Early this semester, a student wrote in to The Post asking for help in dealing with the confusion that followed a hookup with her best friend. “I’m not gay and I didn’t think she was either, but it happened and we haven’t talked about it. I have no idea what to do. I thought I was straight,” the letter read.
BedPost advice columnists Kristin Salaky and Ian Ording assured the letter-writer that this event did not necessarily mean she wasn’t straight. “From the sound of things, straight girls are more willing to hook up with girls than straight guys are with other guys. No one knows why,” Ording wrote, qualifying this statement later with “Okay, someone probably knows why, but I don’t.”
Tony Porter, longtime social justice advocate and co-founder of A Call to Men, argues that he is just that someone to explain why men are typically less open to non-heterosexual experimentation. As The Post’s William Hoffman covered in a Post Modern piece called “Breaking the Man Box,” Porter discusses society’s expectations for men as a box composed of rules such as “Do not cry or express emotions with the exception of anger,” “Make decisions and never need help,” and “Do not be like a woman.” Some of the most important rules for the “man box” are that those inside it should not act “like a gay man” and be rigidly heterosexual. Porter’s Wednesday visit to campus (at 7 p.m. in Baker Ballroom) is deliberately scheduled for the middle of Pride Week, because, crucial to celebrating diversity of sexualities is understanding the ways in which heteronormative beliefs support an imprisoning box of simplistic gender roles.
Pride Week, in many ways, is an opportunity for the university community to show gratitude for the way that our campus’ LGBT Center and the gender and sexual minority-rights movement as a whole betters our lives, even if we do not identify as LGBT. I’m not echoing the politically correct jargon about making our campus more beautiful through diversity, which often seems to confuse queer folk with trees and decorations, but instead am pointing out the ways that the LGBT movement complicates our traditional pictures of love.
Despite what Macklemore may be singing, love doesn’t have to look the same to be valid, and the conventional equation of “Strong man + Swept-off-her-feet woman” does not add up to much more than a wall of Porter’s man box. When we celebrate the many ways that people on our very campus redefine gender and sexuality, we free ourselves from the imprisoning man box that denies worth to all those unable to comply with its standards.
I could theorize with Ording and Porter that maybe women are more free to breach with heteronormative standards because women are already only objects by the man box’s standards. But maybe the better line is Salaky’s reasoning: “There are plenty of options ahead of you, whether that means identifying as bisexual, pansexual, queer or even still straight or choosing not to pick a label at all.” Sexuality, like humanity, is complicated, and distinctly unsuited for boxes of any kind. Thank god we have Pride Week to remind us that the world is better this way.
Bekki Wyss is a junior studying English literature. What are you reflecting on this Pride Week? Email her at rw225570@ohiou.edu.
