if i go down this road, believe me i know that i am liable to hit a mine. so, i'll begin by saying that the boy scouts should change their policy on gay participation immediately. you just can't profile like that, and you should think about how you would feel or do feel about being tarred with the notion that you might be an abuser on the basis, not of anything you have ever done or thought about doing, but on the basis of your demographic segment. also, if there has been a problem of abuse, i feel that people who are out of the closet are a lot less likely to be the sorts of people who abuse boys than those who are huddled within it, and all these bans ever did was build more closets. any policy with that effect should be repudiated on the spot.
but still, i get a bit sqeamish. i was myself a boy scout and let's just say there were some weird 'your hand's on my knee' moments and unsettling rumors. and...perhaps you might want to think about how some of the gay men you've actually known or been have regarded very young men. oh, the cult of justin timeberlake as it existed a decade or so ago, say. now, you might say that het males are no better with very young women, as we might put it. once i knew a dude with a cheerleader fetish that was extraordinarily disturbing after awhile. right, but then again, as a parent, for example, you wouldn't necessarily be absolutely comfortable if girl scout troops or cheer squads were led by heterosexual men. of course, i am also going to assert that my proclivities don't run in that direction at all, and i am going to be pissed if cast under suspicion just in virtue of being a het male. so i am saying that the other way round too.
this is the sort of thing that turns women, and even men, against men in general, by the way; there and not in orientation is where the people with the problem are clustered.
speaking of beyonce i would say in 2002 that justin timberlake's audience was made up primarily of teenage-or-so girls and, you know, 40-something men. it is an aesthetic alliance worth pondering. now speculating on the basis of inadequate data, i would guess that beyonce's audience is somewhat similar, which is rather surprising in some respects. (yo this gender/identity thing is remarkably complex.) i have as it were exposed the entry below to some of my students. and of course college-age guys think beyonce is the very ultra-concentrated essence of hot. so they have her poster up, even. but is that who eagerly awaits her new release or listens to it over and over, dancing about? or goes to the concert when not encouraged by the gf? also i know nothing about beyonce's currency among gay men, but i am assuming that a drag show is inconceivable without her.
why the agreement on justin and beyonce, and perhaps on a number of other things? here's a notion. paraphrasing eve kosofsky sedgwik, there are two modes of the erotic: who you want to make out with and who you want to be. so, the girls and the gay men both wanted to...kiss timberlake, and they both wanted to be beyonce. not everyone, of course.
we might think of girls and gay men as for some purposes a single group of consumers of mass culture, and it is, not to be nasty about it or anything, rather a consumption-oriented demographic. what someone like me is always going to say is: too much surface, not enough depth; too much appearance, not enough reality; too much spectacle, not enough art; a naive aesthetic on one end, a too-ironic, worse-the-better, exceedingly decadent aesthetic on the other.
now, you should, if you do, enjoy this material. but you can't put it beyond criticism on the sheer ground that it emerges from or appeals to in-other-respects admirable groups; nor can you, i believe, safely chalk up the criticisms to sexism or homophobia, though that could be an element in a given straight dude's response. that doesn't show that you don't, to put it gently, have an extreme sucking problem lurking in your culture. so, you might have an alliance between 60-something women (who were younger in 1970) and gay men on barry manilow. nice! groove. buy. but you're going to have a long day defending that crap. well the coalition has had better moments: bowie, say, though i'm still, with complete sincerity and total commitment, nominating 'space oddity' for worst song ever to chart. or 'glee' is pretty good.
so if i'm ragging on beyonce, it's just who i am. but i'll also say this to any re-visitors. i gave reasons not to like beyonce. so far, i haven't heard much in the way of replies to those, only, "no matter what, beyonce is the greatest." i completely defend your right to like what you like. but there might be some pretty devastating drawbacks, or to be fairer, things you might be missing, or ways you might develop.
