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- Coming Out as a 'Side' Guilt-Free | HuffPost
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Sign up for the RSS feed or friend Dr. Bering on Facebook and never miss an installment again. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. To learn more about Jesse's work, visit www. Sex and Suicide: One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Yes, some do, but most don't. But what if a guy isn't a top, a bottom or even versatile?
What about gay men who have never engaged in anal sex and never will, ever? Sides prefer to kiss, hug and engage in oral sex, rimming, mutual masturbation and rubbing up and down on each other, to name just a few of the sexual activities they enjoy.
These men enjoy practically every sexual practice aside from anal penetration of any kind. They may have tried it, and even performed it for some time, before they became aware that for them, it was simply not erotic and wasn't getting any more so. Some may even enjoy receiving or giving anal stimulation with a finger, but nothing beyond that.
Health issues for gay men and men who have sex with men
Sides typically struggle with tremendous feelings of shame. They secretly believe that they should be engaging in and enjoying anal sex, and that something must be wrong with them if they are not. Often they won't publicly admit to not engaging in anal sex, because of the judgments that other gay men might and most likely will make about them. I have heard gay men and even straight people say that if they aren't penetrating or being penetrated, they aren't having "real" sex. If a man has undergone prostate surgery that caused nerve damage to the penis or suffers from hemorrhoids or other issues that make anal penetration impossible, uncomfortable or unappealing, then that physiological or medical reason takes most of the shame out of being a side.
These men may be genuine tops or bottoms but become sides out of necessity. The gay male community has its own preferences that often slide into prejudices, and a great many look down on anyone who's not a top. Bottoms get talked about, even dismissed, as if they were women.
As the joke goes, "Who pays for a gay male wedding?
The father of the bottom. It makes the insensitive presumption that a man "takes the woman's role" by receiving, and that there's something wrong with him for it, namely that he's not masculine. Straight men labor under the same misconception. If they enjoy anal stimulation for pleasure, they often worry that they might be gay. In my office I've heard straight men admit that they enjoy receiving anal penetration from sex toys, or by having their female partners strap on a dildo and give it to them.
The slang term for that is "pegging," and many straight men love it. Furthermore, today, now that AIDS is no longer considered a fatal illness and the HIV virus is controlled through drug therapies, the cult that has sprung up around muscular bodies has been increasingly associated with "discretion", rather than public recognition of a homosexual identity. During the two years I devoted to this research, I struggled with the enigma of how, within online platforms, my interlocutors could claim to be seeking discreet, masculine types that could pass as straight, and yet when I asked them to describe or show me images of men like these, what I saw were men whom, at least within metropolitan contexts, could be recognized as gay.
They displayed images like those created by advertising and publicity targeting homosexuals, men who have come to represent a model of the successful and therefore "attractive". Bodily discipline confers moral qualities on these subjects, while simultaneously eroticizing them and making them socially respectable through their recognition as "well-adjusted".
In spite of what direct online assertions might lead us to believe, the search for discreet men that materialized in the quest for a muscular body may be less related to the fact that they can pass for straight and more to do with the kind of model that they have come to embody. The bodily discipline that involves exercise, dieting and supposedly healthy habits distances these men from prevailing stereotypes of homosexuals as undisciplined, social deviants who are prone to reproachable or dangerous habits. The muscular body is seen as the opposite of the thin, fragile one 10 that emasculates, and serves to denounce a homosexuality that is associated with effeminacy, lack of strength and even sickliness.
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At the end of the last century, images of the wasted bodies of AIDS victims were widely represented in the media, haunting a whole generation of men who came to symbolically associate - consciously or not - homosexual desire with the threat of contamination, illness and death. Yet in spite of the hegemony of the muscular body, 11 a wide range of body types are shown on internet apps.
Rodrigo C. Melhado analyzed more than profiles of men who seek other men on one such search site. The very close fit between the way users define their bodies and those who seek them could suggest that what lies underneath is a search for partners with similar life style and values. In other words, it is evident that what really prevails is not so much "muscular men" but the hegemony of a type of masculinity within forms of self-presentation and searches for partners. Alongside the centrality of a male gender within the prevailing regime of representation lies the growing rejection of sexual "passivity" associated to femininity.
In recent years, through observing and analyzing hundreds of user profiles, I have witnessed - in addition to the now well-known "masculine bottoms" -, the emergence of profiles which claim to be "top seeking top", men who introduce themselves online as heterosexuals seeking relations with other men or men who "want nothing to do with bottoms", a strategic way of presenting themselves as "masculine" without necessarily claiming to be "top" or "versatile". Quite astutely, the rejection of a bottom profile may be seen as the assertion of their own desire to be penetrated within a sexual relation, thus avoiding the kind of stigmas that are still attached to certain types of sexual preference.
In short - and being perhaps a bit impressionistic - we can speculate as to whether the economy of desire that we have briefly described here revolves around the rejection and erasure of the "fag" "bicha" , an established cultural stereotype that in our society evokes the quintessence of homosexuality.
It’s Time to Take Your Temperature on Topping and Bottoming
Not coincidentally, one of the traits that is associated with the "bicha" is his working class origin 13 ; the "bicha" is the homosexual that can be recognized for his femininity and therefore - in the terms that are dominant in today's apps - as one who has failed in managing the secret of his sexuality. This is a failure frequently associated with "flamboyant behavior", a supposedly bothersome way of behaving that is expressed through gestures and voice that are "feminine" or, at least, insufficiently virile for current hegemonic masculine standards.
This description not only denotes the refusal of a stereotype or way of being homosexual, but of homosexuality itself, increasingly rejected as a means for self-understanding and relegated to those who fail in negotiating the visibility of their desire for other men. This is a fact that makes it possible to recognize both the maintenance of a heterosexist context and the creation of gender technologies that are supposed to enable men who desire other men to keep their desire secret.
Most significantly, it is a visibility regime based on an economy of desire that rewards discretion, awarding those who are successful in keeping their desire and practices secret a position that brings them closer to heterosexuality.
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Within the context of the open normative competition of online platforms, to seem or even to declare oneself straight is equivalent to maintaining a subject position that is desirable insofar as guarantee of moral recognition and material well-being. I have also brought historical and sociological elements to bear on reflections regarding the social character of the desire that fuels this search and the kind of economy that it injects into the present.
In dealing with the experiences of historically subaltern subjects who seek same-sex partners, I associate the empirical sources of my research with theoretical and conceptual reflections that aim to contribute toward making its sociological analysis possible.
This has led me to conceive, still in preliminary form, of what I call a regime of visibility, which I describe as connected to a new economy of desire that I consider to be a characteristic of our contemporary social and cultural scenario. The importance of reflecting on historical contexts as visibility regimes is also linked to the way in which they draw boundaries around the limits of what is thinkable. Queer and gender studies have problematized these limits in order to incorporate that which has been excluded from canonic social theory, historically negligent in its disregard for the role of desire, gender and sexuality in social life.
I hope to have been successfully explicit in showing how, over the last two decades, a connected set of economic, political, cultural and technological changes have created a new social reality in which sexuality and desire have a more fundamental role than they did in the past. Within post-industrial contexts, centered as they are around services and consumption, personal life becomes a cornerstone for self-understanding as well as in terms of the recognition of others. Work continues to be a fundamental aspect of people's lives, even if only insofar as it provides the material conditions they need to take their place within a segmented and "connected" consumer market that awards increasing protagonism to online relating and relationship.
Coming Out as a 'Side' Guilt-Free | HuffPost
Without abandoning other relational spaces, my interlocutors make up part of a specific segment of online interaction, one which pertains to a variety of online same-sex partner search platforms. Although these values come from previously existing offline sources, they require new online characteristics and act to shape types of subjectivity and corporeality. They undergo subjective and bodily changes through their use of these media, frequently subscribing to the visibility regime that is based on discretion and secrecy.
My research suggests a current transformation of the space occupied by the expression of same-sex desire in contemporary social life. It is a transformation that occurs through the negotiation of public visibility, in terms of exchange that involve safe forms of exposure which do not erode heterossexual hegemony and foreclude any type of gender bending. In queer terms, we could say that we have gone from a heterosexist to a heteronormative society, from one that took heterosexuality for granted to one that demands that non-heterosexuals adopt its political and aesthetic standards.
From margins to center, from the ghetto to the market, from abjection to recognition, paths have been walked without deconstructing heterosexuality as a political and cultural regime, evident insofar as it continues to provide hegemonic forms of representation. The new regime of visibility is associated with a new sexual economy in which the desire for recognition is shaped by values that come from a heterosexual regime of representation and its cult to intransitive, binary gendering. Although some changes have taken place, heterosexual male domination tends to be preserved in symbolic, political and economic terms.
Guys on the 'Side': Looking Beyond Gay Tops and Bottoms
In the era of digital media, the latter has in fact become eroticized and serves as a representational model that users look to in their secret searches for discreet, masculine men. It is arguable whether, through online same-sex platforms, there is really a search for "heterosexual" men. I suggest that it is more likely that this constitutes a specific sexual arena where what is shared is a collective fantasy in which hegemonic representations of the masculine homosexual man become the most desirable object.
And if desire can be understood as the search for self-recognition through a desiring other, then it is in the search for recognition from a masculine heterosexual male that that is actually in operation on these platforms. Even when not really present therein - perhaps he doesn't really even exist!
Rio de Janeiro: Editora Multifoco, Robustez na cultura: Capitalism and Gay Identity In: Powers of Desire. New York, Monthly Review Press, , pp. Montagens e Desmontagens. Annablume, HALL, Stuart.
Sage, How to be gay. University of Harvard Press, Consuming the romantic utopia: University of California Press, Why love hurts: Polity Press, Collins Ebooks, The social organization of sexuality. The Chicago University Press, Technologies of Gender: Indiana University Press, Networked Masculinities and social networking sites: Masculinities and social change, vol.
O rosto do desejo: Vitrine do Desejo: Negociando visibilidades: Vibrant - Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, vol. Gaydar Culture: Ashgate, Queering masculine peer culture: Queer masculinities: SexPol - Essays: New York: Vintage Books, RICE, Eric et alii. Sex risk among young men who have sex with men who use Grindr, a smartphone geosocial networking application. Special Issue 4, [http: No problem I can't solve. Over the course of my research, I interviewed a large number of people and accompanied some of their daily lives more closely.
I introduced myself from the start as researcher and honored my ethical commitment to preserving their anonymity. The preliminary results gave origin to the article, "San Francisco e a Nova Economia do Desejo [San Francisco and the New Economy of Desire]" Miskolci, b , a text that provides sociological and historical analysis of some of the determinants behind the creation and use of digital media by North American gay men. I would like to add that Hall developed the concept of regime of representation in order to deal with culture analytically, substituting or refining the Foucaultian concept of regimes of truth, which sprung primarily from his analysis of the discourse of experts - doctors, jurists and clergy.
This Austro-Hungarian sociologist proposed, in his essay on "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis", a sociology of the sexual economy bringing Marx and Freud, and therefore sociology and psychoanalysis together Vide Light, I have preferred to adapt the term to the context of my own research, in which it would not be accurate to refer to the public as invisible. More pertinent is the consideration that it is made up of people who are unknown to the users in their daily circle of relations, demanding caution in personal exposure and requiring the use of filters and sorting procedures in dealing with possible contacts.
David M.