This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The ‘Kathoey’ or Ladyboy designation is a more honest way of categorizing both very effeminate / camp gay men and most ‘straight’, feminine transwomen (HSTS in Blanchardian typology).
Transwomen of a kind are obviously very common. I understand there is still some social discrimination, but probably 70% of Sephora sales assistants in Thailand are ladyboys/transwomen/kathoey/your preferred term here. This is even more common than in Seattle, which I wrote about previously. In my local Sephoras (London Westfield - Shepherd’s Bush NOT Stratford, please - and Soho on Broadway I guess) there are some transwomen and a large number of very feminine, makeup wearing gay men, but something about the experience in Thailand just underscored to me how similar the two are.
It reminded me of a pioneering British local TV documentary I’d written about before, produced in the 1980s about gay life in London in the 1930s. One of the things the men make very clear is that the gay community, such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of camp, effeminate men who were to the man, in terms of sexual role, bottoms. Often they described each other, semi-ironically, with female pronouns or roles (queen etc) which are still used by many camp gay men today. The tops they had sex with were not considered part of this community. In a very real sense, they were not considered gay at all, even and perhaps most clearly by the men they were having sex with.
This wasn’t a legal distinction - a ‘top’ was still committing a crime at the time under British law in having sex with another man, and would flee the night club in the event of a police raid all the same - but it was a clear social one. The femme men themselves didn’t have sex with each other (this is, at least, implied in the documentary), only with the ‘straight’ or ‘topping’ men whom they solicited in clubs, parks, outside barracks and so on. More broadly, the sexual and communal landscape the men discuss seems to be by far the most common way in which human societies have historically understood effeminate or camp males who are primarily sexually attracted to other men. The ladyboys don’t have sex with each other for the same reason that the gay ‘queens’ of 1930 London didn’t. And then men who have sex with ladyboys - or who had sex with those men in the thirties - aren’t or weren’t gay in the same way that they were. That isn’t to say they’re straight, or not bisexual, or not anything else, but it’s clearly not the same thing. The modern Western gay identity, in which tops and bottoms (and indeed lesbians and gay men) are grouped together is essentially a consequence of the civil rights movement and AIDS crisis; it is ahistorical and unusual compared to all historical treatment of non-mainstream forms of gender and sexual identity.
Blanchard’s key contribution to the understanding of transsexualism was that he acknowledged - based on his own practice - that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness. HSTS fundamentally existed along the spectrum of camp male femininity, expressed both sexually and generally. As I understand it, the gay man at Sephora who wears a skirt, a full face of makeup and speaks in a camp, exaggerated feminine voice is - even if he is not on hormones - considered a kathoey in Thailand. And this makes sense - camp femme gay men who are sexually submissive, may wear drag etc and HSTS transwomen are often divided solely by the extent to which they are committed to presenting as female (that commitment ultimately expressed in medical intervention), and nothing else in terms of dress, presentation, sexual preference, interests and so on.
The reason why Blanchard is controversial is not his categorisation of HSTS, of course, but its inverse. The non-HSTS, the top-who-transitions, the man (often in Blanchard’s own experience) who decides after 30+ years of normal heterosexual life, marriage, children, relationships with only women etc, that he is actually a woman, is not part of this long continuity of effeminate homosexual males. He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity. In naming the autogynephilic transsexual man, Blanchard acknowledged a sexual identity largely divorced from sexuality (consider that many if not most AGP are attracted to women at least before heroic doses of female hormones, meaning their sexual identity is not a key part of their transition). The AGP male is closer to the archetypal modern fetishist (I won’t name examples because inevitably that will devolve into a pointless argument), except that the object of his attraction is inverted. His motivations for womanhood are completely different to those of the HSTS, but our understanding of trans identity doesn’t allow us to acknowledge this essential difference.
If an argument one occasionally hears about clearly differentiating HSTS and AGP is that it is impossible to tell the difference, I think the Thai example is a good counterargument. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen. They are, of course, interested in relationships with men, with males, because they are gay males, but that is about it. They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.
Blanchard’s theory is true in the sense that AGP and HSTS populations exist, but it’s overly reductive in the sense that they’re not the only categories of trans people out there. Of course, it was more accurate than the previous view at the time which would lump them all together in a single one.
I don’t think AGP males are a product of modernity - the only thing that’s new is ability to transition using hormones and surgery, and to do it openly without it being instant social and professional suicide (not that there are no social costs now, but it’s completely different to say, the 1950s).
Men who are sexually into wearing female clothing and find the idea of being a woman erotic have probably been around since the earliest proto civilisations (see François-Timoléon de Choisy, who probably lied about seeing the royal family dressed as a woman, but not about being aroused by wearing a corset).
A trans identity that’s truly the product of modernity would be the autistic, nerdy, often terminally online kind (both trans masculine and trans feminine). A 50 year old masculine married man with children who transitions after years of hiding his crossdressing habit from his wife, is not the same as teen for whom transitioning is an escape from the social and physiological pressures of their biological sex. Body dysmorphia, sensory issues, discomfort with heterosexual norms, etc. would be the primary motivations - maybe those individuals would have been celibate monks or nuns in the past, when monastery life and asceticism was a viable alternative to the normal life script.
It’s very clear when you look at a significant proportion of trans masculine individuals, their goal seems to be more to “not be a woman” rather than to be a man. The same exists for males too - see this post by Duncan Fabien which made the concept click for me.
Reading that essay, it appears that Duncan's primary error is that he over-values the 10-year-old-self. Liking transformer robots and looking like Jimmy Neutron is no more optimal than liking the process of sex just because liking the process of sex comes later.
It’s not about either preference being more optimal, or consciously valuing the 10 year old self more than the present self. It’s about sexuality being this uncontrollable compulsion that’s suddenly injected in your brain, and in people like Duncan (and I, before I transitioned), it doesn’t feel like it’s “you” that likes or wants sex.
Like I’m absolutely fine with my preferences shifting across time, discovering new hobbies, becoming a mature adult with a mortgage and a pension fund. But in my case, a preference for sex didn’t feel like I tried something new, liked it, and consciously decided to keep doing it. It felt like there was an alien invader in my brain that I had to pacify so I could get back to doing the things I actually liked. I didn’t actually want sex in the way that my biology was pushing me to want it. It felt like losing control over who I was, in the same way someone might suffer from binge eating when stressed - a completely different experience from being a foodie who occasionally overeats when they go to a very good restaurant.
Most people don’t seem to have trouble integrating their sexuality into their selves. They see their sexual preferences as “theirs”. Maybe something about being autistic can lead to your sense of self crystallise too early and prevents you from tolerating changes, or maybe it causes a mental separation between the self and “base” desires, I don’t know.
But at the end of the day, my happiness and quality of life is enhanced when I take medication that lets me feel like my sexuality is on my own terms.
I'm very much a cis male, but I do find this relatable. In some ways the impulses of male sexuality are annoying and distracting rather than fulfilling.
But in my case there are a lot of hypotheses that can easily explain it without reference to an etiological mismatch: religious upbringing, teenage dissatisfaction, but especially being inundated with feminist memes from tumblr when I was young, that have me walking on eggshells to know what's helpful. In a sense you could say that every superegoistic (to borrow without endorsement a Freudian term) influence on me has been about how my sexuality could go wrong, so it's very, very hard for me to intuitively know where it could go right. It's a lot easier to eject sexuality from your conception of the self if you see it as corrupting rather than enlivening. Repression and/or viewing sexuality as egodystonic seems like a common result of that kind of pressure, as it sometimes is for me.
I do wonder if some of the 'flight from masculinity' you talked about some men having has to do with that; the male sexual role asks much, and in modern times with limited and radically contradictory guidance, and I think it's much harder for men these days to understand who they're supposed to be than it might have been in the past. I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.
I've been meaning to write an effortpost on how male sexuality and male romanticism align or sometimes don't align, but I'm often reluctant because, as much as my posts here are highly confessional, I worry about exposing too much of my internal gears to culture war analysis, and anyway I'm concerned about reinforcing the belief that men are walking sex pests whose sexuality is inherently disordered rather than simply a biological urge that you can deal with in a healthy or an unhealthy way.
I’d love to read more about your perspective and experience on this! Growing up I felt like I was the only one having trouble integrating male sexuality into my sense of self, and standard narrative, from my peers, media, parents was just completely alien. Obviously I gave up in the end and went with the nuclear option, but maybe there would be a world where I didn’t had if the discourse was different.
Or maybe not. I didn’t even have the external pressures you described. My upbringing was irreligious and vaguely sex-positive, and I grew up before Tumblr was even a thing back when “boys will be boys” was still used unironically as an excuse. I’m not sure the problem is lack of guidance. I was already uncomfortable being told the default heterosexual dating script, and if was told explicitly by society that as a man, I must be (all the things that were the opposite of my personality and desires), I probably would have given up much earlier.
What happens if you don’t put on the mask and just stay who you are when interacting romantically or in the bedroom?
I feel like you’d be missing out on so much if you can’t be authentically yourself with your partner. Sex when you’re just acting out a persona in order to please your partner… that just means you’re both getting cheated out of real human connection, no? What’s the point then?
Hey Rae, I took my time with this response because I wanted to get it right. February, like @OliveTapenade said, was gender month on the motte, and it seems like February won't be much different.
A Portrait of Urquan
I wouldn't say that I struggled to integrate male sexuality with my self identity, but more that I struggled to reconcile my personal sexuality and experience of the world, which I've always experienced as male or as cis-by-default, with what was expected of me by society. I've never experienced gender dysphoria, or felt that my penis and the various things which one might endeavor to do with the penis, were strange or foreign to me.
Now, I do have some personality traits that are commonly considered more 'feminine', and have created tension for me in male friendships. I don't enjoy competitive hobbies, like team sports or multiplayer video games. I'm not socially dominant, I don't enjoy teasing-as-bonding, and I tend to be more of a listener in a conversation. It's frequent that after hanging out with someone or going on a date, the other person will say, "Wow, I really talked your ears off, didn't I? I'm sorry I monopolized the conversation."
I enjoy feelings-talk as much as ideas-talk, and my preferred mode of social bonding is to be with one person, or a small group, and listen to how they tell the story of their life, what moves them, what kind of dreams they have, what they care about, what the meaning of life is to them. I enjoy deep chats about life and meaning.
It's a frequent occurrence that any time I try to hang out with male friends, they will proceed to play some kind of competitive local multiplayer video game like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, in the old days Halo, etc. I will often be sitting off to the sidelines because I don't enjoy that kind of experience, and it's been a real tension in male friendship groups I've been a part of that I'm the odd one out, people try to include me, I reassure them that I'm enjoying watching... it's kind of like when you invite your girlfriend to a hangout with the guys and she ends up playing with the dog. That's me, but I'm one of the guys.
When I play video games, I prefer to immerse myself in the story, build a character that I give a backstory to, and use creative tools in the game to express my character's position and identity in the world. Stardew Valley (which a friend once described as "such a girl game") is one of my favorite games of all time. I see video games as interactive stories and creative expression tools, not mechanics in which to demonstrate mastery. I play games on story mode.
Basically the only social experiences that leave me with a feeling of satisfaction are one-on-one, deep chats. I enjoy laughing and having fun with people, but I just am a very intense, and very private, person, and I enjoy bringing other people into my world, and seeing what their world looks like to them.
Love According to Urquan
As I've shared before on the motte, my model of intimacy and relationships is deep and passionate. I see romance as a means of seeing oneself in the other. It's not principally about resources or even sex-qua-sex, but about being close to someone in the special way that romance brings you close. I don't know how to describe it or break it down. There's a je ne sais quoi to romantic intimacy that I can't describe to people who've never experienced it. It's not lust, it's the desire for union of the soul, where someone else becomes an extension of yourself. It's butterflies and it's the feeling that you've entered the kairos -- the special time, the appointed time, when even going to work and doing boring work things feels buoyant. Where the world feels enchanted and beautiful again, the way it always felt when I was young.
When I was a teenager I wrote this:
Oh - and I'm also into classic poetry. Can't you tell?
The main tensions with the male social role I've had have been that I struggle to "slot in" seamlessly to male social groups, as I've suggested, and that I've struggled to find the kind of intimacy that's meaningful to me. A lot of flirting includes the very kind of social engagement that I find unintuitive or unnatural: playful teasing, inexplicit boundary testing, displays of bravado and confidence, sexual confidence. But if it's supremely creepy to begin a conversation with a woman by saying you want to sleep with her, it's massively more insane to begin a conversation by saying, "I'm looking for the kind of love that makes the world beautiful and I want to merge our souls together." But that's what I've always looked for: someone to whom I can expose the reality of my capacity for passion, someone whose eyes I can stare deeply into, someone whose vulnerability and pain I can absorb and comfort.
Because I see love as a means of intimate union and mutual vulnerability, I come into tension both with the expectations of men and of women. In general, men find that kind of thing to be 'girl-talk,' suitable for 'chick-lit,' the kind of thing you invent to reassure your girlfriend, not a mode of thought you inhabit for yourself. Women find it, in men, somewhere between "impossible to find" and "impossible to exist," and there exists few to no kinds of reliable signals that can communicate to a woman that's what you're looking for. Because establishing a relationship where those concepts make sense requires early-stage flirting and dating, I've often felt like I have to suppress the very motivation that drives me to seek intimacy in order to engage in meaningless banter and playful teasing. That doesn't feel like me.
There's also the sexual shame element, I personally am low in sociosexuality, and I find the idea of having sex with someone I don't know well to be deeply uncomfortable. I've done it, but always with regret and a feeling of emptiness and being used that made me want to scrub my body with such an immensity of soap that my skin would burn. So I feel like I've often swam massively against the current, having to compete with hookup bros in a market for lemons, and facing skepticism from women who expect from me a kind of sexual bravado and indifference to social convention that feels totally foreign to me.
I don't see any of my traits as incompatible with being a man. I just see them as incompatible with the carrots and the sticks that surround the socially-constructed model of what a man is. That kind of model is obviously based in reality -- men really do prefer playing multiplayer games together instead of talking about their feelings, as my own experiences would attest -- but what men reward in other men, and especially what women reward in men, operate according to a certain pattern which isn't necessarily my own.
Queer Theory-ing Urquan
There's a stereotype of gay men among normies that they're sensitive, moody, artistic, poetic, romantic boys who just need a well. Accordingly, I was sometimes bullied as a kid for being 'gay' in that sense. This stereotype shows up all over popular culture; one of the more absurd examples is "The Battle of Schrute Farms" from The American Office, where this purported Civil War battle is actually a gay commune, described thus:
In other words, if you're a pacifist, if you're artistic, if you like poetry, if you're not socially dominant, it logically follows that you really must want to suck cock. Seems we have some professors of logic down at the university of science who put a lot of thought into that one.
Our scripts of masculinity have taken everything found "unmanly," bundled them into an archetype, and slapped the label 'queer' on them. The Romantic poets of the past who wrote elegies about their romances with women would be labeled as the queerest queers who ever queered by our modern views of gender, even among progressives. Maybe especially among progressives, for dumb reasons.
Supposedly I'm doing "queer theory" right now, but if you actually sit in a university classroom where undergraduates try to use queer theory as an interpretive lens for historical literature, it's basically the least queer-theory interpretation possible because it consists of viewing any friendly or intimate connection between men as homoerotic. Postmodernism consists of incredulity toward metanarratives, except of course the metanarratives where everybody's fucking gay.
(I will give them the theater kids, though, the majority of the theater kids at my high school were gay or lesbian. I will also give the bisexuals Shakespeare if they wish to have him.)
Maybe such feminine traits are more common among gay men than straight men -- I don't know -- but I do suspect that whatever such traits exist are themselves ground down by
the cock and the whipthe carrot and the stick that gay men have to face, where intimacy is damnable heteronormativity and hookups are liberatory. You will suck the cock after five minutes of chatting and you will like it.I'm principally attracted to women, though with a limited ability to find very femme men attractive (stereotype fulfillment?). My youthful explorations of the gay social scene gave me the impression that, there, I'd find it much harder to locate the kind of intimacy I actually find valuable. It was like looking for love in a world filled only "with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls." What I think Ginsberg missed is that the ecstatic sexual world is as much a part of Moloch as any number of demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses!, or indeed granite cocks!, to those who do not fit its rigid vision of freedom.
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
I can understand why someone with a personality such as you've described about yourself would find gender transition appealing. The default for an AMAB individual with an attraction to men is the gay social scene, which amplifies most of the very things I find discomforting about the male sexual role into almost a comedic parody. I note with almost existential irony the fact that the ultimate immoral mistake for a man to make when flirting with a woman is to send her an unrequested dick pic, while gay men treat dick pics almost as the equivalent of a hello. I'd be interested if @gattsuru has a more nuanced take -- my own experiences of the gay social world were basically college activists and horny college twinks, and they... have their own peculiar way of things.
I don't know what sensitive men like me are supposed to do, or what the world expects of us. We are strange to men, and invisible to women.
(Edited to add: Exhibit A. See what I mean about carrots and sticks?)
The Masked Urquan
Now, let me answer your direct question:
Well, the honest answer is, "nothing happens," and there is no "bedroom" in which sex would happen, regardless. At least in early stage flirting, I have to go outside my comfort zone to get to the point where I could be more like myself.
But as for the second part, I guess it's partway related to the fact that I've dated some more... kinky women. My imagined model of a sexual encounter is very personal, very intimate, low and slow, "I love you so much," kissing, holding each other while going at it -- that sort of thing. I've had that, and I value it a lot. That's typically the "porn for women" script, and it's what stereotypes tend to assume women want from sex.
But stereotypes often also assume that women just... don't want sex that much at all, which isn't true. In the post-Fifty-Shades era, it's pretty clear that a decent chunk of women like dirty, kinky, dom/sub, rough, dirty talking behavior in the bedroom. That's the element that felt more foreign to me when I first encountered it. I never had as much trouble as the "Yeah...you like that, you fucking retard?" guy, but it definitely was hard to adapt to it.
But I feel you, sex is for me about 'real human connection,' just like you said. I guess I've tolerated that stuff because, well, it really turned them on, and women are hard enough to please sexually that if something just does it for them, I'm happy for the opportunity to give it. In the post-orgasm-gap-discussion world, the assumption that vaginal intercourse to completion on male terms constitutes the sex act has collapsed, and you're pretty much obligated as a man to do something that isn't necessarily your #1 thing in order to please your partner sexually.
I hope that answers your question. Obviously I'm exposing some vulnerable things on the forum here, but you've been open with me and I felt compelled to return the favor. If anything stands out to you, I'm happy to elaborate to an extent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link