'Real Men Get Raped' Campaign Comes to London

via HuffPost Gay Voices

A new rape awareness campaign aimed at men in London is hoping to challenge the way that people think about the crime and its victims.

Posters for the campaign, launched by Survivors UK, an organization that deals with sexual violence against men, read "Real men get raped and talking about it takes real strength" and show a rugby ball being punctured by a nail.

The ads will be prominently featured on 140 escalator panels in central London Tube stations on February 20 in hopes of reaching passengers during the Six Nations rugby tournament reports MaleHealth.

The ads will also be show on two 48 Sheet billboards at Clapham Junction train station and on screens at Waterloo stations on February 25 and March 17, when England plays at home in the tournament.

Pink News notes that while over 8,500 sexual crimes against men may have taken place in London alone last year, the British government estimates that only 11 percent of men who were attacked reported the crime due to embarrassment and shame.

Michael May of Survivors UK said:

"We’ve chosen to use an alpha male sport in our advertising to challenge assumptions about the type of men who get raped. It’s just as likely to be a rugby player as a librarian, a suited city banker as a hooded gang member.

And we hope that by challenging our innate assumptions about the identity of male victims, we can make it even fractionally easier for a male rape victim to ask for help."

The National Center For Victims Of Crime reports that about three percent of men in the U.S. -- a total of close to three million -- have been raped at some point in their lives.

While many are applauding the campaign, some bloggers have raised questions about the usefulness of the term "real men."

Jessica Wakeman of TheFrisky.com writes, "Why do we have to call it 'real men'? Isn’t that just feeding into the same stereotype that there IS such a thing as 'real men'?"


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A Flaming New Anthology

via HuffPost Gay Voices, by Emerson Whitney

A bathroom view of two side-by-side urinals is the book jacket graphic for Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's new anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?

In a femme and fearless metaphor, one of the urinals is stuffed full of jewelry, flowers, and other colorful, queer-looking flotsam -- a nod to the book's anthological content, featuring "flaming challenges to masculinity, objectification, and the desire to conform," as the subtitle reads.

In anticipation of the book's official launch -- slated to take place, appropriately, on Valentine's Day -- Ms. Sycamore spoke with me while on her West Coast book tour.

"The book is dedicated to exposing hierarchies wherever they exist," said Ms. Sycamore of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?

The book was born, she said, out of frustrations with the "gay male" sex scene that she inhabits, and the hierarchies within it: internet cruising, sexual commoditization, and assimilationist culture.

"It's about flaming challenges to all of that," she said. "Flaming as in flamboyant and queenie and outside the conventional binary, but also in the sense of lighting things on fire."

She paused. We laughed.

Since her first book, Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, published in 2000, Ms. Sycamore's work has lit lots of us on fire.

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? is her fifth anthology in a string of wildly popular works -- at least, in the queer scene -- including her much-acclaimed Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (2007) and That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (2008).

"Like always with my anthologies, the idea for this one stemmed from a question that's coming from my own life experience and the cultures I'm involved in," she said.

"In my life, I feel really inspired by trans/genderqueer and gender-nonconforming communities that I inhabit. But in a very personal way, I feel less and less hopeful in the sexual spaces I find myself. Gay male space often mimics the grossest norms of everything I hate."

Ms. Sycamore and I discussed cyber cruising scenarios, including the use of Grindr, a gay cruising app for the iPhone. (For further reading, visit a new website called "Douchebags of Grinder," aimed at exposing extreme examples of racist, ableist, classist, and other stereotypical gay male sexual exclusivity, as illustrated by profiles on Grinder.)

"'No femmes or fatties' is practically the mantra of gay cruising culture on the Web," she said. "This gross kind of hierarchical regimentation has become so normalized, to such an extent that most gays don't take the time to say, 'Oh, that's fucked up.'"

Ms. Sycamore described an experience she had attempting to say "that's fucked up" to a random cruiser.
"Someone had one of those standard posts with all the 'don'ts,' and this one was 'no Asians,'" she said.

"I wrote, 'I'd prefer no racists,' and the person responded by saying, 'Don't be sore just because you're Asian.'"

Ms. Sycamore is not Asian, and she was appalled at the expectation she shouldn't be offended by a racist comment if she is not member of the race the comment is perpetrated against.

"I wonder whatever happened to our dream of a world of sexual splendor?" she said. "The dream of a sexually inclusive utopia.

Today, instead of imagination, we just have regimentation. The gay culture started out so we'd have a place to express ourselves sexually. Where's all the glamor and joy and sustainability now?"

The stories of 31 different authors were compiled in Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? in an attempt to answer this question.

And according to Ms. Sycamore, the authors and their subjects are as varied as the alternatives to sexual assimilation.

"For example, there's a piece by a straight, female prison guard about the interaction between homophobia and male-on-male desire in prison," she said.

"And there's another story about how drag king culture sometimes takes on the same kinds of prioritization of masculinity as in the gay male and heteronormative communities.

Even in a performance that is based on gender fluidity, still there's a hierarchy. It's amazing!"


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Sports Deficiency Syndrome

via HuffPost Gay Voices, by Domenick Scudera

Doctor, can you help me? The Super Bowl is this Sunday, and I do not care. I feel nothing. That is not normal, right? I cannot even tell you the names of the teams that are playing.

Am I missing the sports gene?

I always thought my aversion to athletics stemmed from the fact that I was gay.

Professional sports are not exactly gay-friendly, what with all the sports stars spewing "faggot" at each other when they get angry.

And I hated gym when I was a kid. Maybe that's when it started? I was always picked last for a team. I was told I threw "like a girl."

I knew some girls who threw really well, so that didn't make a whole lot of sense. Oh, and I loathed dodgeball. In junior high school all the boys were put in a big, padded room, and the bullies were encouraged to let loose their aggressions by whipping the balls extremely hard at the "less athletic."

In other words, dodgeball was organized gay bashing. But my gay friends today are not damaged like me.

They are totally sports-crazed, glued to their billboard-sized televisions on game days just like everybody else. What is wrong with me?

I have tried to get into sports. I really have. Concerned friends have invited me to Super Bowl parties in the past. They try to explain football to me while we watch, but then they hoot and holler like crazy when someone does something that is seemingly inconsequential, like walking over a line or dropping a ball.

It is all so confusing. Yards, downs, flags being thrown all around. I cannot follow it. I watch all the wrong things -- the players' tight pants, the graphics that overlay the live action.

Commercials and the half-time show are way more interesting than the actual game.

There are commentators on these shows who are supposed to help you. Big, burly, beefy guys in striped suits and striped shirts.

They sit in a semicircle and analyze everything. But to me, it is as if they are speaking a foreign language. These men have encyclopedic knowledge of things that make absolutely no sense.

They know how many yards some player ran four years ago, or they know the exact number of times a right-handed player threw the ball to a left-handed player in the rain on a Tuesday.

How do they remember this stuff? Each one is like a sports Rain Man.

I long to feel the same hyperinflated emotion, the pure joy, that a rabid fan feels when his or her team wins the Super Bowl. Have I ever experienced that scale of elation any time in my life?

Maybe I would feel it if I won the lottery, or if same-sex marriage were made legal. But those are once-in-a-lifetime moments. A sports fan can feel that grand excitement any day of the week just by turning on ESPN. Why can't I be like everybody else?

Is there a pill I could take? A sports reparative therapy? Maybe I could join a support group, an Athletically Challenged Anonymous meeting?

The symptoms get worse around the time of the big games, series, cups, and bowls. I feel so lonely, like the sole human after a zombie apocalypse.

The game will be playing everywhere! Everyone will be wearing their team colors, talking statistics, placing bets. There is nowhere to hide. Please, help!


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Hyper-Masculinity effects on Gay and Bi Men

via GoodTherapy

“Gay and bisexual men experience numerous negative health conditions, including high rates of mental health problems,” said Beth N. Fischgrund of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, and lead author of a new study examining masculinity and mental health in gay and bisexual men.

“Empirical studies show that a strong adherence to masculine norms is correlated with poor health outcomes, such as mental health problems and risky sexual behaviors.”

National studies have shown that gay men are nearly twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety as heterosexual men, and that suicide rates for these men are nearly double those of other men.

The way gay and bisexual men perceive their masculinity has a significant impact on mental health. “Society’s messages about sexuality are not the only cultural attitudes that sexual minority men are confronted with; cultural attitudes also delineate what it means to be a man,” said Fischgrund.

 She added that some men may exhibit hyper-masculine behaviors when they feel their masculinity is being threatened.
“Gay men who endorse hyper-masculine norms might then experience identity incongruence when they are presented with general society’s norms that differ and contradict their own.

 In these situations, the more integral the hyper-masculine norms are to a man’s identity, the more psychological distress he may experience.”

For her study, Fischgrund recruited 311 gay and bisexual men, nearly a third of which reported an HIV positive status.

 “Among these gay and bisexual men, those who adhered to norms that incorporate an interpersonal aspect of masculinity (i.e., conceptions of masculinity as social behavior or as sexual  behavior) endorsed higher levels of mental health distress than did men who adhered to norms that focus on the intrapersonal aspects of masculinity (i.e., conceptions of masculinity as physical appearance),” said Fischgrund.

“Additionally, men who did not know their HIV status endorsed higher levels of depression.” She emphasized the importance of her findings.

“Specifically, designing programs that center on altering the social and sexual masculine norms within the gay male community are needed to decrease the mental health burden of gay and bisexual men, which has been shown to be associated with HIV risky behaviors.”


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Q&A: Errol Fields on Young Black Gay Men and Perceptions of HIV Risk

via TheBody.com, by Kellee Terrell

TheBody.com sat down with the researcher to clarify the findings of his new study, which found that young black gay/bi men believe that "masculine" men are less likely to have HIV.

Excerpt:

This preference for masculine men, or what was perceived as masculine, was fairly dominant and oftentimes, masculinity was described as something that "was not effeminate." Other descriptions of masculinity given were images we would see in hip-hop: Thugs and "gangstas", men who bragged about sexual conquests and certain physical attire. 

But we also found that many of these men preferred masculine partners because by hanging out with more masculine men, they could hide their own sexuality from other people they were not out to. Hanging with more effeminate men would give their sexuality away and they didn't want that. 

In terms of HIV risk, some of them had this assumption that masculinity meant not being involved in a "gay lifestyle" and men who were "wrapped up" in the lifestyle were more likely to be infected with HIV because they were exposing themselves to something they shouldn't be. There is this underlying assumption that HIV is something that is housed in the "out" gay community, and that was evident in their bias. One man told us, "If he is a guy with a girl and two babies, then he is not messing around with a lot of other men, so he doesn't have HIV."

Read it all.

New Study Shows Black Gay Men Think Masculine Men are Less Likely to Have HIV

via KenyonFarrow.com, posted by Keith R. Green

Are we the kind of boys/men we want?

According to a new study by John’s Hopkins University, the answer is no.

The new study, conducted as a series of interviews with 35 young/teen Black men who have sex with men ages 18-24 shows that they:

1.Almost exclusively prefer romantic and sexual partners they perceive to be masculine.
2.Reluctant to allow a man they consider to be feminine to “top” them during sex.
3.Allow men they perceive to be more masculine to control the terms of what kind of sex happens, including condom use.
4.Consider masculine men to be less likely to have HIV, and feminine men to be more at risk.

According to the CDC’s last published incidence data from 2006, “among all black MSM, there were more new HIV infections (52%) among young black MSM (aged 13–29 years) than any other racial or ethnic age group of MSM in 2006. The number of new infections among young black MSM was nearly twice that of young white MSM and more than twice that of young Hispanic/Latino MSM.”

Click here to read more...

VIDEO: Poet Yolo Akili Asks, "Are You the Kind of Man You Want?"

Would you date yourself? 


 Are you masculine enough?

Do you find yourself worthy? An object of your own lust?

Thanks to Rod 2.0 for putting this on the LifeLube radar.

You and Me - Relationship study in SF and NY

You and Me is a study underway in San Francisco and New York City exploring how culture, masculinity, and homophobia play into gay men's relationships and their sexual health.

The work is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, and is a collaborative effort among researchers at San Francisco State University's Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, led by Principal Investigator, Dr. Colleen Hoff (SF) and Co-Investigator, Dr. Patrick Wilson (NYC).

You & Me's goal is to better understand the relationship dynamics and the contextual factors that shape them in order to develop interventions to improve the sexual health of men in same-sex relationships. Little health research has focused on same-sex couples, and even fewer studies have included Black and interracial couples. Talking with couples will allow us to better understand the relationship context that men must negotiate as they make decisions that affect their sexual health.

Learn more and get information on a number of ways you can participate.

Social Bottom in the Bar, Sissy Top in the Boudoir

[we LOVE this]

You are welcome in this community, sissy or otherwise.

via Philly Gay Calendar, by Nicholas Deroose

Excerpt:

For those that know me, you probably would agree that I am really gay. I out people just walking pass them. I like to tell people I have enough gay to go around so don't be shy. I am so loud that most people can hear me before the see me and I say gurrrlfriend with a pitch that makes people think Mariah is in the neighborhood. I am unapologetically gay with every wrist flick, hair toss and booty shake.

So with all my fabulousness, shooting rainbows and butterflies with every step, most people would automatically assume that I am a bottom, and I don't mind if they assume that, because if being called a bottom means being fabulous, than yes, hand me my B-badge. Plus, I find it so much easier to me funny when you're shamelessly loud. I mean how many gay butch comedians do you know? It seems that we have come to equate camp with taking it up the ass. 

Take it all.

Do you see what I see?

Gay men’s body image: An insidious distraction

via San Diego Gay and Lesbian News, by Stephen Brewer

Excerpt:

How is it that we as a community have come to a point where it seems as though only fat-free muscular builds and thin physiques define attractiveness and worthiness of love?

First, take a moment to reflect on how you developed your sense of who you are.

This process was likely heavily influenced by how much your sexuality plays a part in your life. If you are gay, like it or not, your sexuality plays a huge role in your life. I don’t need to repeat how often we hear messages that being gay is immoral, disgusting, and threatening to American culture.

What other kinds of messages are we given? Mainstream media presents us with a selection of caricatures of gay men that can be described as feminine and weak.

Think about it. When was the last time a strong, masculine gay male was portrayed in mainstream American media?

Can’t think of anything? I certainly can’t, but I could be missing something.

Read it all.

A Brilliant Response to Gays Who Hate Effeminate Gays

via Queerty.

Aspirational masculine health - Chinese style

This large inflatable has been, um, erected in Hangzhou, in China's Zhejiang Province, to promote the upcoming 'Masculine Health Day'.

My What a Lovely, Masculine Mug You Have

For gay and straight men, facial attraction operates similarly - via Science Blog

A new study from a researcher at Harvard University finds that gay men are most attracted to the most masculine-faced men, while straight men prefer the most feminine-faced women.

The findings suggest that regardless of sexual orientation, men's brains are wired for attraction to sexually dimorphic faces -- those with facial features that are most synonymous with their gender.

Read the rest.

Sissy Seeks Honesty in Hook Ups

I can count on one hand the number of profiles I have seen expressing a desire for feminine men, in part I think because declaring such a desire would in fact be claiming a kind of queer desire that is not valued and actively discouraged.

LifeLube's pal Trevor Hoppe gets SASSY with all those "looking for masculine" guys...

He recently shared his answer to "How are you healthy?" here.

From Finland with Lust

It's often said that Tom's greatest achievement was in drawing gay men who were masculine, happy and proud at a time when they were supposed to be effeminate, neurotic and shameful.

[A major Tom of Finland retrospective is happening in Liverpool, part of that city's annual Homotopia queer culture festival.]

The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a well-thumbed, seventh-hand issue of Fiesta, a top-shelf favourite of schoolboys in the 1970s. The image, buried at the back, was in a small ad for more “specialised” publications. But it jumped out at me like an outsized erection.

It depicted a pair of muscular butch young men with big chins and broad grins grabbing each other's bubble butts and straining packets while winking at the reader. I immediately rushed out to the post office to buy as many postal orders as my pocket money would allow.

Read the rest.

What does it mean to be a queer man?

Beyond Masculinity: Essays by Queer Men on Gender and Politics
Edited by Trevor Hoppe

Beyond Masculinity is a collection of 20 smart, insightful essays from a diverse group of writers that all tackle the question of what it means to be a queer man. Contributions focus on five key areas: Desire, Sex and Sexuality; Negotiating Identities; Queer Feminist Politics; Beyond Binary Gender; and Transforming Masculinity.

Online and free!

Beyond Masculinity isn’t a traditional anthology. You can listen to the essays via iTunes and download podcasts. All essays may also be commented on directly via the site's blogging software.

click above to continue reading

click above to continue reading

Kanye West Embraces His "Feminine Ways"

Read about darlin' Kanye's masculinity on one of our fav blogs - Rod 2.0 beta.

Don't Look Gay: Why American Men Are Afraid of Intimacy with Each Other

Why do adolescent boys often leave empty seats between each other when they go to the movies? It's a product of the culture of male homophobia in America which pushes men to avoid intimacy and gay stereotypes.

This article by John Ibsen is reprinted from American Sexuality Magazine.

On Saturday afternoon at the Cineplex you can see them: adolescent boys, there to watch one of the action films that Hollywood makes with an audience of young males in mind. What’s distinctive is where the boys sit in the theater. Though they might’ve come to the movie together and might even be close friends, they’ll leave an empty seat between them.

Just where the empty physical, as well as emotional, space between men comes from has been the essential subject of my research as a scholar of American culture. My work has culminated in a recent book, Picturing Men: A Century Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography.

What accounts for that space? A short answer, something academics like me are notoriously reticent to provide, is that countless American boys and the men that they become are afraid of intimacy with each other, fearful of how intimacy might be construed -- of what others and maybe even they themselves might decide that the closeness suggests. What I’m alluding to, of course, is homophobia.

Read the rest on AlterNet.