Leading A Double Standard, er, I Mean Life

August 29, 2007

Yes, we've all heard about it by now. Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig was caught signaling an undercover policeman in a Minnesota airport bathroom for sex. Sounds kinda seedy, doesn't it? Especially if you're a heterosexual male. Hell, it's really gross, if you want to get down to it. Guys like me can't even understand the attraction to another male's genitals, but that's a topic for another blog, I guess. When regular guys hear about a sex scandal, we're at first thinking, A) someone got caught cheating on their wife; or B) some teacher got caught having sex with an underage student; or something along those lines.

And for the brief seconds before we hear the details in a "sex scandal" like Senator Craig's, our mind has already calculated the possible scenarios (see above), and in our mind we're already seeing the genitals of a man meeting the genitals of a female. It's something that regular heterosexual men have to deal with every day, several times a day. It is our curse to have to beat back the urge to tell the little cute brunette working behind the counter at Starbucks that morning that she has a nice blouse on today, while really, we're seeing our hands and mouth all over her chest. Instead, we politely get our coffee, never acknowledging our lustful thoughts about her. That thought has barely left our mental fantasy by the time we arrive at work, halfway-anxious to see what outfit the excellent blond down the hall has on today, and the cycle repeats itself…over and over and over again.

We aren't EVEN calculating man-on-man. It throws us into some other-world of ugliness to calculate the conclusion of what Senator Craig could have been trying to accomplish when he stands at the door of a guy who's already using the stall, peering through the doorjamb crack for minutes on end, fiddling with his pants while peeping, then entering the next door stall. We don't even understand why a man like us would then take his nearby foot, and repeatedly tap the foot of the same guy while he's supposed to be sitting down to do his business and get the hell out of there. What NORMAL guy does those sequences of events? And, as if that isn't odd (queer?) enough, he decides to stick his hand beneath the dividing wall between the two, and turn his hand palm-up, to repeatedly 'wave' at the guy. What the hell??

Indeed, 'what the hell', we guys think. Is that how they do it? How creepy! How sloppy. How indiscriminate. How unsafe. How disgusting.

Now, I can hear some people right now, saying, "John, how would you like to live in a society where you were forced to take such measures to express your desires?" Frankly, that kind of an unrealistic comment has no bearing on me. I've known my fair share of homosexuals in my life, and I'd say that at least half of the ones I know are more oversexed than my friend Jason, the most sexually-busy heterosexual friend I have and know. The homosexual man doesn't have to negotiate for sex ANYWHERE near as hard and unsuccessfully as we heterosexual men do. Women need to have a reason to have sex—men just need to have a place. Does anyone ever see the heterosexual equivalent of a bathhouse for anonymous sex in most major cities across this great country? I've lived all over this world, and I've yet to see one. How about the amount of public parks, rest areas, and truck stops that are the prime markets for New Jersey Governors and those like him?

Swinger's clubs aren't the same thing, and you know it. It was common for San Francisco bathhouses to have something known as a "fantasy wall" in their establishments, where a plywood wall in the back of the establishment had waist-level holes cut into them. Depends on whether you wanted to pitch or catch as to what side you got on. Swinger's clubs are nowhere as anonymous, plentiful, or as indiscriminate as these meeting grounds for homosexuals. Most swingers' clubs I've known of were exclusive to members only or at least by invite-only. And you couldn't show up alone, either. Not that I've gone to any.

Nope, there's no similarity between the amounts of anonymous sexual contact a heterosexual man can get, versus the amount that homosexuals live with. My 40 years of experience with men doesn't compute with this sympathetic talk about how poor Senator Craig was forced into bathroom stalls to express his feelings. That's female sentimentality, and it doesn't hold up in comparison to the reason why us men have sex. We men have the same amount of testosterone coursing through our veins, whether we're homosexual or heterosexual. It's just that we heterosexual men are forced into negotiating for it from another person who attaches a LOT more conditions to it.

So Senator Craig turns out to be a married man who trolls bathrooms looking for homosexual sex, eh? Well, before I can even figure out if it's ok for me to express my reaction that he 1) cheats on his wife; and 2) engages in something I can't relate to (see, I'm a Southern White Christian Male, and the American culture says that I'm the reason that gays are forced into such a second-class status), the Leftist blowhard Chris Matthews takes the criticism even further than I was ready to say: he's a "sexual deviant", according to Matthews.

How about that! The Left has the best of both worlds! When Barney Frank gets caught running a male prostitution ring out of his apartment as a sitting US Representative, the Left says, "Hands off, you right-wing moralists! We're so proud of poor Barney's alternative lifestyle that we're going to promote him to committee chairman and re-elect him for the next 20 years! And we just DARE you to bring up Gary Studds for committing statutory rape of a sixteen year-old boy when he was a sitting US representative!" But let there be a Representative Mark Foley who answered racy e-mails from a teenage male congressional page, or a Senator Larry Craig who waves at another man beneath a bathroom stall, well…it's time to act OFFENDED and INDIGNANT!

Sorry, I just don't believe all the hype. The Left has tipped its hand WAY too much about this stuff for the past 50 years for me to believe their hyperbole. Don't tell me about how hypocritical it is for Senator Craig to be a right-wing moral crusader against gay rights while he's secretly knocking on stalls, and I won't tell you how hypocritical it is for Bill Clinton to be a crusader for women's rights while he's secretly raping and objectifying them.