gatheringbones

[“A basic premise of straight culture is the idea that gendered bodies, especially women’s bodies, require purification and modification to be desirable—shaving, perfuming, toning, refining, shrinking, enlarging, and antiaging. But in queer spaces, it is often precisely the hairy, sweaty, dirty, smelly, or unkempt gendered body that is most beloved. I recall the first time I entered a gay men’s sex shop, in the 1990s in the Castro district of San Francisco, and encountered a barrel full of lightly stained and dingy-looking “used jock straps” for sale. It was my introduction to the fact that there were people in the world who desired men’s bodies so much that they wanted deep, intimate, and seemingly unconditional contact with them—even and especially the parts of men’s bodies that straight women seemed to want to avoid.

Most straight women I knew, no doubt due to their socialization as girls and women, appreciated men’s bodies for their sexual functionality but not as a site of objectification that they were excited to dive into and explore—to smell, taste, or penetrate. Similarly, I have been to dozens of dyke strip shows, burlesque shows, drag-king shows, and sex shows in which women’s armpit hair and leg hair and facial hair or their body fat or their genderqueer bodies have been precisely the objects of the audience’s collective lust. Fat bodies and hairy bodies are also staples of queer dyke porn, not relegated to a fetish category. In other words, queer desire is marked by a lustful appreciation for even those parts of men’s and women’s bodies that have been degraded by straight culture. Like a food adventurer who delights in those parts of the animal or plant deemed undesirable by the narrowing of mainstream tastes, queer people’s desire for the full animal has been less constrained. Recognizing this suggests that gay men may have a deeper or more comprehensive appreciation for men’s bodies than do straight women, just as lesbians’ lust for women is arguably more expansive and forgiving than straight men’s. But most importantly, because queer circuits of desire do not rely on the erotic encounter of “opposites” embedded in a broader culture of gendered acrimony and alienation, queer lust need not reconcile a conflict between wanting to fuck and generally disliking one’s fuckable population.”]

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality