The Dish

A reader writes:

I’m fascinated by this passage from your recent e-mailer:

"Any sexual pleasure derived from the women’s naked bodies is a violation in the sense that there is no consent on the part of the lesbians."

Is this really what the problem is? The belief that arousal requires consent on the part of the … let’s call it the ‘stimulating party’ … or else it’s a ‘violation’? That’s astounding. How could I possibly consent to being arousing? Is there some signal I could use to indicate which people I will permit to be aroused by me and thus avoid this violation?

I wonder if this really is the heart of the problem. People like Tim Hardaway may not care, per se, that you’re gay. What they care about is that gay people could be aroused by their bodies. I am a hetero male, but personally I couldn’t care less if gay men found me arousing. Honestly, I’d take it as a compliment.

Me too in the equivalent situation. If I were showering among straight women, would they be violating me by checking out my body? I find the idea preposterous. I’d be flattered. If a woman were to watch me "with lust in her heart" on a beach, would I find that invasive? Nah. Ironic, maybe. Threatening? Are you kidding me? (Now, of course, men’s mere visual "violation" of women can be more threatening, because it raises the specter of male physical domination over women, i.e. rape or abuse. But among straight men and gay men, the threat of physical force is less salient.)

I wonder whether this phenomenon isn’t connected in some way to Islam’s insistence on veiling women? Isn’t the point of public veiling a means to prevent the kind of "violation’ of which my previous reader wrote? Here is the Koran on the religious duty of women not to provide occasion for men to "violate" them with their eyes:

[O Prophet!] tell believing men to restrain their eyes and guard their private parts. That is purer for them. And Allah is well aware of what you do. And tell the believing women to restrain their eyes and to guard their private parts and to display of their ornaments only those [which are worn on limbs] which are normally revealed and to draw their khumr over their bosoms. They should not reveal their ornaments to anyone save their husbands or their fathers or their husbands’ fathers or their sons or their husbands’ sons or their brothers or their brothers’ sons or their sisters’ sons or other women of acquaintance or their slaves or the subservient male servants who are not attracted to women or children who have no awareness of the hidden aspects of women.

My italics. The Koran is saying exactly what my reader was expressing. The Koran is saying that it’s ok for women to reveal their bodies to men who are gay, because no "violation" can take place. In contrast, I find the whole idea of "violating" someone by looking at them to be a function of sexual and emotional immaturity – regardless of the specific matrix of gender or sexual orientation. Hence my problem with some of the sexual ethics and gender absolutism of Islam.

Some Islamists defend the veil as a way to protect women from the violation of men’s eyes. Others – more plausibly, I think – consider the veil as a way for men to control women: for fathers to control daughters’ sexuality before they are married; and subsequently, for husbands to control their wives’ sexuality. But the question asks itself: why should men control women this way? And why should straight men dictate the terms to gay men in the same way? The mindset behind this thinking is that it’s a straight man’s world and the rest of us just rent space from them. If we don’t respect their authority on this, there are consequences. Don’t get me wrong: most straight men in the West don’t think this way at all. But some do, as Tim Hardaway revealed. And it’s certainly a core feature of Islam.

(Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)

Here’s an honest column from a religious fundamentalist, a former basketball player and now a sports-writer. I think he understands the meaning of toleration better than some p.c. liberals. Money quote:

I’ve played in several rec leagues with LZ Granderson, who is an openly gay writer at ESPN The Magazine. I consider LZ a friend. I’ve gone out to lunch with him, talked music, sports, politics and lots of other things with him. I greet him with a handshake and a hug, just like I greet lots of other guys.

By the way, LZ can ball. In a league in New York City that features several former college players, we both made the All-Star team. He was kind of like our Shawn Marion minus the dunks (though he claims he can still slam!) and I was like our Gilbert Arenas (high game of 39, thank you).

Anyway, when we play in our rec league games, I give him high fives and hugs. Same with one of his friends who is on the team and also gay. When we’re on the court trying to get a win — or in the office talking about a story, for that matter — his sexuality is not an issue.

Granted, I don’t shower with LZ after games like NBA teammates do, and I’ll admit that if I had to, it might be a little uncomfortable at first. But if a gay player just goes about his business in the shower, showing that he has no sexual interest in his teammates and that he’s not "checking them out," I think the awkwardness would wear off fairly quickly.

LZ and I know where each other stand and we respect each other’s right to believe as he does. I know he’s gay, and he knows I believe that’s a sin. I know he thinks I get my moral standards from an outdated, mistranslated book, and he knows I believe he needs to change his lifestyle. Still, we can laugh together, and play ball together.

That’s real diversity. Disagreeing but not being disagreeable.

Agreed.

A reader writes:

I’m a little confused. The position espoused by the reader seems to miss a glaring point. How is a scenario where a homosexual man showers with heterosexual men materially different from one where a hetero male showers with a group of lesbians? In the latter case there’s probably little chance of sexual congress (hetero fantasies notwithstanding) and I believe most conscientious men could probably get through such a shower without becoming overtly aroused but that’s not the point. Any sexual pleasure derived from the women’s naked bodies is a violation in the sense that there is no consent on the part of the lesbians. The fact that I’m able to control my physical response, in my opinion, does not mitigate the violation.

I can see how the reader feels. The practical response is that it is perfectly feasible to separate men from women in terms of things like public restrooms, communal showers, etc. In school contexts, it is neither practical nor conscionable to ask gay men/boys to shower in a separate place, or to vet groups of men/boys as gay or straight. Most public gyms have an option for private stalls if some hetero men feel terrified of being "violated" by someone else’s imagination. But it seems to me that if no one touches you or harasses you, you’re not violated. You’re insecure. Get over it.

It’s quite lively down there. Warren Chisum, the creationist nut I posted about earlier today, is featured in this YouTube clip from a hilarious documentary, "The Dildo Diaries." I didn’t know you were able to own five dildoes in Texas, but not six. Alabama just got nuttier, as well. Enjoy:

A reader writes:

I was at Oxford from 1983-87 too (Keble – ‘not really Oxford’ as one family friend put it) and as a Grammar School boy I have memories of the Bullingdon club and their ilk seared into my amygdala. The main thing that I was conscious was the sense of total entitlement … that the world in general and Oxford in particular revolved around them.

I’ve never been unhappier than I was at Oxford, largely because of the class split that was still totally evident there. The year afterwards, I went to the States and realised that the entire worlds was NOT like Oxford and that in a meritocracy it didn’t actually matter whether you had been a member of the Bullingdon club or not. Those who have not seen their progeny up close tend to think that places like Eton and institutions like Oxford prepare men and women for positions of great power and responsibility. The truth is quite the opposite, and that is the real reason why we should be wary of yet another Old Etonian, or Skull-and-Boneser, jostling for the reins of power.

I’m not so bitter. I’ve known many Etonians who are well-balanced, sane and gifted people. Same with Skull and Bones: they can’t all be at the same level as the president has turned out to be. My own lesson coming to America was to let these resentments die the death they deserve. Of course, immigrating to America was the lazy Brit’s way to avoid the class issue. But it seems that many of those who never left have come to feel the same way.

There’s a huge, juicy scandal unfolding … about a celebrated musician’s recordings. The scandal is … the pianist may not exist. Or her recordings may be elaborate hoaxes. Gramophone News has the scoop. [The first version of this post erroneously referred to her as a singer.]

"When it comes to Iraq, I’m sorry, I can’t be specific about my time there. Honestly, I don’t know what I think. I don’t know much about what I did there or if I did any good. I don’t know what to tell people and what’s relevant. It’s a confusing subject for me. I just know there’s a huge part of me that does not want to believe that I spent a year and a half of my life over there for nothing. A lot of soldiers feel the same way. Did my buddies — 3,000 of them — die for nothing?" – Spc. Jacob Cayouette, back from Iraq, and now in Maine.

For the same reasons Dan Savage does. He makes a point I have made many times before and explain at length in Virtually Normal. It’s worth repeating. I don’t give a damn if someone hates me for being gay. I’m fine with it. If you’re not, I’m fine with that too. Just leave me alone, and we’ll get along just fine.  Now, when the government officially discriminates against gays, it’s another thing entirely. The government should treat its citizens equally, period. But the rest of you? As you please. I’d much rather live in a free country where people are free to be bigots than a p.c. country where everyone is legally required to be nice. Hate is a permanent human condition. Trying to ban it is folly. What the gay rights movement should be about is simple public civil equality. Period. Let us marry, serve in the military and then spew whatever bile you want. Deal?

A reader sums up my feelings:

I’m beginning to see the Bush/Gonzales intransigence in the face of overwhelming evidence against the use of "coercive interrogation techniques" (let’s just call it torture) as just one more incarnation of the Rovian hierarchy of politics-trumps-policy. How else can you explain it? At this late stage in the game, they’re still desperate to convince anyone who’ll listen that the Bush team will protect America "by any means necessary". It doesn’t matter if those means are contradictory, ineffective, un-American or downright inhuman. They’re banking on the American people’s continuing detachment from and ignorance of reality concerning interrogation and the consequent and pervasive fear this reinforces.

Pitting this fear against such a widespread anti-torture consensus among those that actually do the hard work smacks of the most despicable and cynical politics we’ve come to expect from Rove. I’m becoming more and more infuriated everyday when I think of how his opportunism has come to define this entire political era. Whenever I’ve had to give a reason as to why I never have and never will trust George W Bush, the Rove name alone has sufficed.