3/18/14

We were talking this weekend, in Chinatown, about theories of pedophilia. We were at a tea house, the one he knew that made sugar-free bubble tea. He bought mine for me. I got mango with bubbles, regular sugar. We were talking about pedophilia. I told him that I sometimes joked that I'm the only gay man I know who doesn't want to fuck little boys. That's a joke, obviously. He told me about some theories, I forget whose theories exactly, Foucault maybe, which posit that the theory of the child is a kind of fallacy, a projection of adult fantasies. And that actually, so-called children could be thought of as completely autonomous, and they could in fact want to have sex with adults, with so-called adults. I'm boiling an eloquent point down to a sentence. Basically, that the whole question of adults doing it to kids is only one way to look at it; that there're other theories that think of it in more nuanced terms or whatever.

Right, I said. And how convenient. You know. How convenient to discover this theory that the kid maybe wants it. It's especially convenient if you want to fuck kids, right? To know about this theory. It's really lucky for you, to discover the theory, far out and radical as it may be that the kid wants it. That what you want is okay. Of course you have to think that.

And we were also talking about masculinity, and I expressed a kind of frustration I had (personal and political and larger) with this kind of masculinity that has to constantly assert itself. That only knows itself through conflict, domination and submission. The kind of masculinity that was concerned only with expressing, demonstrating power. He said "But that's what masculinity is."

I said no, it isn't. I said there's a myriad of other ways to be. To be masculine, to be in the world, in a way that we might call masculine. It's just that our culture teaches us there's only one way to be and only one awful way to measure it. It's like saying that that the only way to get around is in a Mercedes Benz. That could be the standard, the dream, the ideal or whatever. In the commercial. But as a matter of course, most of us have to find other ways to get around. I guess it's just that we don't talk about the buses we're taking. The public transportation. How we're all fine, right?

We finished out bubble tea and walked uptown and I met up with my cousin and we said goodbye. It was a beautiful day on Saturday.

1 comment:

gp said...

Totally agree with you- about both pedophilia and masculinity.