Male Bondage

It could just be my dirty mind, but it occurred to me the other day that terms like "mancave," "manbun," and so on, remind me of gay male pornographic jargon: "mantool," "manjuice," and the like.  I don't want to press the comparison too far, but it seems to me that in both cases the prefix "man-" is intended to ease profound anxiety among the audience about their masculinity.

I'm not sure where it began -- in fact I think I first encountered the idea in cultural feminist writers -- but there was at one time a popular pseudoscientific dichotomy between women, who create womblike spaces, and men, who create pointy phallic towers.  So, for instance, "mancave" is meant to reassure a guy that he's not being swallowed up by a woman's orifice, but is in a cave that is his, perhaps built by him, for a man, without any polluting female cooties.

Taking it in the butt is scary but it's less so if a mantool is penetrating a manpussy.  Or when a Southeast Asian sissy penetrates a bigger, older man, it's okay as long as he "rolled on a condom and made manly love to Anton."

For either group, though they're probably not mutually exclusive, it's the use of fetishistic language, the mantra of "man" and "manly" and so on, that soothes and reassures the frightened little boy inside.  I shouldn't be snide.  What bothers me is not the need for reassurance, but what seems to me a stubborn refusal to engage the reasons why they're afraid.

(This post is from my Drafts folder.  There's more to be said on this subject, but this will do for now.)