre-pandemic, and we used professional sound booths. And as you'll hear, the audio quality is pretty great. But it was also very complicated and expensive. And when the pandemic hit, those booths became impossible.
00:00:23
Speaker
So in season two, we tried recording interviews locally while chatting on Zoom, which kind of worked. But the audio quality was spotty. Sometimes people made manual mistakes with the recording. It was a huge hassle for me to receive the files, convert the formats, compile the audio, edit by hand. I knew I needed a better solution if I was going to continue the podcast.
Zencastr and Podcast Production
00:00:46
Speaker
And Zencaster was that solution. The thing that was most important to me, knowing how the process works, is that the audio gets recorded locally, not over the internet like Zoom does. When you get up to seasons three and four, you'll hear how good the audio quality is. It rivals what you're about to hear from season one, which was recorded in professional sound booths. And it's so much easier and cheaper. Everyone can record from home with whatever equipment they have, even just a laptop's built-in mic.
00:01:15
Speaker
And then there's the editing and post-production. I used to have to go through every track manually, reducing background noise, mixing volumes and levels, making sure my guest and I were synced. Now Zencaster post-production takes care of all of that and delivers ready to upload files. So if you're thinking about starting your own podcast, I highly recommend Zencaster. It's easy, it's affordable, and it's very reliable, and the sound quality is great.
00:01:40
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And now if you go to zencaster.com slash pricing and enter promo code 2BUYGUYS, you'll get 30% off your first three months. That's z-e-n-c-a-s-t-r dot com slash pricing promo code 2BUYGUYS for 30% off your first three months. It's time to share your story with Zencaster.
Interview with Jane Ward on Sexual Identities
00:02:07
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Two Bye Guys. I'm Rob. And I'm Alex. And today we have another interview for you, one that actually was so exciting and so worthwhile that it's gonna be a two-parter this week and next week. I could not be a part of this one.
00:02:22
Speaker
But Rob interviewed Jane Ward who wrote a book called Not Gay, Sex Between Straight White Men. My Bible at one time. I flew all the way to Los Angeles to get this interview and it was very worth it. And it was a Bible of sorts for me even as somebody who had identified as bi for quite a while before reading. But for me it really opened up my eyes to
00:02:46
Speaker
just the idea that somebody's identity, somebody's label, did not need to match their actions. Right, right. And like how that could open a door for so much more fluidity within that.
00:02:58
Speaker
Right and it's really what we want to talk about is a lot of straight identified guys who are doing some not so straight stuff and like that was me for a while and this book really helped me to see those things. Now I will just say that the title of this book was a bit controversial when it came out. It's been seen as problematic and we do discuss that in the interview.
00:03:19
Speaker
So if you're skeptical, just keep listening and keep an open mind. But I will say this upfront, the book does not erase bisexuality in my opinion. It's not homophobic in my opinion, although it is about homophobia. And the not gay title is kind of tongue in cheek. It's getting into the mindset of these straight identified guys who are having contact that they would sort of describe as quote, not gay.
00:03:44
Speaker
And also, even though the title is not gay sex between straight white men, it's not just about white men. It doesn't value whiteness more highly or anything like that, but it does discuss the ways in which fluid sexuality is racialized. And it's sort of specifically about the ways in which white men use their privilege to explore fluidity and still be seen as straight while non-white men don't always have that luxury.
00:04:12
Speaker
You know, we know, like we talked about in our first episode, I think, we talked about this UGov study in the UK about how 49% of young people identify as something other than straight, right? And so that's a lot, but most of that percentage identifies on the Kinsey Scale as a one or a two.
00:04:34
Speaker
It's 22% of young people identify as a one, 13% as a two, so that's 35% of all young people identify in this sort of mostly straight range. Yeah, so they may identify as straight still, but they don't identify their sexuality being 100% heterosexual.
00:04:53
Speaker
Right, exactly. And so like, what does that really mean? Like, how are these people identifying? What are their interactions? What are their desires? How do they express their sexuality in the world? Yeah. And also 15% of all adults in that same YouGov study
00:05:11
Speaker
identify as a one or a two. So it's higher among young people, 35%, but 15% of all adults are a one or two. That's more than identify as a six, as gay. A lot more.
00:05:24
Speaker
Well, then I think it's important to acknowledge the difference in that generational difference that we're seeing and that like there is less homophobia in today's world, right? So among younger people, there must be less, right? And it makes sense, right? Like without that internalized homophobia that is a product of systemic homophobia, then maybe those numbers will sway even more, right? Imagine where we would be in a world without homophobia. Yeah. Well, and there was another book I read really recently by Rich Savin Williams, I believe,
00:05:54
Speaker
called Mostly Straight. And I didn't love parts of the book just the way it was presented and presenting this Mostly Straight label as this distinct thing. Right, like as an alternative to a bi-label. Yeah, because it seemed like it was just complicating things a little bit. But there were interviews in there.
00:06:12
Speaker
that were really worthwhile with a lot of these mostly straight young men, predominantly white from what I remember, who were just discussing how they were straight, but they also are acknowledging that there's feelings that they have towards other men that they don't necessarily want to or can't overlook entirely.
00:06:32
Speaker
Right. I read that book too and I thought the interviews were so fascinating and validating of stuff I was thinking. And, you know, a lot of these guys still want to identify as straight because they see themselves marrying a woman or maybe they even only see themselves in romantic relationships.
00:06:50
Speaker
with women. But like you said, they have these other thoughts and desires. And I think they're sort of caught in a bind because even if you are a one or a two on the Kinsey scale, if you publicly express that you're having sex with men or interested in having sex with men, I think a lot of people just immediately assume you're all the way over on that scale. You're a six, you're gay. And what happens then is that
00:07:15
Speaker
you know, relationships with women get taken off the table, or at least the fear that it will get taken off the table exists. And so it can be very difficult to explore any desires because of that fear. Yeah, especially when you can very easily just live as a straight man, right? Like if your experience is 95% straight, then why even bother with that 5% if there's that much at stake?
00:07:40
Speaker
Right, right. Exactly. And so what ends up happening is a lot of these guys sort of push the boundaries of straightness as opposed to crossing that boundary into bisexuality or some other sort of queer identity. In many ways, what this interview is about and what Dr. Ward's book is about is
00:07:58
Speaker
how straight guys push those boundaries and the scripts that they write together and the ways in which same-sex conduct happens in a way that they can still maintain their straight identity.
Exploring Male Sexual Fluidity
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a really exciting interview, so without further delay, we'll let you get into it. Yeah, enjoy.
00:08:25
Speaker
Hello, I am out in LA today. I'm one by guy. I'm solo without Alex to interview a very special guest. I'm extremely excited. Dr. Jane Ward. Welcome to two by guys. I'm so excited to be sitting here across from this one by guy.
00:08:41
Speaker
Me too. So Dr. Jane Ward is a professor of gender and sexuality studies at University of California, Riverside. She teaches courses in feminist, queer, and heterosexuality studies. She has published on a broad range of topics, including feminist pornography, queer parenting, gay pride festivals, gay marriage campaigns, transgender relationships, the social construction of heterosexuality,
00:09:06
Speaker
the failure of diversity programs and the evolution of HIV AIDS organizations. All very interesting stuff. Her first book, Respectably Queer Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations, was named by Progressive Magazine as a best book of 2008. And her second book is titled Not Gay, Sex Between Straight White Men, which is what we will be talking a lot about today.
00:09:30
Speaker
And Jane is also a baker, an urban gardener, and a parent to one human child, four cats, and 11 chickens. Wow, 11 chickens. And now a pig. And a pig. Are there still 11 chickens? Do they come and go? They come and go, but we still have 11.
00:09:45
Speaker
Okay, good. So the reason I wanted to meet you and talk to you is because of this second book, Not Gay, Sex Between Straight White Men, which was basically my Bible a few years ago when I read it. And I was coming out to myself and realizing that I was queer and understanding what queerness is in a whole new way. And even though this book is about a very specific thing, it was
00:10:10
Speaker
I felt like it was about me. So many things I had been thinking about started to make sense and that was my window into queer studies and gender studies and learning about this. So I'm excited to have you here and talk to you about it. Let me just start briefly with you. In addition to this professional resume, we've got what are your pronouns and how do you identify or how would you like to identify before we get started?
00:10:37
Speaker
Thank you for asking me that. My pronouns are she, her. I also am happy with they, them. I identify as a dyke, as a white dyke, as queer, a radical, sometimes a pervert, a perv.
00:10:54
Speaker
I'm going to try that one on. Cool. Sometimes I say my sexual orientation is feminist because I'm often very attracted to people's political orientations more so than, I mean, I love genders too and I'm attracted to different kinds of genders, but I also find feminism very hot on various kinds of bodies.
00:11:17
Speaker
Very cool. Yeah. All right. Well, I want to get more to your identity later and talk about that conception of what queerness is. But let's start with the book because I think there isn't that much out there about male sexual fluidity. And this was one of the first like really in-depth things that I read about it. So why don't we start with the book and explaining the basic thesis of it.
00:11:41
Speaker
Basically that homosexuality is an invisible but vital ingredient of heterosexual masculinity and that like it's it's everywhere and we're just talking about it in a way that sort of Makes it invisible or makes it feel not important. So how do you see that?
00:11:58
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Well, I'm just gonna jump right off with psychoanalytic theory for better or for worse. All right. I mean, I think in the simplest terms what I wanted to convey is that I believe, as Freud believes, that when we're born as infants we don't actually have a sexual orientation at that time. You're not like a gay newborn or a straight newborn.
00:12:22
Speaker
Instead, Freud says we're polymorphously perverse. We have the capacity to feel pleasure in response to so many different stimuli. Bodily human touch, but also dipping our finger in peanut butter and the fur of our kitty cat or our actual kitty cat. That wasn't a sexual reference.
00:12:42
Speaker
So what happens is that as we get older, we get socialized to direct desire toward what Freud called a proper object. And culturally, we believe that we're supposed to desire
00:12:58
Speaker
human beings and we're supposed to desire people who are of the opposite sex because we live under heteronormativity. And so parents start to kind of orient children that way very early on. I won't get into all the ways, but I'm sure you can imagine what many of those are.
00:13:17
Speaker
And what Freud argued, and again, I share this view, is that something has to happen to all those other desires, that beautiful, delicious, diverse range of desires that we had the capacity to experience.
Challenging Innate Sexual Orientation
00:13:33
Speaker
they basically get suppressed and so that includes homosexual desires but it also includes you know a whole set of fantasies that we might have or I'm not suggesting that like toddlers have a bunch of sexual fantasies but the toddlers don't yet have a disciplined idea of what
00:13:53
Speaker
sensuality could be or what bodies are capable of and that's why often parents freak out when they walk into a little kid's room and they're playing they're touching their siblings body in a way that parents think is inappropriate or they find you know often children will masturbate just out in the open because you know they haven't been they don't have shame basically so
00:14:17
Speaker
This is all a long way of saying that for what I came to believe in looking at how common it is for straight people to engage in homosexual sex practices is that, you know, that part of ourselves never fully goes away. It gets repressed. And so then when it expresses itself, it expresses itself in some really surprising and often paradoxical ways. Sometimes it expresses itself as
00:14:45
Speaker
homophobia right in the very moment of two men touching. But it still expresses itself because it's still there. Yeah. So essentially you're sort of pushing back against the born this way idea of queerness and homosexuality that that is not actually something you're born with. Absolutely. I don't believe that.
00:15:04
Speaker
I was a psych major in college and I took a class on human sexuality and I loved it at the time. But in hindsight, it was very much a class about evolution and it didn't really have a good explanation for queerness. Like it's sort of, I was taught in college that it was like a byproduct and like an accident or a mistake, but you're basically saying everyone has the capacity for queerness when they're born.
00:15:28
Speaker
When you think about it, why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we have the capacity to be interested in the bodies of every kind of person? Now, some people will say, well, we wouldn't because it's not evolutionarily advantageous to have that interest because we're all supposed to reproduce.
00:15:49
Speaker
But if you look back again through human history, we have no end of evidence that people engaged in a lot of sex practices that did not lead to procreation, oral sex, masturbation, so forth. Human sexuality is far more complex than that reproduction argument.
00:16:14
Speaker
So tell us a little about how you researched this book and this topic in particular and like how did you come to understand sex between straight white men?
00:16:24
Speaker
Yeah, so I had been interested in this subject for a long time actually. When I was in college is when I learned about some of the homosexual hazing practices that happen in college fraternities. So I went to one of these party schools in Southern California in which Greek culture was a big part of the campus culture.
00:16:48
Speaker
And I think I opened the book with this story that a friend of mine told me about a hazing ritual called the elephant walk or the elephant chain. And for those of you who haven't read the book, this is basically, you know, these fraternity pledges are asked to strip naked and then they're
00:17:06
Speaker
different iterations of it, but usually it's hold the penis of the guy in front of you, and then your penis is held by the guy behind you, and then you're sort of walking in a circle like elephants linked tail to trunk, and sometimes it's, you know, your finger is in the anus of the guy in front of you. They're all different versions of this delightful ritual.
00:17:27
Speaker
And there are photos in the book. Yes, exactly. I'm so grateful that I found that photo because some people did suggest that this was urban legend. So anyway, when I first heard about that, I was in my 20s and I thought, what does that mean? I know that young women don't
00:17:48
Speaker
engage in that same kind of behavior, which isn't to say, of course, it isn't to say that young straight-identified women don't have sex with other women because they do. But it doesn't look like that. It's not the sort of really performative group activity with a lot of hierarchy, with a narrative about how you have no choice, but you have to do it, about how it's disgusting, but still you do it. You know, just all these elements that were very interesting to me.
00:18:14
Speaker
So, then fast forward in the early 2000s, the mainstream media started to report on the down low and all of that reporting, which was really a story about straight identified men who had sex with men, but it was a story that was focused primarily on black men.
00:18:35
Speaker
And often what was argued is that black men are doing this because they can't come out as gay, even though they're really gay, but they can't come out as gay because the black community is so hyper-homophobic. And then a similar kind of story started to circulate around Latino men, that Latino men who had sex with men, you know, were really gay, but they couldn't come out because of homophobia in their community.
00:18:58
Speaker
So in thinking about this, I'm reading this press coverage of the down low. I started to really wonder like where are white men in this story that's being told because I know they're touching each other. So I wanted to know why the focus on men of color, why the invisibility of white men in this discourse.
00:19:20
Speaker
And I
Racial and Cultural Narratives in Sexual Fluidity
00:19:21
Speaker
also wanted to ask the question, like if we're going to say that there's something happening in the black community or in the Latino community that is determining how straight identified men, it can talk about their sexual fluidity, then what's happening in the white community that influences how white men do that as well? Interesting.
00:19:41
Speaker
So talk a little bit more about the ways in which those white men, and we'll get to the DL later, but the ways in which white men have sex with other men and how do they perform it? And like, when they do it in a certain way, how can they maintain their straight identity? Or it can actually bolster their masculinity, you argue.
00:20:01
Speaker
Yes. So one of the controversies that I think this book ignited was that many people who read it or who didn't read it but saw the cover anyway or skimmed through the table of contents.
00:20:17
Speaker
felt that, you know, the practices that I describe aren't actually sex. So they might say, okay, well, you're describing men, straight-identified men holding other men's penises, but that's not sexual, that's just hazing. Or you're describing
00:20:36
Speaker
straight identified men in the military who are licking each other's anuses, which I do describe in the book. But that's not sexual, that's again just partying. And the list goes on, men in prison and men in public restrooms.
00:20:53
Speaker
So the first characteristic of straight identified men's sex with men is that white straight identified men's sex with men is that white men have the privilege to control the narrative so that they have been able to argue this isn't sex at all. This is hazing. This is boys will be boys. This is a joke.
00:21:17
Speaker
This is wrestling. This is drunken shenanigans. And so unlike men of color whose sexuality has long been heavily surveilled in the United States and pathologized in both in the medical profession and then in the media,
00:21:37
Speaker
white men have been able to kind of fly under the radar and engage in an enormous amount of sexual touching without it having any identity consequences for them.
00:21:49
Speaker
Right. We basically control the scripts of how we talk about those things and how we make sure people realize it's not gay. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And it starts really young. So they're in high school, for instance, guys will play
00:22:10
Speaker
sometimes called a gay chicken game, but there's various versions of this, which is like, let's see how close we can get our faces to one another and whoever freaks out first is probably gay. Or I'm going to run my hand, I'm going to start at your ankle and slowly run my hand up your inner thigh.
00:22:28
Speaker
These are really interesting games if you think about it because is A, a way for young boys to really have an intimate moment with each other, but in the service of expressing their heterosexuality, the idea isn't let's have this like queer intimate moment. The idea is supposed to be let's use this touching as a way to prove our heterosexuality.
00:22:54
Speaker
And that's actually how a lot of this kind of contact looks for straight, identified white men. And so the other fascinating thing about those kinds of gay chicken tests is that they're also, the presumption is that the one who withdraws is the one who's actually gay because that person is confronted with maybe their authentic sexual orientation. But what does that imply about the other one? What it implies about the other one is that you're truly straight.
00:23:24
Speaker
and you're so secure in your straightness, you could do anything with another guy and it's not gonna have any lasting impact. It's not gonna be significant for you. And we see that over and over again in the military in particular, where homosexual, like very intimate anal penetration, hand to penis, hand to mouth, mouth to anus, these kinds of things are built into some of the hazing rituals in the military that I describe in the book.
00:23:50
Speaker
And they're understood not as signs of weakness or homosexual identity, but as actually opportunities to demonstrate one's resilience and to demonstrate that one has such a powerful heterosexuality that even putting your mouth on another guy's butt doesn't threaten it.
00:24:11
Speaker
Right. It is counterintuitive, but it makes so much sense because I grew up in these hyper-masculine environments and I'm thinking of high school and summer camp I went to and the guys who were not homophobic at all and willing to do stuff and willing to be naked around other people, that actually made them seem more straight in the scripts we were writing together and they performed their heterosexuality in that way.
00:24:40
Speaker
I never realized that growing up. I never saw it that way. And then I read this and I was like, oh, that is what was going on. And what if underneath all of that, everyone really just does want to try this stuff out and see what it would be like to be naked with a group of guys or like have a circle jerk or like, I remember at camp, there was a time where the older campers came into the younger cabin and told us we were going to have to do a circle jerk and the last person would eat it.
00:25:09
Speaker
And then they left the room and freaked us out and everyone's scared for a few minutes. And then they came back in and said, just kidding, you don't have to do it. But it was the guys, like I was freaked out about that. It was very charged for me. Whereas other people pretended to not care at all. They were so secure. They were like, OK, let's do it. Yeah, I'm so straight that this doesn't threaten me at all. And I'm excited about this. But that's so counterintuitive to be like the straight guy who's excited for the circle jerk.
00:25:37
Speaker
Right. That paradox is, I think, precisely why it's often hard to find to locate straight white men's sexual fluidity or why it has been so invisible. It's not just that it's hard to locate it, but it's also that
00:25:54
Speaker
People are very defensive about it. You know, it's gone by so many other names. Facultative, homosexuality, opportunistic homosexuality, situational homosexuality. These are all these terms that psychologists have used to argue that sometimes people will engage in a homosexual sex practice.
00:26:14
Speaker
but it does not have any identitarian meaning for them because they're only doing it because you know an opposite sex partner wasn't available or because they're locked up in prison or whatever.
00:26:33
Speaker
Let's jump to that. Let's talk a little bit about some of those areas where the sex between men doesn't have meaning because of where it takes place and how they talk about it. So you mentioned the necessary sort of model, which is like prison and military and maybe other things. Explain that a little. What's the script there?
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah. So the script there is that you have a bunch of straight guys and they would never ever want to touch each other. But there's some kind of story in circulation that they have to touch each other because if they don't, they're not going to get into the fraternity they want, you know, or if they don't, they won't. So that's in the college situation. If they don't, let's say it's in the military, then they won't have toughened up their body enough.
00:27:24
Speaker
or they won't have demonstrated their allegiance to the group. So anyway, the narrative, which in a way functions sort of like an alibi, which is I didn't want to do this, but I had to do it, is what I call necessary homosexuality. It's a discourse. It's not a real thing. To me, what's interesting about it is how much people believe in it, even though, of course, it's not actually true. You don't
00:27:50
Speaker
have to participate in an elephant walk. The worst thing that happens is that you don't get into that fraternity. But the people who participate in it, they kind of willingly take on the urgency of it, the significance of it. And it makes sense that they do that because in doing that, it's sort of out of their hands. It reminds me actually of a research project that I'm working on now, which is about
00:28:16
Speaker
intimacy coordinators in Hollywood. These are people who are on set for a sex scene and they help choreograph the sex scene and they work with actors to make sure that actors aren't being asked to do anything they're uncomfortable with. I've worked with some of those. Oh, okay. So I was talking with one in an interview a couple days ago and she was saying that she notices the difference between straight identified actors who are playing gay male parts. So straight men who are playing a gay male
00:28:45
Speaker
character and women actors, even when it's straight women actors who are playing a lesbian character, that straight male actors don't want to play any role in choreographing the sex scene. They're basically like, you just tell me what to do and I'll do it. Because I don't know anything about what gay sex is like. And so they feel very comforted by being just told what to do. Whereas women, even if they're straight, but they're playing a lesbian or bisexual character,
00:29:14
Speaker
They are like, well, you know, I think maybe this would look good. They're not as threatened by having some input there. And so part of what we see in straight male psychology, particularly white straight male psychology, is this idea that you cannot possibly agentically make contact with another man. You can't choose it. You can't craft it. But if it just sort of happens to you, then, you know, you're in the clear.
00:29:43
Speaker
That is really fascinating. It's an amazing microcosm of this broader thing, and it makes so much sense to me. I'm thinking about the fraternity thing you mentioned. When I was in college, I didn't join a fraternity, but I had heard these kind of stories about hazing and this stuff. I didn't realize I was not straight at that time, but I remember thinking
00:30:04
Speaker
That kind of stuff sounded interesting to me. The hazing sounded kind of fun. It wasn't something I could suggest to my friends that we do that. The reason it was appealing to me was because you were forced to do it. So you could experience that in a way that sort of made sense with my identity.
00:30:23
Speaker
Absolutely. And so I didn't join that fraternity, but anyone that did, I think they sort of know what they're getting into to a certain extent. So even though the script is that I have to do this or that it's bonding, it's still something you're choosing.
00:30:38
Speaker
Right. You know it's coming. You've heard the stories. Yeah.
Societal Norms and Gender Differences in Fluidity
00:30:42
Speaker
And straight-identified women also have an alibi, but it's fascinating to me how different it is. So for straight-identified men, the alibi is, I have to do this really uncomfortable thing to prove my manhood and my heterosexuality to a group of other straight men. I have to do gross things. I have to do demeaning things. And one of those might be sexual contact with another man.
00:31:07
Speaker
For street-identified women, the alibi is, I have to do this girl-on-girl action because it's titillating, it's exciting to straight men who are watching. And so often, street-identified women, they can kiss other women or touch other women as long as it's for a male audience. And so the difference in those two alibis is revealing, right? It tells us a lot about how heterosexuality is gendered.
00:31:36
Speaker
and how the way that heterosexuality is gendered provides different opportunities to explore, to step out of the bounds.
00:31:47
Speaker
Yeah, let's talk a little more about that, about how sexual fluidity is seen differently based on gender. You write in the book that women are generally rewarded for sexual fluidity, whereas men are not, or they're even shunned for it and they suffer greater gender regulation. How does that play out and why is that?
00:32:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think we have to have a feminist analysis there because a big part of that is that women's sexuality is constructed from the get-go as a sort of
00:32:22
Speaker
male possession, you know, that women's sexuality is for men, that women don't have much of a sexuality unless men are there to witness it. It's sort of like, you know, if a woman has sex in a forest and there's no man there to watch, did she even have sex?
00:32:40
Speaker
Yeah, so we could go very far back to look at the way that that played out. You know, this is a big part of why male homosexuality historically was criminalized. So men who engaged in sex with other men were imprisoned, institutionalized, put to the death penalty, whereas there weren't those same kinds of horrific punishments for women.
00:33:08
Speaker
It was because it wasn't believed that it was even possible for two women to have sex with one another because what could they possibly do together, you know? How could sex happen without a penis? So for that reason, which has everything to do, of course, with patriarchy, women are able to get away with
00:33:29
Speaker
much more sexual exploration. On the one hand, that is a good thing for women. We get to have a lot of hot sex that has been without as much consequence. But on the other hand, the reason for that is that our sexuality is not taken seriously. Right.
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah, and it's also people's perceptions of fluid sexuality is very patriarchal and male-centric because I think a lot of people assume that fluid by queer women are really straight, or eventually they'll be straight, whereas fluid men are really gay. And the assumption is that everyone must really want to be with a man, right? Right.
00:34:08
Speaker
Yeah, and if we had a gender hierarchy in which women were on top, and if everything about men's sexuality was presumed to be for women in the service of women, and if women thought that it was hot when two men kissed each other or something like that,
00:34:24
Speaker
then we would see things playing out very differently. But instead, the reverse is true, that men see two lesbians and they think, oh, that's for me. That's for me. So therefore, it's easy to script it as heterosexual. If more straight women were interested in watching two men have sex with each other, if they looked at that and thought, that's for me,
00:34:49
Speaker
then I think there'd probably be more room there for men to understand that as at least a bisexual practice, if not sometimes a practice that had heterosexual meaning. I don't know that that's the direction that we really want to move in, but it is interesting to kind of take one framework and think about just as a thought project what would it be like if we applied it to the other gender.
00:35:12
Speaker
Right. It highlights the inequity. Right. And all of this stems from this patriarchal system because I think I read this in the book that the people who have been telling us about sexuality for most of the history of this country are white men, basically, right? Like the scientists, the psychologists, the people studying this and setting the norms were white men.
00:35:34
Speaker
Right. And they defined in the 20th century, they defined normal sexuality, what is normal, healthy sexuality as the sexuality of a straight white man. Yeah, as their own. As their own. Right. So, you know, I talk about in the book how black men and women
00:35:55
Speaker
were pathologized and especially around issues of sexuality that black men were understood to have predatory sexuality, out of control sexuality, that black women were hypersexual, that you couldn't really violate a black woman's sexuality because she was sort of infinitely sexual.
00:36:15
Speaker
White women were often cast as sexually frigid as needing to be balanced out by male sexual energies because they were so virtuous that they kind of put a boundary around sexuality. So everybody in different kinds of ways had an inferior sexual expression relative to straight white men.
00:36:39
Speaker
Now, that wasn't the reality, but that was the story that straight white men told about themselves in order to place themselves at the top of this hierarchy of sexual normalcy.
00:36:58
Speaker
I think that when I identified as straight before I saw this stuff that was invisible to me, I resisted this kind of analysis because it felt like it blamed me for this system. And then the more I've learned, and actually from your book and from a very close friend who kind of explained patriarchy to me,
00:37:20
Speaker
She sort of told me that patriarchy can hurt the people at the top of that system, too. Like, it is a hierarchy, but even if you're at the top and you benefit from it and you have all this privilege that may be invisible, you're still being boxed into norms and things, and you're repressing things that would be natural to express. And that really helped me not feel blamed and understand the system more.
00:37:47
Speaker
Do you agree with that? I absolutely agree with that. I think, you know, these systems of violence and oppression, they dehumanize and degrade us all. And in some ways I feel like patriarchy
00:38:03
Speaker
I mean, if you think about Donald Trump, for example, he's such a pathetic, degraded human being. Agreed. And you can see so clearly that he has been degraded. He has been damaged, really damaged by his own privilege, such that he cannot see the world clearly.
00:38:29
Speaker
So I absolutely feel that way. I think whiteness does that to white people and I think, you know, patriarchy does that to men. But the other important thing about that is that it's not ever really just about any individual man. It's about a patriarchal system. So within that, individual men can make tremendous progress towards like, you know, seeing their position within that, questioning their position within that. And so that's
00:38:58
Speaker
you know, men are always invited to be feminists, you know, just like get on board. We're waiting for you.
Conclusion and Teasers for Part Two
00:39:04
Speaker
Yes, good. Well, hopefully some more and more and more of us will notice this stuff and enjoy the bandwagon. It actually reminds me of this quote from your book that
00:39:14
Speaker
was really an aha moment for me. And it's about Freud, you mentioned Freud and other psychologists and philosophers, and you argue that men have to repress homosexual desires in order to achieve heterosexuality and normative gender, that this loss of possibilities can't be grieved openly.
00:39:32
Speaker
and that this produces a unique form of melancholy, a kind of repressed sadness that is generated as heteromasculinity. When I read that, I was like, oh my God, that's me. And I had that loss and I couldn't grieve it and I couldn't even put my finger on it. And it really sort of all started to make sense when I read that.
00:39:56
Speaker
So can you explain that further? Does that happen to everyone or is it possible or like how do you know if that's happening to you? Yeah well I think we all humans are social beings and we all want to have intimacy and we want to have intimacy with
00:40:14
Speaker
all the people in our lives that we care about, you know, beginning very formatively with our parents. Most children have people, adults of the same sex and adults of the opposite sex, in their lives who are very significant and to whom they're very attached.
00:40:29
Speaker
when you will take little boys, since we're talking about two bi guys, when you're a little boy and you start to grow up and you're told that you're not supposed to cry, you're told that you're supposed to like little girls more than you like little boys, you should be a real heartbreaker, you know, just all the stuff that little boys learn, that you should suck it up, not be a pussy, all of that.
00:40:54
Speaker
Each one of those is asking a young boy to suppress or disavow a part of himself that was there. You don't need to tell him not to cry if he wasn't already crying. He was already crying because humans cry. That's what people do. So what happens to that disavowed part of the self that wants to connect for that little boy that wants to connect with other little boys holding their hands?
00:41:24
Speaker
I mean, I'm not saying every man wants to have sex with other men. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that every man wants to have intimacy with other men and that the more that opportunity is denied him, the more distorted the desire will become. I believe that.
00:41:47
Speaker
I think that is true for everyone, that we have to have an outlet for those basic human cravings.
00:41:55
Speaker
Yes, that makes so much sense and the distortion of that makes sense too because as I got older and older the path to exploring those kinds of things becomes narrower and narrower as my identity was like more ingrained as a straight man and therefore the ways you can imagine to explore this stuff become much more specific and deviant sometimes and like you can't just hold your friend's hand like you might have been able to at age five you have to sort of
00:42:24
Speaker
go to Craigslist and find an anonymous encounter. And the whole thing and reading your book and my understanding queerness, it's interesting you differentiate between sex or sexuality and intimacy. And I think all different types of relationships, queerness sort of opens up understanding relationships as a spectrum too. And they're not society boxes them into like, this is a romantic relationship. This is a friendship. This is a family relationship.
00:42:52
Speaker
there are different rules for all of those. But why is that? And who makes those rules? And why can't a relationship cross those boundaries, right? Yeah. And then, you know, ultimately, in trying to answer those questions, we get back to patriarchy again, because the investment in this whole system is keeping women's sexuality attached to men. Because so, so much is connected to that. Yeah. There's issues around
00:43:21
Speaker
just women's autonomy, abortion, rape culture. It's just like such an intricate web of patriarchal institutions. And so what we're talking about in many ways, I think, is such a perfect example of how men are hurt by that. Because under heteronormativity, if men are required to possess women to express their sexuality only in and through dominance over women,
00:43:48
Speaker
Well, that doesn't only hurt women and also shuts down so many other ways that male sexuality could be expressing itself. So that was part one of Jane's interview with Rob. Yes, lots more to come. Yeah. And also next week, Alex and I will talk a little more about some of our experiences with and as straight identified men doing some not so straight stuff. Yeah. Bringing some of this theoretical discussion that's happening into a little bit more of that concrete
00:44:18
Speaker
You know, some anecdotal evidence for you. Yeah. So stay tuned for that and thanks for listening. Our music is by Ross Mincer, graphic design by Caitlin Weinman. This podcast is edited by Moxie Pung and is also produced by Moxie Pung, Matt Loomis, Rob Cohen, and me, Alex Boyd. Thanks for listening to Two Bye Guys.