[LINK] "Why Straight Men Have Sex With Each Other"

[rfmcdonald]

New York's Jesse Singal has an extended NSFW interview with Jane Ward, author of the upcoming book Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men. In this book, Ward seems to make the argument that self-identified straight man who have gay sex are not necessarily in the closet, whether about being gay or bisexual, but that they actually are straight. They just don't think of what they're doing as sexual, necessarily. Further into the interview, Ward makes some unsettling observations, suggesting that sexuality can be based on repulsion as much as attraction.

I'll be keeping my eyes out for this book.

There does seem to be this idea that women can do it without being seen as gay, while with men, either there’s some explanation that can explain it, or they’re gay and just don’t realize or won’t acknowledge it.

Right, and it's not just sort of conventional wisdom or conservative ideology that teaches that. I think there's been a lot of sexological and psychological research suggesting that men's sexuality is more rigid than women's and that women are inherently more sexually fluid. And what I argue in the book is that even that research is situated within some long-held beliefs about the fundamental difference between men and women that are not accurate from a feminist perspective. It's interesting, because if you look at this belief that women's sexuality is more receptive — it’s more fluid, it’s triggered by external stimuli, that women have the capacity to be sort of aroused by anything and everything — it really just reinforces what we want to believe about women, which is that women are always sexually available people.

With men, on the other hand, the idea that they have this hardwired heterosexual impulse to spread their seed and that that's relatively inflexible, also kind of reinforces the party line about heteronormativity and also frankly, patriarchy. So one selling point for me in the book was to think about, Why are we telling this really different story about women's sexuality?

You take readers on sort of a 20th-century American tour of heterosexual dabbling in homosexual behavior, and there was never a lack of evidence that such dabbling took place. You write about homosexual activity within biker gangs, for example — one Hell’s Angel, enthusiastically describing having gay sex for cash, memorably told Hunter S. Thompson, “Shit, man, the day they call me queer is when I let one of these faggos suck on me for less than a tenner.” This stuff was sort of always going in all sorts of different situations and cultural contexts, right?

Right, exactly, but what's interesting about all of those accounts is that because we’re so committed to this narrative that men's sexuality is bound by biology and can only be shifted somehow by the most extreme circumstances, the authors of those various accounts always seem to come to the conclusion that it was the very unique and particular circumstances of that context that account for why heterosexual men would act homosexually.

So if it was in prisons it was like, Well, this would only happen in prison because there are no women available, and that's how we would explain this. And people who looked at the military would say, This would only happen in the military, but no one who was looking at prisons or the military was also looking at what was happening in bathrooms or bars or living rooms or in biker gangs or all of the other contexts where, frankly, those constraints aren’t in place. And yet despite lacking any pressing reason to do so, men are still manufacturing reasons to touch each other’s anuses. So that was one of the guiding questions through the book: What happens when we pull all of this evidence together? What might we glean about straight men's sexuality?