I was going to leave this as a comment on a LiveJournal, but it started getting kind of long, so I moved it over here. Responding to this LJ post by sinboy, which I will quote in full here:
Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, told the Web site military.com in an interview published Friday that an "overwhelming" number of Marines would be opposed to bunking with someone of a different sexual orientation. As a result, he said, the Corps might have to ditch its double-bed rooms and offer single rooms to everyone.
"We want to continue [two-person rooms], but I would not ask our Marines to live with someone who is homosexual if we can possibly avoid it,"
Yes, because gay people will wank while thinking about you while you sleep. Or look at you. Naked. And glistening.
Jesus what a fucking coward [edit - brought down to single coward. I have no idea what other people who're in charge think, much less non commissioned soldiers and officers on active duty.]. I hate to talk about Marines as cowards, but that's just fucking cowardly.
I'm certainly not the first person to make this observation, but it bears repeating anyway: this is one area where the concerns of women (of any orientation) and queers (of any variety) intersect very strongly. The sentiment looks like simple anti-gay prejudice, and primarily anti-gay-male prejudice, but it relies entirely on intense underlying sexism.
The reason that hypothetically being looked at in the shower or bedroom or whatever is so threatening is not because these tough Marines don't know how to say no. It's because in a classically sexist construct of gender roles, men do the looking and women are looked at. Women are the objects of the male gaze. So when men look at other men they are treating them like women. And for those who are deeply sexist and/or deeply insecure in their fragile sense of masculinity, being treated like women is the worst thing you can do to them. Because being a woman is the worst thing in the world.
The logic is precisely the same as using "pussy" as an insult or saying someone is "your bitch" or calling someone a "girly man." All of these boil down to like a woman. Those are effective insults, sometimes fighting words, because being a woman, in this model, is bad. This is also why bigoted people harp on the stereotypes of either the drag queen or the limp-wristed effeminate: those are like women. It's also why they obsess over anal sex: being the receptive partner is seen as being like a woman. In some cultural contexts, bottoms are gay but tops are not, because the bottom is the one acting like a woman by being penetrated sexually whereas the top is still acting like a man by doing the penetrating. I think this mindset applies in U.S. prison rape situations as well.
So underneath all this gay-panic stuff about being looked at by a man is indeed a horror of being treated just like women get treated constantly. And that's not because the treatment itself is so awful but because it implies that they are like women. And that's a huge, huge threat to people whose sense of masculinity is entirely based on a negative: they men because they are not women. Suggesting that they are like women makes them feel that they are therefore not men.
And unfortunately, some people -- I'm not suggesting that sinboy is among them -- fight the stereotype of the effeminate gay man in part by emphasizing that plenty of gay men are not, in fact, remotely effeminate and can easily pass for straight because they're "manly men." While that's perfectly true, and a useful thing to communicate (newsflash: not everyone is alike!), it's actually counterproductive in dealing with the larger problem, because it accepts the inherent premise that being like a woman is bad and thereby throws both women and effeminate gay men under the bus. And that's exactly the premise that most needs to be fought in order to defuse this issue.
The riddle for me is how to encourage the replacement of a negative definition of manhood (not-woman) with a positive one: man!!! And that's a much larger task than getting Marines adjusted to the off-chance of being scoped out in the shower.
One reason the 21st Century has been such a mess is because the Guy in Charge was an insecure overgrown teenager who went by an old-fashioned definition of what it means to be a Man, and who found himself wanting.
Posted by: Serge | March 29, 2010 at 01:29 PM
What old-fashioned definition of 'man'? You know, he's the biggest/loudest/meanest chimp in the group, and he has others submit to his will. A real man is not a victim, not even a potential victim.
Yes, I am being sarcastic about that kind of man.
I much prefer the kind of man played by Gregory Peck in the western "The Big Country": he knows who and what he is, and he doesn't feel that he has to prove it.
Posted by: Serge | March 29, 2010 at 01:34 PM
This is making me think of something Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance said on stage a few years back. As you probably know, the guys in MCR wear a lot of makeup and don't have a stereotypically manly-man presentation. This often led to mockery from teenage boys. Well, at one point, Gerard addressed the teenage boys in the audience, saying, "Yeah, I know, you're making fun of us up here, and you're only here because your girlfriends dragged you. If you don't like what we're doing, you can go wait out in the parking lot, and meanwhile your girlfriend's going to be in here screaming over ME. Think about it."
I wonder what effect THAT had on the teenage boys' sense of fragile masculinity?
Posted by: Rikibeth | March 29, 2010 at 02:41 PM
Rikibeth... I shudder to think.
Posted by: Serge | March 29, 2010 at 04:50 PM
Notice that he says "our Marines" as if no Marines are gay.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | March 29, 2010 at 07:04 PM
One of my dance students tonight pointed out the obvious: under DADT, there are already plenty of gay Marines. They just don't admit it.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | March 29, 2010 at 10:24 PM
Kind of silly, eh, Susan? Mind you, 'silly' isn't really the word I'd like to use.
Posted by: Serge | March 30, 2010 at 12:01 AM