Dear Camille:
I've searched through your archives for guidance and wisdom. Many, many thanks. However, I've found no reference to "Bears," those big, fat, hairy gay men who meet in their own bars, have their own porn mags and even star in their own porn videos. A decade ago, the lean, smooth, muscular body was the gay ideal of manly perfection. Now it's acceptable (and sometimes more desirable) to be fat and hairy in the body-conscious gay world. What do you think about that?
Yours most humbly,
Bearmuffin
Dear Bearmuffin,
You raise a fascinating question. What is the subliminal symbolism of sexual attraction? Any gender theory worth its salt would deal head-on with these issues instead of dallying in the choking thicket of poststructuralism.
Depilation has become highly fashionable in the gay male world, as shown by the many ads in the gay press for total body waxing and tweezing. Pinpoint shaving of the genital and anal areas has become a gay beauty profession unto itself. Not since Greek athletes scraped their oiled, sandy bodies with the strigil (see Lysippus' fourth-century B.C. statue, "Apoxyomenos") have men had such a fetish for girl-smooth skin. The current fad has come from competitive bodybuilding, where depilation clarifies the outline of well-cut muscles.
In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears' fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell's Angel but the capacious bosom of the primal earth mother. The gay bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion.
The Greek-style pretty ephebe is a cold visual icon, tauntingly remote and ultimately ungraspable. The bear, however, offers warm, soothing regression to what Freud calls the polymorphous perverse, the whole-body tactility of early childhood. My working theory is that the gay bear as a sexual persona is a mythic father-mother, a parental fusion like the androgynous Egyptian river god Hapi or the Roman Father Tiber, bearded and jovially recumbent amid his swarm of rollicking cherubs.
I'm by no means a raving Camille Paglia fan-boy but I really think she hits the nail on the head with this quote. I read it a while ago in one of those bear-themed books but just found it via google today so I'm posting it for posterity's sake.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 05:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 05:41 am (UTC)those last two paragraphs are straight outta the first Bear Book...i think it was Ron Suresha's essay.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 07:00 am (UTC)Uh... are you sure about that?
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Date: 2003-07-16 08:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 08:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 08:21 am (UTC)i know this is totally ruining my credibility, but i do not, at this time, have my copy of The Bear Book on me.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 10:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 12:28 pm (UTC)thank you
males
Date: 2003-07-16 05:45 am (UTC):: n33o ::
MTL
Not to restart an old war, but isn't this cliché dead yet?
Date: 2003-07-16 10:03 am (UTC)Don't make me say the "s" word, Ms. P!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 10:03 am (UTC)There is to me formal beauty, what someone views as "perfection or as the ideal" and then there is attraction which is much more subjective, what is " my ideal...what is attractive to me". And is what makes secure, comfortable and loved not to be attractive.
Sure..we might not term it ideal, in the sense that this is the template for what the human body must be to accomplish its greatest feats and be most aesthetically pleasing...but it is the body which we comforts us most greatly and protects and cherishes us.
If you are to choose what would ressemble to you someone who could be a guardian, nurturer, parent, and in the end an earthbound lover...you are not going to choose the greek ideal as a representative...you are going to choose someone who is much more grounded, sturdy looking, experienced. I object greatly to the term of regression..because I truly believe it is comparing apples and oranges..what we believe is the greatest and final product of the human endeavour and what is the body we want to care for and be cared by.
Mythic mother-father, my ass
Date: 2003-07-16 04:56 pm (UTC)If this is not a Paglia parody, it out to be. Give me the thickets of post-structuralism any day. "Bears" are more about the willful disconnect from mainstream imagery like Calvin Klein ad campaigns- not some bouquet of art historical references. And the strigil was not used for depilation. If images of ancient greek atheletes are not hairy it's because the images themselves have a vocabulary dictated by convention and media (ie. try to sculpt a hairy chest in marble sometime).
Besides, she left out 2000 years of Hercules and Silenius... and who among us hasn't worked at being a cold visual icon, tauntingly remote and ultimately ungraspable?
Re: Mythic mother-father, my ass
Date: 2003-07-16 05:06 pm (UTC)Excellent points, thank you.
"Willful disconnect", my hinder
Date: 2003-07-16 06:46 pm (UTC)Re: "Willful disconnect", my hinder
Date: 2003-07-16 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-16 08:22 pm (UTC)Her perspective is basically reliant upon romantic, idealized notions of bears of the kind that the bear community itself is fond of promulgating — especially the naturalistic conception of beardom as "simultaneously animalistic and nurturing."
Cheerful as these ideas are, they are just not that useful, really. They are neither completely true nor completely untrue (and my own opinion on the validity of these kinds of ideas varies based on where I'm at along the cynicism/optimism continuum on any given day).
Mythologies aside, trying to suss out essential differences between "bears" and twinks/queers/lesbians/gays in general/etc is a misguided effort at best: because bears have as many similarities to any these groups as differences. And the perceived similarities amongst bears themselves are tenuous at best, and up for debate: you'll get different answers no matter who you talk to. So I can see Paglia's take on bears as valid — but ultimately no more valid that any other opposing ideas.
Universalizing theories about beardom might work when applied at some mythological level — but they become fraught with inconsistencies when you try to apply them to the real world, in which whatever "meanings" beardom has are fluid and contested.
Just my thoughts... thanks for giving me something to think about! Off to bed now...