Posted on August 14th, 2008 by Colin
What do you guys think about Manhunt? Did you know their founder donated to the John McCain campaign? Michael Joseph Gross has some things to say about it. He thinks that it may be destroying gay culture and wrote all about it in a recent article for Out magazine.
I’ve never been an avid reader of Out. It’s one of those general interest lifestyle mags that just doesn’t feature anything I generally am interested in purchasing and sells an ideal of beauty I honestly don’t find so attractive. I often also actually have difficulty figuring out the difference between Out, Details, and GQ? Seriously though, Gross’ article has honestly given me a newfound respect for the magazine. It’s ballsy, honest, and analytic on a subject that generally isn’t publicly discussed — the cultural prevalence of online cruising among gay men.
The couple times that I’ve dabbled on Manhunt were pretty much complete failures. I don’t own a digital camera and rely on what’s posted on my friend’s Flickr accounts making it impossible to create the sort of desirable, pornographic persona described by Gross, “a sexy image that stands separate from your physical self.” Besides, while I have no problem getting nude on the beach in public, I am extremely self conscious about posting a picture of my penis, a “dick pic,” online. Plus, who wants to see my tiny penis? It’s like a Ken doll down there.
I think Gross is entirely right to be frustrated with what cruising sites our doing to our culture of desire, and it’s a frustration I share. I didn’t even have to leave Out magazine’s web site to find a perfect example. Seen these ads recently? Because they’re all over MySpace as well, targeted at gay profiles.
This banner campaign rotates between these three images, starting with “he was passionate” to “he was playful” and ending with “he held me tight.” There’s a fourth panel I’ve also seen, not present in the creative used for the banners on Out, that says “he was mine.” As Gay.com is owned by by the same company as Out, it makes sense that Gross might feel the need to limit his story to Manhunt. But it’s hard not to see how this Gay.com ad is playing upon urban insecurities and urging gay men to pornography themselves in an attempt to find meaningful romance, the effects of which may be entirely self defeating:
The project of pornographying ourselves while cruising online — whether by taking naked self-portraits in the mirror, masturbating with another guy via webcam, or volunteering to go for broke on OnTheHunt.com — can impair or devastate gay men’s ability to find intimacy with one another. “It means you’re always looking for the better or the best,” says Detroit psychologist Joe Kort. “This is the negative effect of a culture where people spend lots of time looking at pornography and judging each other primarily based on naked pictures of each other: You always think there’s something better, because you’re seeing it — it’s out there — so why shouldn’t you hold out for somebody whose looks are everything you dream of?”
As part of a community that lacks real life romantic role models, whether because the individual’s sexuality isn’t discussed, as in the case of Anderson Cooper, or because hyper-sexuality and multiple partners is the de-facto stereotype we’ve been handed (via a long legacy as outsiders from the traditional cultures involving the formation of the family unit), we have a void in the way we understand ourselves, a void that personal sites and sex sites have identified and readily exploit. Are we allowing ourselves to form our understanding of what it means to be homosexual and be in a gay relationship based on images provided by marketing companies? I know feel manipulated when I see those ads.
On the flip side, I’m generally a very sex positive person and have difficulty actually condemning any of these cruising sites. Beyond the porn stars and muscled bodies on each site’s homepage urging you to register with promises of fulfilling your hottest wet dreams, they provide a necessary service — putting people of like sexuality in contact with one another, something arguably accomplished by the bath houses of yore. But is there a balance between embracing the migration of sex online and creating real community and understanding of ourselves?
RSS Subscribe
Follow on Twitter
Facebook
August 14th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Thanks for posting this. I wouldn’t have read Gross’s article had you not said it was worth reading. It’s a complicated matter that I’m not sure I’ll ever understand, since I’ve been in a monogamous relationship basically since I came out, but Gross hits on a few points that I’ve been considering quietly to myself about my friends’ sex habits. I do actually think that the ones who constantly use these sites are gradually losing their ability to have an actual dating relationship (and gradually thinking some boring one-man-guy like me is a fucking space alien), but I can’t really hold it against them that they want to get laid, as long as their being as safe as they can be about it. So it would seem like a paradox.
Bummer.
[reply this comment]
August 14th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Someone is always lamenting that gay men are going about it all wrong, and I’ve done my share of howling in the wilderness. So once more, but with feeling this time, please.
In the 70s the city I live in (Minneapolis) had more democratic venues than it has now for obtaining sex and meeting someone with whom one might start a relationship. There were bars, baths, adult bookstores, and parks. By the late 80s all of these had been shut down except the bars. True, some new venues appeared, like gay religious organizations, but churchy groups have that major speedbump of belief and picky morality to contend with.
Greater tolerance (and even acceptance) has made life difficult for many gay men in an unexpected way: Hostility toward gays created a common bond that hasn’t since been matched. (AIDS might seem to have replaced oppression as a common bond, but only for the survivors.) Now that AIDS has been reduced to an expensively manageable disease, it doesn’t work that well as a binding agent.
So, we turn to other possibilities such as the Internet.
No matter how one operates on a website, when one sets up a meeting the virtual becomes real, and the age-old problems of establishing a connection between two people arise.
The disadvantage that Internet sites do have (and these are common to invitation only gatherings) is that it is based on excluding everyone who doesn’t fit into the perfectly acceptable range. There is too much up-front specifying for anything like a democratic meeting place to develop serendipitously. (The thing that made a park or a bath house democratic was that everyone expected that anyone could be there, and there was just enough time pressure (can’t wait around all night) to keep desire relatively flexible.
Mike Janarch
[reply this comment]
August 18th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Seriously, gay men, put your dicks away and talk to one another.
[reply this comment]
August 25th, 2008 at 8:01 am
You said it, friend. And good call on the Gay.com bullsh.
However, “sex positive” means “slut” right? It’s a lot less offensive than when when a reality show skank will call herself “a very sexual person.”
Well…we’re ALL sexual by nature, but you’re just saying your vagissy is essentially a library book, right?
[reply this comment]