bill

Mart Finn

Re: We are all warriors, we just need to know the direction of the battle.

11-23-2003

Thanks for your words Bill, thanks.

Re: Phalli interactive.

I use the term "phalli interactive" in my writing to indicate that the 'focus' of sexual activity is on or between penises. Cocktocock.

Humans tend to try to boil things down to an essence ... a sound bite ... essentially a kind of metonym ... a hook to hang things on.

We are taught to believe that sex must involve FUCKING. A) Because it goes with the reproductive modus operendi of many species (who impregnate internally). (B) Ergo ... all men like to fuck. Some twist it around to getting fucked ... but as I have said before that is a shade of a shade.

One of the crucial questions in the realm of maleness and masculinity is: what kind of male are we if we decline to fuck anything?

Over time I intend to research, write and publish on 'this kind of man'. Definitions of maleness and masculinity are always primarily culturally based, therefore, in existentialist terms they are externalised from the individual. Learned. Although I have no intention of becoming definitive ... I find this aspect of masculinty and male behaviour compelling.

Re: transactional sex

In my work I do not associate any exchange of money or goods for sex when I talk about the experience being a 'transactional' one.

By transactional I mean a kind of sex, whether it be casual or in a relationship, where one party or usually both are psychically distanced from each other. They are 'doing sex together' ... for themselves.

The concept is inextricably linked to the commercialisation of gay male attitudes to sex and often life. Sex is just another activity. To be compared and evaluated against previous experiences and those of our peers and dominant subcultural norms. If our expectations and an idiosyncratic paradigm of desires are fixed as we engage, embrace ... come to our lovers, then we are asking them to fulfill something for US. We fully intend reciprocity ... if they can stimulate it from us.

I understand what the anthropologists are on about ... transactional ... indicates money goods or favours. Yet we know there are many other forms of transaction which are not so overt ... the motivation of modern western men and women when they engage in sex can be one of them.

So once again, for me the concept of transactional sex is inextricably linked to the commercialisation of gay male attitudes to sex and often life.

Mart Finn

Bill Weintraub

Re: We are all warriors, we just need to know the direction of the battle.

11-23-2003

that's brilliant

thank you Mart

Mart says

"The concept of transactional sex is inextricably linked to the commercialisation of gay male attitudes to sex and often life. Sex is just another activity. To be compared and evaluated against previous experiences and those of our peers and dominant subcultural norms."

To me that's a key point.

Forty years ago there was very little commercial activity associated with gay sex.

There were gay bars, but even those were few and far between -- outside of New York and SF, there were just one or two in any large city; and there were a few "athletic pictorial" magazines -- guys in posing straps.

None of the other commercial activities which have come to characterize gay male life existed.

There were no bath-houses, no sex or dance clubs, no circuit parties, no glossy soft-core or hard-core magazines, no videos or DVDs, no gay bookstores, no gay gyms, and no gay travel industry.

And there was no AIDS industry: no condoms, no pricey lubes, no pharmaceuticals, no safer-sex educators, and no ASOs.

And of course there was no internet.

Gay life was, relatively, free.

Of course there was police harassment, there was blackmail, and there were hustlers.

But most gay men managed to live their lives without any involvement with any of the forces.

Of course too there were standards of beauty and attractiveness.

But those standards were much broader, ranging from thin beatnik hippie and rocker types to muscle men to burly blue collar guys.

The requirement that all gay men be as buffed as Arnold and as smooth and alluring as a porn star simply didn't exist.

Most gay men, then, lived very private lives in which standards of attractiveness were still very free-ranging, no one sex act predominated, and sex itself was free.

A completely unintended consequence of Gay Liberation was the intense commercialization of gay male life and gay male sex.

And the subsequent cultural dominance of anal sex.

Anal sex was particularly well-suited for and benefitted from commercialization.

For example:

Because anal sex involves shit, it's important to be able to wash (preferably shower) and, for the bottom, have a bowel movement, afterwards.

Enter the bath-house.

The bath-house, which became ubiquitous in the late 1970s, provided the perfect environment for promiscuous anal sex.

A man could fuck or get fucked, have a shower and a shit, and do it again.

And again.

And again.

And look clean each time.

That was the beauty of it.

He looked and smelled fresh as a daisy.

The fact that beneath his seemingly hygenic exterior he was harboring a fatal pathogen didn't become clear until hundreds of thousands of men had been infected.

Of course there were other institutions which catered to men into anal and other extreme forms of sex, like fisting, which made no pretence at cleanliness.

Clubs like NYC's Mine Shaft and Crisco Disco "celebrated" the "funkiness" of those acts in environments with little more than a couple of dirty toilets and a filthy sink.

All of those clubs were commercial, money-making enterprises; and all of them contributed tremendously to the spread of HIV.

HIV / AIDS, in turn, gave rise to other industries: condoms and lubes and pharmaceuticals and "AIDS Service Organizations" and "safer-sex educators."

All of which, even when they offered their services "for free," cost someone money somewhere -- donors, and after awhile, taxpayers.

The rise of anal was accompanied by the rise of the clone and the hyper-masculine, buffed, look.

To obtain that look most people had to join a gym -- once again a commerical venture -- and spend long hours working out, time no longer available for more constructive pursuits like building non-commercial community institutions and political organizations.

Plus the time and money spent on physique was no longer available to be expended more usefully in other ways.

For example, virtually no gay men were willing to learn a martial art or other form of self-defense.

When I was putting forward L&G self-defense courses in NYC in the early 80s, most gay men told me they didn't have time to take a self-defense course because it would interfere with their work-out routine.

So the cult of muscle which arose was a completely empty and narcissistic one.

Its only goal was to make the person more "commercially viable" -- better able to compete in the vast meat markets of the big gay cities, in which men with monotonously similar body types, haircuts, and facial hair spent the better part of their free time obsessively pursuing each other.

Useful skills, like self-defense, were denigrated, while looking "hot" was prized above all.

So it was that gay men purposefully and consciously turned themselves into commodities.

Commodities which spent money on a compulsive quest to attract and bed other commodities.

In an act of transactional sex -- anal penetration.

Thus Mart's conclusion: "So once again, for me the concept of transactional sex is inextricably linked to the commercialisation of gay male attitudes to sex and often life."

Everthing becomes commercialized in gay male life: one's body, one's career, one's home, one's "partner" -- a term taken from business -- and sex itself.

All are commidities, all have a price.

The "gay man" *spends* 10 hours per week in the gym, *earns* $2000 per week on his job, *buys* a house for $450,000, and has a "partner" -- not a lover but a partner -- who likewise *spends* 10 hours per week in the gym, *earns* $2000 per week, and can *buy* a house for $450,000.

Sex is a trade-off -- a top for a bottom, a bottom for a top.

They're no longer people -- they've become buffed, cosmeticized, and prosperous sexual positions.

Frot, by contrast, is natural and free.

As is Fidelity.

Men who practice Fidelity and Frot remove themselves physically, morally, emotionally, and spiritually from that commericialized gay world in which human beings have become products, toys, objects for consumption and use.

And we need to keep it that way.

Mart also says "One of the crucial questions in the realm of maleness and masculinity is: what kind of male are we if we decline to fuck anything?"

I think another question, since many of the men in this club have vaginal intercourse with women but decline to butt fuck men is: "what kind of male are we if we decline to fuck another male?"

To me the answer is men who are living their own lives and being true to their own dreams, free of cultural expectations.

Men who are able to think outside the gay=anal box, and live their own, self-actualized lives.

Such men are Warriors, Cockrub Warriors, and