I've long had this question, but yesterday it came to the fore.
Walking down the street behind a teenaged boy, darkskinned fella who could have been Latin or Black, and I see that not only are his jeans slung low to show his underpants, but his underpants were slung low to show his ass, crack included.
Now I am puzzled. Teenaged boys are the most homophobic group on earth. And teenaged boyz of color are the most of the most.
So why do they walk around with their asses showing?
3 comments:
In prison, if you're considered a risk by the authories, your belt is taken away. The idea is you can't use your belt as a weapon and at least one of your hands will be busy holding up your pants all the time. The current droopy-drawers fashion is based on that. It's a way of saying "hey, I'm just out of prison, I'm so tough I had my belt taken away, now I'm walking around like I have a hobble skirt on."
But of course it's racist to comment on someone else's culture.
I was thinking recently about how an odd similarity between contemporary black culture and gay culture is how they both include guys who no longer even know to keep their _glutei maximi_ in their pants. One just takes it a little further.
--Nate_FM
Maybe their homophobic attitude results in part from from the vague sense of endangerment that might result from "walk[ing] around with their asses showing." One doesn’t want one’s “heel” "bruised" by the serpent. Sc, first the ass exposure, then the homophobia. Or at least, the ass exposure is an independent variable which contributes to the homophobia.
My sense is that despite now the wide availability via internet of “hetero” porn including erections, the preponderant, pervasive enculturated cultural meaning and subliminal psychical meaning of penises is as instrument of violence, punishment, and subjugation, devaluation, degradation, dishonour in prison rape. This is the fearsome, lurid, numinous meaning of penis in the conscious and subliminal culture, even though there is also a general sense in the culture that penises are objects of disgust and instruments of defilement.
The numinous gaolhouse-rock meaning of the penis is maintain’d in jokes in prime time and late-night television, and even Simpson's Cartoons, although the words "penis" and "rape" aren't mention'd. Whereas penis as organ of sexual pleasure or as organ of fertility has no lived-experience cultural presence at all — except for exegetical adepts in art history and religious symbolism history and so forth, and even there the themes of political or ecclesiastical domination are closely connected, which returns our conscious and subliminal awarenesses to the theme of gaolhouse rock.
In their way, feminists object to any interpretation of the vagina as garbage dump etc, although they don’t directly question the thesis that a penis inevitably degrades a vagina; which leaves them in agreement with and even in a way devotees of the prison rape interpretation of the penis as the truth of the penis. Jungians have revalued the meaning of “power” for the psyche (“power” isn’t inevitably about political, corporate or ecclesiastical control, etc), but I guess even they don’t hear the word “phallocratic” with connotations of power of pleasure.
Admittedly, the penis in gay culture does seem to have at least some meaning as organ of desiring and being desired, able to give and receive pleasure, even TLC and the jouissance of ecstatic dissolution into and yes-saying to the beloved. Straight guys experience their own penis this way, but only in the narcissistically alter’d state of sexual arousal; after jouissance we abandon phallic narcissism and re-accept and re-contribute to the meaning of object of disgust for their penis from the general culture, which seems so realistic to us — although the numinous meaning of penis as instrument of hierarchical subjection still seems luridly other, as I suppose is intended.
Yet maybe even in gay culture the preponderant meaning of penis is one congruent with or even powerfully contributory to the gaolhouse rock meaning of the penis. In any event any homosexual or homoerotic meaning of penis as organ of desire and being desired, of giving and receiving pleasure, doesn’t penetrate into the general conscious and subliminal culture.
Voulez-vous coucher avec mon surego?
jpnill@aol.com
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