Sexual harassment: it’s not always as bad as it sounds.

Sometimes it’s better than bad — it’s great! And you can’t spell “harassment” without “ass,” so there’s a Freudian tell for you.

I’m not talking the creepy, stalky, lawsuit-filing kind. I mean the ass-slapping “Uuuuh! Looking good, baby!” sort we all either have to keep ourselves from indulging in or secretly wish would happen to us. The Eric Massa scandal kind of started out rather cheeky and funny in several respects, but as it’s grown increasingly ugly, it’s clear how some things should stay grounded in the windmills of the mind and consequence-free porn plotting. If we lived in a world wherein all employers were hot as hell, sex carried no problematic implications, and there were no Bible-happy buzzkill co-workers, we wouldn’t need GLAAD or the ACLU because we’d all just gleefully fuck our way to the top.

So who suffers the worst? You’d think it would be the ladies infiltrating the workforce and getting paid less while having to fend off skirt-chasing churls with wives at home, a Mad Men boys’ club mentality, and lecherous superiors wanting to coerce them into doling out sexual favors if they want to ascend the career ladder. You’d think old world machismo is the problem.

But no. It’s the Muscle Heads — they of the trademark mandanas, douchey tattoos, Ed Hardy attire, porcupine quill hair styles, and jacked-up roid racks — who are the real victims of our culture of lust politics. Their opponents: the queers with their perpetually roving eyes and inability to keep it in their pants. Their battleground: the locker room. Forget the Lilly Ledbetter Act. This misunderstood minority needs a Donny Dumbbell Act mach schnell.

I’ll admit that I’m part of the problem. As an Alpha Gay, nothing gets me off more than turning straight men’s self-entitled pigism back on them in a wily game of role reversal. Sure, I can manage a seamless work relationship with the hottest of women on the most equal of footing, but put me in a room with a swaggering slab of beef who thinks he runs the place, and my first thought is, “I’m gonna pound you out like a dented fender!” A gym setting in particular — I’ve never gone for a strictly gay stomping ground because I miss the variety — is fertile harassment territory.

My favorite gambit in college was to invert the traditional gauntlet of nasty talk that guys put girls through either to their faces or behind their backs. Turnabout is fair play, and that same full-of-himself no-neck who opines of a female student, “She’s doable all right — I’d just duct tape her mouth first” (this is actual trash talk I once overheard) will blanch in humiliation when I ask him how being the cock socket in a backyard gang bang feels. “I don’t do that shit!,” he’ll assert, and I’ll respond, “Really? Huh. I’ve never had a crew of dock workers lead me wrong.”

Once, when I casually slipped my hand between the legs (from the back) of a hated, half-soused straight rival, he didn’t react with the expected Gay Panic lash-out; instead, he shrank back in a stunned “How dare you!” posture, so I flicked my tongue at him and sauntered off. Stepping way over his sexual boundary was a massive turn-on, and I felt a surge of power and one-upmanship in a very Blue Velvet “Baby wants to fuck!” manner. In that moment, I owned that ass, and he knew it.

The converse is also a fun ride, too. I’ll confess I’ve always envied women being sexually harassed in that playful, cat-calling manner straight men go for. I want to be whistled at, ogled, and called “Sweet Thang” or “Hot Lips” by whole groups of crotch-thrusting men. Some years back when I was walking with two female acquaintances past a construction site, one of the workers innocently starting telling them to “Shake-it-don’t-break-it, ladies!” They laughed and were obviously flattered, and then he facetiously — in a supreme moment of equal opportunity sex-baiting — howled out to me, “Shake it, son! I’m your Daddy!,” so I slapped my ass right then and there for him. He made me feel like fifty bucks — and not only did I love it then, but I still get hard thinking about it now.

Alas, for all their brawn and braggadocio, these pituitary cases need careful handling, and the tool who treats women like knotholes in a barn wall is the same guy who expects his mommy and sisters to be venerated like vestal virgins and untouchable goddesses. He’s also the one who’ll feel the most threatened by being sized up by a gay guy. I had a yearlong membership to a Hell’s Kitchen gym that was very Guido, but that I liked for the convenience. Yeah, I stood out and was clearly not one of the boys, but I always loved how all their knuckle-chafing apery would suddenly mute and disperse whenever I moved within their zone of proximity. It was like they couldn’t maintain the show when the fear of being objectified came into play.

I took up a brief but hot on-the-sly series of liaisons with one of their older members who always wore those low-slung tanks that barely covered him. He’d constantly bitch about the queers and the hustlers checking him out while he was naked in the locker room. All I could do every time he brought it up was grin and say, “Hey, babe, if you don’t want the attention, you better tone down the wardrobe. Do you even own a turtleneck?” He couldn’t help smiling, at that was his red-handed way of admitting, “You’re right…I’m a slut.”

I found myself thinking of him when Joe Rogan — dick bag Jack of all trades and Number 4 on our epic Top Ten list of reprehensible men we’d still bang anyway — shot a transparently self-serving video exposing his travails with a locker room dick stalker. Artfully titled “Hog Watch,” it features Joe being Joe, his ‘baggy wing man chiming in, a moon-faced Emo kid (and obvious plant who can’t keep a straight face), an aural barrage of grunts, and a rollickingly gay “Ride ‘em cowboy!” opening and closing motif.

I get that this is meant to be both a visual depiction of the plight of the objectified Muscle Head and a probing exposé of the leeringly voyeuristic gay male gaze. Still, may I query of you, Joe: if the ladies are forever chastised for donning their halter tops and mini-skirts that drive straight men who can’t be expected to control themselves crazy, then I’d argue the same applies to you. Maybe if you didn’t strut around lubed to a glare, tatted up like an escort, anabolically enhanced to pneumatic proportions, and looking like you’re about to headline Raging Stallion’s upcoming Pigs At The Trough, you wouldn’t get so much eyeballing. Sometimes, we don’t just ask for it.

Sometimes we’ve got it coming to us.