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A different look at heterosexuality in the twenty-first century A straight white girl can kiss a girl, like it, and still call herself straight—her boyfriend may even encourage her. But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity, or would kissing a guy just mean that they are really gay? Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: there’s fraternity and military hazing rituals, where new recruits are made to grab each other’s penises and stick fingers up their fellow members’ anuses; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and, last but not least, the long and clandestine history of straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men. For Jane Ward, these sexual practices reveal a unique social space where straight white men can—and do—have sex with other straight white men; in fact, she argues, to do so reaffirms rather than challenges their gender and racial identity. Ward illustrates that sex between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways. These sex acts are not slippages into a queer way of being or expressions of a desired but unarticulated gay identity. Instead, Ward argues, they reveal the fluidity and complexity that characterizes all human sexual desire. In the end, Ward’s analysis offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging in homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, dis-identification and racial and heterosexual privilege. Daring, insightful, and brimming with wit, Not Gay is a fascinating new take on the complexities of heterosexuality in the modern era.
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Thanks to Netgalley for giving me a chance to review this essay !
Not Gay is a deep and well documented study on white straight male sexuality and general behavior. It shows the tendencies of a certain part of the white straight male population to have homosexual behavior under certain conditions. It takes a bold stance concerning the fluidity of the sexuality and its evolution especially nowadays (while having a look on how the roles and gender evolved through the last century).
This essay is really interesting, quite deep and demands to be focused on its reading (especially due to the multiple use of queer terms and gender-theory related terms), but teaches a lot on things related to the straight white male sexuality through the hazing rituals, the marine and military initations, drunk sex, craiglist ads of straight dude looking for other straight dudes... It shows also how gender and sexuality evolved, with the apparition of the heteroflexible sexuality (neither gay, bi or totally straight), and explains how those straight homosexual relations can be interpreted but also what they imply.
The whole book was really interesting, challenging my mind at every part. It made me discover some things I really didn't know (like the fact that until 1930, both heterosexuality and homosexuality were considered as perversion as they didn't aim for conception) and surprised me on a lot of subjects (male rituals, “on the down low” sex, ...). For everyone interested in gender and human sexuality, this is quite an essay to read !