Reverse Chauvinism.

It’s becoming more common as of late, especially in hetero culture wherein women are no longer necessarily reliant on nailing themselves an older man of means to provide for their needs, basic or otherwise.

Sugar mommies, cougars, boy toys, himbos-for-hire, kept men, house husbands, man-whores, mercenary man arm candy, get-ahead-of-the-game hostility between the sexes — it’s all a chance for the ladies to turn the tables and give back everything they’ve gotten over the years. Isn’t it time we saw men bent over car hoods with asses arched high, male cheerleaders shakin’ it on the sidelines, and beauty pageants full of glazed-eyed studs who want to end world hunger and love Jesus?

Sure, but double standards weren’t built in a day or even a decade, and attempts to turn straight men into pliant sex objects tend to backfire with hilarious results. (read the full article)

The diet and fitness industry runs on predatory deception, selling the dream that any shape can be sculpted and molded into a universally-desired end result. How many ads feature two completely separate and unrelated people — one heavyset, the other body perfect — morphing into one another like water poured into a vase?

The reality is that human anatomy is too varied and reliant on biological constraints to ever be as malleable as clay, with even the coveted Olympian standard proving to have widely diverse scale. Wrestling, weight lifting, gymnastics, long distance running, boxing — each requires a highly-specified body type to fully achieve, and this astonishing range is on display in Howard Schartz’s and Beverly Ornstein’s “The Athlete”, a photo essay depicting contenders big and small, lean and beefy, tall and compact.

Deadly doubles. Troubled twins. Fractured fugues. Doomed doppelgängers.

If you’re a fan of delirious movie pop psychology, then you know them all. Hitchcock, Lynch, De Palma, Castle, Cronenberg, Verhoeven, Argento — each has delved into the weird Persona-esque blurring of identities that invariably leads to homoeroticism, and barring that….muuuuurder!

We’ve all heard the cliche: somewhere in the world, each of us has a physical double, but have you ever wondered if that could really be true, and better yet, what if you crossed paths? Would it all end in dizzying tragedy a la Vertigo — or better yet, Folly Under the Big Top like in The Legend of Lylah Clare? Maybe a family inheritance, a devastating secret worth killing for, and campy drag theatrics would ensue like they did in Homicidal, Dressed To Kill, and Dead Ringers? Would you prefer the Black Swan/Mulholland Dr. art house treatment, or take the full-throttle Showgirls exploitation kick that has you and your shadow self alternately trying to kill and fuck each other for fame?

I’ll take all of the above, preferably in the form of an identical cousin like in Twin Peaks, or screw it — two of them to give Patty Duke a run for her money. However will we distinguish the designated scold and the dumb middleman from the the evil one?

He’ll be the one who does porn. (read the full article)

Career suicide.

Let’s face it — it’s rampant. Everywhere you look, people who have their tickets are throwing it all away with abandon. “Tragic” is a word that’s become something of a misnomer applied to misfortune or upheaval, but it really means having a hand in your own downfall. Pride. Greed. Folly. These are the fatal flaws that can bring a heavy-hitter to his knees. If you’re a red-blooded Republican male, nothing — not even taxes — is more anathema than a moral lapse. When you tomcat, it’s scarlet letter time for you.

How else to describe Congressman Chris Lee’s face-palming implosion than occupational hari kari? His downspiral – which seemed to elapse over thirty minutes — began last month when he got caught trawling for dates on Craigslist, instantly branding him “The Craigslist Congressman.” There had to be more to it, though. Surely his eagerness to jump ship meant there was something even more tawdry he was trying to keep under wraps? Something…gay maybe?

A friend of mine called it as soon as he saw Lee’s shirtless pic, inferring immediately that Lee was at the very least bi. “No way he’s on the prowl for strictly pussy,” he asserted. “Women don’t wanna see shirtless, flexy photos. They wanna know about kids, jobs, income, whatever.”

“Total ‘mo.” (read the full article)

Homo-sploitation? Homo-fraternization?

When dealing with a certain sector of the hetero male population, the line gets too hazy to distinguish. The Crypto-Queer — like the cryptozoological missing links of an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure paperback or Peter Pan’s faction of Lost Boys — is reliant on a dominant male hierarchy and a pack mentality social system. Whether it’s the thrill of pushing a self-imposed boundary or the effects of too much sexual frustration, men (or more technically, man-children) who are the most rigidly heterosexual will flirt with bemusing nasty-boy behavior gays themselves wouldn’t be caught dead acting out.

Sure, it’s a good thing to be in touch with your animal nature. It’s just that some guys maybe need to consider hormone suppressants.

Crypto-Queers have their own highly-specified customs that constantly verge on the brink of all-out gayness but never actually dare to take the plunge. Common markers include: living in close quarters with other members of the herd in the form or brotherhoods and fraternities, spontaneous bouts of public nudity, skinny dipping, circle jerking, pantsing, taking forever to get dressed in locker rooms, rough-housing standing in for actual sexual interplay, spraying one another with beer and putting maximum effort into contorting the body in order to suck their own dicks. (read the full article)

I understand that nipples on men are largely superfluous, but I still find them fascinating and think we’d look incomplete without them.

It’s all supposed to come down to dick and ass, yet I’m an inveterate tit man who goes Aaooga! at the sight of a gigantic, suffocating man rack. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t breast fed or I’ve watched too much Russ Meyer. Who can say? I can’t be alone in my obsession, so it’s at least heartening that there are others like me who are eager to forgo tall, dark, and handsome for compact, fireplugged, and stacked.

I often debate whether I should ask a man I barely know to show me his, and usually do, most pretty happy to oblige. All the better if I can get a massive set of protruding nips out of the deal. Not only are they obvious evidence that we exist in a gender-neutral stage for a time in the womb from which certain secondary sex characteristics remain extant, but they make men the best of both worlds — sort of a Vargas Girl crossed with Tom of Finland. I’m perfectly amenable to sacrificing my perfect posture every so often if it means I can view a great pair in uptilt from beneath, and it is a lot easier to talk on-the-fence straight guys into letting you put your dick between their pecs than it is to get them to put in their mouths.

At any rate, I’m extremely green with envy that I don’t have either huge tits or huge nips, but then again I’m sure I’d never get any work done if I did.

A frankly hilarious (and a little suspect, I think) feature via Marie Claire UK on Reese Rideout’s — who knew? — expert balancing of his gay porn career and a wife at home.

This isn’t the first account we’ve been privy to in which a wife either loves to watch her gay-for-pay better half get plowed, cashes the checks to keep up with the Joneses, or just says “Who the hell cares?” — Jack Wrangler’s rather bemusing hitching to Margaret Whiting was an early much-publicized example — but as just exactly what qualifies as a “real” marriage is being hotly-debated across the country, this kind of arrangement shows how complex and even wacky the true-life side of the American Gothic marital union ultimately is. In a country full of open pairings, swingers, group marriages, fetish enthusiasts, equal opportunity same-sex dabblers, adult film star/sex worker spouses, and plenty of marriages of convenience, it’s clear that the sacred, Biblically-approved definition of marriage is getting harder to hold up as a gold standard. (read the full article)

Authority.

We, the gays, have a complex and even masochistic relationship toward it — especially when it’s embodied in the male form.

Yes, much of our lives come down to rejecting the tyrannical father in his various incarnations, yet so many of our private fantasies orient themselves around carnally collaborating with him, sometimes besting him, but more often surrendering to him. The very institutions — law enforcement, the military, blue collar breadwinning, workin’ man chick-balling, sundry “butch” vocations whose brotherhood mentalities would be violated by a canny, chameleonic queer in their midst — that either oppress us openly or conspiratorially shut us out ultimately prove central fodder in our porn reveries. The dance we do therein is twofold; on one level we delight in an overheated and overblown variation of our oppression in which we’re sluts for authority, while on another we succeed in making the aloof Dude Culture our own by depriving it of its supposed virtues.

Making it our partner in crime.

Uniforms are, natch, obligatory tenants in gay porn iconography, and virtually every feature boasts some kind of fetishization of position, vocation, and the attire that accompany them. In the Village People lineups of our minds, a man in uniform is the human equivalent of catnip. None are so devoted to the job that they won’t bend the rules when an opportunity to unzip presents itself, and the abuse of power therein is a good time had by all.

Now, a catalogue of ten uniformed desires… (read the full article)

So superficially, I’m thinking that the casting of a trans man — which I’ll confess I’ve never had the opportunity to encounter — in the current cast of Argentina’s Big Brother (apparently, many nations have a variation on this human zoo experiment) was intended to act as a shocking rupture in the social fabric of the series’s hermetically-sealed narrative. The horror of self-contamination! The dread of difference! The paralyzing anxiety of having to share a living space with…one of them! I’m sure the producers were looking for arc somewhere along the lines of Boys Don’t Cry by way Just One of The Guys with a dash of Dressed To Kill to cap it all off.

And yet…

Something kind of magical seems to be going on here. In this footage, who’s the one person who seems unpretentious and real amid all the ego-preening and forced interaction? Here, Alejandro Iglesias completely undercuts the expectation of what hetero culture envisions a transsexual to be — male-to-female, overheated and overglossed, bitchy, campy, theatrical, unable to pass as one of them — and I hope genuinely takes the audience as off-guard as he does the other cast members.

Gender dysphoria is all the proof I need to see that capital N Nature is not an omnipotent puppet master beyond reproach, and all the tension and burden that comes with being born in the wrong body is on display here: the can-you-believe-it?! whispers that make him seem like a changeling, the careful apprehension about finding a trustworthy confidant(e), and all the tiny little things that the flock take for granted while the lone wolf looks on with quiet aspiration.

The One alone dreams of stepping outside the body and transcending its limitations, and the Many are too fixed in their own shells to wish that big.