I love that gay men can unironically select those two boxes. Not that the two are necessarily contradictory, I suppose, but I mean the root of bitchy -- "bitch" -- is at root a gendered female noun. I think what's actually going on here is that sissies aren't willing to self-categorize as "Feminine," and instead I'd imagine the vast majority of Gay.com users ID as "Masculine / Butch." It's no fault of their own, really, but rather a gay culture that privileges masculinity on high while scrambling to conceal / cloak / disown femininity.
When guys ask me if I'm masculine in the first few minutes of an online conversation, I say goodbye. Because there's only one right answer -- no matter how much of a fag you are in real life. I'm not willing to play that game anymore.
Sigh.
oh trevor, what i love most about you is that you spend all this time analyzing gay.com/etc. and you actually come out of it with more than an STD. i'm so impressed :-)
Hi Trevor,
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HA! I had a chuckle reading this. "bitch/butch" notwithstanding, its all about subverting the binaries isn't it? And I think gay men do this either with confidence or with some inherent confusion...or sometimes both. Interesting.
Hey QinCin! Long time no comment. Glad you're still following along. I've been meaning to update my blogroll and swap some folks around to add you. I'm procrastinating in a cafe at the moment, so perhaps I'll get to that now.
Kush, I don't read this as subverting any binaries. I understand what you're pointing to, but I don't think these guys are "really" "masculine / butch" and "bitchy." Rather, I think these guys are afraid to check the "In the middle" or "Feminine" box for gender for fear of what it might do to their sex lives. And they're probably right. In general in our gay worlds, masculinity is sexualized while femininity is castrated.
Try this thought experiment: Can we think of any sexy, super femme gay men in the media? In gay porn? Even twinkboy porn is still committed to a kind of adolescent masculinity generally, a kind of a Greek throwback to fetishized boydom. I've only seen one exception here, and that's the "Super Twink" line of porn. You'll notice that he has to go REALLY far in presentation of femininity, with extreme makeup and elaborate costumes. But it's an interesting start.
Hey Trevor, this is super interesting. But let me be a little provocative here. More than the castration complex, I am always a little perturbed when media is made out to be the mainstream. I mean, following the classic ice-berg theory, the media is just 10% of our otherwise diverse gay universe. Then what makes some of us often draw conclusions or better still, "mold" our sex-lives based on goings-on in that 10%?
Well it's in part because of visibility, right? We often measure our success as a community by the gay faces we see reflected back at us on TV, in magazines, etc.
I'm not sure we "mold" our sex lives based on that media exposure though. I'm a much more firm believer in community normalization through things like Internet chat rooms, bars and night clubs, and of course sex clubs and bathhouses. Those are the big gay institutions, right? My post here evidences the masculine norms of the Internet. Bars and nightclubs may indeed have some exception here. And I'm not sure about bathhouses and sex clubs -- I would tend to think that muscle / hair / brawn goes further than smooth / femme / boyish. But I'm sure that's contextual!