Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Entertainment Makes You Queer
by Travis Hedge Coke
Imaginal. Adjective.
1 relating to an image.
2 relating to an adult insect or imago.
3 relating to imagination.
A difference between gender or sexuality as performative and being a performance is that gender and sexuality are anticipated from outside the individual, but genders and sexualities, as terms, are not precision descriptive.
When Harvey Fierstein came out as not-rigidly-gendered, he did express a desire not to be identified as “nonbinary,” on the basis that there is not as much a binary as sometimes people will insist. While, perhaps, a misreading of what and how nonbinary is used in reference to gender, particularly by nonbinary people, like the pan/bi debate, or some monosexuals’ fascination with delimiting the realm of “tourist gays” and “queer til graduation,” all of the terminology can only roughly, and imperfectly, encompass anyone’s sexuality or gender, or the sexuality or gender base of a community or culture.
The blurring betwixt true crime as a genre and actual crimes as a practice mean there is a blurring between what is permissible or criminalized in social interaction or admission when it comes to the purview of true crime interactions, primarily those concerning serial killers and violent kidnapping. The principle reward in blurring between imaginal and social practices, in this case, is empowerment of at least two imaginal and one or two practical elements: 1 schadenfreude (see the lionization of terrible violent assaulters couples with), 2 I would simply fight back; 1 I have not been assaulted and/or 2 I have been assaulted.
Emotions and physiological experiences incurred during the reception of fiction are not emotionally nor physiologically different from those incurred during engagement with nonfiction narrative or direct, unperformed (inasmuch as there is such a thing) real life. Our maturation into whatever our contemporary state is, of our individual gender and sexuality is shaped as much by our fiction entertainments as our nonfiction engagements, and the only real, in practice, divergence, is that we learn which realms of engagement the rules or factors of each permit or reward or punish which practices or admissions.
It is easy to claim that, “No one would think about _____ all the time, unless they were _____,” however this relies of _____ being a thing which others can ascribe to you, an accurate encompassment, and because they are internally-identified and not dependent on a community consensus, sexualities and genders are not.
All anglophone women’s sexualities and all genders are queer, because all women have learned to have male experiences. Most are, around the world, of all the world. This maleness is neither universal maleness nor universal and total male privilege or standing. This is why it is absurd, to pretend or act as if trans or nonbinary people who are read by someone as male have universal and total male privilege. But, this commercialized – as it is – maleness is educative immersive experience.
This experiential learning and conducting separates from ethnicity and culture because gender/sexuality are internally-generated and externally appraised, while ethnicity/culture are generated externally. One cannot be made less gay or less bisexual by an external group or individual’s appraisal, while one can be excised from a particular community or a neighborhood or family group, including a gay group or a queer community.
Fiction presents social structures and interpersonal dynamics which do not apply well, if at all, to living social and interpersonal engagements. Stories of cis male homosexual interactions or social existence made primarily by cishet women for cishet women are not cultural instructional manuals for gay men. Romance comics are no more behavioral guides or decorum primers than adventure or horror movies, and the intended audience is always to before incidental audiences.
The intended audience of those stories of cis male homosexuals made by/for cishet women do not, however, present a cishet women’s social interaction or internality. They present a queer internality which touches on several nonfictional lived social and internal states, while being – especially as stories are agglomerated into genre – their own existence, with its own dynamics, expectations, taboos and procedures. As those are internalized by the audience, as those dynamics and taboos are attached to particular consequences in that fictive kind of world and the emotions felt by the audience as they experience those fictive worlds, the engagement on personal and social levels becomes genuine through the medium of the protagonists and the moral causality and societal expectations they face.
Yaoi or BL/ML comics for and by women are sometimes criticized, from outside, for their lack of veracity in men’s community standards or practices, for the body language or spoken engagements resembling more dynamics recognized between women and men or between women and women, that sexual acts, including masturbation, may be portrayed more in line with common practices or positions involving cisgender women.
Maybe.
There is a difference in body language in a Dale Lazarov-written or Gengoroh Tagame comic, from Hiro Madarame to something Stan Lee edited to Ayano Yamane. There is, too, a difference in primary audience which fundamentally alters the dynamics and consequences of their respective worlds. Specifics which may be pleasing to cisgender women become pleasing become the pleasure specifics. Specifics which may be pleasing to cisgender men become the pleasure specifics.
Mauro Mariotti does not represent gay male sexuality in the same way as Sanami Matoh, but neither does Ang Lee, James Ivory, or John Cameron Mitchell.
A friend of mine always makes fun of pornographic scenes she has to pretend to orgasm in which please a person doing them to her, perhaps, more than she is pleased, but she is not performing for an audience of her, she is performing for an association a male audience might have through her.
Because we do not always know intended primary audience or the qualities of the authors, actors, painters, pencilers, singers, writers, this territory can and will become muddled and even perplexing.
The sexual and gender dynamics of Yuu Watase’s comics were declared and debated as queer long before she came out publicly as x-gender, but were also decried and dismissed by some people because of misapprehension or prejudgment of her gender and sexuality.
There is a theory that the Jennifer Finch who ostensibly drew, The Adventures of a Lesbian College School Girl, is not a pen name, but Jennifer Finch, the bassist for the band, L7. There is a theory that Jennifer Finch is a cishet man. There are theories. We do not know, for sure, the majority of us, who wrote or drew Lesbian College School Girl, or who, really, the intended audience was.
No matter how many times it is repeated in an English dub of Sailor Moon, that characters are cousins, a queer audience could intuit queer romance. Altering the gender of characters did not especially, in that same dub, alter gender expression for audience for whom that expression was not a proxy empathy but lived and breathed realness in them.
“No one would think about _____ all the time, unless…”
What someone may be thinking of, which may extend to feeling and being, might not be expressible in real life or common social engagements, without being solely a paraphilia. Most of what we push into the qualifier of paraphilia are not affectations or fetish, but elements of a state of being which is facilitated by imaginal or fictive or genre-reified mores and expectations.
The truth of this goes far beyond only gender and sexuality, but it is difficult to really grapple gender or sexuality, alone, into something small enough, concrete enough, to go too far beyond.
Genre-virgins making genre work are often as proud of their prowess and inventiveness as sexual virgins having their first sex. And, maybe they impress their virgin/new-to-sex friends with takes like, “Batman should put his money in social programs” and “the princess should not marry the guy she only just met,” because they are unaware how many many many many many times in other people’s stories those have been done.
Genre immersion is not a case of “socialization.” Immersion is always sought, being familiarized with a genre, like a gender, will not result in intimate emotional/physiological immersion and awareness of the performative mores and anticipations. Reflex sexual reactions are an easy indicator, which makes sexuality a gauge we can go to quickly, but there is a substantial range.
While cishet-male-aimed pornography featuring only women often invites these men to associate with the women’s bodies or experiences, leading to men’s rights/pick-up artist personalities to rail against the feminization of (cis) men, misreading, through their own anxieties, an empathetic association that reaffirms a cishet male state. It is important to note that MR/PUA media influencers are poor even armchair psychologists or social theorists.
The MR/PUA aficionado is both socialized and has an immersion into a fictive state of being. PUA rhetoric is a genre of fictional narrative, and it is one which is identity-based. The anxiety the fan of the genre has when the genre’s rules are questioned in terms of their real-world contemporary culture application indicate the level to which the genre has become, or is used as, expression of something they are and identify as.
Few people very familiar with, for instance, the genre of Disney princesses, will argue that one cannot criticize the rushed marriages of Snow White or Cinderella and their prince-loves, , but those are movies whose stories were codified hundreds of years ago, which have been critiqued openly since or before Charlotte Lennox in the 1750s, and operate not only on the moral codes and societal mores of those times but an additional layer of the moral and societal coding of children’s stories of those times. The genre-savvy can point to a multitude of twists on this theme, stories which do not fit the theme, those explicitly critiquing the theme, satires, parodies, variations.
More often, those unpracticed in a genre, creating stories – and all art, here, becomes story; a painting has a narrative, et cetera – create stories which are not reinventions of the wheel, but the most basic wheel we can imagine. They roll their first modeling clay snake.
As a nominally cisgender, heterosexual woman may be acclimated into narrative societies of homosexual or transgender-and-homosexual men created and engineered for a nominally cishet female audience, those feelings being real and those dynamics being imprinted as causally true, as predictive, they are not cishet women’s feelings or experiences, nor experienced by proxy by the audience, but genuinely experienced, genuinely existing as the feelings and intuitions of a sexuality and/or gender which is also not what the practical, living world’s cultures or communities might recognize as a gay man’s.
Imaginal genders and sexualities are genders and sexualities, not the proxy thereof.
A trans reading of Lesbian College School Girl does not require a trans person, or a cis-identifying woman who is gaugeable as trans by outside metrics, to believe in the cultural mores of the fictive world and its fictive states. The nostalgic story of a student and her sexual, phallocentric lesbian fantasies, the word, “college,” is in the title for the same reason Pornhub is populated with step-family. Legality.
Lesbian College School Girl features almost none of the common markers of the dickgirl genre as manufactured by nominally cishet men for nominally cishet men, nor the nominally-cishet women for nominally-cishet women yaoi tropes, particularly, in a lack of fragility/receptiveness or intense top/bottom gendered-ungendered power dynamics or sexual enthusiasm. (Or, the “sexy lampshade” nature of, for example, Milo Manara or Frank Cho’s cishet-male-for-cishet-male pornographic women.)
Experiences had through affecting and repeated characters and fictive worlds are not proxy experiences or affected perspectives, but trained and reified in the same fashion as walking around riding the bus going to the store kicking rocks and chewing gum in-the-flesh life. There is an understanding that identity can, sometimes, be enacted solely in fiction, most of which are categorized as paraphilia or sets thereof, but it can be an orientation and thereby, a state of being. Monster-fuckers. Furries. The inherently genderqueer fujoshi.
Gender does not extend from female to nonbinary to male. Robustness can be a gender.
Ralph Bakshi homoeroticism can exist in pairs, groups, or individual represented men, yet it is a heterosexual male homoerotic.
The ease with which we can talk, “being socialized male,” or posit that a close connection to imaginal mores or communities can be a case of being “socialized,” comes from a misapprehension of what socialization does. A trans woman, “socialized” male, experiences a trans woman’s experience of being in alien territory. How to be a trans woman negotiating the mores and codes of a male group dynamic might be learned, but not how to be a man in that same male group dynamic. A trans woman, like a cisgender woman, can learn to negotiate the expectations and mores of an imaginal men’s community or communal space in a direct, personal fashion, if that woman is emotionally and physiologically engaged beyond a proxy or assumptive level, because imaginal presentations always include more than an individual’s experiential range. It is Goofus and Gallant, not, Gallant in a Vacuum.
“Socialized male,” is worrying a kid will grow feathers because they have been familiarized with Disney duck stories. A male social world always has non-male components. It is not Goofus in a Vacuum.
There is a susceptibility in familiarization, that familiarization can reify a sense of rightness or inevitability, that familiarization with fiction-safe or fiction-workable mores and practices can lead to an inability to correctly judge the application or avoidance of practices into a real world. Correlation can accompany causation, but it should not be allowed to imply causation, even if the correlation causes us anxiety or violates the ideational or imaginal tangents of a taboo.
Nor, is a social taboo reason to ghettoize or devalue a healthy, functioning state of being, which is enacted and existed as in a functional and healthy form, whether through fictive realms or real, day to day, flesh and finance life.
There is an entire – well-respected – book, published in 1971, on how Donald Duck is used to feminize boys, which, ironically, does not include the actual 1945 Disney animated short – co-written by Carl Barks – in which Donald hypnotizes the dog, Pluto, into a limp-wrist swish. A presentiment of hypno-sissy narrative can obfuscate the actual presence. Looking for something to label “male socialization” or “female socialization” will net you examples, if you are desperate enough, but that same desperation makes those examples flimsy as wet tissue when faced with the rest of the unexamined social context.
The reason that non-men are not simply “socialized” by male protagonists operating in male-rewarding, male-gaze, male-skewed fictive communities/worlds, is that association and proxy are, at best, a beginning, and there is genuine, true to life emotional/physiological context for those non-men audiences on a consistent basis. This does not mean that non-men audiences have become men or are men. The frequency with which we see nominally cisgender women, ostensibly cis women, acknowledge that they do not feel cis, is sometimes a reaction to seeing any label that is not “normal,” or “natural,” as an othering, as an alienation or attack, but more often, more commonly and casually, these women are not cisgender in the strict confines of how anglophone and many other societies and communities work with that term. They have, as well as their women’s perspective, a kind of male, or male-identifiable perspective that is not – as is often relayed as a truism – because women have more empathy than men.
“Women and nonbinary people,” may cause an anxiety, and a sense of devalorization of both nonbinary people and women, by enlarging the scope of men to a full half of a dichotomy, or by making nonbinary a paraphilia or phantom limb of women’s territory. Politically, it can be problematic, because it is, in a political sense, often a legal or practical fiction. But, this is correlation, not causation.
Nobody will talk of rescinding or canceling a “man card” or “mommy card” or “license to woman” like someone who will double down that gender and gender roles are immutable.
The male character who represents a female sense of being, the female character who stands in for a kind of male being are longstanding traditions, however they are not meant to obscure their truth from their intended primary audience.
The girls of Gerald Tyrwhitt’s The Girls of Radcliff Hall are adult men, and the intended primary audience, who are roman a clef characters in the novel, themselves, were never intended to look on themselves as lesbians, nor true to life schoolgirls, while acknowledging the function of boarding school girls’ stories and the she/her gay man.
The male-identifiable perspective of these women is not a case of empathy because it is not a case of relating through or to a proxy. The familiarity with scenario, being, dynamics and mores and consequences, is that person’s, not their awareness of the reality of it being someone else’s experience or situation.
The phallus is not inherently gendered. “Can you make a woman cum using only your dick,” is not questioning the gender of the person being spoken to, nor is, “Can you make a woman cum using only her dick, but socially, because of socialization, familiarization, the individual asking the question may presuppose or even require a specific gender for the person whom they are addressing and it is socialization and a societal set of mores and taboos which either emphasize “a woman” as active being or reduce her to lampshade.
In story, a duck who is a man can turn a dog into a woman, but he has to turn the dog to a hen to do it. Or, as the gender critical might parse, “an adult human chicken.”
Hate groups and salacious news outlets resurrect rumors that schools have children who believe they are cats and then provide them with kitty litter boxes, because they know that conflating furry and homosexual or furry and transgender will not only light fires in their already-primed target audiences, but will also enervate unity amongst outlying or disenfranchised sexualities, gender-categories, paraphiliacs; everyone under threat.
There are no gendered realities or universal gender politics. They are all fictive and nonfictive, imaginal and matters of reiteration.
Why would being a cat, to any degree, be inherently and irrevocably a sexual or gendered thing?
Gendered non-gendering, such as he/him lesbians or she/her gays predate the current wave of anxiety over these at once fictive and nonfictive existences. Existences which are not necessarily, as a state of innate being, transgender or specifically and rigidly male/female gendered. The repetition of she/her in gay communities reifies the she/her gay man. A man.
It takes a village to make one adult insect.