I am not, for what it’s worth, the kind of woman who watches gay male porn. I have never been drawn to yaoi, or boys’ love, or any of the other iterations of Two Boys Kissing that many of my colleagues and peers are drawn to*. It actually took me a fair amount of time to understand the hows and whys the appeal this genre of media held for so many of my female colleagues. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like a good love story, regardless of the gender of the participants. It’s just that the boys kissing boys aspect, specifically, has never been a draw for me. It’s simply not how my personal attraction to men works.
So because of that, I’ve never thought quite as deeply about what it means for a woman to exploit a male partner’s bisexuality for her own personal sexual pleasure the way men routinely exploit bi women’s for theirs. I mean, in my defense, it is simply not as common a trope: bi rights activists, the bi community, we all talk a lot about the specter of straight men — or even just men who are attracted to women — coercing their bi female partners into threeways, or treating a bi female partner’s queer exploits as their own personal spank bank.
We do not talk so much about this happening to bi men at the hands of women.
If anything, I think this sort of fetishization — and it is fetishization — is often framed as desirable, especially in contrast to the more common “gay panic” that straight women are presumed to have in reaction to learning that a male partner is bi. Better for her to be turned on by a dude’s homoeroticism than repelled by it, right?
And yet.
I think this is a kind of complicated conversation (and, yes, one that I am thinking about because of Challengers, which I am planning to see again this weekend). The facile reaction to this sort of question is, “if it’s wrong when a woman experiences it, it’s wrong when a man experiences it” — except anyone with half a brain cell has to know that that is simply not always true. When a member of a marginalized group has an experience, the context is different from when a member of a privileged group has that same experience. Broke Straight Boys — the porn website where straight men (or maybe “straight”) are “coerced” into doing gay stuff for money — is always going to have a different, less exploitative feel than Broke Straight Girls (which is, you know, the same, but with women) because of our sense that women are more vulnerable, that straight men retain some degree of power and agency even as they are nominally being exploited.
So a movie like Challengers, where a (presumably straight) woman engineers a kiss between two men for her own enjoyment is necessarily going to feel different from… what was that movie from the 1990s with the teacher having a threesome with two female students? Wild Girls? It doesn’t really matter, because I think you know the trope I’m referring to regardless. Two men being manipulated by a woman will always feel different than two women being manipulated by a man. Hell, two women choosing to have a threesome will still be subject to clucking tongues and discussions of their choice to exploit themselves in a way that two men actively being tricked into banging it out by a lady simply will not.
And yet. I’m going to do a total 180 here and say that even as I firmly believe that it’s different when a woman objectifies, even fetishizes, male-male sexual contact than when a man does the same with two ladies; I also feel weird about giving women the all clear to fetishize queer male sex just because we are members of an oppressed class. There’s a way in which women — especially straight women — can reduce queer men to dress up dolls made to kiss one another for the woman’s amusement, a dynamic in which it becomes obvious that even as we’re talking about a woman objectifying men, that woman’s straightness (or at least straight desire) puts her in a more privileged class than men whose sexual desires are taboo.
You don’t get a free pass to treat people like your own personal porn show just because you’re a member of a marginalized group.
Anyway. Because of … how the world is … it doesn’t surprise me that we’ve seen way more of the “men ogling lesbians” than the “woman ogling gay men” trope in mass media. And I think the rarity, the fringe nature of the latter, is part of what makes it feel more okay to many people. But I also think that as it becomes more common, there is a danger of it slipping into something that is simultaneously more boring and more dangerous: it is not progress to see homoeroticism turned into a party trick for straight women’s enjoyment, you know?
Challengers is great, not because it has a woman engineering a kiss between two men, but because that kiss — and the woman’s dynamic with the men — is about something much larger than just the fetishization of boys’ love. Indeed, if more MFF threeway movies were as dynamic and complex as Challengers, I wouldn’t be as down on the genre as I am.
So let’s hope, then, that Challengers inspires other storytellers to bring depth to their own threesome/bisexual narratives. Let’s hope, then, that we don’t just see it inspiring pale imitations that take nothing from its story other than “women find it hot when boys kiss.”
* I did watch a lot of gay male movies as a teenager but, you know, that was basically the only Queer Cinema™️ that was available in the 1990s
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