Once upon a time, straight men were perceived as paragons of virtue, perfectly content to settle into wholesome, monogamous marriages. Gay guys got the rap for being sexually hyperactive, going through partners like potato chips, unable to eat just one, as the old ad used to say. Even lesbians joined the chorus, blaming the snail’s pace towards LGBTQ equality on unbridled gay male promiscuity. When, in 2005, the MPD Vice Squad shuttered a Gay Arts Center production of the international hit musical Naked Boys Singing, a local lesbian writer penned a bitter editorial chastising those horrible horny gays for besmirching the community’s reputation. Nevermind the closure had more to do with selective (in this case, illegal) law enforcement to harass LGBTQs than any real concern for moral standards.
Speaking of selective enforcement and harassment, a local former sheriff once publically identified gays busted in sex stings. Even the Marquette Law School Faculty Blog decried this obvious exploitation based on animus towards gays. In 2013 when I interviewed the LGBT Community Center’s executive director, Colleen Carpenter, she insisted the sheriff was mistaken to think he could advance his career on the backs of LGBTQ people. The problem was, he already had. The arrests and public shaming essentially checked off the “tough on fags” box and helped establish his conservative credentials. This is the same lawman who, to assert his political potency, accused his boss of “penis envy” and trotted about on a horse in a display of symbolic equine virility. Then, decrying marriage equality, the flustered sheriff famously uttered “any freakish lifestyle … is now considered part of the norm, and they’re shoving it down our throats,” coining a popular metaphor that, given the context, went blushingly beyond the visual of a goose being overfed for foie gras.
It was no surprise, then, when during the last presidential campaign, candidate Marco Rubio groped for the low-hanging fruit and suggested a rival’s endowment was inadequate. In a tit for tat, the target insisted it was. Speaking of penis envy, one might wonder why the dotard with petite hands is so obsessed with undoing the performance of his predecessor, our first black president. Anyway, it seems for Republicans, flaunting one’s stuff in the public’s face is trump.
Ironically, everyone’s now gushing with self-righteous indignation over the sexual harassment of women. Still, how we can possibly find sexual harassment surprising, much less offensive? In our highly sexualized society everything—TV sitcoms, pop music lyrics, blonde bombshell news anchors and a nudie model as first lady—overtly encourages misogyny for its own sake. It’s puzzling, given our cultural embrace of the Alpha male, that acting on that empowerment should be such a scandal.
We’ve also learned fallen media icons Matt Lauer and Mark Halperin may be at least in part to blame for the current regime’s ascendance. Their sexist misogyny toward Hillary Clinton apparently contributed as much to her defeat as Russian meddling.
Admittedly, I feel a certain schadenfreude when calamity befalls the demagogues of straight male privilege. But, really, there’s little joy in the fact the nation as a whole has suffered at the hands they couldn’t keep to themselves.
