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TOO-SAFE SEX? (ADDENDA)
June 22nd, 1999 by Clark Humphrey

YESTERDAY, I SEARCHED for signs that today’s young singles were ready to move beyond the anti-intimacy, consumeristic hedonism too prevalant in an allegedly “sex positive culture” of porn, vibrators, S/M, et al. Today, some postscripts.

Postscript #1: On Friday, I chatted with the Dutch magazine writer who’d interviewed me back in ’97 about “life after grunge.” This time, she was writing about how hard it was to start a relationship in Seattle, especially for men, and why this might be so. She wondered if Seattle women were “too politically correct,” too obsessed with propriety and power to risk the uncertainty of emotional closeness, to open themselves up emotionally to others, or even to acknowledge men as having souls.

(Update: The writer in question emailed the following addition to this discussion Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”)

I didn’t see the situation as bleakly as she did; but I had to agree on certain points.

This has long been a bourgeois town; a repressed-Scandinavian-via-Minnesota town; a place of lawyers and engineers and college administrators who defined themselves by their supposedly superior “taste” and social bearing, compared to the farmers and loggers supposedly out there in most of the rest of the west. It’s also been a town of strong women, who built social institutions and fought for such “civilizing” movements as Prohibition.

Mix that heritage up with today’s capitalist rugged-individualism and “feminist” ideologies that sometimes merely exchange one set of overgeneralized gender-stereotypes for another, and you end up with a city of men who need women and women who claim they don’t need men.

A city where casual sex (at least in some subcultural circles) is often available, but where anything more substantive is blocked by women afraid to let their guard down and men afraid to even ask for anything, lest they be immediately denounced as “a typical male.”

The old sexism stereotyped women as either virgins or sluts; the new sexism, at least as practiced around here, stereotypes men as either wimps or creeps.

But there are ways beyond this new double standard; speaking of which…

Postscript #2: On Saturday, I saw the Fremont Solstice Parade, with its apparently-now-annual rite of nude, mostly male, bicyclists before and between the oh-so-funky floats and bands. This year there were some real nudies, some fakes in anatomically-correct body stockings (of the wearers’ own or opposite gender), and some “almosts” clad in loincloths or streamer tape.

This spectacle of male exhibitionism (before a co-ed, all-ages audience) was unthreatening yet still more robust and joyous than the foreboding wholesomeness of organized nudism. It demystified the male organ, that most taboo-to-reveal of either gender’s body parts. A man can indeed take healthy pride in himself without being a creep about it. Male sexuality, these true rebel bikers showed, is nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.

That’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s a start.

Postscript #3: Matthew DeBord, writing in the online zine Feed, suggests the answer to the dilemma of sensitive straight boys feeling too ashamed of their manhood is to listen to role-models for positive self expression–then names the lesbian band Sleater-Kinney as an example.

The problem, of course, is that a self-defeatist straight boy can be all too willing to allow lesbians to express self-confidence but to still wallow in misappropriated gender-guilt himself. I say, better to have male role models who are males themselves, to better break through the new double standards.

Tomorrow: Some male singer-songwriters who depict relationship-angst as something risky but beautiful and necessary.


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