The Softer They Come – Review of The Declining Significance Of Homophobia

The Declining Significance of Homophobia – How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality  By Mark McCormack  New York: Oxford University Press 2012.

This book, The Declining Significance of Homophobia[i], is, according to its author, a ‘Good News story’(p xxv). I capitalise ‘Good News’ for reasons that shall become clear. But focusing first on the main thrust of the thesis (and there is no reference to it but I am certain this is a book written out of a PhD thesis), the ‘good news’ is how teenage boys in the UK are less homophobic than in previous eras. Good news indeed.

McCormack’s research, with the fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2009, consists of ethnography in three school sixth forms in the South of England. He used participant observation and semi-structured interviews with teenage boys/young men between the ages of 16 and 18. The argument he makes is clear:  in line with Eric Anderson (2009)’s theories of ‘softening’ or ‘inclusive’ masculinities, McCormack tells us that the young people he studied do not marginalise and discriminate against each other on the basis of sexual orientation, or even perceived orientation. And this is because homophobia has declined in our culture, since the ‘homohysteria’ that characterised the 1980s and 1990s (Anderson 2009) (p32-36).

There are some positive aspects to this book. One is simply that I always value qualitative research, and especially ethnography. In this age, that McCormack himself describes as being ‘a world in which the social sciences must demonstrate their impact and pay their way’ (p 9), in-depth studies that focus on people rather than numbers are refreshing. I am also pleased that he overtly challenges what he calls a ‘victimisation framework’ (p130) often adopted by people from LGBT communities. McCormack acknowledges the ‘agency’ (p32) people have to contest their and others’ oppression. This goes against recent research, for example by the UK LGBT organisation, Stonewall, (p61) that I have found to be scare-mongering about bullying and the hopeless ‘plight’ of LGBT youth.

Another plus to The Declining Significance of Homophobia, is that even in 2012, feminist-dominated gender studies does not adequately cover the experiences and accounts of boys and men. As Tom Martin’s[ii] recent (failed) attempt to sue the Gender Institute at the LSE for discrimination against men[iii] suggests, whilst the name ‘women’s studies’ has been lost from most university gender departments, the bias against men and masculinity remains. McCormack rightly puts his book in the context of a small amount of existing research on men, boys and masculinities in the field of education, citing work (p xx –xxv) by academics such as Mac an Ghaill (1994, 2007), Epstein and Johnson (1994) and Rivers (1995). In doing so he critiques the concept of Hegemonic Masculinity, developed by R Connell (2005). I have criticisms of Connell’s theories, not least because they reinforce the misguided, in my view, notion that ‘patriarchy’ continues to allow ‘orthodox’ ‘masculine’ men as a group to dominate and discriminate against women (and ‘effeminate’ men) as a group (p39). McCormack does not let go of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, or of a feminist perspective (p xxix). But at least he is critiquing Connell’s ideas, not accepting them unquestioningly.

Unfortunately I have some major problems with McCormack’s book. My biggest issue is with his statement that this is a ‘Good News story’. Whilst McCormack  is very critical of the historical role in religion in reinforcing homophobic attitudes (p59), and in particular ‘evangelical Christianity’ (p59),  I think his book reads like an ‘evangelical’ tract itself, spreading the ‘Good News’ that homophobia is on the decline. There are two main reasons for my feeling. One is that his book relies incredibly heavily on the ideas of one man: his former- PhD supervisor, and ‘mentor’ Eric Anderson ( pvii). McCormack refers to Anderson’s ‘vision’, his ‘academic critiques’ and his ‘exciting theoretical developments’ in awe (pvii). The other reason I think the book is ‘evangelical’ is that McCormack also dismisses out of hand some very important work by other theorists in the field. It reads to me like this is Anderson’s Good News, and ‘academic critique’ of Anderson’s work is not encouraged by McCormack at all.

Anderson’s theories are used by McCormack to explain everything! Whilst I can see that McCormack is using Anderson’s theories of ‘inclusive’ and ‘softening’ masculinity to explain the demise in homophobic language and behaviours amongst contemporary teenage boys, I am less clear as to why he also relies on Anderson almost alone, to explain the homophobic cultures of the 1980s and 1990s, including the devastating impact of AIDS on people’s lives and attitudes. Other writers who are missing from McCormack’s book who have carefully examined the recent history of homophobia (including AIDS), include Mark Simpson (in Male Impersonators 1994 and in Anti- Gay 1996), David Halperin (In How To Do The History of Homosexuality, 2002), Steven Seidman et al (in Queer Theory/Sociology 1996), Steven Zeeland (in Barrack Buddies 1993) and Keith Boykin (in Beyond The Down Low 2005)[v].

The implied ‘defence’ made by McCormack for ignoring and/or dismissing other theorists and writers is in itself worrying. In part, his logic consists of his assertion that poststructuralism is invalid as an epistemological and theoretical basis for research on gender and sexuality. With a grudging concession to what he calls ‘soft’ poststructuralism (p8), that he says maintains that social identity categories have some use, McCormack is damning about poststructuralist theory. He writes:

‘…poststructural scholarship, being wedded to transgression and subversion, cannot theoretically legitmate particular forms of anti-assimilation; it must valorise all or none. That is, postructuralism does not have the conceptual tools to distinguish (‘bad’) sexist and homophobic norms from (‘good’) normative ideals such as antidiscrimination and law-abidance (Nussbaum, 199a) (p7).

This is an inaccurate and unfair interpretation of poststructuralism. What McCormack is doing, is equating all poststructural theory, with ‘relativism’. But many poststructuralist writers have grappled with the potential for their work to become ‘relativist’, and have shown clearly why it is not. Writers and theorists such as Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Bordo and Butler have all explained why their interest in the ‘deconstruction’ of meaning, does not and should not necessarily lead to a belief in the dissolution of meaning. And we only have to read accounts of Foucault being influenced by the Mai 1968 ‘manifestations’[vi], or watch youtube footage of Butler addressing the crowds at the 2011 Occupy demonstrations in New York[vii] to be convinced of their commitment to social justice and political activism. Even Baudrillard[viii], who was less resistant to the idea that deconstruction might lead to a complete obliteration of meaning, seems to me, to have actually very potently and politically predicted the ‘internet age’ with its cacophony of voices, its rows and rows of flat screens, and its ‘hyperreal’ imagery. If it has not disappeared altogether, then in the 21^st century, surely ‘reality’ is much harder to grasp , to analyse and to categorise than it was in previous eras?

But it is Judith Butler who McCormack saves most of his anti-poststructuralist ‘zeal’ for. He uses her as a reference to state how ‘obscure’ a lot of poststructuralist writing is:

‘…the writing style of many poststructuralist theorists is so dense and obscure that it is understandable to only a subgroup of academics (Butler,1990). And they only imagine that they read clarity in the writing’ (p9).

He goes onto cite those (including, of course, Eric Anderson), who have criticised Butler’s writing:

‘… In a searing and accurate critique, Martha Nussbaum (1999a) argues that this writing is a wilful attempt to ‘bully’ readers into docility, and Anderson (2009) calls it a ‘violent, shameful act of academic exclusion’ (p33).’

Whilst McCormack calls Gender Trouble (1990) ‘impenetrable’, he provides no evidence in the form of quotes from Butler’s seminal work to back up his statement. We the readers are expected to trust McCormack implicitly in his analysis. And, if we may have been so foolhardy as to have read Butler ourselves, McCormack tells us confidently that those who read and understood her work, ‘only imagine that they read clarity in the writing’ (p9).

McCormack  is using his book in part to challenge the queer (and poststructuralist) ‘turn’ (p6) that took place in gender and sexuality theory, and is attempting to replace it with something different, something better, something more ‘Good News’. He writes, towards the end of the book:

‘The consolidation of heterosexual identities in these settings means that decreased homophobia does not necessarily result in a dissipation of sexual identities. This would suggest that, and that deconstruction has its emancipatory limits (Anderson, 2009; Kirsch 2000; Weeks 2007) (p133).

Having earlier dismissed postructuralist queer theory as ‘obscure’ and ‘elitist’, McCormack is able to assert his belief that ‘identity-movement politics’ is the way forward for LGBT young people. I strongly disagree with this perspective, partly as a result of my PhD studies and post-doctoral research into ‘identity politics’[ix], and partly as a result of my own personal, very negative experience of ‘identity politics’ in action.[x] [xi]

The way in which McCormack’s attachment to Gay identity politics is shown in the book, is via his endless use of the word ‘gay’ to describe young people who do not identify as ‘straight’. He talks about ‘gay discourse’ (p114), ‘gay-friendly schools’ (p121), ‘gay students’ (p130), the ‘gay rights movement’ (p57) and ‘gay men’. McCormack mentions at the beginning that some of the young men at the sixth forms (UK equivalent of American High Schools) he studied, identify as bisexual, and one identifies as trans. But throughout the text he prioritises the term ‘gay’ to cover all LGBT young people, and in doing so, I believe, does most of them a great disservice.  The theoretical justification he uses for this is worrying to me. Not satisfied with rejecting poststructuralism’s insights into problematic identity categories, he uses biological determinist theory to ‘close down’ the debate about how we come to be who we are. In particular he uses uncritically the widely-contested[xii] (see also: Simpson 1994) work of sex ‘scientist’ Simon Le Vay. McCormack writes:

‘Post-structuralism and social constructionism both recognise that current conceptions of gender and sexuality are socially constructed and historically situated (Foucault 1984, Weeks 1985). This means that although one’s own sexual orientation is biologically determined (Le Vay 2010, [emphasis mine]), the way society understands forms of sexuality is determined by the politics and people of the time, and this will vary across cultures.’(p6).

This ‘born this way’[xiii] version of sexual identity is gaining traction in the 21^st century. Of course the subject is still debated, but the dominant view seems to be one which I find highly conservative, and indeed oppressive: that our sexual orientations are determined before birth, and the rest of our lives are somehow enslaved to them. I personally don’t identify my sexual orientation, not out of some political ‘stunt’, but because, aged 41, I still don’t know what it is! And that is not through lack of having tried to find out, in both ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ ways[xiv].

By privileging ‘gay’ terminology in his book, I think McCormack, even on his own ‘identity politics’ terms, is not helping bisexual, trans, asexual and non-identified young people find their way in the world, or indeed find their voices and experiences in the literature.  Another of my criticisms of McCormack’s exposition of his research findings, is that he does not give enough space to the accounts of the young people in the study. Apparently he conducted over twenty semi-structured interviews in the three research sites (p15), but hardly includes any quotes from those interviews. When he does quote the students he is very quick to impose his interpretation of their words, rather than giving them a chance to speak for themselves. [xv]

I have one final criticism of McCormack’s book, which extends to a general criticism of masculinities theory and research overall – it relates to what could be seen as an unmentioned, under-researched, unacceptable great big pink ‘elephant in the room’.[xvi] The elephant’s name? Metrosexuality. McCormack makes one single, cursory reference to metrosexuality in his book, in relation to work by David Coad (2008) on metrosexuality and sports (p64). But I think his whole thesis and his research would be improved immensely by giving serious consideration to this ‘21^st century’ phenomenon, of men expressing their ‘desire to be desired’ via consumer and media culture (Simpson 2011)[xvii]. According to Mark Simpson, originator and key theorist of the concept of metrosexuality,

‘Con­trary to what you have been told, met­ro­sex­u­al­ity is not about flip-flops and facials, man-bags or man­scara. Or about men becom­ing ‘girlie’ or ‘gay’.  It’s about men becom­ing every­thing. To themselves. In much the way that women have been for some time. It’s the end of the sex­ual divi­sion of bath­room and bed­room labour.  It’s the end of sex­u­al­ity as we’ve known it.’ (Simpson 2011)[xviii]

And there lies a clue as to why McCormack ignores Simpson’s ground-breaking theories. Because, according to Simpson, metrosexuality, including ALL men’s display of ‘feminine’ traits such as narcissism and passivity, marks the beginning of the end of sexual identity categories[xix]. And it is sexual identity categories that McCormack is so keen to hold onto. Also, McCormack’s mention of young men using facebook and the internet for example, would make much more sense if put in the context of Simpson’s theories of ‘mediated’ and ‘commodified’ masculinities (Simpson, 2011).

McCormack and Anderson are not only holding onto gender and sexuality categories. They seem very attached, additionally, to ‘binary’ notions of gender. They talk about masculinity in terms of (having once been) ‘hard’ and now becoming ‘soft’. McCormack  seems to be uncritical of the categories used by both theorists and young people themselves, of ‘masculine’ men being ‘hard’ and ‘effeminate’ or ‘camp’ men being ‘soft’. This view is critiqued comprehensively by Mark Simpson, who highlights how machismo is actually often ‘camp’[xx], and how men who attempt to appear ‘uber-masculine’ often display very ‘feminine’ traits.[xxi]

The final paragraph of McCormack’s book is a defence against imagined ‘critics’ of his work. He says that if readers accept his position that homophobia is declining amongst young people, they will accept his research as a valid addition to the literature, documenting this ‘changing social zeitgeist’. Well, this reader does and doesn’t accept the validity of McCormack’s Good News. On one hand, as I stated above, I see it as a valuable (if flawed) addition to the qualitative and ethnographic literature in masculinity in education studies. On the other hand, I see it as an ‘evangelical’ sermon on the importance of Eric Anderson’s theory of ‘softening’ and ‘inclusive’ masculinity, that, ironically, is not inclusive at all. For it dismisses the proven value of most poststructuralism to the study of sex and gender, it clings on to sexual identity categories that are becoming less and less relevant as the 21^st century progresses, and it ignores the ‘social zeitgeist ‘ of metrosexual masculinity that has been clearly documented by Mark Simpson since 1994. In short, I found this Good News story somewhat depressing, and am much relieved, having finished reading it, to return to the ‘exciting theoretical developments’, not of Eric Anderson, but of wonderful writers such as Simpson, Butler, Foucault and The Daddy of sex and gender theory himself, Freud.

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Dr Elly Tams is an author and freelance researcher. She also publishes and blogs under the pen-name, Quiet Riot Girl. Her debut novella, Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls, is about a world in which Foucault, the famous French homosexual philosopher, in fact (in fiction) had a daughter.

An edited version of this piece originally appeared at The Sociological Imagination: http://sociologicalimagination.org/

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NOTES

[i] McCormack, M (2012) The Declining Significance of Homophobia – How Teenage Boys Are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality, New York: Oxford University Press

[ii] https://twitter.com/#!/Sexismbusters/status/179639793880281088

[iii] http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/rights-feminism-gender-british

[iv] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/dear-feminism-the-end-of-the-road/

[v] Simpson, M (1994) Male Impersonators (Cassell), Simpson, M (1996) Anti-Gay, Freedom Editions

[vi] Foucault. M (2000) [1980]. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press

[vii] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVpoOdz1AKQ

[viii] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/

[ix] http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_gendering_of_work_in_Sheffield_s_cul.html?id=PPNeHQAACAAJ&redir_es

[x] http://graunwatch.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/bona-drag-paul-burston-and-his-naff-polari-prize/

[xi] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/against-feminisms/

[xii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_LeVay

[xiii] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/born-this-gay/

[xiv] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unethical-Sluts-ebook/dp/B005ZU10HW

[xv] Also, as his research is not ‘action research’[xv] it is not clear how young people could use his findings to improve their lives. That task seems to be left to academics, educators and adult ‘activists’.

[xvi] http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/the-metrosexual-elephant-in-the-room/ Mark Simpson first described metrosexuality to me as ‘the elephant in the room’ but this is anecdotal. I have used his phrase since.

[xvii] Simpson, M (2011) Metrosexy, Amazon Kindle

[xviii] http://www.marksimpson.com/metrosexy/

[xix] Simpson, M ‘The End of Heterosexuality As We’ve Known It’ (2010):

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/06/11/the-end-of-heterosexuality-as-weve-known-it/

[xx] http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/11/15/america-to-machismo-how-do-i-quit-you/

[xxi] http://deathatthemall.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/big-tits-masochism-and-transformation-in-bodybuilding/

Wilhelm It Was Really Quite Something

 

This is Mark Simpson on Morrissey, his long-term lover and anti-life partner, at the Spectator Arts Blog

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Because the 80s is the decade that actually ended the 19th Century – the 90s was just an after-party clean-up operation – it’s also the decade that never came to an end itself. In fact, the 80s just won’t go away.

Economy in (‘Big Bang’) recession. Tories in power. Cuts on the table. Riots on the streets. Royal weddings on the telly. The Falklands becoming a fighting issue. And my mother complaining about Morrissey. (‘I see that chap you like so much has been in the papers again. Ridiculous man! And he still can’t sing!’)

As Madonna might put it, it’s all a bit reductive.

Everyone has been enjoying moaning about Morrissey lately – just like the good old days. In case you somehow missed it, at a performance in Argentina last week, his band appeared in t-shirts printed with the charming message ‘WE HATE WILLIAM AND KATE’ (remember 80s protest t-shirts?).

Perhaps worried this might be overlooked back home, the former Smiths front-man also offered this bouquet to his Argentine fans about those bitterly contested, sparsely-populated rocks in the South Atlantic: ‘Everybody knows they belong to you’.

The Times, Mirror, Telegraph, Sun and Mail all dutifully denounced Morrissey’s big mouth.The Guardian for its part ran an earnest discussion between two music critics titled: ‘Is Morrissey a national treasure? (The answer seemed to be ‘yes – but a very naughty one.’)

Not bad for a 52-year-old crooner currently without a record contract. But then, just like that other 80s diva keen on hairspray and frilly-collared blouses, we’ll never entirely be rid of him.

The British experience of the 80s is forever dominated by two very difficult personalities. Both from the north, both unafraid to speak their mind, and both possessing a gender all of their own.

And while one was a working class militant vegetarian anarchist Sandie Shaw fan with a flair for homoerotic imagery, and the other a bossy petit bourgeois social Darwinist and devotee of General Pinochet who famously outlawed the ‘promotion of homosexuality’, both of them were radicals on a revenge trip.

But, while Margaret Thatcher owned the 80s, Steven Patrick Morrissey stole its youth. Or at least, the youth that didn’t want to be a part of Thatcher’s 80s. The Smiths were not just an ‘alternative’ band: they were the alternative that Maggie said didn’t exist.

In fact, The Smiths were reviled by almost everyone at the time – Fleet Street, the BBC (they were effectively banned from daytime Radio 1), the record business (they were signed to a teeny-weeny Indie label), and indeed most of the record buying public (their singles struggled to even get into the top 20).

But they have become the heart of a decade that didn’t have one. They are now the band that everyone liked – two or three decades after the event.

Including, most famously, David Cameron, who used The Smiths and Morrissey as a Tory rebranding and detoxifying tool at least as important as those melting glaciers he went to gawp at. Declaring The Smiths his favourite group not long after gaining the leadership of the ‘Nasty Party’, he was even pictured, if memory serves me right, with a copy of Morrissey’s 2005 album Ringleader of the Tormentors on his desk.

Cameron, the former Carlton PR, was telling us that the Tories were now cool and sensitive, that they had assimilated the social and cultural anti-Thatcher reaction.

But Morrissey, whatever you may think of him, isn’t a man to be assimilated lightly. Especially by a Chipping Norton Tory.

When, in 2010, his estranged former Smiths collaborator Johnny Marr tweeted that he ‘forbade’ David Cameron from liking the Smiths, animal rights activist Morrissey endorsed him, adding:

‘David Cameron hunts and shoots and kills stags – apparently for pleasure. It was not for such people that either Meat Is Murder or The Queen Is Dead were recorded; in fact, they were made as a reaction against such violence.’

No-one can be genuinely surprised that someone who called an album The Queen is Deadis fiercely anti-Royalist. No-one can be shocked that the man who sang ‘Irish Blood English Heart’ is no fan of the remnants of the British Empire.

And let’s not forget his famous 1984 quip: ‘The sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Margaret Thatcher escaped unscathed’, or the track ‘Margaret on the Guillotine’ for his 1988 album Viva Hate.

Unless, that is, they hoped that Morrissey had mellowed with age and become some sort of singing Stephen Fry with a quiff. Morrissey’s views haven’t changed. Morrissey hasn’t changed. He hasn’t grown up.

Still an adolescent curmudgeon, an otherworldly prophet from Stretford, he’s just older and thicker around the middle. He did after all promise us again and again that he wouldn’t change, couldn’t change.

It’s we, his fans, who have changed. If we’re embarrassed by his antics it may be because we’ve finally become the people we used to hate.

Mark Simpson is the author of Saint Morrissey

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts-and-culture/night-and-day/7714548/morrissey-hasnt-changed.thtml

From Poppers To Paninis: How ‘Gay’ History Has Been Rewritten

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/11/gay-rights-civil-partnerships

According to Aaron Hicklin, editor in chief of Glossy Gay Magazine OUT, 2011 has been a good year to be gay.

Once I read that standfirst I didn’t really feel like going any further. The ‘gay is good’ and ‘good is gay’ message has been rammed down our throats for decades now, and Mark Simpson and colleagues carefully pulled it apart 15 years ago, in Simpson’s edited 1996 collection Anti Gay.

But I have read the whole article now, and it was as bad as I expected.

After celebrating the achievements of gay activists and individuals, such as gay marriage, the repeal of DADT, and the positive representation of gay relationships on TV, Hicklin produced this paragraph from hell:

‘Looking back it’s clear that this dramatic metamorphosis, from poppers to paninis, represented a broader shift in gay culture, or – if you believe the commentator Andrew Sullivan – the “inexorable evolution” towards the end of gay culture itself. Sullivan may have been overly optimistic in a 2005 article that he wrote for The New Republic, welcoming the receding differences between gay and straight, but he was the first to fully articulate the assimilation of gay identity into the mainstream. A year later, when I became editor of Out, it seemed pertinent to ask what function a gay magazine would serve in a world that, if not yet post-gay, seemed to be heading that way.’

Where to start? Well how about with Hicklin’s assertion that Andrew Sullivan, cuddly  gay bear American conservative  ’was the first to fully articulate the assimilation of gay identity into the mainstream [in 2005]‘?

I have just finished reading Mark Simpson’s 2002 Sex Terror, and it includes an article entitled The New Naff which was originally penned in UK Gay magazine Attitude in 1999. In that piece he wrote:

‘You see, ‘gay’ is now the new naff. The lifestyle -ism and makeover mania which gays largely pioneered, and with which they seduced the straights, has become as dominant and as dull and dreary as the Old Naff once was’.

In other words, thanks to the gayification of culture we may indeed have gone from poppers to paninis, but that is not good, in some ways it’s very very bad.

 Simpson and Sullivan have both appeared in books together, and have quoted each other (with varying degrees of (dis)approval) over the years. And Mark Simpson has been a regularcontributor to OUT magazine itself for a long time. So ignoring him and his contribution to this discussion of ‘the end of gay’ can only be a deliberate oversight on the part of the Gay Magazine editor.

But my anger at this ommission is not merely to do with my respect for Mark Simpson’s role in conceptualising ‘gay’ culture and its problems, or the notion that we are moving into a ‘post-gay’ world.  It is partly due to the way the author of the article, along with many gay writers, journalists and academics, is rewriting history. Not just ‘gay’ history but, as Foucault has termed it: The History Of Sexuality.

Funnily enough, it was in OUT magazine, under the editorship of Mr Hicklin, in 2009, that Mark Simpson wrote about this history, the one that Hicklin et al are now rewriting in their own image. In his piece marking the 14oth anniversary of The Homosexual he wrote:

‘As you may have noticed, the out-and-proud modern gay, born amidst protest, shouting and flying bottles outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969, is now forty years old. But you may be less aware that this year is also the 140th birthday of a much more discreet and distinguished (if pathologized and sometimes pitiful) figure that Stonewall is often seen as making obsolete: the homosexual‘.

And that’s the problem with this Guardian article for me. It is erasing the ‘homosexual’ from the history books, and turning the history of (homo)sexuality, into the history of Gay.

In 2007, Simpson developed his thesis about the gayification of everything, to include how ‘homosexual’ sexual habits have been adopted by heterosexual people, now that the proscription of homosexuality is no longer enforced legally or socially. In other words, straights have gone gay. And, in this sense at least, he is less pessimistic as the merging of sexual behaviours has enabled some freedoms.

But this discourse of Gay marriage, the end of DADT, the appearance of gay characters on Glee, the ubiquity of paninis and cappucinos, are all part of a ‘homogenisation’ of  sexual identity and lifestyle into this big gloopy gay mass. And, though this has actually happened, it does not describe ALL the people and all the sexualities that continue to exist today, if it describes any of them. For ‘gay’ is the culture, the commodification of homosexual identities, it’s not the actual people (apart from Graham Norton). So, whilst Hicklin is right we are moving into a ‘post-gay’ world, he is spinning it through a ‘gay’ perspective, and in doing so, missing out a lot of people and a lot of viewpoints.

In his gay article, Hicklin talks a lot about bullying of ‘gay teens’. He says ‘ life as a gay teenager can still be incomprehensibly lonely. ‘ But it’s not just ‘gay’ teens who are bullied as I have said here at Graunwatch before. Life as a teenager can still be incomprehensibly lonely. Hell, LIFE can be incomprehensibly lonely.

Take this young man in America, a rapper  who is heterosexual but happens to like wearing colourful tights and lipstick. He is not a ‘gay teen’ but he gets teased and ridiculed for being ‘different’.

The history of people falling outside the ‘norms’ of sexual behaviour and gender identity is not ‘gay’. The photos in the OUT feature mentioned by Hicklin, on their list of top 100 influential gay figures, includes Andre Pejic and Chaz Bono. Pejic is an androgynous model, Bono a trans man who is engaged to a woman. THEY ARE NOT GAY!

I’m heterosexual (I think). I don’t feel I have the right to say that this Gay assimilation is oppressing me, per se. But I do get annoyed when teh gayz take role models/icons who we can all relate to and identify with, for their own gay hall of fame. And, I am astounded that more ‘queer’ people are not up in arms about their erasure from the history books and the contemporary narratives of ‘gay’. Maybe they’ve given up and given in. It’s certainly a relentless, subsuming machine.

But it’s wrong.

Hicklin also ‘gayed out’ television and popular culture. He wrote:

‘Visibility begets change. Reality TV, for all its questionable ethics, has brought real gay people into the living rooms of America; in 2009, the most popular of those shows, Simon Cowell’s American Idol, was seen as a bellwether of changing attitudes as a young gay contestant, Adam Lambert, in eyeliner and glitter, advanced to the final. Lambert’s flamboyance conflicted with the show’s notorious reluctance to field openly gay contestants: he seemed to be telling us he was gay without spelling it out (until after the finale), and the subsequent conversation in the media, and online, showed how far we had come.’

This paragraph illustrates one of my criticisms of the piece – how it erases anyone who isn’t ‘Gay’ with a capital G from the history of ‘gay’ sexuality. Bisexual people are very familiar with being ignored and denied by gay narratives. As Mark Simpson has written about, it’s not just straight society that believes bisexual men, and it is usually men, don’t exist. According to many gay commentators, you must be either Gay, Straight Or Lying.

And,  I have already mentioned how Hicklin has lumped in trans people (eg Chaz Bono) and gender-non-conforming people (eg Andre Pejic) with the ‘gay’ identity.

But there is another group of people being erased from this story, a very large, very buff, very tarty group: metrosexuals.

Mark Simpson has tried to explain till he’s blue in the face, how it is metrosexuality – men’s desire to be desired in consumer culture – that has furthered the acceptance of gay identities and homosexual behaviours in our culture.

In his important 2010 article, The End Of Heterosexuality As We’ve Known It, he wrote

‘Of course young men in the US are much more accepting of homosexuality – because so many of them are now way gaythemselves.  It’s not really an issue of ‘tolerance’ or ‘acceptance’ of ‘otherness’ at all.  It’s about self-interest – quite literally.  About men being less down on the gays because they’re less hard on themselves now – in fact, rather sweet instead.  It’s about men in general not being so quick to renounce and condemn their own ‘unmanly’ desires or narcissism – or project it into ‘faggots’.’

Hicklin also said in his Big Gay Article:

‘It was also a reminder of how critical popular entertainment has been in challenging attitudes, and it remains the single most compelling argument for the annual Out 100, a photo portfolio of 100 gay men, women and transgender people from all walks of life who live their lives openly and without compromise. Few are household names, but that’s partly the point. The androgynous Australian model, Andrej Pejic, who met the Queen in October wearing a vintage Versace pencil skirt is as much part of the unfolding gay narrative as the social secretary of the White House (and first gay man to hold the position), or Gareth Thomas, one of the most capped Welsh rugby union players in history. Collectively they represent the vitality and diversity of the gay community.’

But Aaron Hicklin’s catalogue of gay people taking over popular culture, or at least becoming more represented within it, just does not make any sense without an understanding of how popular culture, including advertising, pop music, film and television, has transformed the representation of masculinities as a whole, and in doing so has transformed masculinity itself.

Again as Simpson has been telling us over, and over, popular culture has been the breeding ground for metrosexuality, which has resulted in greater acceptance, not only of gay identities, but also of gender-non-conforming behaviours amongst all men.

In relation to Blue’s participation in the Eurovision song contest, Simpson wrote:

‘Boy bands played an important role in the spread of metrosexuality, with Take That most famously evangelising the male desire to be desired in the 1990s, turning a generation on to the charms of pierced nipples, leather harnesses and eager male sex-objectification. None of Take That were, despite the many rumours, gay. But Take That as a band were very gay indeed. Their gay manager took the gay male love of the male body and sold it to millions of teen girls – and boys. All that baby oil helped loosen up ideas about masculinity.’

So, ironically, in his attempt to document the end of marginalisation of gay people, Hicklin has managed to marginalise all men in contemporary culture, as well as erasing the work of Mark Simpson, our leading expert in masculinities working today.

Well done Aaron. Stay classy Gays!

Talking to myself about narcissism

Barthes basically says all writing involves ‘transference’ – you have to put your stuff somewhere.  ’In transference, one always waits–at the doctor’s, the professor’s, the analyst’s’ – Barthes. But the question I am interested in is what about the other guy? what was he involved in? Who is he? analyst? professor? doctor? patient? Ghost?

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I think though when you write you have to be your own ‘amourous subject’ and ‘loved object’ simultaneously, your own analyst and analysand. And sometimes Mr Simpson, in contrast to Barthes, seems to avoid being his own ‘loved object’ – he often tries to get out of the frame. But you can’t. And as Sontag said, writers *always* end up with autobiography. Barthes did. That’s why Saint Morrissey made me smile – because it was analysis by someone trying very hard not to be analysed. Like a slippery eel.

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The irony being that Metrosexuality, Simpson’s main theory, is all about taking yourself as your own love object. I, who lack narcissism and ‘self-love’ physically and often emotionally, am more than able to take myself as my ‘love object’ in prose. Maybe if you are too ‘narcissistic’ you can’t examine yourself closely as the whole thing might fall apart? I don’t know. Where’s Sigmund? I mean, metrosexuality has not produced a whole generation of self aware men has it? Maybe the opposite?

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scribd.com/doc/58531502/F… Freud ON Narcissism On Scribd

marksimpson.com/blog/2008/11/1… Twinsome Devils and the Narcissus Complex by Mark Simpson

http://www.digiworldinc.com/users/j/james/barthes.htm Waiting by Roland Barthes

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From QRG HQ:
In Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse he says that the ‘amorous subject’ suffers from an overload of empathy. In one sense it is the opposite of narcissism as the amorous subject focuses on the ‘loved object’ more than himself (Barthes always uses ‘he’ and ‘him’) but in another sense ‘love’ in the constructed sense of the word, is all about reflecting back on the self. There is this devestating bit in the book where he basically says every time you think you care about how your ‘loved object’ feels you are kidding yourself. You only care about how he feels in relation to you.

It really hit home to me.

But after reading it I was with Barthes all the way. He positioned himself as the ‘amorous subject’ and that seemed to me like the font of his creativity and knowledge and writing and work. If you are always the ‘object’ of someone else’s affections, it is a very passive role. What do you actually do?

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/12/05/still-ill-narcissism-is-sick-again/

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This subject made me recall this, one of the first conversations I had with Mark Simpson, king of metrosexual narcissism, on his blog in 2010:

QRG: ‘Classic Pushy Bottom’ is a classic phrase!

MS: Well, I’ve enough experience of that particular species to recognise one when it pushes back at me – in Widescreen

QRG: Maybe the ‘Classic Pushy Bottoms’ and the ‘Classic Passive Tops’ should get together in a (very large) room and fight it out amongst themselves. With the cameras rolling of course, for the rest of us to enjoy the carnage.

MS: Oops, I think I may have already appeared in that movie….

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2006/11/20/bashing-bonds-blonde-bollocks/#comments

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Barthes v Simpson

 

‘Sex is the theory. Porn is the practice’. – Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators (1994)

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/03/06/tarty-armanis-latest-sporno-spunk/

Susan Sontag on Barthes:

‘It is the nature of aphoristic thinking to be always in a state of concluding; a bid to have the final word is inherent in all powerful phrase-making’.

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/01/18/does-my-brain-look-big-in-this/#comments

THE WORLD OF WRESTLING

 

From ‘The World of  Wrestling’ in Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1957):

The graniloquent truth of gestures on life’s great occasions.

Baudelaire

‘The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theaters. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.* Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.’

…

This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theater, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one’s suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.

Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles. As in the theater, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant. Thauvin, a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nicknames, displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what, in the classical concept of the salaud, the ‘bastard’ (the key-concept of any wrestling-match), appears as organically repugnant. The nausea voluntarily provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of signs: not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but in addition ugliness is wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter: the pallid collapse of dead flesh (the public calls Thauvin la barbaque, ‘stinking meat’), so that the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer stems from its judgment, but instead from the very depth of its humours. It will thereafter let itself be frenetically embroiled in an idea of Thauvin which will conform entirely with this physical origin: his actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. I know from the start that all of Thauvin’s actions, his treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. Wrestlers therefore have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts: just as Pantaloon can never be anything but a ridiculous cuckold, Harlequin an astute servant and the Doctor a stupid pedant, in the same way Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble traitor, Reinieres (a tall blond fellow with a limp body and unkempt hair) the moving image of passivity, Mazaud (short and arrogant like a cock) that of grotesque conceit, and Orsano (an effeminate teddy-boy first seen in a blue- and-pink dressing-gown) that, doubly humorous, of a vindictive salope, or bitch (for I do not think that the public of the Elysee- Montmartre, like Littre, believes the word “salope” to be a masculine).

 

The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each other, and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident toall the intolerable nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever- entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure.

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of ‘paying one’s debts’) always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theater. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler’s gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.’

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ikalmar/illustex/Barthes-wrestling.htm

From: Fight Club: How Gay Is MMA? By Mark Simpson (2008):

‘In the octagonal UFC cage set up over the Bell Centre ice hockey rink — octagonal perhaps because it better affords multiple viewing angles than a square boxing ring — Mac Danzig is still on his back; his sweaty, pumped, almost translucently white torso is flushed with the auburn heat that auburn skin produces when it is aroused. His panting, fetching head has been pushed up against the cage by redhead Marc Bocek’s energetic pounding, as if the cage were in fact a headboard. Bocek isn’t making love, however, or at least not the vanilla kind. He’s hammering the living daylights out of Danzig, stoking the crowd into ever-higher waves of frenzy. Although the Octagon is right in front of me, I’m watching all of this on one of the giant screens overhead: MMA is mostly a horizontal sport — one that requires multiple zoom lenses and a big TV to enjoy properly.

Bocek pauses for a moment to grab his partner/adversary by his hips, almost tenderly, and drag him backward while still kneeling between his legs, not wanting to break contact and negotiate that tricky “re-entry.” It isn’t, though, out of consideration for his chum’s cricked neck. He’s worried that Danzig will use the cage to get up off the canvas — and then get him in the “bitch” position. MMA is all about fighting for top. (Or maybe for extremely truculent bottom.)

Unfortunately for Bocek, Danzig succeeds in breaking away anyway, jumps to his feet, and deftly, impersonally, brings up his knee and smashes it against Bocek’s left eyebrow, which provokes another roar of excitement from the crowd and opens up a very nasty laceration that spills hot blood everywhere, streaming into his eye, across his face, down his chin, and splatters across his lily-white chest — and all over his opponent. MMA is definitely not safe sex. The ref pauses the fight to examine Bocek’s eye. If the blood is preventing him from seeing, the fight will be declared in Danzig’s favor.

Turning to my beautifully produced glossy fight program, which includes full-page colour images of the topless young fighters arranged opposite one another and their vital statistics, I learn that Danzig is 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds, 28, and a Cleveland native. His feisty opponent, Bocek, from Woodbridge, Canada, is 26, and is also 5 foot 8 and 155 pounds. As someone who has a thing for redheads and short-asses, I’d say they are well matched.

The ref continues the match — and why not? Blood looks good on TV. There are only a few seconds left of the third and final round (UFC fights only go to a maximum three rounds at five minutes each — about the average length of a porn scene). Bocek, despite the turned tables and his pasting and what must be deathly tiredness, is still putting up an astonishing fight. Danzig scores a take-down almost immediately and moves, as they say in MMA, “directly to the mount.” Bocek “gives up his back” to try to save his ruined face from further punishment but is then caught in a “rear-naked choke” by Danzig’s powerful, fatally inviting arms. He “taps out” (submits) at 3 minutes, 48 seconds.

I don’t know about Bocek, but these were some of the longest 3 minutes, 48 seconds of my life. I’m aroused and inspired and exhausted and confused. For my money, Bocek won that fight — morally speaking. Which of course means that he lost very badly. His face is roadkill. He is really fucked. But he displayed that quality you hear people talk about reverently in MMA: heart.

Despite the gore, MMA is generally safer than boxing — there are fewer fatalities and brain-damage is less common. Because the fight is “full-contact,” the head doesn’t take all the violence. When it does, though, it’s pretty gruesome. Yet amid all the mayhem, there is a touching tenderness to MMA. Not because it looks to my twisted, queer eye like very rough sex — but because of that “heart” business. After a bout is over, most fighters hug each other in a pseudo-post-coital embrace that re-enacts the warlike hug earlier, only this time it’s a hug of warm brotherhood.

There is another huge, manly Gallic roar. The arena’s giant screen is now tuned to the locker room; a rangy young blond skinhead fighter has peeled his shirt off, revealing a well-oiled fleshly fighting machine. The light behind him and his piercing blue eyes gazing into the camera, not to mention the low position of the locker-room cam, give him the cast of a demigod. It’s Georges “Rush” St.-Pierre, the handsome, stylish 26-year-old local Montreal boy who tonight is hoping to seize back his UFC Welterweight belt from Matt “the Terror” Serra, 33, the no-nonsense Long Island master of Brazilian jujitsu who dispossessed him of it last year with what some people said was a lucky punch.

We’ve only been watching the hors d’oeuvre. All this blood has just been so much foreplay.’

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2009/11/01/fight-club-how-gay-is-mma/

La Chaine Simpson

“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”

― Roland Barthes

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From Quiet Riot Girl HQ:

This is a note to my long-suffering readers. And to Mark Simpson in particular (though I don’t know how much he reads me these days).

—————————

I have had an idea for quite a while, for a book-length project based mainly on Simpson’s work. I am going ahead with it and will name the piece after my other, less-visited blog, Death At The Mall .

—————————

As you all probably know by now, I have found myself in the rather strange position of being the lone advocate of Mark Simpson’s work, an ‘ardent Simpsonista’ with no comrades, a ‘disciple’ with no brothers. And I am the only person I know of, who places his work in a tradition of theorists, not only of gender but also of culture, that include Freud, Foucault, Butler, and of course Barthes. In the promotional material for Simpson’s last book, Metrosexy, I called him:

‘“A Roland Barthes for the i-phone generation. Simpson is our very own ’meticulous observer’ of the contemporary world, who somehow manages to make the death of culture sound seriously sexy.”

More recently I added: ‘And yet nobody cares about this Roland Barthes. Nobody places him in the ‘canon’ of media theory and post-structural semiotics alongside his predecessor. Nobody reads him. Except to meet deadlines and steal from him.

But I do. ‘

This echoed Simpson’s own sense of himself as a successor to Barthes, expressed in the introduction to his 1996 text: It’s A Queer World. He wrote there:

‘It’s A Queer World sets out to decode what did not at first appear coded, bring out the strange in the familiar, the odd in the ordinary, the uncanny in the canny. A kind of Barthes’ Mythologies, if you will, but with a few more gags.’

Metrosexuality is of course Simpson’s key ‘discovery’. For that alone, regardless of what he has written on the subject since he first uttered the ‘m’ word back in 1994, he should be acknowledged as a major contributor to gender theory. As I have written:

‘Metrosexuality is the contemporary era in terms of gender. And it has a major theorist. If we don’t acknowledge Simpson’s role as such, we are hastening the end of reading, and writing, and thinking. I know I sound like an old relic even writing those words. So be it. The new world may be the prettiest it’s ever been, but it’s ugly to me.’

I don’t know yet what form or content Death At The Mall will take. I don’t know if Mr Simpson, who is often a reluctant ‘object of study’ welcomes my project or not. He can always tell me if he has any misgivings. But if you have been reading my blog, and if you have spent any time on his too, where I used to scribble all over his lovely clean walls, you will know I am passionate about his work, maybe, as he has said,  more passionate than he is himself:

———————–

‘Elly gave me enormous encouragement and support in putting together  Metrosexy, which in all honesty probably would never have seen the light of day without her. She also proved tireless in spreading the word about it.

Elly is not only extremely enthusiastic about the concept of metrosexuality, she’s one of the few people to really engage with it and grasp its import. Perhaps more so than even Metrodaddy himself, who remains something of a deadbeat dad. This is why Metrosexy is dedicated to her.’

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Ideally I should like the next book about Simpson’s ideas to be by Mark Simpson. But I think I’d be waiting a long time for that to happen. Meanwhile, men’s tits are getting bigger, and more orange, and masculinity is changing at such a rate, that something must be done to try and capture it, understand it, document the change. Simpson has written  very recently:

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‘in the 21st century men’s tits have not just rivalled but replaced women’s as the touchstone of sexy in mainstream pop culture, even when the audience for them is other men’.

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The picture at the top of this post is a Toulouse Lautrec print, entitled ‘La Chaine Simpson’. Just as I see Simpson in a ‘chain’ of writers and thinkers that includes Freud, Foucault, Butler and Barthes, so I see myself as part of that chain. The next link. I have private correspondence from Mr Simpson, suggesting he agrees with me. And based on that, as well as my own instincts, I think I am the right person to, for I am the only person who can, continue developing and advocating his theories and observations.

Looking For Sigmund, Finding Simpson

If anyone is still in any doubt as to the importance of the work of Freud to Mark Simpson’s oeuvre, when they read the soon to be re-released Male Impersonators, the matter will be settled once and for all. Some may call it ‘Freudian Twaddle’ but that book revealed to me once again, the originality of Simpson’s theories, but also where they come from. He doesn’t so much ‘reclaim’ Freud as re-vitalise him, and remind us of the fact that we ‘forget Freud’ at our peril. As Simpson writes in the introduction to Male Impersonators:

‘While it is not the purpose of this book to vindicate psychoanalysis or save it from its past, I hope that by employing it in the way that I have, in the way that has been meticulously avoided for so long- to elucidate the problem of heterosexuality and masculinity- its usefulness as a critique of ‘common sense’ notions which segregate homosexuality and heterosexuality, masculine and feminine, will become apparent’ (Simpson 1994:9)

In a recent post mentioning the new film about Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein, A Dangerous Mind, Simpson once again reiterated his sense that he is an ‘incurable Freudian’:

‘Although it’s pretty clear that in most important things Freud was right and Jung just plain wrong, nobody is really interested in that. In fact, precisely because of the airy-fairy incoherence of his ideas, and because in his ruthless egotism he was more of the kind of person we can relate to now, Jung seems to be regarded more sympathetically these days than Freud. Jung the keen astrologer who came up with the breathtakingly nebulous concepts of ‘racial memory’, ‘the collective unconscious’ and ‘synchronicity’ is hip. Or maybe, just a hipster.

But as an incurable Freudian myself I would say that.’

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/10/26/jungian-complexes-at-the-multiplex/

I find it a little sad that nobody has yet commented on this post. It is a graphic sign that Freud really is considered ‘passe’ now. And that maybe even  blogging and discussing under blogposts is too. If such an intelligent and engaging writer as Simpson is not garnering much activity ‘below the line’ then maybe we should all pack up and go home?

Simpson’s piece on Freud and Jung (and the empty comments section) is particularly poignant to me, because my discovery of  his website (and his writing in general) in the last year or two has been quite ‘Freudian’ in itself.

In some ways I found Simpson’s blog to fulfil the role of Freud’s famous couch.

I can’t explain how or why, but the experience of reading Simpson’s writing and engaging with him in discussions on his blog has been for me ‘therapeutic’ in the psychoanalysis sense to some degree. Maybe I picked up on his enthusiasm for Freud’s work, maybe I keyed into his deep and lifelong interest in sexuality and the hidden aspects of people’s (mainly men’s of course) sexual desires and impulses. Maybe I just found someone I was able to talk to, in a way I rarely do.

Whatever the reason, if you were to read back through the comments on his blog (I am not advising you do!) over the last year or so, you might find yourself as I have done, picturing a woman lying on a couch, speaking the inner workings of her mind, and maybe revealing more than she intended.

This  reminded me of the  French film, ‘Confidences trop intimes’, or Intimate Strangers. A woman, slightly troubled, goes to see a therapist. But she knocks on the wrong door and finds herself confessing her problems to a bemused accountant. He doesn’t tell of her mistake until it is too late and they are locked into a dynamic that neither of them is able to break off.

But as any analyst will tell you, therapy can’t go on forever. When I realised how dependent I’d become on being able to go and lie on Mr. Simpson’s virtual couch, I knew I couldn’t continue to do so indefinitely. And after one or two stops and starts, the ‘therapeutic’ relationship between the unsuspecting analyst and the unstoppable analysand came to a mainly peaceful end.

Or did it?

My continued investigations into the work of Mark Simpson could be interpreted as some kind of ‘analysis’ as if the tables are turned and the analysand has become analyst. As often they do – just see the case of Sabina Spielrein.

There is something very inviting about Simpson’s work, and his ‘persona’ for a patient turned therapist, for a reader turned critic. Partly it is to do with just how ‘hidden’ and unappreciated/uncriticised his writing  has been. He is a ‘lost treasure’ in some ways, that is ripe for excavation and exploration. But also he rarely places himself in the position of ‘subject’ or ‘object’, though he alludes to that possibility. For example in another piece about a Freudian writer  he confesses:

‘I’ve never been in therapy. Like an Anglican agnostic, or perhaps just a pathologically lazy person, I don’t take part myself but it reassures me to know that lots of other people are.Instead I like to think I can read myself better, or at least smarter. Certainly there’s no shortage of literature these days pandering to those who can’t quite make it out of their armchair and onto the couch, encouraging however tacitly the idea that a talking cure can be a reading cure.’

But can we ever read ourselves ‘smarter’ than others read us? Janet Malcolm may say no. She has written some amazing analyses of other writers. Her most successful I think is The Silent Woman, about the biographies of Plath and Hughes. In that book she makes it quite clear her belief that no writer of non-fiction can quite get at the ‘truth’ either about themselves or the subjects they study. As she says:

‘In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in “The Golden Bowl” that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have no reason to doubt him or to wonder whether Maggie is “overreacting” to what she sees. James’s is a true report. The facts of imaginative literatures are as hard as the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist’s and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer’s or the autobiographer’s or the historian’s or the journalist’s. In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios — there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.’

from Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman (Granta UK 1996:155)

Malcolm also observes, in relation to journalists in particular – which Simpson is – their form of narration creates a false sense of detachment from their subjects. In her book,  The Journalist and the Murderer Malcolm writes:

‘The “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life’.

So perhaps I am interested in uncovering the ‘Clark Kent’ hidden beneath Simpson’s Superman costume, just as he does with his (nearly all male) subjects, from David Beckham, to Mikey Sorrentino to Morrissey. Because he won’t do it for us. Not in his journalism/theory writing anyway.

When it comes to reading ourselves ‘smarter’ than others, to the ‘self-analysis’ which I know Freud conducted, and which I  practise obsessively myself as well, it never quite does the trick.  If we want to gain insight into ourselves and our psyches we have to allow ourselves to be analysed, to be read, by others. Surely all writers are asking for that in some way?  The act of ‘reading’ is a complex combination of ‘reading’ ourselves and reading others – in the form of texts, conversations, relationships.

My ‘relationship’ with Mark Simpson, regardless of any sessions I have spent on his blog/couch, then, is primarily that of a ‘reader’. That’s how I know him, through his writing. And just as the ‘reader is the writer’ and the ‘patient is the therapist’ ‘the analysand the analyst’ so my reading of Simpson’s work has some critical, creative and transformative role. I hope.

And it is not as if the man didn’t see me (or someone like me) coming. In his book, The Queen Is Dead, he wrote to his friend Steve Zeeland:

‘Be careful Steve, if gay studies are like murder novels then you’d better watch out for the final plot twist in which the hunter becomes the hunted, the analyser the analysed, the deducer the deducted.’

In my role as the analysed turned analyser, I am not so much reclaiming Simpson’s theories  (for nobody else had claimed or rejected them in the first place, unlike Freud’s), as revitalising them, and reminding us of the fact that we  ‘forget Simpson’ at our peril.

I think I came here looking for Freud, someone to  understand me, but like the woman in Confidences trop intimes, I knocked on the wrong door, and I found not an accountant but  Simpson instead.

And I am glad I did.

Grand Theft Metro

http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201111/new-ideal-male-body-obsession#intro

Details Magazine has finally got with the programme and is acknowledging the work of Mark Simpson, and his concept of men’s mediated metrosexuality!:

‘Look around. Everywhere you turn, the male form is being idealized, commodified, fetishized. On TV screens (the ripped vampires of True Blood), in Hollywood (Ryan Gosling’s toned torso lifting Crazy, Stupid, Love to the top of the box office), and on billboards (towering images of chiseled men in briefs), laptops, and smartphones (the appendages of Weiner and Favre). Now look in the mirror. (And we know you do.) We’ve allbecome body-conscious to the core (not to mention conscious of our core). Working out more, eating better, dressing in slimmer clothes, getting the hedges trimmed (and maybe even a nip or a tuck). Because, in the end, we all want to look as good as David Beckham does in briefs. Have we entered a grand age of self-improvement? Or is it narcissism? Or homoeroticism? It’s all those things, and more…’

The Details feature consists of a slideshow of the top 41 ‘metrosexual’ moments that changed the face of  masculinity. It starts with Marky Mark’s underwear ads for Calvin Klein, which Simpson wrote about in Male Impersonators back in 1994:

‘For much of 1992, a giant billboard featuring a Herb Ritts photograph of a 21-year-old rapper in Calvin Klein boxer briefs snarled traffic in Times Square. The baby-faced guy, whom we now know as Mark Wahlberg, looked like a supermarket bag boy. But each of his pecs was the size of a taxicab, his cut abs two stories tall. His boy-next-door smile sent a message to our collective subconscious: You, too, could look like this.’

And then the article goes on to list other great metro-icons, all previously identified and examined by Mark Simpson,  from Obama, to Beckham, to Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), to James Bond (Daniel Craig) to Mikey Sorrentino.

But all is not as it seems. Despite obviously drawing on both Metrosexy and Male Impersonators, and regurgitating Simpson’s central thesis, that men have become their own objects of desire, Details don’t actually mention the ‘m’ word, or the ‘M’ word, once. It’s a blatant burglary of Simpson’s work. And the thieves will get away scot free.

I have written previously about how Male Impersonators has been stolen and appropriated by feminist and other academics.  And Simpson himself  has drawn our attention on a number of occasions to how his work is often taken and used, often changing its meanings, without crediting him and his ideas.

My reasons for documenting and bemoaning this ‘grand theft metro’ are at least towfold. Yes I am an ‘ardent Simpsonista’, keen to bring his work and his original theories of masculinity to light, to try and give him the place he deserves in the gender theory hall of fame. But also I am interested in the current cultural climate, and how the ‘tumblr generation’ really signifies the final stage in the ‘Death of The Author’, and marks the long, slow,Death Of The Reader.

‘Nobody Reads’. Or rather nobody treats reading how we used to. Nobody reads with a view to understanding and acknowledging the ideas of the author. Nobody reads to take knowledge and build on it, question it, critique it. People read to fill column inches, to show off on the tube, to pass the time between facebook updates. But nobody reads.

Apart from the fact Simpson is the only current writer on men and masculinity who is saying anything relevant and interesting and prescient (which is why his work is stolen so often), he is also one of the few cultural critics who still reads.

Details took Marky Mark’s Calvin Billboards and Mikey Sorrentino’s GTL routine from Simpson, but they left the most valuable objects untouched – his readings of Freud and Foucault, his critique of the homogenised ‘gay’ identity including gay marriage campaigns and bi-phobia or bi-erasure, his textual analysis of advertising and its spornographic transformation in recent years.

When I reviewed Simpson’s latest book, Metrosexy, I said he is:

“A Roland Barthes for the i-phone generation. Simpson is our very own ’meticulous observer’ of the contemporary world, who somehow manages to make the death of culture sound seriously sexy.”

And yet nobody cares about this Roland Barthes. Nobody places him in the ‘canon’ of media theory and post-structural semiotics alongside his predecessor. Nobody reads him. Except to meet deadlines and steal from him.

But I do. And I will continue to defy the low morals and low attention span of the tumblr generation, and to advocate for Simpson’s work to be recognised. Metrosexuality is the contemporary era in terms of gender. And it has a major theorist. If we don’t acknowledge Simpson’s role as such, we are hastening the end of reading, and writing, and thinking. I know I sound like an old relic even writing those words. So be it. The new world may be the prettiest it’s ever been, but it’s ugly to me.

Invisible Men: Mark Simpson’s Male Impersonators Revisited

In his contemporary classic, Male Impersonators (1994),  Mark Simpson undresses the idea of the ‘natural man’ and shows us how men perform masculinity, in popular culture in particular. Gay strippers and drag artists, ‘macho’ body builders, advertising, pornography, sport, The War Movie, reality television, rock and roll. They all reveal, as examined by Simpson, with a little help from theorists such as Freud, Foucault, Iragaray and Butler, the complexities and often the homoerotic and homosexual subtexts of modern masculinities.

I  was already familiar with Mark Simpson’s work when I came to read Male Impersonators. I had greedily devoured most of his other books, and everything I could find by him on the net, since I first found out about him in 2010. My discovery of his writing reminded me of my discovery of the music of one of my favourite bands, Low. When a man I dated introduced me to these Mormon musicians, back in 2005, I was simultaneously overjoyed and dismayed. Overjoyed that I had found such amazing haunting music when I thought I knew all the pop music in the world, but dismayed that I hadn’t heard them before. They had been making consistently brilliant albums since the early 1990s. Why hadn’t anybody told me?

Just as I became Low’s biggest fan, so I became Simpson’s, and also an enthusiastic ‘convert’ to his theory of metrosexuality –men’s desire to be desired, as expressed in consumer culture. It was the first time a theory of masculinity actually seemed to relate to and describe the men I see around me every day, their tits and abs blazing as they shop and preen and look at themselves in the mirror.

I decided to read Male Impersonators alongside other books about masculinity from the last two decades, to see how this work fitted into and informed contemporary gender and masculinity theories. What I found was shocking, depressing and very revealing. The first book from academic gender studies about similar themes to those covered in MI that I read was Susan Bordo’s The Male Body. Published in 1999, five years after Simpson’s book, I was expecting it to make some reference to his text. I wasn’t expecting it to have completely ripped off Male Impersonators, with barely a mention of Simpson’s name. But that is what it did.

The Male Body (1999) examined men’s physicality and the symbolic meanings of masculinity as revealed through popular culture, with reference to psychoanalysis and feminist theory. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Not only did Bordo take the central premise of Simpson’s book as hers, she also blatantly stole many of the subjects, themes and cultural products that he used previously: Marky Mark and Calvin Klein, The Crying Game, the launch of Playboy in 1953, Bill Clinton, gay pornography, puritanical attitudes to the male body, Tom of Finland, Fathers and Sons, the history of shaving adverts, they are all in there. As are the theorists Simpson used to understand masculinity – Freud, Iragaray, Butler.

But The Male Body is a very different book from Male Impersonators. One of the original and daring aspects of Simpson’s work is  how he shows masculinity to be a set of conflicts, between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ identities, and between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ displays. He shows how those conflicts, exaggerated and made apparent by mediated metrosexual culture, exist in all men.  Bordo avoided this uncomfortable finding, took all the themes raised by Simpson and either ‘straightened’ or ‘gay-ed’ them out. In doing so, she completely removed their potency. For example she only talked about gay men, and hetero women enjoying looking at Marky Mark’s Calvin Klein ads, whereas Simpson points out how the ‘gaze’ of the ‘straight’ man on the images of Marky Mark in his tight underwear, is crucial in forming their (homo)erotic power. And crucial in forming what he later came to conceptualise as metrosexual masculine identities. She also avoided the subjects discussed by Simpson in MI which simply could not be ‘straightened’ out, such as the homo-erotics of football, and of rock and roll. So The Male Body was a pale imitation of  Simpson’s original work.

Bordo, like Simpson, is quite interested in the phallus, from a Freudian perspective, and, like Simpson she is also interested in its fleshy impersonator, the cock. But whilst Simpson presents both as having real and symbolic power, especially in close relations between men, such as those of footballers and their fans, and actors and viewers of ‘gay’ porn,  Bordo managed to render the phallus very ‘flaccid’. She described for example,  the end scene of Boogie Nights where Dirk Digler the porn star, played incidentally by Marky Mark Wahlberg, reveals his huge dong and both he and his member seem very deflated.

Bordo also seemed to revel in stories of men’s ‘sexual shame’ and physical pain, such as the case of Lorena Bobbit literally castrating her husband, and of Clinton’s fall from grace due to ‘that woman’. I couldn’t help feeling she was aiming her knife at Simpson’s ‘phallus’ itself.  Especially as she was using Freudian theory. In relation to the Bobbit case, Bordo wrote, with a possibly sinister undertone:

‘Freud had told us all about it, hadn’t he: the little boy whose organ is ‘so dear to him’ will have it ‘taken away from him if he shows his interest in it too plainly’… ‘Freud did speculate, didn’t he, that in ‘the human family’s primeval period’ castration actually was used as a punishment against naughty boys? He was right! And it’s happening again!’

Unfortunately, Bordo’s ‘hatchet job’ of Male Impersonators is not an isolated event. It was allowed to happen, uncommented on, uncriticised, because it represents a common practice amongst feminist gender academics. In fact, it could be said that feminist-dominated gender studies is in itself, a deliberate ‘castration’ of men, their place in culture, their identities  and their sexualities.

Male Impersonators was published in 1994, which at the time seemed quite  a ‘radical’ epoch for the study of gender and sexuality. Poststructuralism had opened up the ‘gender binary’ to consider a range of gendered identities and subject positions. And writers such as Butler(1990), and Paglia (1990) had provided a version of postmodern gender theory that some (by no means all) feminists were at least prepared to consider. But things did not turn out as positively as they could have done. And the fate of MI and Simpson’s radical notion of metrosexuality, illustrates how feminism has maintained its essentially ‘conservative’ perspective, even through the ‘radical’ 90s and into the 21^st century.

Feminism has done three things particularly in relation to masculinity that have made it impossible for gender studies to entertain the idea of metrosexuality:

It has been based on the assumption that men are ‘catered for’ by society at large, and within academia, and so any treatment of gender has been focused on the disadvantages faced by women, and how women have been ‘omitted’ from research, arts, literature, history etc.

An example of this assumption can be found in another book published in 1994 –Angela McRobbie’s Postmodernism and Popular Culture. The book has many discussions of women, girls and ‘femininity’, but look for ‘masculinity’ in the index and you will draw a blank. She justifies this glaring omission with statements such as this one:

‘It is in buying and selling clothes that girls and young women have been most active. The male bias of subcultural analysis has relegated these activities to the margins…’ (McRobbie 1994:163).

McRobbie is right that books like Dick Hebdidge’s seminal work Subculture: The Meaning of Style(1979), and his lesser known Cut n Mix (1983) (about ‘black music’ in the early 1980s and its origins) do position men as subjects of subculture more than women. But the mods, punks, rudeboys  and skinheads featured in Hebdidge’s work tend to take on quite a ‘gender neutral’ identity. ‘Masculinity’ as a term is also missing from the index of those books. Thirty years after Subculture was published, we still have not tried to understand the situations and identities of those ‘invisible men’ that fill its pages. Compare that to the huge amount of feminist texts that have been produced on the lives and identities of girls and women, and the ‘bias’ shifts dramatically.

Feminism, when it has considered masculinity, has tended to treat it as ‘a problem’. Heterosexual masculinity in particular has been ‘pathologised’ by feminist gender academics, with heterosexual men being portrayed as the oppressors of everyone else: hetero women, queer women, queer men. In 1995, Rawean Connell (Then Robert W Connell) published Masculinities, and this became the ‘bible’ of masculinity studies. Its core idea of ‘Hegemonic masculinity’ gave the ‘problem of heterosexual men’ a fancy name.

The idea that straight men have power that they use to oppress women in particular, has been used by feminist writers such as Elaine Rapping, an American media and film analyst, to justify statements such as this:

‘Everywhere you look there are books, movies, discussions and news reports about male violence… Faced with the deadly serious question: ‘why are men such creeps?’…’  (Rapping, 1993:114)

Hegemonic Masculinity as a concept, and its misandrist underpinnings, has proved to be a very resilient buffer against all the ‘attacks’ on traditional feminist theory, from post-structuralism, from queer theory, and from the obvious changing gender landscape that Simpson documents so clearly.

The only aspect of masculinity that feminism has allowed to be considered without completely dismissing its value, has been ‘queer’ masculinities. But with the exception of Butler and  Paglia, this has been very much left to ‘queer theory’ and considered an issue for gay men to worry about. It is no coincidence that the one single reference to Simpson in Bordo’s The Male Body, which is not even a reference to anything he has written, but rather a passing mention, is in relation to a point he made about gay pornography. Bordo and other feminist writers suggest there is a definite line between ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ men, and between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘queer’ masculinities.

So Mark Simpson’s ideas, about how all men are becoming their own and each other’s ‘objects of desire’, as ‘passive’ not ‘active’ subjects of the gaze (all gazes), and as ‘everything to themselves’ do not fit into any of the boxes made for men by feminist theory. He has had to carve out his own path and has done so with great style and imagination. But he has not managed to single-handedly transform the ‘feminist orthodoxy’ that informs masculinity theory or our common sense perceptions of gender.  How could he?

Other writers and academics, apart from Bordo, have also made it clear they must have read Male Impersonators, but have not acknowledged just how much his book has ‘inspired’ them, and in some cases have not mentioned Simpson at all.

The most well-known of these is probably Susan Faludi. Her book Stiffed:The Betrayal of the American Man, published in 2000, the year after Bordo’s The Male Body, certainly draws on the themes introduced by Simpson in Male Impersonators.

‘In Stiffed, Susan Faludi turns her powers of reporting and analysis to the problems of men and comes up with a revolutionary diagnosis. Men’s problems aren’t the product of biology, or of such trumped-up enemies as feminism and affirmative action, but of a modern social tragedy’ (http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/36465/Details)

In particular, Faludi’s chapters on ‘hood ornaments’ – men’s newfound ‘decorative’ role in culture, and ‘waiting for wood’- men in pornography, seem to owe a great deal to Simpson’s Male Impersonators. In fact, the central thesis of her work, that men have lost their ‘traditional’ identity as breadwinners and ‘action men’, and are shifting to the position of consumers, is also the central thesis of MI. Anecdotal evidence suggests Faludi and Bordo are friends, and so it would seem odd that they were both writing about masculinity at the same time, and both used Simpson’s ideas, and both omitted him from their bibliographies, which in the case of Stiffed, was supposedly a comprehensive list of books and papers about men and masculinity to date. Further anecdote tells of an interview with Faludi, where Simpson’s name was brought up and she declared ‘Oh Mark Simpson. I’m his biggest fan!’ And the rest, as they say, is history.

Other academics who have obviously drawn on Male Impersonators with little or no reference to Simpson include Germaine Greer (2003), Ros Gill et al, (2005), Harris (2007) Eric Anderson et al (2009) and Hall (2010).

I am not listing these people merely to point a finger, but rather to demonstrate just how influential this book is, and yet to lament its lack of popularity, and the fact it is not a key text on gender studies/media studies and sexuality studies degrees. And the fact that its ideas have been appropriated and disguised, rather than embraced and illuminated by other people. And that this has been due to feminism’s deliberate erasure of men from gender studies, except as ‘oppressors’ in ‘patriarchal’ society.

Though its lack of recognition saddens me, there is something about the fact that Male Impersonators is a ‘lost’ treasure that makes it so much more precious. Not only is it as fresh now in its ideas as it was when it was written 17 years ago-because they have not been developed by anyone seriously, since-but it  also provides a clue to ‘how we got here’. Reading MI felt a bit like being an archaeologist finding some vital artefacts or fossils, that explain a hidden era in history. And, the book is particularly precious to me because the thing that has been hidden from view and from our understanding, the thing it uncovers, is something I love dearly: men.

After enduring years of feminist dogma (since I was a child in a feminist household in the 1970s, right up to doing a phd and working as a researcher in recent years), that has convinced me ‘men have had their say – it’s women’s turn now’, reading stories of men’s lives, behaviours, pleasures and representation, freed from the constraints of ‘queer theory’ has been a revelation. I had been experiencing that ‘revelation’ in Simpson’s other works, and his articles and blog, but to see it laid out as it was conceptualised back in 1994 was very special. If you are familiar with his writing you will know what I mean when I say that in Simpson’s hands, even an advert for razors or a cheap gay porno movie can become full of magical and fascinating meanings.

All those cultural products, many of which were later sanitised and deadened by Bordo’s academic, dry prose,  were brought to life in their original, sparkling setting –The Crying Game and that shocking moment when Dil is revealed to have a dick, or Stand By Me, where a group of boys express their homo-love for each other, in the shadow of death, or football and its homosexual conflict between the ‘fucker’ and the ‘fuckee’, or Marky Mark’s tight ass, appearing on billboards throughout America – suddenly men were vibrant  and real again. And they had a sexual charge. A sexual charge that we all know men have. But that we tie ourselves up in homo-anxious, repressed, feminist, gay knots, convincing ourselves that they don’t. Or that they only do in certain acceptable circumstances and contexts.

Male Impersonators blows the lid off our preconceptions and the lies we tell ourselves about men and masculinity. It blew it off back in 1994, but the feminists and gender academics and ‘masculinity experts’ and queer theorists and gay men who read the book, have spent the last seventeen years trying to force it back on. Unfortunately they succeeded.

But Male Impersonators is back and it is as explosive and as dangerous as ever. Maybe they won’t be able to get the lid back on this time. I hope not, for all our sakes.