Why are people in the U.S. so afraid of homosexuality?  [Anyone who doubts that people are afraid of gay should watch a few Brüno clips.]

Disclaimer:

1. I do not think that homosexual people are poop.  Rather, I think that this is the position the heterosexual matrix puts them in.  This is tragic and terrible.
2. However, I think this position can be described otherwise, and appropriated as a site of power from which to destabilize discussions concerning homosexuality.
3. Read on!

One possible answer to why many fear homosexuality, following Judith Butler, has to do with identity and social excrement.  So . . . Identity is not something innate.  Identity is formed through “regulatory practices” –the laws, interactions, and discourses that try to regulate social life.  One of these regulatory practices is “sex” (you know, binary, hetero, sex).

In order for “sex,” or lets say, “the heterosexual matrix,” to regulate identity, it has to define itself against something; it has to refuse what it is not.  So, homosexuality becomes refuse, excrement.  It is the necessary remainder, the deviation, the “outside” of the matrix.  In order to maintain a heterosexual identity, there must exist powerful forces that guard the constructed boundary between inside and outside, in this case, between hetero and homo.

The catch is that these boundaries are never absolute.  After all, we know that where there is excrement, there is orifice.  Where there is orifice there is the potential for things to both go out AND come in.  To follow the metaphor, there are many orifices, or weak points, that threaten to disrupt the heterosexual matrix.  On an individual level, for a “heterosexual,” this means that homosexuality is doubly threatening: 1) it threatens the person’s very identity 2) because, it undermines the entire matrix of practices that constitute heterosexuality.

In short, homosexuality is so scary because recognizing it means that the stuff you worked so hard to push out is coming back in, and that puts the whole system out of whack.

I love Anthony Bourdain. If the folds in his chef hat symbolized his personality 99% of them would represent crass sarcasm. And 1% of them would hint at good time sincerity. Perfect. Just how I like all my food/travel shows. And while watching his show last night I felt like he had read my mind. In fact, my journal. The show was titled “Food Porn“.

Being a woman who loves her food and her carnal delights, putting the two together sometimes seems like a natural blend. But back up. I’m not talking about combining the two. I’m talking about replacing one with the other. Follow me back in time about a month…

I have a creativity board in my office (space). I pin up pictures, fabric, sticks, leaves, jewelery, and whatever else I can pin to cork board. I use it as a space to create moods and play with inspiration. And on this particular day the mood I wanted to create was sexual passion.

I thumbed for pictures through about 12 magazines (yes, I read a lot of magazines) and realized that I had found ONE picture. One! Not ready to give up I moved to a second stack of magazines and started finding pictures instantly. But wait. None of these pictures had people in them.

The pictures were all of food. A close up of deep red, steamed cherries in bourbon and phyllo dough, a picture of a hand gently swirling rich red wine in a glass, figs on a wood cutting board with melted chocolate. Are you feeling tingly yet?

When I stopped to think about it, it didn’t seem unusual. Is it possible that we have replaced human sexuality with food sensuality?

We all fall into some of the pattern behaviors. Favorite quickies at a taco stand, pho, or dare I say it…name brand fast food joints. Or perhaps your into Tantric: seven courses, drinks, bread, appetizers, salad, soup, main course and an explosively fabulous dessert. No need to finish with a cigarette, just have a wonderfully rich cup of bitter coffee. Or maybe you’re into something off the books, that hole in the wall foreign food place that you just can’t get enough of, but that everyone is sure you’re gonna catch something from.

And food, food you can enjoy in public. And in groups. And you can pay for when you aren’t getting enough at home. We’re encouraged to have it when we wake up, at noon and in the evenings. Hello. Yes please. And other bonuses may include but are not limited to: while feeling guilty the morning after there’s no fear of “oh my god, will this meal ask me for college tuition in 18 years?” or “will this meal ignore me at work or forget to call?”.

Back to my inspiration board. Are my only options for sexuality or sensuality Playboy or Gourmet? Well, at this point, my board remains half filled. The rest is left to my imagination.

What about you? Do you think we’ve replaced human sensuality with food? Or perhaps given food a more prominent and hallowed place in our society? Is this a problem?

Am I a capitalist in the bedroom? Consuming a product? Becoming a product? In which case, is my intercourse cascading into the simulacrum of the pornographic? Or, am I the triune layity of ego, superego, and id? Am I a kid playing playing games? An adult creating? A creature? An American? A caucasian male?

I know that these abstactions functions to estrange us from sex, but that’s just the symptom of a larger problem. One that can’t be solved without parsing the lack of a clear predicate.

And maybe that’s the problem. I don’t have sex any more. They do. Maybe it’s the fragmenting of the subject that makes the predicate so difficult. Maybe when my predicate flows easier (I am…), other predicates follow suit.

Does unity (or, perhaps better said, a lack of fracture) within the subject save us from estrangment?

As I started to think about this more, it hit me that portrayals of fetish in the media fall into two camps: trendy and abberant. It’s funny in American Pie 3 when Finch yells out “put a finger in my ass”, because the ass has been democritized. When the movie came out, anal play was the dirty-not-dirty.

Trouble is, fetish, as a rule, tends toward the subjective. Subjective in this sense means that our sexuality feels aberant when its not reflected in what we have mistakenly considered to be normative sexuality. In other words, if someone gets “freaky” with us in bed, we’re only supposed to like it if its generally accepted “freaky.”

So, the question becomes for me. How do we reclaim our sexuality? With something as personal and inherent as our sexual wiring, should I have to wait until my fetish is trendy to accept it? Equally as important, how much can we expect of our partener when exploring the un-democracy of sex? And finally, how do we go about freeing our fetish?

Of course, being the social neo-phyte that I am, I made this instant conversation during our Christmas breakfast prep. Over nicely browning potatoes you could hear the lovely harmony of Christmas words:

Me: “Sure, we aren’t the people in this ad, but it acts as a cultural image for us. The man is in control, the woman out of control.”

Brother-in-law: “But I don’t see rape when I see that picture; I see sex. Plus it’s Gucci, most marketing isn’t that graphic.”

Me: “But that’s the point. If we see sex there, and the man is in control…”

Brother-in-law: “I just can’t buy that Gucci is our ‘cultural image.’”

And he’s right. But the whole thing (blog, Christmast, conversation) got me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves. Rape is sex as a form of domination. Are we telling those tales? Or, is the telling of those tales creating it’s own eddy of cultural disintegration that is disconnected from the construct that created the cultural image?

It got me thinking to about who is doing the telling. Who’s behind the lens of these photo shoots? Only recently have women begun to shoot women. For time uncounted men have framed history. When I look back in time I see men, I see the phallus. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” according to Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Both are phalluses. Both have dominated history. But I digress.

There is a path of conversation that I don’t want to follow, but can’t avoid. It’s a path into sexuality. If I’m honest with myself, I can’t divorce my sexuality from power. For me, as a man, sex is, at least in part, about power. There was a time that I thought power in sex was inappropriate. I think the insidious thing about our phallocentric history is that we’ve become afraid of the power that women exhibit in sex. Men think they are more powerful than women, and so it is confounding that at the moment of what should be our greatest power (sex, or more specifically our partner’s orgasm) we find our power absolutely eclipsed. At the climax of sex, the power of a woman is revealed as wholly dominant.

Throughout most of western history the sexuality of women has been vilified, I think, for that very reason. Our cultural image could not account for the eclipse of the phallus in the act of sex.

And so, the narrative trend has been to subdue (or, in the free market, to commoditize) the female orgasm. Does that frame exist intuitively, or unconsciously, or purposefully in the Gucci image? Certainly more discussion is necessary here.

Finally, let me ask, are we still subduing the power inherent to sex by questioning rape as conformity? It strikes me that the more insidious narrative is the one that subverts the sexual power of both parties. Give men and women permission to have power, and use it.