(No, Lisa’s preferences in regards to anal sex or lack thereof are not a theme that is going to be explored in this blog post. If harassed about it, I will briefly state my preference, but hopefully nobody will so far miss the whole point of this post that they will be motivated to ask.)
I got to thinking on this topic today after a brief hop over to Feminsting’s community blogsite where I saw an article entitled “Feminist Critique of Hetero Male Culture Causes Mass MRA Hysteria.” I wasn’t too intrigued by the header there, I’ll admit, because most feminist critiques of anything to do with men and sexuality send most MRAs over the edge of rationality–in other words, well okay but so..? but I was also waiting for about 5 million work emails to finish printing out on my feeble home printer and I had time to kill. So I read it, and followed the embedded link to the original blog post by the author on her own website and read that too.
It wasn’t a bad article, even if the author had to start out with the tired old refrain of “when I was a little girl I was really more like a little boy! because 99% of little girls, unlike me, were all about Barbies and gossip and hated physical activity of any sort–!” I do get tired of that one. It certainly does incline me to agree that the female writers who regularly prop up this stereotype did, indeed, have zero little girlfriends growing up or they’d know better than that. But then, if they acknowledged that to be true, they might have to reconsider why they didn’t actually have more little girlfriends, eh..? I’m sure it’s much more pleasant to imagine that one didn’t because one was simply too guyishly cool for all those little pink rainbow wussies! rather than it being, perhaps, for some other less self-congratulatory reason.
But moving on to the actual point she was trying to make–she certainly got it right about the prevalence of men using being on the receiving end of anal sex as a euphemism for a miserable situation. However, I think she rather missed the boat on why. Men also, just as frequently if not more so, use being raped in the same euphemistic fashion. So, when men are talking about being fucked up the ass by their boss, or the government, or their ex-wife’s lawyer, they’re not actually referring to the mechanics of anal sex–they’re referring to being raped. Since women don’t rape men (yes, I know they do, but bear with me), men are simply using the phrase “fucked up the ass” synonymously with “getting raped.”
That whole idea did strike me as interesting, though–because men also use “rape” euphemistically, with themselves as the main actor, to describe how they absolutely defeated some other person or persons in competition (the competition can be either formal, as in a softball game, or informal, as in getting the best parking space at Wal-Mart). However, they do not ever (that I’ve witnessed) describe themselves as “fucking someone else up the ass” in that way. So the distinction is made, and the distinction seems pretty clear-cut in cause to me. It is homophobic, specifically male-homophobic, and all of a piece with how the most common thing I hear out of pre-pubescent and pubescent boys’ mouths as an insult exchanged with other boys (and since I have a twelve-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old son, I get to hear a lot of this kind of exchange) is, “You’re gay.”
Men, therefore, who use all these euphemisms, have a clear grasp of the essentials–only women and faggots, ie, persons with status less than the standard issue heterosexual man, get fucked up the ass. To be fucked up the ass is to have your human status reduced. If something happens to you that reduces your status in the eyes of others, you have been fucked up the ass. If you soundly defeat another man, you have reduced his status to that of a woman–you have raped him–but you don’t quite want to say that you fucked him up the ass, as he is male like you, because that would make you a faggot and reduce your status too.
This is why we have the seeming paradox of these men fearing rape more than any other crime that could be committed against them, with the possible exception of castration, yet having no issues at all regularly blowing off and otherwise dismissing the rape of women by men, with the sometimes-exception of the rape of a prepubescent woman or a virgin. For them, rape is psychologically devastating because it makes you a homo, and physically painful because while pussies are clearly designed for dicks, assholes aren’t. They accept that rape might also be psychologically damaging because a girl child’s brain probably hasn’t fully accepted adult concepts yet and a virgin is probably saving herself for some special man, and physically damaging because a child’s vagina isn’t quite done developing to full readiness for a man’s penis and because they can imagine that the rupture of the physical membrane that is the hymen could be painful. However, once a female has begun to menstruate and no longer possesses a hymen, her getting fucked in the vagina is totally natural both physically and psychologically–it’s how we were all designed, right?–so it really can’t be considered anything nearly as psychologically or physically devastating as a man getting raped anally by another man. And it doesn’t reduce a pubescent, non-virgin female’s status–she’s already not a virgin, which is the only status boost she could possibly stack onto her pre-existing undeniable femaleness, and once that’s gone, she has no more to lose.
An interesting conundrum that this can present for men who find that they really enjoy receiving anal stimulation–I was in a long-term, monogamous relationship with one (I won’t say which one). He asked me, very hesitantly and shame-faced, after the first time we really made a point of trying it out, if I thought that that meant he had homosexual urges. I said, I don’t think so–who do you want to be doing this to you? Me, or a man? You! he said, very definitely, and I said, Well, I think that’s what defines you as homosexual or not–who you’re doing whatever you’re doing with, not what exactly you happen to be doing. But men who want to perform anal sex on women don’t have this agonizing conflict–because, again, it is getting fucked that reduces your status and puts you in your place, not doing the fucking.
I used to wonder why men seemed to have so much trouble empathizing with most types of rapes, when a woman was the victim, or even why they en masse never seemed to take it seriously when a man was raped by a woman, yet clearly had no trouble at all wildly overempathizing with the horror that was a man getting raped by another man. This is the answer, and it’s a pretty sad one.
On an end note, though, I can’t help but preemptively sympathize with the author of the original Feministing community blog post–one of the very first responses to her article was the following, by a self-described “MRAman:”
If you don’t like butt sex you should just say so. Nobody would be surprised anyway, since everyone knows feminists are always opposed to things men like.
Sigh. Yes, that must be it…well, if I’m lucky, our periodic trollers won’t be around to read this particular blog post and visit me with such sage perceptions as well. Fingers crossed. 
This is just like how many guys won’t see anything wrong with catcalling girls, but would beat the shit out of a guy doing the same thing to them. They don’t see anything hypocritical about that because women are interested in men sexually (at best lesbians don’t exist) while they are *not* sexually interested in the men doing the catcalling. It’s like they can’t imagine that all women aren’t sexually attracted to all men on some level, like women could not possibly understand how un-attracted sexually they are to other men. We secretly like the “compliments” they yell at us. Or something.
I want to comment but the page doesn’t refresh and I get this in the address
http://punkassblog.com/^http://65.26.53.112/$
That’s my IP…
..I have no idea why it would be doing that…I’m sorry!
I think you’re overthinking it. “Getting screwed” and versions thereof are a figure of speech that most people, even white male residents of red states, use to mean simply ‘getting the short end of the stick’. I won’t deny for a moment that some significant subset of those also dislike gays, but I am quite skeptical that they make any mental connection between the two. Similarly, you probably know a lot of very liberal people who say something is “gay” when they mean it’s dumb.
I don’t think I’m overthinking it, though I’ll agree that “you’re gay” specifically has become such a mainstreamed insult that it’s lost a lot of its direct connection to homosexuality. However, I was more referring to the fact that it got started out as I described.
As far as “getting screwed,” that’s another version of my same point. The most emasculating thing that can happen to you is if somebody else forces sex on you, as it makes you a woman or a faggot. Real men are the performers, not the performees.
I agree that both phrases started out as you described. I guess I would say that the etymology of the terms is a separate issue from their common usage today.
What’s interesting to me about the genesis of getting ‘screwed’ or ‘bent over’ and soforth as a term for, er, getting shafted (I wonder how many variants I could think of…) is how it references the power aspect. I can see your interpretation that it means “real men” give instead of getting; I’ve personally always thought of it more abstractly, as simply meaning that the other person – regardless of gender – got the better of you. Then again, I tend to overthink things too
As an aside, I stopped saying “that’s gay” many years ago after someone pointed out how directly it equates homosexuality with being wrong and stupid. I could imagine having the same outlook on saying “assraped” but for my interpretation that I described above, which seems to placate the couple of people who ever brought it up with me.
“I’ve personally always thought of it more abstractly, as simply meaning that the other person – regardless of gender – got the better of you.”
I’m pretty sure that’s the point in a nutshell. The problem which Lisa is referring to is the phenomenon in which men interpret getting fucked as something which lessens a person. This is self-evident in all the euphemisms so many men use to describe someone getting the best of them, or of them getting one over on someone else (screw you, take it in the ass, bitch, i’m going to make him/her bend over and take it, etc. etc.).
This is slightly off tangent, but it infuriates me to no end that “suck my cock” is used as an insult. Doing so degrades the act and turns it into a punishment instead of a pleasurable act. The same thing occurs with all the other bullshit euphemisms I mentioned above. By turning sexual acts with men into an insult, it makes it extremely difficult to enjoy engaging in a sex act with a man. I mean, really, do you really want to give a blowjob to someone who runs around saying “suck my cock” when he’s pissed off? Not a lot of logic there….
…what?
I completely missed that memo.
You just don’t live with two tween/teen boys who have friends over all the time, who use the word to refer to absolutely anything under the sun they don’t agree about, often things that could not no matter how hard one tried be tied into human sexual orientation.
However, what hasn’t been lost is the connection between homosexuality and something bad, I should have clarified by stating.
Happily, though, many of our more sensitive youth have left behind the use of “gay” as an insult. They’ve replaced it with “retarded.” (Or variations like “fucktard,” which you can see all over Teh Intertoob.)
I think Stacy’s dead wrong, by the way. “Getting fucked” wouldn’t have gained, and kept, the connotation of “getting the short end of the stick” if so many people didn’t see getting fucked as degrading, humiliating, etc. It carries over into many domains of thought and language that are still in everyday use, like the sexual double standard, the nervousness many straight men have about women who initiate sex, and so on, which are very old (see the book of Ezekiel and the Revelation, for example). And just because many straight boys have learned to pay lip service to equal rights for gays and to support gay marriage, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still homophobic. On the other hand, it isn’t fun for them either: the anxiety they have about not being man enough, of being cast out of the boys’ club or worse (which can include violence against their persons, not just mockery and ostracism), isn’t pleasant. It’s room 101: being thought gay/a penetrated man/a feminized man is the worst thing in the world, so they do their best to throw others into the path of danger.
Yes. 100%.
It’s also related that it comes from the same frame as we see from anti-gay right-wingers who can’t see the difference between homosexuality and pedophilia. They can’t see consent, or at least don’t value it as highly as your “position” in the “exchange”.
Like with many things, it ends up being used as projection which leads to them freaking out over the gays suddenly raping them or treating them like women or women rising up if they got rights and strapping-on and “returning the favor”. It’s essentially the same paranoid fervor of a Southern slave-owner slapping around the slaves because they “might rise up”.
Excellent post. You encapsulated a lot of things I can’t seem to put into words myself…
Along the same lines- the general use of the term ” Fuck you” and how often men use it. Obviously “fucking” is seen as a derogatory thing, a degrading act. Men also want to fuck women yet after they have many times lose respect for them or think they are sluts if the women consents.