How women’s interest in man-on-man-lurve came out, got main-streamed – and topped the “real” gay thing. Without my permission.
Having recently completed it, I was planning to post something about the sports-themed, age-verification-exempt, streaming gay porn everyone else has already written and raved about – reporting how women are apparently ‘feral’ for it.
You know the one, based on Rachel Reid’s Canadian ice-hockey fanfic, about crash-helmeted, macho rivals on the ice sheets who get heated between the bed sheets.
Along with the uncanny popularity of other similar main-streamed homoerotica created by and/or aimed at women, which I’m told is rampaging across streaming services globally.
I say “completed” because it took me a while and a bit of effort. I kept taking a break for a few days or weeks. Not because I hated Heated Rivalry – it’s well-made, and the actors Hudson Williams as (Ilya Rozanov) and Connor Storrie (Hudson Williams) are fine, easy on the eye, and, unusually in this furry day and age, have faces. (Perhaps for that boyband vibe). I also didn’t much mind the lack of realism, or ice hockey – it is after all a fantasy.
Which is also why the cartoonish ugly Russophobia about Ilya’s homeland and family (but not cute Ilya because we know he is really, deep down, Canadian) isn’t a deal-breaker. After all, it’s standard in most factual content these days.
And there’s lots of gay sex. Which is, despite the constant, much-mocked, rather non-gay explicit requests for consent – “can I fuck you?” – quite convincing. By which I mean arousing.
No, the reason for my reluctance was because I struggle with commitment. There are five, hour-long episodes. In which nothing much happens, if very prettily and angstily. Building up to a season finale in which – and I think I can say this without spoiling anything resembling a plot – the money shot turns out to be… commitment.
Or as a twice-married-with-kids, sometime bisexual but always sentimental, male friend put it to me: “But Mark! How can you say nothing happens? Two beautiful people fall in love!”
And then, while I was sucking my pencil, about to start writing this post, I remembered a TV documentary proposal I’d written twenty years ago with the working titles ‘Man-Love for the Ladies’ or ‘Queer Eye of the Straight Gal’.
It promised to explore the phenomenon of female interest in male-on-male lurve-action, its hidden history in pop culture, how and why so many were still in denial about its existence, despite the then-ubiquitous – nay, mandatory – acknowledgement of the appeal of girl-on-girl action for guys.
And how it was coming out of the closet and about to go heavily mainstream.
Here’s the opening pitch:
For some time now, boys have been getting sexual thrills from the idea of two girls getting it together. In the last decade in particular, this has become something that straight men openly and proudly talk about and the media has covered extensively. Being turned on by lesbianism, we are told, over and over again, has become a part of normal, red-blooded male heterosexuality.
As well as a cliché, it is, apparently, a no-brainer: of course straight men enjoy watching two women together, the argument goes – it’s TWO of everything they like.
However, for the most part, there has been a curious and rather staggering silence about the logical corollary of this: WOMEN being turned on by TWO MEN together.
This is about to change.
The new generations of sexually upfront and assertive post-feminist women and increasingly narcissistic and sensual – ‘metrosexual’ – men and the popular culture that caters to them are bringing female voyeuristic pleasure in the idea of two attractive men getting intimate with one another, what I shall christen ‘Femantasy’, out of the closet.
You can see why, as the daddy of the metrosexual, I was keen on anatomising this phenomenon. Men had gained the freedom to enjoy the previously proscribed ‘passive’ pleasures of the desire to be desired – of being looked at. And women the freedom to enjoy more ‘active’, voyeuristic fantasies about men. Instead of simply being a voyeuristic fantasy for men.
In the viral 2002 essay which introduced the metrosexual to the US, I made a brief mention of ‘female Sex and the City metrosexuality’, elaborating: ‘Female metrosexuality is the complement of male metrosexuality, except that it’s active where male metrosexuality is passive.’
What I dubbed ‘Femantasy’ is in some ways this flip/female side of metrosexuality. On the one hand you have the assimilation of many facets of hitherto ‘niche’ gay male culture to consumerism and mainstream masculinity – the queer eye OF (rather than ‘for’) the straight guy. And on the other you have the assimilation of the versatile power/pleasure dynamics of gay sex to women’s liberated erotic imagination – man-love for ladies (MLL).
Metrosexuality represents an escape from the heterosexual division of labour in looking and loving.
Queer Eye of the Straight Gal was pitched by email and in person to several UK TV commissioning editors, mostly at Channel Four, by Mark Ford, formerly half of Rapido TV, makers of Rapido and Eurotrash. (Mark completely and enthusiastically shared my pov – and contributed examples to the proposal).
Having read the proposal for the first time in a couple of decades, I decided that I should post it [below], in all its Cassandrine glory – as time capsule of a pre-social media culture on the cusp of a sea-change. A sea-change the MSM gatekeepers couldn’t or wouldn’t see.
As you may have guessed, Queer Eye of the Straight Gal wasn’t commissioned.
The proposal now reads like an essay with a TV show tacked on at the end as an after-thought. And ‘Femantasy’, used as clumsy shorthand for women’s erotic, emotional, and psychic investment in homoerotic narratives, isn’t a catchy coinage (I don’t think I’ve used it anywhere else). But none of that was the reason it was rejected. Mr Ford, a consummate telly professional, will have pitched the proposal much more pithily in person than I did on the page.
No, the reason every single comm ed gave Mr Ford a “nah” was the concept of MLL itself. They just couldn’t believe that it was a real trend: that women really enjoyed watching man-on-man action – or more than just a few weirdo ones. (As I recall, most if not all of the editors were men: back then, most comm eds were, even though they were commissioning content mostly for women.)
The dedicated denial mentioned in the proposal had triumphed again.
Instead of trying to convince blinkered male TV execs about the obvious kinkiness of female sexuality, we should have just figured out a way to exploit it ourselves. We would now be wealthier than Mr Pornhub.
It’s probably just as well the doc never got made. It would have been a bit cringe – how could it not have been? Perhaps it would even have created an alternate timeline in which most women never dared come out about their interest in man-on-man action.
And what on earth do I know about female sexuality? I just wanted to choose some of the straight guys the female presenters were going to cajole into snogging one another.
Nevertheless, no one – least of all a TV commissioning editor – could deny we’re now living in the over-Heated, out-and-proud, manlurved-up, clit-tastic MLL future the proposal predicted. The online ‘niche kink’ has gone corporate.
In an era when many women are reportedly “embarrassed to have a boyfriend”, male homoerotica allows them to publicly enjoy two. And two hot jocks in the case of Heated Rivalry.
To be horribly, hideously Freudian about it, Femantasy turns penis envy into penised proxies. But as a woman pal of mine used to say to me, long before Madonna decided she was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body: ‘Who wouldn’t want a penis? For a day.”
Or as I put it at the end of Queer Eye of the Straight Gal, more as a provocative prediction than a reality at the time:
‘‘It is perhaps the ultimate triumph of postmodernism that man-on-man lurve is no longer the property of… men.’
Women expect much more action than they did twenty years ago – the sex scenes in Heated Rivalry make Brokeback Mountain look like a Platonic relationship (which it kinda was). There are also many, many more of them than there are gay men – and everything is about the numbers nowadays, darling.
Understandably, some gay men are unhappy about this. There have been complaints about the lack of realism of Heated Rivalry, and the ‘fetishisation’ of gay intimacy – the streaming equivalent of the hen parties (mentioned in the TV proposal) reportedly invading gay bars looking for titillation. Some have also complained that the stars are unrealistically good looking.
Which is not something that you’ll find me doing. Especially since they probably meant that the pink pound-town protagonists weren’t hairy-beary enough.
Instead, I would probably quote Rocky Horror’s Dr Frank-N-Furter to them, the way that I have quoted him to women who complain, like Janet, that today’s Rockys – aka spornosexuals – have too many muscles: “I didn’t make him for YOU!”
Though I doubt though that the makers of Heated Rivalry et al would openly admit who they are really making their homoerotic content for.
It’s true that gay sex and also gay romance has been commodified by corporate capitalism and no longer belongs to your actual gays, but, as with the rise of male vanity and sensuality, this was the inevitable result of the end of the legal, moral and traditional repressions of male homosexuality that gay and bisexual men worked hard to overcome. From a materialist perspective, the assimilation of homosexuality was precisely so it could be commodified.
Either way, once it was commodified it “belonged” to the largest, most lucrative market for it. Them’s the capitalist rules.
And let’s not get started on how many gay writers have made careers out of claiming to have intimate knowledge of what women really want.
How do I feel about it myself? Now that the non-gay gay future I predicted has arrived?
Conflicted. But only somewhat.
They certainly don’t need my permission, but for what it’s worth, I welcome women, of whatever sexuality, writing or producing male homoerotica. It saves me having to bear the burden of homo-ness – outsourcing it instead to people who are much more optimistic and excited about it. It’s also interesting, amusing and sometimes exhilarating to see the results of a woman’s subjectivity and imagination at work on men’s desiring bodies. (And yes, sometimes horrifying.)
It’s not as if gay-male written and directed films nowadays are necessarily any more “authentic”. Or any good. Even and especially those garlanded with critical acclaim: such, the pointless pig-farmer remake of Brokeback Mountain that was God’s Own Country (2018), or anything directed by Luca Guadagnino. (I write about this here.)
Naturally, that hasn’t stopped me complaining about some examples of popular MLL, because they strike me as laughably or cynically executed. Or because everyone likes a good moan every now and again.
Ambivalence aside, how could I seriously object to it? I was a big fan of (lesbian) Mary Renault’s historical homoerotica novels, as a hopelessly romantic teenager back in the 1980s. Looking her up, I discovered that her contemporary (1953) novel The Charioteer – which I also loved – prompted Noel Coward to make an early impassioned plea against early lady man-love fiction which sounds eerily familiar today:
‘Oh dear, I do, do wish well-intentioned ladies would not write books about homosexuality. This one is turgid, unreal and so ghastly earnest. It takes the hero – soi-disant – three hundred pages to reconcile himself to being queer as a coot, and his soul-searching and deep, deep introspection is truly awful. There are ‘queer’ parties in which everyone calls everyone ‘my dear’ a good deal, and over the whole book is a shimmering lack of understanding of the subject. I’m sure the poor woman meant well but I wish she’d stick to recreating the glory that was Greece and not fuck about with dear old modern homos.’
(I should point out here, cattily, that Coward uses the word “dear” twice in just three sentences from his posthumously-published journals, complaining about the way the queens at the god-awful 1950s queer demi-monde parties lampooned in The Charioteer call everyone ‘my dear’. But then, those queens were probably imitating Coward – who, by the way, didn’t write an explicitly homosexual character until 1966, the year before male homosexuality was partially decriminalised in England and Wales.)
Ultimately, 21st century MLL mostly isn’t for me. And that’s fine. Because, like 20th century bodice-ripping romantasy, it isn’t meant to be.
As I put it at the end of the Queer Eye for the Straight Gal proposal, talking about the difference between (explicit) slash-fiction and gay porn.
‘gay porn is usually about casual and anonymous sex – there is no real narrative apart from that of erection, intercourse, ejaculation. A short and repetitive ‘no strings’ script. The Femantasy version of man-lurve seems more serpentine and is often much more bound up in emotion and commitment. Perhaps narrative, like love, is a function of the womb, rather than the penis.’
OK, I was being provocative again, and highly subjective. Plus this paragraph is probably yet another example of why I’m terminally single.
But it does explain why I had such trouble finishing Heated Rivalry.
You probably won’t believe it, but I do have a romantic side – if only when it comes to the past. I recently devoured – rather than ‘completed’ – nine episodes (total running time over 11 hours) of The Beatles Anthology. It’s spellbindingly replete with original footage, much of which I’ve not seen before, that captures the frenzied maelstrom of success that surrounded four quick-witted, hilariously funny, resolutely unpretentious (pre-Yogi), now shockingly-young-looking working-class northern English lads who loved one another. And who transformed and transfixed the Anglo world.
Watching footage of their stupendously screamy US tour in which the (mostly white) teen girls of America discovered how to collectivise and weaponise unrealised lust, I couldn’t help but notice, or imagine, that the supersonic screaming seemed to crescendo whenever John and Paul, styled and packaged by their gay manager in Vidal Sassoon bobs and Italian-cut suits (with John’s wife carefully closeted away), harmonised their love-lyrics at one another, open mouths inches apart, tongues teasing a shared, erect mike.
A reminder that it was gay men, in the form of boyband managers – and yes, The Beatles were very much a boyband in terms of how they were packaged – who helped create, or cultivate, the phenomenon of man-love for the ladies in the first place.
To this day, I still vividly recall being much too interested, on the precipice of puberty in the early1970s, in an image in a The Monkees annual – a UK produced hardback book of comic strips about the zany US TV Beatles knock-off band, which I’d nicked from my older sister. (The Monkees were aired in heavy rotation on UK kids’ TV in the 1970s.)
The image burned on my young retina? A scene depicting their Paul McCartney clone Davy Jones, naked and hog-tied, being roasted over flames, his pert bum prodded by imps with tridents.
I’ve searched online for evidence of it, sadly without success. But I can assure you that I was far too innocent to have imagined it. Who knows how this old homo would have turned out if I hadn’t been exposed to this depraved and corrupting boyband erotica at such a formative age?
And who can be surprised at how the girls – and their daughters and grand-daughters – those Monkees annuals were made for turned out.
After posting this, I found that formative Monkees comic strip: it’s a Jack & the Beanstalk panto parody called ‘Once Upon a Climb’, from the 1969 Lady Penelope Annual. If anything, it’s even kinkier than I remembered it, half a century on. Jones/Jack (who is drawn very girlishly, perhaps in keeping with the panto tradition of Jack played by a girl) is imagining himself being tortured, naked, hogtied on a spit-roast – with what looks like a baby’s dummy in his mouth – not by imps but by his hooded hungry bandmates’ big, pointy tridents.
Man-Love for the Ladies
OR
Queer Eye of the Straight Gal
By Mark Simpson
[Written 2007]
THE BACKGROUND
For some time now, boys have been getting sexual thrills from the idea of two girls getting it together. In the last decade in particular, this has become something that straight men openly and proudly talk about and the media has covered extensively. Being turned on by lesbianism, we are told, over and over again, has become a part of normal, red-blooded male heterosexuality.
As well as a cliché, it is, apparently, a no-brainer: of course straight men enjoy watching two women together, the argument goes – it’s TWO of everything they like.
However, for the most part, there has been a curious and rather staggering silence about the logical corollary of this: WOMEN being turned on by TWO MEN together.
This is about to change.
The new generations of sexually upfront and assertive post-feminist women and increasingly narcissistic and sensual – ‘metrosexual’ – men and the popular culture that caters to them are bringing female voyeuristic pleasure in the idea of two attractive men getting intimate with one another, what I shall christen ‘Femantasy’, out of the closet. This has already happened with Manga cartoons in Japan, which regularly feature male-on-male action for the delectation of female readers.
The phenomenal success of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (despite being a rather bad and cheap movie) illustrates this. After all, this is an erotic story about two handsome cowboys who fall in love with one another written by a woman and made into a Hollywood movie which women in their thousands went to see again and again, talking openly about how erotic as well as emotional they found the film’s subject matter. We are on the cusp of a sexual sea-change here.
How do I know? How can I be so sure about women’s interest in boy-on-boy action? Especially when… I’m not a woman. Well, partly for subjective reasons: I seem to be getting more and more requests from women keen to see their boyfriends in action with another man (I usually do my best to rise the occasion).
But mostly for the more objective reason that the evidence of the fantasy is all around – if only we will see it. Pop culture has been slyly exploiting the power of Femantasy, women’s until now largely secret enjoyment of boy-on-boyness very profitably for many years now. For instance….
Boy bands from the Beatles to Bros to Wham! to the Backstreet Boys have almost always been managed by gay men. Not just because they have an interest in young men, but, more importantly, they know how to sell boy-love to the girls. Brian Epstein put a ban on girlfriends because it would interfere with that ‘special relationship’ between John and Paul that was part of the Beatles fantasy he was selling to teen girls.
In his book Black Vinyl, White Powder, Wham’s manager, Simon Napier Bell describes how he taught George and Andrew to flirt with each other – knowing it would turn their teen-girl fans on. True, it might have just been something he liked to tell his puppet-poppets to turn him on (he is openly homosexual), but judging by Wham’s phenomenal success it clearly worked with the girls too.
This is probably why the Boy Band to end all Boy Bands, Take That’s success was based on their outrageous and contrived gayness‚ (regardless of their actual private sexuality) After leaving the band one of Robbie’s favourite chat-up techniques was said to be telling girls that he’s gay, he and Mark were lovers (which seemed to be a regular fantasy of many female fans) but that she might be the one to convert him.
Despite the recent libel case, much of Robbie Williams successful solo career has been based on a contrived ‘is-he-or-isn’t-he?’ image. He and Morrissey were rumoured to be planning to end a cancelled duet on last year’s The Brits with a Britney-Madonna style snog. This might seem reckless, not to mention dangerous to Robbie’s sales figures, but if there’s anything to Femantasy it might have proved a very smart move indeed.
The hit TV series QUEER AS FOLK offered a sort of Take-That-With-Knobs-Out with it’s acres of hairless Mancunian boy-flesh. What was so remarkable about QUEER AS FOLK was that it was such a huge hit with women (over 60% of the audience was female). Was it then a co-incidence or clever casting that the show’s main hunk, skinny Stuart, as played by a straight actor, was classic male-totty for the girls but left most gay men cold? (Trust me girls, with that bubble perm, pigeon chest and jacket he would have been completely invisible in a gay disco).
One of the most memorable scenes in SEX IN THE CITY involved the ladies watching gay porn on DVD and admitting to each other that it turned them on. This is one of the few moments that Femantasy has ever been acknowledged in the mainstream culture
Those ‘shocking’ ‘controversial’ gay male kisses on CORONATION STREET, DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES and other TV soaps may not have been so shocking‚ or unwelcome to many straight female viewers. In fact, it may well be that one of the reasons why so many soaps have gay characters/couples now is precisely because women viewers – who are the main audience – like seeing them get it on.
This has real repercussions for gay men – gay bars are finding themselves invaded by female hen parties. Many are not looking for fashion tips – they’re hoping to see men getting it on with one another. (This has led one gay bar in Melbourne recently to go to court to get an order banning straight women from gay bars.)
Recent UK BIG BROTHER winner the Geordie metrosexual retro 70s go-go dancer spent much of his time in the BB House being very friendly and close with the ‘camp gay crimper’ as the press dubbed him. While there was much ‘questioning’ of his sexuality in the press, this special relationship probably helped him win the hearts of millions of female viewers.
From Butch and Sundance to Frodo and Sam, women have enjoyed the chaste-yet-virile love between men in what has to be Hollywood’s most enduring genre – the male Buddy Movie. Ironically, when Thelma and Louise kissed before their leap over the edge of the cliff it was as much a realisation of the boy-on-boy subtext of the buddy genre the film pastiched as it was of girl-on-girl romance/friendship.
But, it would appear, women are growing tired of these coy, cynical, clit-teasing allusions to man-on-man love and want something rather more…. explicit. Fed up with waiting for pop culture to provide them with it (and even BROKEBACK is very coy in terms of what it actually dares to show) some have invented their own Femantasy erotica: a form of fiction called ‘Slash’. And it is slash, more than anything else, which provides the final proof of the power and reality of Femantasy.
Slash fiction comprises fantasy stories written by (usually) heterosexual women in which two idolised male ‘buddies’ (both fictional and real) move from platonic love to erotic love. So, Kirk shags Spock, Starsky beds Hutch and Westlife have a gang-bang (boy bands are particularly popular – even ‘homophobic’ Eminem gets the slash treatment). Nothing is sacred: once famously celibate crooner Morrissey is also brought together with Robbie Williams and others with much more than just a snog.
Amongst the most popular in recent years has been Sam getting it good from Frodo – which, I suspect, even the most uptight male viewer of the RING trilogy would think was a blessed relief after all those longing looks. More controversial are the wilder storylines which involved the (under-age) Harry Potter bedding Ron Weasly (and some S/M action with Drako Malfoy to boot)
The internet has massively increased the popularity and visibility of slash fiction and encouraged women to ‘come out’ about their interest in Femantasy and make a community of like-minded women – women who are keen to explore different sexual subjectivities than the usual, passive ones prescribed to the ‘gentler sex’, through the active bodies of their fantasy male heroes. It’s almost a kind of psychic sex-change.
Interestingly, slash fiction shows how romance is often a very important part of what are nevertheless very explicit encounters. The two men are usually heterosexual, but end up in bed because they ‘love one another’. This is rather different to the usual storyline of male-male porn aimed at men: gay porn is usually about casual and anonymous sex – there is no real narrative apart from that of erection, intercourse, ejaculation. A short and repetitive ‘no strings’ script. The Femantasy version of man-lurve seems more serpentine and is often much more bound up in emotion and commitment. Perhaps narrative, like love, is a function of the womb, rather than the penis. As a consumer of gay porn myself, I have to say I find it almost impossible to become aroused by slash porn. (But then perhaps that’s more a function of my own jadedness.)
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, written as a short story by a woman, is a slash story: Butch and Sundance Get It On (somewhat). Even the way the film turns their love affair into a life-long secret seems slash-orientated. The producer has recently admitted in interview that the target audience for this film wasn’t gay men but women. (Though apparently gays loved it.)
It is perhaps the ultimate triumph of postmodernism that man-on-man lurve is no longer the property of… men.
THE DOCUMENTARY
We meet the women readers and writers of Slash fiction, and try to discover whether learning that many straight women are turned on by man-on-man action. (Julie Burchill and Germaine Greer are man-love fans and might be persuaded to contribute.)
We’ll also get a Sex in the City group of women together to watch gay porn and have them talk about how they felt and measure their sexual responses.
More importantly we’ll follow couples who are actively seeking this form of sexual experimentation. In particular we will find a couple who have never done it before – where the boyfriend claims to have only agreed to make his girlfriend happy.
As a framing device – and for maximum entertainment – we will send an all-female (and attractive) film crew out, headed by a sexually assertive female interviewer (perhaps Jodie Marsh, who has gone on the record about her interest in seeing men together). Their task will be to visit straight pubs and nightclubs, football and rugby clubs and see how far they can persuade straight boys to go to please the girl-crew – perhaps flirting with one another to get the boys going, and then tell them it’s now their turn (like that famous scene in AMERICAN PIE).
ENDS