Can You Feel the Power?

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So look, I love Charlie Brooker normally. I’ve loved him pretty much forever and ever. Certainly, since when he was just that snarky website. Maybe I identify with him someway somehow, but, o’ course he chose to snark about TV and here I am snarking about some ridiculous asshatted sexual sub culture that I choose to inhabit for reasons that escape me right now.

Charlie Brooker is funny and smart and I’ll always remember him saying that The Power of Nightmares was like someone coming along and washing all the bullshit off your TV with an industrial hose. And I even forgave him that lame sitcom. But sometimes, in the end, you are cruellest of all to the things you love, because, god, you just expect so much more.

So, see, let your eyes roll over this here as a (presumably – I’ve not checked or anything) heterosexual man gets all confused by men being a teensy bit nakeder than usual and allowing themselves to be a teensy bit more sexualised than usual and so decides that that makes it, um, ‘homoerotic’.

Incredibly, [Spartan is] not the gayest-looking male Gladiator. That honour goes to Atlas, who has a body made of raw, bulging muscle, but the head and face of a woman. In his introductory ident, he appears to shake his flowing locks and wink coquettishly at the viewer. They should’ve called him Dorothy and had done with it.

Yes, he winks at the *viewer* so that makes him gay, of course, because the viewer must be male. I mean there is no other way to deconstruct that paragraph is there? Strapping young Atlas flirts with the viewer – attempts to engage the viewer sexually - therefore Atlas is gay. Sorry, does Charlie Brooker (who I *heart*, remember) not know that women watch television? That women have eyes?

What the fuck is going on here that this is an acceptable way to talk about the stuff of things?

You don’t think it might be slightly repressive to label all male (potential) sexual interaction as ‘gay’, do you?

Um…

Keeping with the homoerotic theme, you may have noticed that all the male Gladiators have names that sound like gay nightclubs. Oblivion, for instance, sounds like a steaming 4am sinbox filled with strobe lights and shaved heads.

Yes, but Charlie, because of people thinking the way you do about male sexuality, everything to do with men being sexualised in any way sounds like a gay nightclub. Our entire vocabulary for sexualising men was invented by gay men ’cause they had the agency to do it. (Whatever the world has thought about gay men throughout time and space the one thing they don’t seem to have thought is that they don’t have sexual agency – if anything (’backs against the walls’) they are thought to have too much.)

All sexy macho stuff is has vaguely gay overtones because gay men led the way in demanding sexuality from men. I may have mentioned this before when explaining how submissive men – if they really wanted to be sex toys for women – ought to find ways of sexualising themselves that were less fucking unsexy.

Men, if you want to dress like a slut, (i.e you want to dress like your desperate screaming need for sexual humiliation overwhelms and degrades you – and really, please do) dress like a man-slut, damnit. Wear a white jockstrap and big black boots and a collar and shave your head and get some bits of metal slammed through your strategic points of interest. Yeah, you will look kinda gay. That is because gay men know how to sexualise men. In fact, if you look gay you’re doing it right.

And because of this whole thing where gay men practically invented the idea of men being sexy, straight women owe them a debt. There is no doubt that without them we would be stuck with the ‘ew, cocks, ew, smegma, beer belly, hairy arse…‘ idea of male physicality that (some) straight men seem to like to wallow in whenever anyone mentions the idea that men might be sexually attractive.

But having this vocabulary for sexualising men is also full of big problems. And Charlie shows us just where they crop up. Male sexiness is just too close to gayness for a lot of men to feel comfortable with being sexy or seen as sexually attractive *ever*. (Or even with other men being sexy.)

And because sexy = gay for men that makes it harder for us to demand sexuality from men because

(a) het men are scared of the gay - so scared that straight submissive men would rather sexualise themselves with women’s clothing (i.e in a way that doesnot actually look sexy on men) than dress the way a gay man would dress to mark himself as sexually available

(b) it means that any whinging for adequate man sexaulising porn can be responded to by being told to, well, look at gay erotica for that, darling.

God, you know, at least 17 people have emailed me to say that kink dot com are doing a gay porn BDSM site. And isn’t it a bit fucking strange that, god, really, that is so going to be more attractive to women who like men tied up that the site they already have featuring women tying men up!

Look, another disclaimer, I don’t find Gladiators particularly sexy – they are probably just too ridiculous for me - but they are sexualised in a way men mostly aren’t, and the idea that that makes them ‘gay’ is totally fucking offensive and another big eraser rubbing out any kind of female gaze/female desire/ female sexual wanting.

We need to stop filing every image of a naked/hot/aroused/sexy/sexually available man in ‘homoerotic’. Apart from anything else, last time I looked there were homosexual women and they aren’t a whole bunch about the sexualised images of men. I mean, do I even need to start about how if you are a woman a homoerotic image would be one of a sexualised woman - in fact if you are a woman you live in a sea of homoerotica. And yet, somehow, no one ever sees it that way.

But no, let’s look at it this way, and image can only be homo (or hetero) sexual if there is more than one person in it. Otherwise - like Wilde- it can only be sexual.

Because, really, how exactly is pouting hair-tossing Atlas being so gay? He’s there on his own. A man on his own really isn’t going to get up to a whole bunch of gay sex.

(NB You know when I said I didn’t find gladiators particularly sexy I mostly meant the modern version, the idea of real gladiators, or gladiatorial combat, well, I’m just glad we don’t have that now – I’m conflicted enough about the stuff I like as it is. (Although I am also glad we don’t have them now because, obviously, it is also gross and wrong. (But also… (Ah, forget it))))

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