6. The Cult of Masculine Obscenity
For girls, good is an active state, which means that girls who are being good are perceived as being in control of their selves, deliberately and happily being good partially to get approval, also because that's what girls are like. Unfortunately for girls, that trains them to satisfy, to please, to refrain from figuring out what they really want. In short, girls become so well-programmed in being actively good that they don't have much left over to be actively anything else -- dynamic initiative-taking and decision-making doesn't blend well with unconsciously trying to figure out what the others expect and want of you so you can provide it like a good girl should.
For boys, good is being passively controlled by others, since everyone knows boys are bad. The boy who is seen as deliberately and happily being himself is the bad boy, who doesn't get approval, per se, but everyone understands that he's having a lot of fun, and his motives for being bad aren't disapproved of, only his (bad) actions, which often get a sly wink of understanding even as the whip comes down.
Bad girls, we all know, aren't deliberately and happily being naughty, they're to be pitied for being contemptibly weak of character. They aren't getting away with anything, and they need straightening out for their own good.
Boys, in reality hurt by not getting the approval they see the girls getting and knowing that they're being treated unfairly, rebel by treasuring that which is bad. Because it's bad. Bad is fun. Bad is also all the traits the world deplores in them, so bad is crude, nasty, insensitive, and disgusting. So crude, nasty, insensitive, and disgusting are fun by virtue of being bad.
So what kind of crude and disgusting things can little boys revel in and delight in?
Going to the bathroom. Which is a euphemism for stuff so taboo we pretend people bathe in there. Which is not what we mean when we say, "I have to go to the bathroom" (okay, don't forget to wash behind your ears) (huh?).
Now, bathing in the stuff that gets flushed down the toilet, that's disgusting! So boys verbally bathe in it, and long before sex takes over as the favorite topic, a vivid description of someone who took a bath like that because Martian commodes are huge and the victim didn't know any better...constitutes a side-splitting dirty joke.
My battered American College Dictionary defines scatology as "the study of, or preoccupation with, images of physical filth (excrement) in literature". The only times when the boys I grew up with put it in literate form was when writing the old four-letter terms for excrement and the bodily orifices of excretion all over the boys' "bathroom".
Not sharing their rebellion and devotion to the raunchy, I never could figure out what was so outrageously funny, was often disgusted, and so avoided my gender when so engaged. Dirty jokes! Seriously!
In my isolation, I never spotted the subtle shift in interest to something else of which I was pathetically naÔve: scatology is so distinctively the ancestor of pornography in its crude-and-disgustingly-funny form that I didn't realize the other boys were privy to information I wasn't (all I knew about sex was how babies were made; I hadn't picked up on the aspects of sexual attraction, appetite, enjoyment, and so forth, and no one told me for the longest damn time what to expect!).
Since sex and elimination involve the same areas of the body, it's easy to see how disgust with those organs and one of their functions (either sex or elimination of wastes) could be transferred to the other function as well. What is less obvious is which comes first. I used to assume that scatology led to pornography, but I've come to question the idea that excretory functions are actually disgusting. Childhood fascination with elimination has been thought a natural thing since the days of Sigmund Freud *, but I suspect that boys embrace scatology mainly because adults tell them that elimination is disgusting; and that makes it equally possible that the disgust is transferred from sexuality.
From the outside, listening casually to the ribaldry, there is no appreciable difference in boys' talk between "fucking" and "shitting" and "pissing". What a wonderful introduction for little boys to human sexuality!
* * *
The flip side of the cult of obscenity is "polite society's" meticulous avoidance of what it considers disgusting. I grew up at odds with, and therefore alienated from, the boyhood understandings of many things. In constrast, I learned what I learned of life from sources that saw dignity and beauty and deep meaning in things...but I did not learn of sexual feelings and sexuality from such sources.
I have heard many stories of groups of giggling, whispering third-grade and fourth-grade girls talking about sex and swearing that they'll never do such weird things. It seems that I grew up knowing less than anyone. The early sexual feelings I did have ó a special secret excitement thinking about girls and how and where they are built differently, and how it shapes their shorts differently in a way that you can tell by looking ó I always thought were unique and unexplainable feelings that only I had.
Even later, when I had had it explained to me what the other boys were talking about when they used words like fuck and told their jokes, I didn't fully understand that it had any connection to my private, secret feelings.
* * *
One of the funny things about the cult of obscenity was the idea of dirty words. On the one hand, the boys were snickering and giggling about being able to use words just because they were dirty. Meanwhile, the teachers and so forth were feeding the idea, attaching a rather powerful moral value to the use or nonuse of words like shit and cunt and fueling the idea that the meaning of such words was dirty and disgusting.
At the time, of course, being such a good little boy, I relied on the euphemisms and politely clinical terms that were pronounced okay for children to use. Now the whole notion that simple down-to-earth terms could be bad strikes me as odd and phony...and yet I can think of exceptions.
All the socially prohibited words for sex flunk. Reflecting the adult focus of the obscenity cult, the disgusting (and disgusted) phenomenon of being sexually attracted to people you first learned to hate, these words associate sex with hate and hatefulness in what I'm going to call the subject-object dynamic.
Pick up a screw. Stab the point into a piece of wood or sheet metal, and drive it in with a screwdriver. Wanna get screwed? Me neither.
Fuck is a special case. It was perhaps the very word I've been looking for, in the beginning, but usage over the years has given this old anglo-saxon word a double meaning, of which the original verb "to sex (with)" is only a secondary component as it's used nowdays: this car won't run, it's all fucked up; I'm gonna fuck you up if you mess with me; fuck you if you can't take a joke...to hurt, to violently and forcibly destroy, and with anger and disgust.
To use fuck in the sexual sense as if these connotations aren't indelibly imbedded (asking a boy is he's fucked his girlfriend yet, for example) drags all sex into the subject-object realm.
In fact, if you compare the social connotations of rape with fuck, you can see that rape serves as a prettied-up euphemism, lacking the violent, subject-object, disgust-centered hatefulness that it obviously should bring to mind, while fuck preserves all the connotations while legitimizing the act by redefining the act as sex.
To accept fuck, with its double meaning, is to accept that the two meanings are associated, that sex is destruction and violence and that rape is normal sex.
And yet, the perfect illustration of the two-sidedness of the cult of obscenity is provided by the fact that there is no good, simple, single-word verb to take its place. Obscenity has a monopoly on the terminology. Therefore, in rebellion, I have stolen the noun "sex" and turned it into a verb: I sexed, she sexes, they are sexing...
* * *
The result of the two sides of the cult of obscenity is a male delight and fascination with the disgusting.
Because of the obscenity cult, sex has been turned into something crude and disgusting: the elements that despise the crude and disgusting have avoided openly acknowledging sex and sexuality, which says that sex is dirty; and the elements that seem fond of crudity and dirtiness celebrate sex as the epitome of enjoyable filth. This has not changed as much as many folks think: when was the last highly visible portrayal of male attractiveness and sexual appetite that was not intertwined with a bit of lewd nastiness?
For girls, the realm of "romance" can serve to redefine sexual relations and feelings as something altogether different, something not disgusting and not bawdy...but because of the mechanics of the boy-chase-girl game, it is the boy who must personally acknowledge an interest in actively seeking sexual experience, and in knowing how to do so successfully. Even if it is very nasty, the boy must familiarize himself with this stuff, and the available sources of information, until only very recently, certainly did their part to portray it as something very nasty, indeed. The male must develop an acceptance of the notion that this filthy crude thing, sex, is desirable, and/or accept that sex, this desirable thing, is filthy and crude...and he is going to have to get used to the idea of being held responsible in his pursuit of it as if it were all of these awful things.
Once again, there are options, but not good ones, scarcely legitimate ones. To maintain reasonable human standards of dignity and decency as a boy, even long enough to examine and reject these horrible notions about what sex is, is to greatly forestall if not forego sex altogether...and no adolescent is remotely inclined to accept that. Sexuality, after all, is a very powerful appetite.
* * *
Adolescent girls are warned to be cautious in pursuing affairs of the heart lest they be hurt emotionally by a boy who crudely relates to her only as an available slot into which he may insert his tab. Boys just don't tend to have that sensitivity that would allow them to experience it as a deep, beautiful, and fulfilling celebration of love (or so goes the legend); they are likewise too insensitive to be hurt.
Sex, they tell her, can be beautiful and mutually tender, but when it's not, he's getting away with something at her expense. Boys learn that chastity is foisted upon girls to protect them, not to keep them from having a good time. It's for their own good. No one tells her that it's wrong for girls to be insensitive to the emotional vulnerabilities of boys, though. If it's wrong for a girl to go off sexing with a boy just to scratch her itch, it isn't wrong because of how it might affect him when he finds out she doesn't care for him as a person, it's wrong for other reasons: it might ruin her reputation; she might get pregnant; it's unfeminine or sinful. but how many boys go out on dates with warnings to treat that girl with respect ringing in their ears?
For any boy who reaches the age of hormones with his sensitivities intact, these attitudes are a problem. Sexual feelings have a way of making a person feel vulnerable and awkward. So what happens to the fellow whose first clumsy expressions of sexual feelings are interpreted as manipulative attempts to do something nasty to the girl he's with?
The next time he gets warned to treat his companion with respect, will he wonder that no one warns him of the the possibility that he might get hurt? That no one ever talked to him about the capacity of sex to make him feel scuzzy and used if makes him feel unspecial, like sex with him is available for the asking, that he's unparticular, interchangable with any other male? Not likely: he'll be too busy resenting the implication that he's a nasty boy who's only after one thing. So when he finds himself reacting sexually to his date, he's likely to feel very unsure of himself, ambivalent, very vulnerable, and in need of understanding.
Yet if he lets on to his arousal, this gentle, sensitive girl will probably tell him what a beast he is, all appetite, and she isn't that kind of girl, unless she's feeling aroused herself and is inclined to give it expression, in which case his uncertainty is overlooked as she enthusiastically opts for some passion. Naturally, it may just as easily be the girl who is feeling unsure of herself, and undeniably not every boy is going to see that as anything but an obstacle to overcome, but often he will notice and care and ask her to share her feelings, talk about it, and is rewarded by an attitude that says he's a boy and wouldn't understand. You don't cast pearls before swine. Even nice swine who recognize pearls couldn't possibly truly appreciate, and would tramp them while trying to do them justice. So, like an adult condescending to a child, she merely says she's feeling strange and either can't or doesn't want to talk about it, and prefers not to be touched or held right now. And tomorrow she will complain that boys never understand.
When a man feels tentative and uncertain and emotionally tangled up about sex, both he and his partner may wonder why he "can't get it up", rather than consider that he may not be feeling sexy or is ill at ease at the moment about sex (in contrast, how many people would think in the same terms of a woman's "failure" to get it immediately wet and engorged any time there's a naked, willing, and waiting man in her bed?). Conventional concepts of male sexuality, including female notions and expectations of the male as perpetually horny performer, leave no space for a man having mixed feelings, of not knowing for sure what he wants, and even as girls and women complain about males always wanting sex, they are often contemptuous of men who don't behave as sex-appetite-symbols when they expect them to.
Outside of the immediate dating and sexing environment, however, women are by no means the worst offenders. We men are our own worst enemies. Men, traditionally "masculine" or otherwise, are quite adept at crediting themselves with higher motives and more refined natures while viewing all other men (especially with regards to sexual feelings) as selfish, coarse creatures. In The Stand, Stephen King portrays a triangle composed of a young man and an older man both interested in their female traveling companion. When the younger relates his feelings at being kept at a cold distance by the woman, for whom he has strong feelings, the older man suggests masturbation as a solution, thus reducing the boy's entire range of attraction and interest to a crude desire for having his nerve endings entertained.
If a woman told another of strong feelings for an indifferent man and was similarly advised to use her fingers, it would be understandable only as an insult, whether serious or teasing-friendly. Likewise, if a boy's mother were to call his girlfriend aside and warn her sternly not to victimize her son sexually, there would probably be frost and hatred in the air every time the two were together, but the fathers of daughters warn and threaten and stare suspiciously at the girl's boyfriends often enough to make a young guy feel creepy about sex and his own sexuality.
Eventually, I turned the tables: smiling and (deliberately misinterpreting an innuendo) replying that I could defend my virtue, had done so in the past, but thanks for the warning.
But before I reached that point, I had to undergo a long and far less amusing set of experiences with these attitudes towards male sexuality.
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