ARE ALL COUPLES ALIKE? A Reader

From Ben Dykes:

I am glad to see how Maggie has turned to cultural issues that highlight these fundamental misunderstandings held by many conservative straights. Let me address a few:

Maggie's idea about men needing women as a relief from the world of competition reflects a common misunderstanding of gay men: that we are basically straight men who want to have sex with each other. Since (on this view) all men fear being 'soft' or being beaten or humiliated by other men, only a woman can provide a man--even a gay man--a safe space to relax and feel intimate. Therefore a "marriage" between two gay men is really just a temporary truce between two straight men while they have sex, with a bunch of legal goodies thrown in. Such a "marriage" is not emotionally real, because with two men, competition would destroy the home.

This notion may make sense if your experience of male interaction occurs primarily in a heterosexual context, and especially if you believe that the only thing separating gay and straight men is the object of their sexual attraction. But male relationships are not that simple. It all depends on whom you're allegedly competing with, and for what.

A male-oriented male culture involves a dynamic rather different from a woman-oriented male culture. Gay culture doesn’t assign a certain group of men to be the emotional caregivers and tell the rest to compete for them in a kind of zero-sum game. There is a potential for both friendship and romantic partnership in all people, so it's false to assume that even a gay man needs someone very different from him to find emotional support and a "safe space" (i.e., in a woman so defined). In a gay man's life, certain men will be acquaintances, others good friends, others sexual flings, others romantic partners and, in many cases, one man emerges as someone he wants to marry. Gay men differ from straight men in having to find these differences among the men with whom we interact, but it is not that different from the romantic rituals that straight men and women use to find a partner. Same-sex and opposite sex couples share enough common ground for the emotional features of marriage to apply to both, even if their cultural structures provide each with their own complexities and richness.

So it's simply not true that gay men need women in the same way that straight men do. Even if some gay men--usually one or two generations ago--marry women for the sake of hiding their homosexuality, doing so for the sake of emotional support is psychologically highly deviant (numerically and normatively). Even in Will-and-Grace friendships, such friends are too smart to think that the woman will be emotionally satisfying for the man in the way another man would be.

Many heterosexuals boast about their seeming to heroically bridge the "gender gap," even as they maintain a cultural cliche that men and women--even those married for many years--never really know one another. Bridging the gender gap is admirable, but having such a gap is a vice straight couples must overcome, not something to be held up as intrinsically important to all relationships. I daresay gay men aren't impressed with declarations about overcoming the gender divide, because plenty of us are close friends with women already.
posted by maggie at 5:19 PM | Link |

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