Private apologies make sense to me. I have given them and been given them. Public apologies, part of the civic media ritual of our dissolving society's obsession with victimization, give me agita.
Last night my ex, T, came over for dinner and somehow the Bible came up. He expects, expectantly, that in 50 years no one will read it. I declined to agree or expect. He challenged me for having been very angry with the church for years and now sometimes coming to its defense. He doesn't like variation. Or, on the other hand, immobility. Hard to please. Anyway, I explained that it was like a breakup. At first you can only see the bad side of your ex, but over time, when you settle down, you can differentiate between what you loved and miss and what you found yourself unable to cope with and don't miss. He changed the subject and we had a very nice evening.
Men at war. Kerfuffle of late over a video of US soldiers pissing on the corpses of Taliban. Shock and horror amongs the bien-pensants. I, of course, would give them a medal. On the other hand, a story about a young Chinese-American solider apparently driven to suicide by his platoon's serious and ongoing mistreatment. If the story is true, I'd put the cowards in the brig for a very long time. The one thing about men that I have a hard time with --even though I understand the evolutionary drive-- is a gang mistreating a weaker person. It's cowardly.
A couple of stories on line about people getting in trouble for noticing certain public male persons in religion acting effeminately. Dustups ensue. I have noted in my years in ghetto living that gay men will go to great lengths to change themselves to make themselves more attractive: going to the gym, taking steroids, cutting or dying their hair, plastic surgery to reduce with liposuction or enhance with implants, regrowing their foreskins or pumping up their packages, dermabrasion, tannings and tattoos and piercings and teethwhitenings, even, for God's sake, bleaching their buttholes*. But ask them to work on a voice or gait or manner or set of interests that's typical of a teenage girl or a celebrity diva past her prime and you'd think you had blasphemed against the sacred Mother of God in church on Easter. Suddenly the guys who contort themselves in fifty ways to change into something they deem more fuckable become the possessors of an inviolable True Gay Self that cannot be criticized without turning you into a Nazi Republican breeder who wants to put us all in concentration camps, like Bush.
I don't think that masculinity is simply a matter of butching it up. But it sure couldn't hurt.
*I saw the ad in the window of the local gay sex shop last week. One wag called it "BriteSmile for BungHoles".
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