Sex is boring
and we're crowdsourcing on 3rd parties
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. Check out his Friday newsletter. Last week’s covered the zine party and some thoughts on Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and yesterday’s covered Trump as pomo diva and a Pasolinian take on J.D. Vance.-We’re crowdsourcing for our post on third parties. If you’d like to be featured DM/email/comment below with your a) first name b) in 2-4 sentences tell us why you’re voting third party and/or how you respond to people who say you’re wasting your vote. (We don’t need to know who you’re voting for). Also, check out Stephen’s pieces on the history of third parties and the prophetic role of third parties.
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Sex is boring
I recently reviewed Manuel Betancourt’s book The Male Gazed for RealClearBooks…the book also appears in our Summer 2024 Book List.
Read an excerpt below:
“Fantasy love,” claimed Andy Warhol, “is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting…Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway.” He lamented that social and scientific progress led to both people learning about sex at a younger age and longer life-expectancies, giving them more time to “play around with the same concept. The same boring concept.” Rather than endorsing a permissive attitude toward sex, Warhol thought it better to “let the kids read about it and look forward to it, and then right before they’re going to [do it], break the news to them that they’ve already had the most exciting part, that it’s behind them already.”
Warhol was certainly not a prude, nor was he a model of chastity. During his lifetime and after his passing, he developed a reputation for being perverse, and even abusive of his models and protégés. But to his credit, Warhol was anything but boring. A master of subtlety, he had a knack for wielding his sexual ambiguity to expand his creativity. He managed to walk the fine line between sexual indulgence and repression, the profane and the sacred, pulling off a balancing act unknown to our age that seems to be increasingly averse to nuance and complexity.
The predominant attitude toward sexuality today tends toward libertinism, valuing the unleashing of sexual desire in the name of not wanting to repress “who we really are,” while those who don’t buy into the cult of authenticity tend to be pure reactionaries, opting to parade their “traditional values” in the public sphere and [trying to] repress their erotic desires in private. This dichotomy has given rise to a dreadfully unimaginative and painfully predictable discourse around all things related to sex.
SJWs harp on narratives about gay victimhood, and most coming out stories follow the same cookie-cutter model. Religious conservatives employ overused tropes warning about the threats of the trans lobby and Drag Queen Story Hour. Few dare, like Warhol, to explore human sexuality beyond the moralistic or sociologistic reductions that have a chokehold on today’s public imagination. Cue Manuel Betancourt, a Colombian-born millennial culture writer whose recent book The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men attempts to venture beyond simplistic thinking about homoerotic desire. Emphasis on attempts.
Betancourt earnestly explores his first sexual awakenings as a shy private school student growing up in a family of divorce in a country whose attitude toward male homosexuality is not only unwelcoming, but downright hostile. Whether you pin Latin American machismo on the influence of Catholicism or on the blight of its colonialist past, young boys like Betancourt growing up in Colombia who desire genuine intimacy with other guys do not exactly have it easy. His willingness to examine his desire down to the painstaking details, to inquire why, exactly, he feels what he feels when gazing upon particular iterations of the masculine form, offers his readers a refreshingly insightful manner of thinking about sexuality–something that is becoming harder to come upon today.
A bonafide pop culture junkie, Betancourt delves deeply into the numerous films, TV shows, and musicians that played a role in his sexual awakening. Take his chapter on the films of queer Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, which examines the unique aesthetic sensibilities of gay artists. He focuses especially on Almodovar-muse Antonio Banderas, who–though heterosexual–expertly takes up the role of gay characters who give rise to the question of why gay men are often prone to obsessiveness, possessiveness, and violence in relationships.
In another chapter, he confesses to his obsession with the singlet-clad Mario Lopez playing A.C. Slater in the hit 1990s sitcom Saved by The Bell. Demonstrating his raw self-awareness, Betancourt psychoanalyzes his wrestling fetish, transparently examining his paradoxical relationship to the sport. On the one hand, he felt alienated from the other boys at school who regularly engaged in rough-and-tumble play. On the other, he was fascinated by the way that such play became a space for intimacy and bonding–and with wrestling in particular, the way the sport glorified manly strength and beauty.
Yet here’s where his attempt to get to the depths of his desire gets stunted by conventional tropes. When talking about the normalization of masculine aggression, he slips too easily into social constructionist reductions. Surely, many men are drawn to toughness and violence due to social conditioning. But Betancourt fails to consider the extent to which such drives are rooted in that which transcends social constructions: both biology (testosterone) and ontology (the symbolic “design” implicit in the gender binary).
He takes up the theme of his fixation on strong, muscular men in a chapter on Disney movies. He was obsessed with Hercules, whose build allured him in a way that the prettiest of the Disney princesses never did. As a kid, he was plagued by the question of whether he desires to look like Hercules or to look at Hercules. Such simplistic, binary thinking downplays the complexity and malleability of sexual desire. ¿Por qué no los dos? Could it be possible that his desire to look at Hercules is rooted in his fear of being deficiently masculine…that he doesn’t look like him enough to be a “real man”–and is trying to compensate through gay sex?
While Betancourt has no qualms about engaging with Lacanian concepts and the material-sociological questions they give rise to, he steers clear of such Freudian ideas, which risk wading too far into the deeper metaphysical implications of erotic desire (similarly, he opts for analyzing RuPaul’s Drag Race through the lens of Judith Butler rather than the likes of Camille Paglia). Further, he too-readily buys into the romanticist claim that embracing one’s “true” sexuality requires one to indulge in one’s instinctive desires at face value…whereas real sexual fulfillment often requires restraint and sublimation, holding space for tension and respecting (or at least recognizing) taboos rather than naively trying to erase them.
Similarly, he falls for the facile cliche of blaming the queer-coding of Disney villains on homophobia. The prospect that perhaps the correlation between queerness and these sinister characters could be attributed to the fact that homosexuality is inherently transgressive–that in its essence, it toys with the boundaries of nature (and not just with those of social conventions)–seems to be completely off the table.
We see more of this run-of-the-mill authenticity-pilled logic in his chapter on Ricky Martin. Betancourt cites Martin’s autobiography–which “coincidentally” was released right after he came out of the closet–gullibly buying into Martin’s framing of his story: He was a gay man living in denial, pretending to be attracted to all the women who threw themselves at him, who eventually found the courage to show his true self to the public, risking losing his status as a sex symbol and becoming the brunt of machista, homophobic hate speech. Perhaps this is all true. But perhaps this was all a ploy to relaunch his career and achieve relevancy after being a has-been for so long.
Either way, Betancourt celebrates Martin’s blatant expressions of sexuality and of “being himself”–from quasi-pornographic Terry Richardson photoshoots to his lewd Instagram photos. Yet such forms of eroticism that celebrate self-indulgence and leave little to the imagination come off more as a cope for his lack of creativity and genuine sensuality.
In an age in which we’ve made it our aim not just to accept those whose lifestyles transgress taboos, but to elevate them to the status of normalcy, sexuality—both gay and straight…and everything in between—has been rendered increasingly boring, to echo Warhol’s sentiments. The oversaturated, omnipresence of eroticism has not led to greater diversity or creativity, but to greater homogeneity.
In 2016, Ricky Martin released a song with (heterosexual) Colombian singer Maluma. The music video of “Vente Pa’ Ca” was emblematic of our new frontier where a straight man–a Latino, at that–has no qualms not only about hanging out with openly gay men, but even about dancing next to scantily clad muscle-boys (as well as bikini girls) at a pool party. Perhaps we may feel inclined to applaud this step into a new era of progress…but progress toward what, exactly?
The two singers’ sexed-up pretty-boy aesthetic are indistinguishable from each other…and neither is genuinely sexy. Pier Paolo Pasolini, another gay artist who, like Warhol, was known for his complex, unconventional hot takes, warned in the 1970s that sexual liberation was part and parcel of the spread of a pervasive consumer culture borne of the expansion of corporate power. What we tell ourselves is increased sexual freedom is in reality the absorption of even the most intimate aspect of our lives into the regime of technocratic capitalism. What we call increased esteem for tolerance and equality is a front for the gray homogenizing effect of the commodification of our bodies and the neutralization of boundaries and differences. We are all one…united by our common identity as consumers.
Gay and straight. Male bodies and female bodies. As “Vente Pa’ Ca” demonstrates, it’s all the same. Everything–including the production of the song itself…a generic vallenato-pop-reggaeton confection–is formulaic. But hey, the video garnered 1.9 billion views on YouTube. The neutered consumer ideal may not be interesting, but at least it’s lucrative (for corporate record label execs).
Continue reading at RealClearBooks.
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Any recommendations on other books and authors that delve into homoerotic desire?