askygoneonfire: Red and orange sunset over Hove (Default)
[personal profile] askygoneonfire
I like Stephen Fry, I really do. I liked him in that well meaning 'he's always there' sort of way for years, then I was given Moab is my Washpot for Christmas a few years ago and I liked him even more. Then there was the wonderful Secret Diary of a Manic Depressive where I felt a deep love and respect for this man. What a hero! Then I stopped watching QI because I rather lost faith in it after an offensive episode with the theme 'gender' where Stephen didn't stop a potentially offensive conversation at the usual point he does when things get out of hand. But I shrugged it off, watched a few more episodes and felt the programme/Stephen/Alan Davies had lost their edge; such is life.

This year for my birthday I was delighted to receive The Fry Chronicles. I have trudged through 150 pages of it in a flagging, fatigued sort of manner and sighed as I wade through dropped name after dropped name. Who are these people and why are you listing their names instead of telling me about how you and Kim became lovers and what that relationship meant to you?

When the story broke on twitter that Stephen Fry told Attitude magazine that he believes straight men envy the easy informality of gay sexual relationships and that they all wish there were straight cruising grounds whilst women don't enjoy sex and use it to trap men I was depressingly ready to accept the reality of that claim. Then Stephen huffed off twitter in a blaze of drama only deigning to say it was 'untrue'.

Today he wrote a 4 page rebuttal of the claims. Except he sort of didn't...

At some point we chatted about gay sexuality – well, you would wouldn’t you, for a gay magazine? – and as part of that conversation I repeated the old canard about how men, unlike women, were cursed with their uniquely pressing and annoying libidos. Straight men I have known have often (of course mostly in a kind of bitter jest) said how much they envied gay people the simplicity of their erotic lifestyles (cottaging and cruising and so on) and I vamped for a while on that theme. I do not believe it as some kind of eternal gender truth, I was simply taking a thought for a walk.

The problem here, for me, is that this is not a thought which needs or should be taken for a walk. It's a sweeping generalisation which offends 99% of the people it so neatly ties up in a bow. He didn't say, at the time, that he didn't believe it to be an eternal gender truth, he just trotted out an old stereotype (I know exactly 1 gay man who has EVER gone cottaging. ONE) because he thought it would appeal to his gay audience? There is no part of that which isn't a problem.

At a time when morale is low in the gay community (a chronic rise in homophobia, teenage suicides, gay bashing and religious intolerance) I thought it worth making the light enough point that in some ways you could see the male gay life as a lot easier than the male straight life.

The urge to respond to this merely with "oh thank god Stephen Fry is here to raise out spirits! Our noble leader!" is...overwhelming. Nonetheless, I'll delve a bit deeper. Comparisons of the 'ease' of life based purely on sexuality are problematic. If we want to talk about how society structures power then gay men will always win out on the 'short straw' game against straight men. There are piles of evidence, research and life experience to support that. Stephen Fry; rich, famous, working-in-entertainment Stephen Fry is in no position to comment on who has it 'easier'. The final problem here, as I touched on a moment ago, is that commenting that one persons life is harder or more comfortable than another's because of their sexuality, in this country, in this day and age, is a nonsense. Social, personal, health and economic factors - to name but a few - mean that one gay man's life has nothing in common with another's because, get this!, being gay doesn't give you an identity, it gives you a sexual predilection and possibly some oppression. Beyond that, it's up to you.

It is perhaps sad to think that [women] are as pathetically in the grip of a base and humiliating need to get their rocks off as men are, but if that is the case then that is the case

I think this reveals so much about the place all of this has come from.  Stephen Fry apparently views sex as man's greatest weakness and that women share it is to be regretted.  Here's the thing, as one of the many women on twitter who reacted with outrage at the suggestion that we don't enjoy sex, I'm actually more offended at the suggestion that my enjoyment of sex is a "base and humiliating" urge.  


One of the many fronts on which queer people are dismissed, hated, demonised and marginalised is because we have, throughout history, refused to apologise for wanting to have sex in the way we want to.  Society was reminded by those awful queers that sex didn't have to be functional; it could be about passion and enjoyment and 'base' desire.  The 'death drive' of non reproductive queer sex is the spectre against which many of the transformative social battles have been waged.  It's not about sex, it's about love.  I want to have children to, I just don't want heterosexual sex to do it. etc etc.  And those things are true.  But queer is, also, about sex.  And our continuing liberation is a sexual one as well as a social one.  Glorious, sensual, violent, transformative, forgettable, passionate, animal, unthinking, intellectual SEX.  And that there is any kind of unified distinction between the relationship of persons of different genders and sex is ridiculous.  That all men are 'gripped' by the need to have sex is insulting.  That women sharing that impulse devalues some vague sense of superiority Stephen Fry previously associated with women devalues only his opinions, not us.

All in all, I am saddened.

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askygoneonfire: Red and orange sunset over Hove (Default)
a sky gone on fire

December 2021

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