did our mothers invent loneliness or did it make them our mothers? were we fathered by silence or just looking to explain away this gaping quiet? is it wasteful or wistful to pray for our brothers in a language they never learned? whose daughters are we if we grow old before our mothers, or for their sake? they called our grandfathers the january children, lined up by the colonizer and assigned birth years by height. there is no answer because we come from men who do not know when they were born, because they married women shown to them in photographs, because their children left the country and tried for romance and had daughters full of all the wrong language.

Can we just take a minute to think about how, if I were to put up an identifiable nude picture of myself, on my own blog, taken in my own bathroom, it could come back around an ruin my life?

let’s just think about how, no matter what I do with my life - become a teacher, a lawyer, a scientist, a professor - a photograph of my naked body could render largely null and void the value that others would be willing to give to me.

It would not matter if I were a virgin - it would not matter if I meant them for a lover’s eyes only - it would not matter whether or not I did it for money - my own naked body could actually ruin my life and my work.

Can we just think about that? That is powerful, and not in a good way.

Okay, guy, so why do you feel like you want/need/deserve to settle down with a “pure” woman? I’m genuinely listening. “Oh, it’s because sluts are gross.” Too vague. Do better. “Well, their vaginas are real stretched out and big.” No. “Ummmmm, they probably have a bunch of diseases?” Easy fix! Setting aside the fact that plenty of women contract STIs from monogamous partners or during “safe sex,” it sounds like your real problem here is with illness, not sex. So I assume you’d be fine dating a promiscuous woman who practiced safe sex and happened to be STI-free? “No, because I want a girl who’s traditional and family-oriented.” Having sex doesn’t mean you don’t want to have a family. It just means that you want to have sex. “Yeah, but a slut is more likely to cheat on me.” Really? Then why do couples in the Bible Belt have such a high divorce rate? “The devil, I guess?” NOPE. “I just can’t stand the thought of her getting fucked by all those other guys.” So you’re about to have sex with a woman you’re attracted to, you really want to have sex with her, but all you can think about is her getting pounded by tons and tons of dicks? That sounds like an entirely different issue. “No! I just mean that I struggle with the same powerlessness and insecurity that all human beings do, so as a coping mechanism I take advantage of our culture’s patriarchal power structure and exorcize my feelings of worthlessness by perpetuating shame-based proprietary attitudes over women’s bodies. Basically I’m obsessed with controlling women’s lives because I can’t control my own.” Oh, honey. I know.

I asked all of the gay male students in the room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman’s body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited advice about how to “improve” her body or her fashion. Once again, after a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.

These questions came after a brief exploration of gay men’s relationship to American fashion and women’s bodies. That dialogue included recognizing that gay men in the United States are often hailed as the experts of women’s fashion and by proxy women’s bodies. In addition to this there is a dominant logic that suggests that because gay men have no conscious desire to be sexually intimate with women, our uninvited touching and groping (physical assault) is benign.