It's a Gay old time in the YA section

Michael Gross's article, "Has Manhunt Destroyed Gay Culture?" on Out.com tells a pretty depressing story (hat tip to David Broockman). Gross terms Manhunt " the world’s fastest-growing gay website, which is quietly abetting a revolution in social and sexual mores, under the slogan “get on, get off." The whole article is worth a read, but here's a particularly choice excerpt:

I began wondering about this connection at a dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard when the host asked why, during the past decade, so many national political victories and legal reforms -- an employment nondiscrimination act, a hate-crimes bill, repeal of the military ban, marriage or civil unions -- have remained beyond our grasp. A fashion photographer from Texas drawled, “I think it’s because so many of us spend so many hours of so many days online, doing things that make us feel ashamed of ourselves.”

During the 15 years since America Online men-4-men chat rooms introduced mass-market online cruising (earlier Internet cruising technologies, like IRC chat rooms, were mostly for techies), some aspects of our lives have become more visible than ever. We are ubiquitous in mainstream culture; we are out to our families, friends, and employers; we’re able to hold hands in public, in some places, without having to worry that we might get beaten up; and some states and cities now permit gay marriage or civil unions (more will inevitably follow now that California has joined Massachusetts). As this wave of enculturation advanced, AIDS treatments made the ravages of that disease less visible and dispelled the sense of crisis that strengthened our connection to each other in the 1980s. These factors, along with straight gentrification of gay neighborhoods and the growth of the long-tail economy, hastened the decline of many urban gay enclaves, and the demise of many bars, businesses, and social groups that gave structure to gay life.

“The implications of that trend are enormous,” says Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “It means that gay men who were once socialized in brick-and-mortar establishments, surrounded by other people, are now being socialized online.” Gay men still go out as well, but our nightlife habits are very different than they were 12 years ago. Jeffrey Parsons, professor of psychology at New York’s Hunter College, says his unpublished research confirms the common sense that “when guys go to bars, they’re going to be with their friends, not to meet new people.”

There is an offline analogue to Manhunt: the LGBT bookshelf in any Barnes and Noble. If you peruse this shelf, you will find that it's composed of at least 80 percent erotica. The nonfiction is also mostly sex-themed. I'd assume the writing probably isn't worse than straight erotica, but the troubling fact is, like Manhunt in the dating scene, this seems to be all there is.

Happily, for books, anyway, there may be a generational shift. There is quality LGBT writing out there, but most of it's in the YA section. Empress of the World, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and especially Nancy Garden's Annie on my Mind. All are well written YA that could stand proudly alongside many other books in the YA canon.

And that's the other part of the problem. Mainstreaming LGBT YA makes it difficult to find, since only the extreme works are in the LGBT aisle. It might be that kids growing up on high quality YA, but not if they think the erotica is all that's out there. Similarly, alternatives to Manhunt may exist, but be so mainstream as to be unremarkable. The best hope is to raise awareness of other paradigms and role models.

Couture Femininity isn't that flattering

Project Runway is back this week, and, aside from confirming my long-held belief that people who refer the themselves in the third person should be shot, it got me thinking about an interesting metaphor that Helen developed in the comments trail of this blog post.

To be more helpful: really, try and take the fashion metaphor more seriously. Yeah, fashion has meant lots of different things to lots of different cultures and eras. There are certain common themes (symmetry, simplicity, etc.), but not really enough common ground to hang your hat on. Sometimes we even look back at a particular era and say, "Wow, I can't believe that's what we thought 'fashionable' was!" (A good analogy for how I feel about 1950's femininity: acid wash jeans.) We never completely revert to a former era--fashion is always moving forwards, and so is femininity--but we do look to them for inspiration.

But in spite of all those caveats and admissions of arbitrariness, fashion still matters. You're still not allowed to wear a plaid jacket with a polka-dot tie and blue jeans to your office job and say, "The suit-and-tie uniform is arbitrary. Why can't I just wear what suits me?" If I went up to Tim Gunn and said, "I think that one is most stylish" and he disagreed, he would be right and I would be wrong. On the other hand, I could become a fashion innovator and outpace him (a path that would depend on learning, and to some meaningful extent playing by, the rules).

Let me say first off, this is a great explanation of how femininity matters and how we can live within it without being crippled. I think this is a pretty good analogue, but part of the fashion side has me worried.

Two seasons ago the designers of Project Runway were challenged to design for each other's mothers. The mothers were, to put it delicately, not as petite as the androgynously-skinny models the designers were used to. This challenge produced some of the most hideous outfits I have ever seen on PR, and even the most talented designers were flummoxed. They had never been asked to design for ordinary women before.

Fashion may be moving forward, aesthetically speaking, and it's certainly more comfortable, but I don't feel it's grown more flattering on ordinary women. I fall withing the 'ordinary' range of female bodies and am nearly incapable of finding a flattering shirt or dress in most department stores.

That's why I think Helen's narrative is a little blithe. If the innovators of femininity are as divorced from ordinary women as fashion designers are, there's not a lot to draw on. I'm not sure that couture, aesthetic-only femininity exists, but I'm not listening to Tim Gunn on this one unless I'm sure he knows something about women (though if he has any ideas on the shirt front, I'm all ears).

Escapes: Sworn Virgins

Helen has a few good posts up right now that were prompted by the Times's article on the decline of sworn virgins in Albania. Helen's take:

There is a difference between fulfilling traditionally male responsibilities and adopting a masculine manner and masculine patterns of thought, and insofar as the Virgjineshe realize that you can't do the former without also doing the latter they're smarter than, say, American feminists. The mental quirks associated with masculinity (an obsession with pride, aggression, competitiveness, etc.) developed (partly) in response to male responsibilities, and I think there's something to be said for insisting that, if you're going to play patriarch, you should go all the way with it. Gender isn't a buffet bar; be one or be the other, but pick.

I'm inclined to agree with Helen on most counts, but I don't see sworn virgins as any closer to a solution than gender neutral proponents. Sworn virgins, girl geeks, and gay best friends, when neutered sexually, undermine the idea of gender as a non-arbitrary construct by divorcing the gender role from some of its roots.

After all, why go all the way to Albania, Helen? These behaviors are common in high school. I was treated as one of the guys on stage crew, (not that surprising, as I had no one to be one of the girls with), but more interesting was the situation in my AP Computer Science class. The class was split 8:3::male:female. The other two girls were girls, tank tops, pedicures, lazy coding and any other archetype you care to project. I was still one of the boys, the only girl in the class whose coding was respected, and I was even invited to play Dungeons and Dragons with the boys and then chosen to run the game as Dungeon Master in the summer.

Being accepted as one of the boys meant I was accepted in all spheres of manhood. I heard all the stories about their girlfriends, and the guys felt comfortable talking to me about their conquests and seduction techniques without the slightest discomfort. Because they never treated me as a female, they never thought of me in a sexual context. In fact, the only time that my feminity became an issue was when I wore a non-baggy shirt to school that revealed my figure. The boys proceeded to mock me for this for the rest of the year, in front of the teacher. I hadn't upheld my end of the deal, but the transgression would have been just as heinous if I had leered with them at one of the other girls.

This is what I find particularly interesting about the Albanian sworn virgins. When they become men, they never have sexual relationships with men or women. The Albanian women aren't men, they are neuters. In the U.S., there's a parallel role for men: the (neutered) gay best friend. This isn't as simple as performing a different gender, since it isn't allowed to be performed wholeheartedly.

This shilly-shallying does as much to erode gender norms as equality=sameness feminism. You still retain, as Helen said, the mental quirks of masculinity, which arose in response to male-type responsiblities and objectives. To retain the behaviors while removing one of the motivations undermines the framework in which it makes sense to see these behaviors as related and co-dependent, rather than options to mix and match.

By all means, pick a gender and stick to it, but if you divorce sexuality from these behaviors you didn't pick a side, you're just in a nonsensical no-man's-land.