Since I’m fat, I’m donating half an eye’s worth of time toward the conversations about the new show on The Misogyny Network Lifetime about How To Look Good Naked. I haven’t seen the show and haven’t decided whether or not I even want to. It honestly depends on just how bad the writers’ strike gets and how lacking I am for blog material. As far as I’m concerned I look pretty good naked, all things considered, but since there are really only a handful of people for whom my nakedness is even an issue I don’t think it warrants a whole lot of discussion.
What does give me pause though, is a bit of conversation in the comments on this post at Harriet Brown’s place.
I’d say that one major reason is that gay men have no investment in holding women’s bodies to unrealistic standards of beauty, …. My gay friends were never interested in my body, just my sense of humor.
To be fair, I don’t know those folks behind the comments, so I don’t know the full extent of their relationships with Gay Men®. I’ve had a lot of relationships with a lot of men who happen to be gay, though, and there is one thing I can tell you.
Not all gay men are the same.
I’m bothered by a lot of women’s attitude toward male homosexuals, especially the en vogue idea of having your own pet Gay Man® to make you feel like you’ve got a dog who talks back. He’s Loyal! He Loves You For You! He Doesn’t Want Sex! He Likes To Shop For Clothes! He’s Catty & Funny! It bothers me because it is really nothing more than a stereotype come to life. Having a gay male friend to be funny with you and boost your self-esteem is sort of like having a Jewish friend to balance your checkbook or a black friend to play basketball with.
It discounts the actual people in the equation and replaces the person with an expected function. What kind of friendship is that, anyway?
Like I said, I’ve known a lot of gay men in this lifetime. Some have not cared about my weight at all. One of them (the infamous Ward who gave me my chili recipe) was the meanest person about my weight I’ve ever known. A lot of the gay men I’ve known have been fine about people’s weight to their face but catty behind their backs. Still others have had other attitudes toward women. It’s all as individual as the people themselves.
Having a gay male friend to be funny with you and boost your self-esteem is sort of like having a Jewish friend to balance your checkbook or a black friend to play basketball with.
Ummm, Kat, I know what you meant to say here. I even agree with the point you wish to make. But, um, well, I think you have a problem with parallel structure here. It’s like this: see, there are straight women who have gay male friends to boost their self-esteem. And there are white folks who seem to play basketball with black folks for no other purpose than to brag about that fact. But do you really wish to suggest that there are Gentiles who ask their Jewish friends to balance their checkbooks for them? Seriously? Because, if so, I clearly have a far longer list of people to beat up than I had dreamed….
Kat, the whole time I was watching HTLGN, I thought of you. I can’t help to think you would love it.
Well, considering the host of the show, I can understand why it’s fans might buy into the gay stereotype. I could never understand how so many in the gay community could get behind such a stereotype enforcing show as Queer Eye (I’ll never watch anything hosted by any of the “Fab Five.”)
(Except maybe Jai Rodriguez) (Maybe)
NM, perhaps you should ask your doctor for training in what punches you can land without causing trauma to your neck and shoulder, because I heard that crap in college pretty frequently. Among some girls, the hierarchy of who should take care of your checkbook seemed to be 1. Daddy, 2. Boyfriend, 3. Jewish girl on your floor.
Hopefully that’s changed since I was in school, but I read that and laughed that Kat and I seemed to have both witnessed that.
Maybe it was an Indiana/Ohio/Michigan/Illinois thing, but yeah. It was something I ran into a lot. Not at a Christian college for obvious reasons (there aren’t a lot of Jewish girls in the dorms at a Christian liberal arts school), but my co-workers at Sam’s club would always talk about how they were friends with Jewish people who balanced their checkbooks for them.
I was weirded out.
You’re not sh*tting me? Or pulling some elaborate double-teaming let’s-freak-nm-out prank? Because if what you two are saying is true my mind is absolutely, completely boggled. I mean, I’m flabbergasted in a way that rarely happens — I would be speechless if I were the sort of person who could be rendered speechless. I have literally never even heard of such a thing before — and I don’t think it’s something my friends and I would just not notice. I can’t think what I would have done if someone had asked me to balance her checkbook — I mean, I would have laughed, and said “how’d you get to college without basic math?” but I think I would have started a campaign to ostracize that person, I would have been so offended.
So you’re saying that, considering that I still have three weeks of PT to go, I may have to hire a ninja or something.
Help control the queer population.
Have your gays spayed or neutered.
[...] by Ron Coleman on January 9, 2008 Katherine Coble decries the phenomenon of “the en vogue idea of having your own pet Gay Man®”: Having [...]
BTW, I have polled my family and no one has ever even heard of being asked to balance Gentiles’ checkbooks. One person did point out that it sounds more like having black friends to cut your watermelon than like having black friends to play basketball with, which is sort of my reaction as well. Please, y’all are making this up, right?
Good point on the gay arm candy. I ‘ve seen this phenomenon several times but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that bothered me about it. You nailed it with your pet analogy.
I do have very good friend who has laughingly referred to me as her “token christian friend” for years and I gave her hell when she went into Finance as a career. I also got to sit at the “Christian” table at her wedding and we laughed and laughed because there was a lot of room at that table and everyone else eventually came over. I did get a lot of stereotypes thrown at me though.
Did you have her balance your checkbook?
Of course there will be stereotypes and joking when individuals from different backgrounds meet.* But that one, for what I think are pretty obvious reasons, goes beyond “gee, I never knew X” and “but I thought all you Q-people did Z” and into outright bigotry.
*I once had a co-worker ask me whether synagogues had special drains in the floor for the animal blood to run out.
NM, my freshman year of college, I found one of the girls on my floor standing in the bathroom in her towel looking for all the world like she’d just seen aliens materialize in front of her. I mean, she looked so shell-shocked that, even though I didn’t know her that well, I ran over to her to find out what was wrong.
And, apparently, she’d been getting out of the shower–as you do–and went to grab her towel only to find one of the white girls on our floor staring at her and asking her where her tail was, because, apparently, black people have tails.
The girl in the towel told me that the only thing that had saved the ignorant white girl from getting punched is that she seemed sincerely confused. She wasn’t asking from a place of racist malice, but a place of deeply racist ignorance.
So, really, after that, that said white girl and other girls thought that Jewish girls would just be hanging around waiting to balance checkbooks… Well, anyway, it was another lesson in how I came to discover that people from the Chicago suburbs were not the urban sophisticates I thought they were.
A tail. Wow.
Oh, I get the ignorance part. The woman who asked me about the drains was ignorant, and talking to me with great curiousity because she knew she was ignorant (I was the first Jew she’d ever met), and wanted not to be. But I didn’t find her to be bigoted. But tails? Checkbooks? The bigotry is what sticks out a mile, and really trumps the ignorance. There’s a difference between “I wasn’t aware that Judaism had developed at all for the past 2000 years” (dumb though that is) and “I’m shocked that black people aren’t lower forms of life than I am and that Jews aren’t born knowing how to steal Christians’ money.” Look, bigotry exists. My husband, like many other Jewish kids, used to get chased, held down, and checked for horns by his schoolmates. I get it. But the checkbook thing is completely new to me. I never experienced it, never heard of anyone experiencing it, never have been told about it or read about it or anything. I’m just horrified. I grovel — I apologize profusely and abjectly — for hijacking Kat’s thread, which is about a different kind of bigotry, and a more widespread one. My only excuse is my surprise.
Oh, and certain (not all) suburbs outside major cities exist precisely in order for the people who move to them to be able to avoid the sort of sophistication you mean.
NM-no but I one day hope to have enough money for her to be my financial planner. The second half of our mutual joke was that if I was her token christian friend then she was in big trouble!
We have been fortunate to meet and become friends and to appreciate one another based on our differences in culture (suburban vs. backwoods) and to revel in our differences and learn from each other. Ethnicity and religion just happen to be different and we’ve learned from each other about that too. have been fortunate always to have a diversity of friends and I am surpised by people who don’t. It seems so limited, but ignorance can play a part in that too.
If the polished suburban girl had called me a redneck or hillbilly (extremely offensive words to me) instead of gamely riding a 4-wheeler into a field of cows and shouting “A1 sauce” at them our friendship would be much different. In the same vein, I tend to appreciate my friends for whom they are and not whom they sleep with. Lots of people don’t and they miss out on having more than just pets.
Please, y’all are making this up, right?
I wish I were. Of course, they (Sam’s Club coworkers) probably weren’t actually friends with any Jewish people at all.
Here’s how it came up:
I worked at the Membership desk, which is a seperate area from the cashout line. We had our own registers. One was for membership fee intake, one was a debit register for refunds and one was for general exchanges. At the end of the night it was the responsiblity of the close-out employees to reconcile all three registers, encode all of the checks from the cash line AND the Membership desk and balance the check totals with the register tapes. It was actually my favourite part of my job.
But when I started at Sam’s my first night one of the chicks asked me if I was any good at “accountin’ stuff” and I said yeah, I was pretty good (having no experience further than the A- I got in high school accounting class….)
She said “Good, then you can close out the registers and the check stuff. I’m so bad at that I got a Jew friend to do my checkbook for me.”
Now, that could have been hyperbole on her part, I don’t know. It could also be a “saying” among a certain type of people–you know “busy as a one-armed paper hanger” or that sort of thing.
This particular woman in question was sort of a piece of work anyway. She was full of racist stereotypes–wouldn’t eat with our black co worker or sit in the same chair the black co-worker sat in. The other co-worker who joked with her about it seemed to do so in a way that led me to believe that it was a particular racist stereotype talked about in certain circles that I missed out on altogether.
The other woman–a staunch Catholic whose husband kept getting arrested in front of abortion clinics–would go on and on about “I can’t count money. I’m not Jewish.” (That was her excuse for not closing the registers.) I ended up doing all of the encoding and register closing on the nights that the three of us worked. I liked to do it and I was good at it. They started calling me their “little Jew”.
I think ultimately it was some sort of cover they employed. They weren’t good at it–trust me, they really were BAD at anything math-related–and so they “reasoned” that there is some thing outside themselves that made it not their fault they couldn’t do something. I think a lot of those racist attitudes about abilities are born that way.
Well, you and B have helped me add to my list of “life experiences I am sooo grateful not to have participated in.”
So I’m a good–what? 18? 19?–months too late here (I just stumbled upon your blog from points unknown this evening…and I mean this literally, as I actually cannot now remember how I arrived here…but I digress), but I just wanted to climb my gay self up to the nearest rooftop and shout ‘THANK YOU’!!! Thankfully, I live in New York, where being gay hasn’t been interesting to anyone in like 20 years, but in other places I’ve lived–in particular Chicago–I have been accosted by a nonstop barrage of insecure girls seeking to make me their surrogate boyfriend and instantly assuming that I would make the office a little more ‘faaaaabulouuuuussss!’ and that I’d go out for appletinis with them after work and endlessly discuss Britney Spears while I helped them pick out sex toys or something. It was always much to these girls’ chagrin–and perplexment, which isn’t a word, but is now–when I would choose instead to spend time with those who, you know, treated me like a human being instead of a sideshow act plunked down for their amusement.
Anyway, I digress. I appreciate what you’ve said here. Sometimes I wish I were unattractive and didn’t know how to dress myself and had terrible taste in music so I could just be treated like any other beer-guzzling, ball-scratching troglodyte.
Okay, no I don’t. But you know what I mean.