Dan Savage, as usual, finds the sex positive take on even sexist Halloween costumes.
We know what it’s like to keep your sexuality under wraps, to keep it concealed, to be on your guard and under control at all times. While you don’t suffer anywhere near the kind of repression we did (and in many times and places still do), straight people are sexually repressed, too. You move through life thinking about sex, constantly but keenly aware that social convention requires you to act as if sex were the last thing on your mind. Exhausting, isn’t it? It makes you long for moments when you can let it all hang out, when you can violate the social taboos you honor most of the rest of time, when you can be the piece of meat you are and treat other people like the pieces of meat they are.
and then:
Straight guys don’t have the same incentive to bare their flesh on Halloween. It’s a shame, of course, because there are a lot of straight guys out there who have amazing bodies, and they should be encouraged to show off on Halloween, to celebrate their erotic power and do like the gay boys do: objectify and be objectified at the same time. That would make the straight pride parades, aka Halloween, feel as egalitarian as the gay pride parades on which they were unconsciously modeled.
Oh, if only!
Yeah..Gay men show such freedom of open sexual intent. Taking off your shirt in a gay bar is like an open invitation, like a peacock showing it’s feathers.
Thanks for the post; I’m going to slut up my outfit just for that reason.
That was a great find, Helen. I read Savage Love every week (in the Georgia Straight), but I don’t often see The Stranger. I quite like Dan’s sex-positive view of slutting it up on Halloween. Next Halloween I’ll be several months post-op. I’m no spring chicken, but I bet I can still have some sex-positive fun.
He’s right, though, that guys should stop being so inhibited.