It is essential that men understand the fundamentals of feminism and queer liberation before they adopt trends created by the girls and the gays…
By Jesse Boland
Take a moment and ask yourself, what is straight culture really? Well, besides not getting tested for STIs, there really is no such thing as straight culture. Heteronormativity is but the bland, sprinkle-less scoop of plain vanilla ice cream that serves as the template for human sexuality and relationships. It is only through queerness that curiosity and excitement can truly zest up the navigations of our own culture of sexuality. The gays and theys have historically been the true arbiters for cultural development, with the straights trying their best to keep up with us. Straight men in particular find themselves chronically late to the discovery of human joy that the girls and gays have been acutely aware of for generations. Their most recent discovery of genuine pleasure: lookin’ like a bitch and actin’ like a slut.
Before I lose you, we all know that cishet men are the original whores, who have allowed their loins to shape the very fabric of history through wars and crusades because they couldn’t just jerk off and call it a day. But promiscuity and hyper-libidinousness are just a small part of being a slut, with many who are branded the term often being victims of imagined projection from their name caller. Rather, being a “slut” or a “hoe” comes from a place of voyeurism wherein the slut in question serves as a symbol of sexual objectification for their onlookers.
While traditionally seen as a method of demeaning the subject, who becomes but a mere piece of meat whose sole purpose is to be ogled at and used for debaucherous enjoyment, as it turns out this can actually sometimes be kinda fun! It should be known by now that the majority of times when women dress up they are seldomly doing it for the attention of men but rather for their own personal pleasure, or even for the camaraderie of fellow women who find joy in celebrating their own bodies in an unapologetic fashion. While gay men were quick to follow suit and equally partake in flaunting our bodies in scantily clad outfits and gyrating our hips in suggestive fashions to pulsating music, if one were to open TikTok these days it would seem our cishet male guests have also decided to drop in to the party.
Straight men suggestively flaunting their sexualities is nothing new: one can go all the way back to a young trollop named Elvis Presley spelling “COCONUT” with his hips on The Ed Sullivan Show, or Bruce Springsteen bussin’ his monkey wide open on his cover for Born in the USA; and God help us when Gen Z discovers how The Red Hot Chili Peppers used to wear their socks on stage. These depictions of male sexuality are fascinating. There’s not a woman’s body in sight: the idea is not to state men’s power over women, but rather for the female to gaze on them, to hegemonically allow themselves to be objectified by women. Similar to Springsteen’s album cover, the single cover for Maluma’s 2023 single “Coco Loco” sees his headless, naked torso holding a coconut over his crotch, stripping him of his personhood and reducing him to an ornamental piece of man-meat to be gawked at by male-attracted onlookers; much to his slutty delight.
The term metrosexual has swiftly evolved from a blasé term of the early 2000s that describes men who properly wash their asses into a Tumblr-amplified branch of neo-gender studies observing how straight men use queerness and feminism to their own benefit without giving back to either movement. While analyses of Harry Styles-esque commodification of feminine aesthetics for galvanizing queerbaiting have been done to death and the world has slowly picked up on the trend of straight men hiding behind queerness and androgyny to hide their abusive actions, we have only recently begun to see the trend of men acting like bad bitches, and what ramifications it may have on women and queer men are still left uncertain.
While a public figure like Bad Bunny genuinely seems like he has the purest of intentions by posting naked selfies and throwing his ass in an octagon in the club as he has frequently advocated for the rights and protection of queer people – the ones who made it okay for him to live in his thotness – there are sure to be men who walk down the street wearing five-inch seam shorts with crop tops but still resort to violent straight panic upon becoming the subject of attention from gay onlookers. For while straight men have the privileged luxury of being able to dabble in slut culture by wearing revealing outfits and dancing suggestively, they are still mostly immune to the dangers of a rape culture that target women and queer people. So while we may venerate the optics of men embracing their inner bad bitches, it is important that we not pretend that this is some great advancement of feminist gender politics or queer 2SLGBTQI+ acceptance but just straight guys getting yet another step up the ladder. After all, do you really think straight men embracing getting their asses eaten by their female partners was at the top of Judith Butler’s mission statement?
Still, you can’t exactly be mad at these men for making the most of their privilege. And while we may have made the case that some straight men are gradually learning to embrace acting like a thot, they are still only a small percentage of the population who are taking baby steps outside of their repressed cages of sexual frustration known as masculinity. It is essential that men understand the fundamentals of feminism and queer liberation before they can be trusted to roam free in their short shorts, taking thirst traps in the gym on butt day for their followers to yearn over. Men have historically allowed their penises to lead them into wars, and it is not impossible that they could very well let their bubble butts back them up into wats too if left unchecked.
Only time will tell if this celebration of straight bros acting like sluts will be a step forward for gendered equality, or yet another step back for double-standard misogyny/homophobia. All I know for now is that NLE Choppa went crazy on “Slut Me Out” and I am hyped to see some hockey butts making it clap to it this summer.
JESSE BOLAND is that gay kid in class who your English teacher always believed in. He’s a graduate of English at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) who has a passion for giving a voice to people who don’t have data on their phones and who chases his dreams by foot because he never got his driver’s licence.
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