"Every Man Does Not Look Like Brad Pitt"

Dave Zirin interviewed the gay ex-NFL player Wade Davis for The Nation, and alas, Davis (who is "now the executive director for the You Can Play Project", which indicates he thinks he's some kind of spokesman) didn't do a very good job.  When the inevitable "objectification" (aka "What do I do if a gay guy looks at me in the shower?") question came up, Davis said:

You know, it all comes down to having experiences. I guarantee that if Jonathan Vilma has a chance to sit down with myself or any other gay person, he’d be like, “You know what? These old ideas that I had about gay people… they really aren’t true.” It’s not all Jonathan Vilma’s fault. Our country has a very monolithic way that they show gay men—the Modern Familys and what not. The exposure’s great, but let’s have some nuance to show that there are different types of gay people, so Jonathan Vilma’s mind can expand and he can say, “Oh, every gay man doesn’t want me.” Most guys look terrible naked, and I should know. And, straight guys look too… there’s a perception that straight guys don’t check out other guys’ penises, and that’s a lie. The one difference is that some straight guys get uncomfortable and think that every gay man wants them. Wrong. Every man does not look like Brad Pitt.

The best thing here is Davis's pointing out that "straight guys look too."  It's not necessarily erotic, it's more the expression of competitive anxiety over penis size -- though such anxiety doesn't necessarily exclude erotic interest.  But yes, having spent some years in locker rooms, whether under compulsion for high school PE or of my own free will when I was working out, I know that if every man who looks at other men's bodies in a locker room is gay, there are hardly any straight guys in locker rooms. 

But aside from that, Davis's remarks are a mess.  What "looks terrible naked" is open to considerable variation, and you don't have to "look like Brad Pitt" to be desirable.  (Not all gay men want Brad Pitt in the first place.  Or Channing Tatum, or whoever.)  This is just more of the same old garbage which puts down everyone who doesn't look like a model or movie star as too ugly to fuck.  Luckily, those of us who don't look like models or movie stars still do get laid, and checked out in the showers for that matter.

Besides, I wonder how many straight men really will be reassured by being told that they're too ugly to fuck.  Again, in my experience, many straight men -- and not only straight men -- are disappointed when they find out that a given gay man isn't secretly seething with lust for them.  And some, especially athletes like Vilma, may still want to ask "But what if some gay guy does want me?"  That's easy enough: you say, "No, thanks" or "Yes, please," depending on your own wishes.  It may help to reassure them that no matter what they look like, not all gay men will want them.  On the other hand, some straight men enjoy being admired and desired.  The real problem for people like Jonathan Vilma is that they think that just being looked at, admired and desired, unmans them.  But there's nothing much they can do about that, since they'll be looked at, admired and desired even when they're fully suited up for the game.

Zirin and Davis use the word "objectification" for this, but that's too easy: not all desire objectifies, and indeed objectification doesn't have that much to do with erotic desire -- it's about control, about seeing erotic relations as a power struggle from which the man must always emerge the victor.  (For many gay men, of course, being a bottom is victory.)  Should Zirin and Davis have gone into this?  If they're going to touch on straight male anxiety about being "objectified," yes.  I don't think we're going to be able to resolve homophobia and antigay bigotry unless we can think about such things.  About thirty years ago Joanna Russ wrote:

I’ve always thought that patriarchal male sexuality must be a rather difficult business. To over-simplify: A partner’s hostility or boredom is ordinarily a real turn-off – and yet this is exactly the situation under patriarchy, where so many women are not interested, not excited, not participants, and not happy. Yet men must penetrate and ejaculate if there are to be any babies – and so the problem for patriarchy (whether you think of this as a one-time invention or a constant process) is to construct a male sexuality that can function in the face of a woman’s non-cooperation or outright fear and hostility.

As long as that's the case, and I think it is the case, it's not surprising that the existence of openly gay or bisexual people is going to generate anxiety among many heterosexuals.  That means we not only need to talk about such issues, we need to do some hard thinking about what they mean in people's real lives.

A Few Brief Notes

I mentioned the other day that many people conflate or confuse "sexual identity" and "sexual orientation."  Earlier this evening I was on a GLB panel speaking to an undergraduate class on human sexuality.  I noticed when we walked in that the instructor had projected a PowerPoint slide on the classroom wall, listing some "sexual orientations."

HOMOSEXUAL

HETEROSEXUAL

BISEXUAL

QUEER

PANSEXUAL

I'm quoting that list from memory, so I may have left out some.  I don't remember if GAY and/or LESBIAN were on the list, but they might have been.  I'm sure about those I quoted here, however.  The alert reader will have already noticed that some of the terms are not sexual orientations but identities: queer, and (I would argue) pansexual.  The latter is disputable, depending on what you consider a sex; several of our younger volunteers prefer the label pansexual because they are attracted to transgender and intersex people, so bisexual doesn't include enough sexes.  I think that pansexual is an identity that covers the same ground as bisexual, but maybe I'm an old fogey.  (I first encountered pansexual in the mid-1970s, in a rock-magazine article about Country Joe McDonald that I'll try to track down, but of course it meant something different then.  Just as bisexual has different meanings depending on context.)

Queer, however, is definitely an identity and not a sexual orientation.  The same would be true of gay or lesbian, had they been listed.  So why, in a college-level course on human sexuality, was this misinformation being disseminated to students?  I'm wondering if I ought to write the instructor and ask about this.  But for now, I just want to point it out as an example of the confusion I talked about before.

A big news item of the past few days is the coming-out of Michael Sam, a college football player who's moving into the pros this year.  Sam had told his team about himself in his senior year, and they all evidently adjusted with no problems, going on to a very successful year.  This is a novelty for professional sport, the first time a player came out at the outset of his career, rather than in its twilight or after it was over.  Of course the media are all trembly about this prospect.  Ta-Nehisi Coates has a good piece on the story, which includes a quotation from another player, Jonathan Vilma of the New Orleans Saints.  Here's a longer version of the same quotation, and you can see him say it on camera in this Daily Show clip.

"I think that he would not be accepted as much as we think he would be accepted," Vilma added. "I don't want people to just naturally assume, like, 'Oh, we're all homophobic.' That's really not the case. Imagine if he's the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?" 

The Huffington Post article quotes "OutSports' Cyd Zeigler [who] suggested Vilma respond the way someone would to anyone who's looking in the shower: Tell a joke or just keep chatting like it never happened."  I think even this is reading Vilma too generously.  What Vilma seems to have meant by "looks" was something like "undresses me with his eyes" -- never mind that he's already "dressed, naked ... the whole nine."  After all, when a bunch of people are naked together they will look at each other; it may or may not mean anything.  What Vilma is afraid of is that a gay player would admire him, look at him in order to lust after him.  He knows he'll be able to feel the scorch of that lust, his tender skin will grow hot under it.  And then who knows what will happen?  I know it's unfair to suspect all homophobes of harboring secret gay desires, but Vilma really seems to be fantasizing there.

At least no one seems to have jeered that no self-respecting homosexual would want to have sex with an ugly toad like Jonathan Vilma; we're talking about a professional athlete here, it's very likely that many gay men would love to enjoy the riches of his body.  Jon Stewart handled the issue better.  I think there's no real way to reassure the Jonathan Vilmas of the world, and my answer to questions like this has always been that they can never know that other men haven't been scoping them out in the shower all along.  Indeed, the more men they've shared showers and locker rooms with, the better the odds that there have been gay or bisexual men among them, some of whom very likely just so happened to look at him.  He wouldn't have noticed.  What terrifies Vilma is knowing that one of his teammates is gay.

One commenter under some article I can't remember right now demanded that if there are going to be gay athletes out there, we must have segregated shower rooms -- one for the gay ones and one for the straight ones.  But that won't work, because the gay room would only house openly gay or bi players.  The closeted ones will still be lurking amongst the straight players, just so happening to look at them.  The only solution I can think of is private locker rooms and showers, or perhaps special locker room and shower garments so that modest men like Jonathan Vilma can cover their nakedness from the lustful eyes of other men, and of themselves.