Ideal of Freedom: Sex Like a Gay Man

What I've found most productive when looking at the world is to be flexible in my philosophies. Not to swear allegiance (though I've had those moments) but to try on a lens and see how the world looks through it.

This is my thinking when I'm exploring conspiracy theories, most importantly the satanic, Illuminati theories. Not only do they apply a level of meaning to otherwise shallow pop culture, they create a new image of the world I know and through which I can compare the map with the territory.

So it is with a layer of credulity and another of skepticism that I read HenryMakow.com. Makow is a (I believe) former professor in Canada who started as an anti-feminist blogger. His interest widened into the global satanic conspiracy, with a bit of Jewish conspiracy thrown in. The Jewish stuff is as non-anti-Semitic as is possible for such a site, emphasizing again and again that the average Jewish person is as much a victim of the conspiracy as the gentiles. A fine line, I know.

The site's quite a hodge-podge of topics, with angry Canadian Muslims criticizing their universities to disgruntled recovering feminists to gloating satanic conspirators contributing. What I've found most enlightening is his repeated assertion that we are being driven to a sexual morality that mimics that of male homosexuals. Lust ranking high above love, casual encounters, group sex, habitual breaking of taboos, emphasis on appearance over everything else.

Reading Vice this weekend, I had that familiar shock of reading something that fits one of my filters. Try "Learning How to Have Sex Like a Gay Man" by Fiona Duncan.

For years, my best women friends and I have bemoaned our inability to bang like our gay male peers, who seemed to practice an ideal of free love we longed for, full of equal opportunity objectification, elective nonmonogamy, unashamed sluttiness, and a communal acceptance of all of the above. Gay sex land was, to us, a magical place where traditional monogamy was possible, maybe, but usually questioned; where jealousy wasn’t nonexistent but it could either be ignored or made hot.

It's the mark of our academic Left that they insist their instincts are wrong and that their theories are right. I can see where Makow is going with this, because going against one's instincts in order to find transcendent bliss is the core of occult esoterica. Duncan reaches the promised land on mushrooms while getting fingered in the midst of a crowd of gay men at a music festival:

I was at the center of a queer Dionysian cabal, and in my post-orgasm rush, I saw God. High in the sky, she rose up: a hologram above the rainbow stage lasers and the sea of bodies.

We could all argue with Duncan and those like her about the dangers of this behavior both to herself and to society but it would make no difference. They have been trained, and trained themselves, to view all resistance as oppression, even if that resistance comes from within.

In the past, I hadn't approached men not because I didn’t want to or men didn’t want me to, but because of the power dynamics of traditional heterosexual relations. The scripts of courtship are well rehearsed: singledom as a path to coupledom and coupledom as defined by a property-oriented monogamy. The woman is the beloved, the man is the lover, pursuer and pursued, blah blah blah. None of this ever fit me. I envied my gay male peers, because they got to start fresh and write dynamics to suit their desires, rather than forcing their desires to fit some predetermined model.

You see, her reluctance to "jump" men wasn't the natural order of the complementary relationship of the sexes, it was a product of "power dynamics" and "scripts." She had to overcome these instincts and to do so she had to make them alien, a role-play injected into her brain before she could make her own decisions.

That, in a nutshell, is why I'm pessimistic about the American experiment. As we've driven further into waters only charted a priori, we've also cut off all paths of retreat. Any phenomenon that disproves the theory is already discounted as fear or ignorance or as a tool of control. The only way back, it seems, is for each individual to wake up, one by one. Most will not until they realize they live in a ruin.