Andrew Sullivan is a silly man.
Sullivan doesn't get heterosexuality. This basic fact is on dislpay in this post about the movie "300":
Yes, Brokeback Mountain is about being gay. Male bonding through sports or the military is not about being gay. Emotional attachments between men fostered by team competition and conflict has nothing to do with sex. It isn't a sexual thing. It is a male thing. What is it about the sex part of sexual identity doesn't Sullivan get? Being gay is about wanting sexual relations with men, not about wanting male friends. Sullivan can wish that male bonding would lead to homosexual desire, or that heterosexuality is a curse, but it isn't so. You're different, Andrew. Just accept it.
Hollywood and the Curse of Heterosexuality
04 Apr 2007 03:55 pm
Here's an interesting review of "300":
"300" celebrates the male bonding that is found in most war and sports movies. What gives those films their homosexual subtext is less the sweating, shirtless males working together for victory. Rather it's the unstated assumption that unlike the men, none of the women in these men's lives will ever really grasp this singularly important, defining experience. Whatever these men and their future wives share, the women will just never "get it." However, in war and sports films, the men still hunger for a life of normalcy - settling down and raising a family with their female soulmate. But that fantasy of living happily ever after with your true love has little emotional resonance in contemporary buddy films and romances: think The Break Up, Failure to Launch, Old School, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, American Pie.
It wasn't always so. In '50's and '60's films, the emotional relationship that men craved was with a woman. Then two films undermined that assumption. For the artier crowd, "Diner" depicted male friendships as deeper than anything that a man could share with a woman. For the mass audience, the same message was abundantly clear with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. No woman could ever be as perfect for Redford or Newman as they were for each other.
In that sense, Brokeback Mountain wasn't so much about being gay; it was about being male, in ways that women can never understand. Maybe the chick flick has produced its mirror image: the dick flick.
Yes, Brokeback Mountain is about being gay. Male bonding through sports or the military is not about being gay. Emotional attachments between men fostered by team competition and conflict has nothing to do with sex. It isn't a sexual thing. It is a male thing. What is it about the sex part of sexual identity doesn't Sullivan get? Being gay is about wanting sexual relations with men, not about wanting male friends. Sullivan can wish that male bonding would lead to homosexual desire, or that heterosexuality is a curse, but it isn't so. You're different, Andrew. Just accept it.
posted by Anonymous at 7:52 AM
3 Comments:
Sullivan's problem is the result of identity politics toxicity. He now defines himself as homosexual, not homosexuality as one of his attributes. If you start with that view, that sexuality is the central definition of a person, then it follows that everything else is a reflection of that sexuality.
I haven't anything to say one way or the other about Sullivan's piece.
I do find it weird that a movie or television show that will never be seen by more than 3% of the population can be seriously interpreted as a signal of anything.
The same goes double or triple for books.
Ideas do arise and expand through a society, but not in any sense as Sullivan would have it here, or many pundits elsewhere.
I believe there is a cable TV show called 'Comedy Central,' which people who blog seem to watch a lot and take it to be some important alternative statement.
I'm pretty sure that less than 2% of the population has ever heard of it and less than 1% have ever seen one episode. I wouldn't be surprised if the number who have seen, say, two dozen episodes would not fill a football stadium.
Brokeback Mountain was partly about gayness, but it was mostly about isolation and boredom. Good film though.
I haven't seen 300 but the ads look as camp as Christmas.
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