Last night I had a dream that really made me think a lot afterwards. Strangely it was a sex dream which normally people don't associate with 'thinking a lot' but nonetheless that is the effect it had. (I wish I could collect stats on which readers of my blog clicked away when they read the phrase 'sex dream' and which got even more interested.) In the dream I was myself and I was having a threesome with Wendy and a nameless man. The man is nameless because in the dream he had no identity; in most of my sex dreams the people involved are people I recognize and can put names to and the cast does not often feature men aside from myself. Note that the frequency of such dreams for me is definitely more than 'rarely' and less than 'constantly' so I assume I am normal in this regard even though the data supporting that conclusion is sketchy at best. I remember distinctly the feeling that I wanted the Unknown Man to enjoy himself but was uncertain as to how to best accomplish that. First off there is the complication that I have a decent sense of how sex between a woman and a man goes but much less so between two men. The second trick is I have a decent sense of how sex between two people goes and much less so when there are three involved. Hell, even physicists have huge issues with the three body problem.
I recall in the dream that I tried a few various things in an attempt to cause Unknown Man to enjoy the experience but I will spare the reader from the precise details. The part which was most strange in retrospect was that I wasn't particularly excited or nervous or anything like that - I viewed it more as a social obligation to be fulfilled rather than something crazy and overwhelming. Note this is not the case when I have sex dreams that don't involve other men as in those I generally feel like people normally do in novel sexual situations: Excited, nervous, aroused, etc. I was trying new and previously unavailable sex acts and yet just wasn't especially interested. This made me think about my attitudes towards homosexuality and how they might be the same or different from the attitudes most men have. I won't even try to compare the attitudes of women towards homosexuality to mine because quite honestly I don't think I have any idea what those are. Most men that I have met or read about feel a little bit of revulsion when it comes to the idea of having sex with another man. Not that they object to homosexual behaviour in others by and large but when it comes to themselves they would find that a distinct negative instead of simply neutral. Whether or not it is possible to really be neutral on homosexual issues when one has such a personal revulsion is a good question of course but since this isn't the sort of thing one can just decide to stop thinking I don't think I need belabor that point.
For me the entire point of sex, the crux of the issue, is a woman being involved. While a man could certainly physically stimulate me *cough* it just wouldn't be the same thing at all. I wouldn't find it bad though unfamiliarity would certainly make it a new and strange experience. If Wendy wanted to have a threesome with another man I wouldn't be averse to it but I wouldn't be especially interested either aside from the potential to use it as a lever to arrange a threesome with distinctly more appeal. Obviously these sorts of tendencies are mostly inherited as people don't get to choose their sexuality but I do wonder how much of it comes from socialization. In ancient Greece most men would have their first sexual experience with another man and sex with women was viewed at least in part as only for procreation. This had a lot to do with women mostly being viewed as inferior and unsuitable for proper friendship I expect but it does show that how men view sex with other men is not at all limited to how things are in our society today.
A lot of people go through a very experimental phase in university where they try relationships and sex types that are quite outside their normal boundaries. I never really did that in part because I just don't have significant interest in most of those behaviours and in part because I foolishly tried to start off dating looking for a life partner instead of just looking for experience and understanding. I suspect that the world would be a much better place for homosexuals in particular and for anyone with nonstandard sexual or relationship preferences in general if the population as a whole followed that advice. Date people. Have (safe) sex with them. Try both sex and relationships with both genders, multiple partners and all kinds of other bizarre permutations. I firmly believe that doing so would result in a much more tolerant society as it is much harder to demonize people for doing a particular thing when you and everyone you know has done it and much easier to say 'People do all kinds of strange things... as long as they don't hurt anybody or try to force us to join them we should leave them to it.'
Recently when reading up on Feminism and trying to get a better understanding of the issues there, I saw a statement that rung true about the cause of homophobia. That many men perceive women as a conquest of sorts. A thing to be pursued controlled and possessed, and that the thought of another man thinking of them in this way is what makes them so afraid / repulsed by homosexuality. It still rings mostly true to me. I'm guessing that most men's repulsion comes from the idea of another man having sex with them, not them having sex with another man, which seems an odd distinction to make. Anyway, mostly wanted to weigh in because your post got me thinking.
ReplyDeleteI've actually heard that in some cultures you are not considered homosexual for having sex with another man as long as you are the one doing the penetrating. The other man is the gay one. That really goes along with that idea that sex is seen as a conquest or domination, which I think is present in a lot of people, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that an attitude of sex as conquest goes along pretty well with a homophobic attitude in some cases (although undoubtedly there are plenty of gay men out there with a sex-as-conquest attitude, so there's something else going on).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think Seinfeld explained male homophobia very well. As he pointed out, men are afraid of gay men because they know they can be sold anything in a store. Someone is going to say, "Hey, why don't you walk around with this guy? You two look good together!" and the next thing they know they'll be gay.