Pretty, witty, and…bright?

A Sex and the Screen post after a long while!

Just a quick note: in the part where I said “who outside of this topic knows the difference” between “gay” and “queer”, it’s referring to the fact that Queer Theory in many ways completely contradict the (perhaps accidental yet inevitable) ideas of “Gay Pride”.

I think I may have mentioned something similar to this post in a previous post, so forgiveness please if this is a bit of a repeat.

But yesterday I was having lunch with a few friends when one of them left to buy food, leaving behind her mobile phone. As all immature friends do, I found the name of her closest (and therefore, by theory, the most tolerant of strange antics) friend, and wrote something along the immature lines of “hey baby I miss you and your funny laughs”. This other friend is also female, by the way.

So if we’re looking at this scenario in a heteronormative way, we’d see that both of my friends, being straight, would find the sudden flouting of the codes by the first friend (let’s use names because I’m confusing me: First friend whose phone I used is called T, second friend is called B) would put her outside of the heterosexual group, but because B knows that T is straight, it would thus become an amusing and perhaps ironic mess with tradition, calling more attention to that friends are sometimes allowed to break convention with each other, rather than T actually would call B “baby” in a slightly sexual way.

And, I have to say, in any other circumstance with any other pairing of friends, this text may have been milked for all the immature humor it contained, with B replying in a similarly suggestive fashion, T then taking it a bit too far, and B laughing it off and they all giggle later on about how weird they were (and how platonically close and comfortable with each other they felt).

Yet somehow, in this instance, the humor of the breaking of codes seemed to have completely escaped B. B knows that I’m friends with T, therefore she might have been able to guess that T’s phone was used by someone else, but instead of replying with the “lol haha give T her phone back”, B replied with “um WTF what are you talking about?”

And it was in this instance of denying the humor (I’m not saying that being gay is funny or whatever, but it seems that the general idea is if you’re something other than straight, that’s lulz) that suddenly made the text incredibly awkward. Suddenly being suggestively un-straight made things uncomfortable and it took a lot of careful wording for me to inform B that T didn’t write the message but at the same time continued the line of joking.

The really sigh-worthy part of this is, B and T have both on previous occassions professed their “okayness” with gay people (because it’s something you just end up tolerating isn’t it), but on more than one occassion they’ve proven that any activities considered outside of the Charmed Circle (bar the, you know, heterosexual promiscuity and infidelity or whatever), so sexually deviant actions and thought, etc etc, render them very uncomfortable to the point of them saying “ewwww!”

And this very long example brings me back to Warner’s point – that it’s become unfashionable to critique the gay movement or pride. It’s become unfashionable but it’s not not a fashion, much like flare jeans are now looked upon with distaste but everyone still has an old battered pair in the back of the closet (haha closet).

And regardless of whether you actually secretly (or not so secretly) still wear those flare jeans around your house, and maybe to a friend’s, or just when you duck down to the shops where no one you know will see you, or if you actually burned those flare jeans because they’re FLARED FFS, there is still that memory of those flared jeans (btw, in case you lost it, the flared jeans is a metaphor for criticism of gay pride – which is viewed synonymously with queer, because I mean how many people outside of this topic actually know the difference?) being worn and being liked at some point. You just no longer want to admit out loud that you like flared jeans.

B and T wear skinny jeans these days, but I still remember the days when they used to wear flared ones, and not realize that one day they’d have to deny ever liking it. I think they secretly still like it.

Alex.

Since blogging is meant to end on Friday and I have an essay to write today, that will be the last one.

Alex

Who wears the pants?

Another Uni blog for Sex and the Screen:

The thing that made me think the most – apart from Butler’s mindblowing suggestion that there is no such thing as an ungendered sex – was that everything is brought back to heterosexuality, or a version thereof.

I have a few friends in a lesbian relationship, and in the three cases that I immediately think of, at least one of them is considered “butch” while the other “girly”. I know this is counter-productive, but they sort of prove the theory that in a relationship, one of them have to be the “masculine” one (or, the one who takes on the role of masculinity), and the other the “feminine” one.

One of the couples got asked at a party “so, who’s the guy in your relationship?” which ALSO solidifies that idea of a relationship as between a “masculine” and a “feminine”.

There’s also that saying “wearing the pants in the relationship”. Again, that implies that in a relationship, there is someone who takes the masucline role, and if those pants happen to be on the non-male (or the “non-masucline”) of a relationship, then it’s considered amusing because it’s an inversion of the “normal”.

However, there seems to be a different way of looking at this for homosexual guys. For some reason, when someone says lesbian couple, the first thought to come to mind is a butch girl with a girly girl, or two butch girls (I am giving up on the “” marks, but you understand where they might go), yet when someone mentions a gay couple (gay guys), the first thing to come to mind (at least for me) are two “feminine” guys – two guys who enact more of a feminine role than a masculine one.

(Argh, drowning in the prescriptive non “” words here.)

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I just find it weird that the heterosexual relationship pairing only exists for lesbian couples, and not gay couples…

Oh oh and this video confused a lot of my (straight) guy friends a lot. I like this (watch before you keep reading):

Thailand’s Got Talent video

My guy friends found themselves at a loss as to whether to think she’s adorable, or what. I think, when you live in a country with more transexuals (like Thailand), you kind of become more desensitized to the ambiguity of transexuals.

Alex.

That video, seriously, love it.

Alex

Yet another Uni blog assignment…

For one of my subjects, Sex and the Screen, I have yet another blogging assignment (I actually have 2 blog assignment subjects this semester so this should be interesting.

This is my first post for Sex and the Screen.

A quick introduction – usually I write an entire post for that but honestly I’m not that interesting – my name is Alex, and I’m a 2nd year Media & Comm. student. If you want to know anything else about me, feel free to abuse the comment box. Makes me look good hey.

This is just a quick note, really, nothing deep. Today in the lecture when we were warned not to be homophobic or sexist or any other -ist, I kind of had a moment where I saw things from the other side of the stick. While it would please me to no end if any kind of discrimination would just disappear off the face of the earth, it’s plain naive to think that they don’t exist if we simply repress it. The thing is, people have gotten so sensitive over any kind of negative intention behind words spoken that you can basically look at anything as insulting. To be slightly homophobic is now considered ‘wrong’, and there is a huge stigma stuck to it.

To have any kind of opinion isn’t ‘wrong’, but it can be ‘close-minded’. The aim should be to open those minds, not force some version of ‘correct’ onto them. Doing that would almost be identical to repressing homosexuality, for example, because homosexuality is considered ‘wrong’.

My point is, if someone posts a homophobic post, or a racist post, it’s too extreme and, to some extent, plain counter-productive, to fail them on the subject. Instead of punishing them for having an opinion, and further cementing their negative feelings towards a social group, engage them in discussion and try to have them see things from the other point of view.

While it saddens me, whenever I come across a friend who expresses homophobic tendencies, I don’t just tell them that they’re backwards, I try to ask why they feel that way.

The other part of this post is really just…people take things too seriously! A tiny little joke gets blown up to epic proportions of inappropriateness, and it just makes what would be a light-hearted conversation annoyingly technical.

Alex.

P.S., hopefully GIFs work. I won’t do it too much but I do love my GIFs.

Alex