Masc gay sex
Taking off the ‘Masc’: How Gay-Identifying Men Perceive and Navigate Hyper-Masculinity and “Mascing” Culture Online
INTRODUCTION
The proliferation of gay online spaces and the opportunity they give to experiment and explore one’s hold sexual identity have made online platforms increasingly significant in the social, romantic, and feeling lives of homosexual men.[1] For many queer men, online spaces serve as sanctuaries to meet other gay men, experiment with their personal identity construction, and cultivate gay communities. Some scholars contain researched how the internet, specifically social media platforms, hold helped to normalize queer identities.[2] The anonymous and disembodied character of online engagement has created recent opportunities for individuals who are questioning their sexual identities to explore and experiment with their own identities.[3],[4] Online platforms that provide social networking opportunities for gay men contain transformed from uncomplicated forums and websites into sophisticated and highly popular apps like Grindr, Scruff, and Jack’d.[5] These new apps have been called “hybrid media” because they integrate the offline and online experience of
Illustration by Sarah MacReading
In this day and age, it’s almost old hat for gay characters on popular TV to trend more toward Homer Simpson than Waylon Smithers. From Happy Endings‘ Max Blum to Looking‘s Richie Ventura, the “masc” gay dude has gone from an manageable punch line to the brand-new norm, and it’s far from a huge leap to claim that in 2016, certain ideas of gay masculinity have finally become firmly entrenched in mainstream Western pop culture.
Masculinity is, indeed, something that gay men obsess over and have obsessed over since the 1970s and the rise of clone customs. It’s an obsession often manifested in derisive and self-loathing ways, because gay men often fetishize masculinity to the point that they look down upon and subordinate their feminine peers. The same pattern is evident among straight men—sexism and misogyny, after all, are alive and well—but this same type of anti-effeminacy often goes unnoticed among same-sex attracted men themselves.
The parallels between how anti-effeminacy plays out between the two groups—straight and homosexual men—is too-little studied. So while completing my master’s degree in sociology at Louisian
Photo credit: Shed Mojahid
Article by Hugo Mega (edited by Alyssa Lepage)
I used to think that “coming out” was going to be the hardest part of being gay. That, being free to be me, I could finally halt pretending. I would be able to drop the heteronormative disguise that I used to wear, to ensure that I belonged and that I felt safe. Little did I know that in the years that followed, more often than not, I would detect myself butch-ing up, trying to be more masculine than what I naturally was. How did I find myself here again?
Like walking on thin ice, any false shift I made, could easily throw me back into a loop of antique patterns that condition my ways of being and behaving without me even noticing it.
Tired of this self-limiting pattern, I decided to confront my views around masculinity. Since then I’ve been engaged in deconstructing my conditioning and notions of what it means to be a dude. In the process of deconstructing my beliefs it was difficult to elude one’s own toxic masculinity. I used to believe that being gay absolved me from organism toxic like many straight man can be, but I was wrong.
In this article I will be reflecting on personal experiences and different p
Reflections on Gay Masculinity
By Justin Natoli, JD, MFT
If market price is a function of supply and ask for, then my advice is to start investing in masculinity. That stuff is flying off the shelves. For a variety of reasons—innate and learned—masculinity is like catnip to a significant percentage of queer men, and it appears to be in concise supply. The appeal of masculinity isn’t breaking news. A quick glance on Scruff reveals one masc/musc man after another looking for masc-only sexual connections. What sparks my curiosity is the role masculinity plays in our sex lives and what our longing for and fetishizing of masculinity says about the gay experience.
I sat down with some ‘masc-only’ same-sex attracted men recently to know better what they perceive like when connecting with men they judge to be masculine. These conversations suggested three distinct but overlapping roles masculinity plays in sexual relationships with men. One group is drawn to masculine men because they feel protected. Another group says they enjoy feeling dominated by masculine energy. A third group reveals that connecting with masculine men validates their own masculinity and helps them feel more masculine. Time and tim