So what about bears…

I find a lot of the comments elicited by the last post quite interesting. There is one that I would like to specifically address–bears encouraging people to be unhealthy. Obviously there is an ideal weight for everyone which is different for everyone. Lambasting the bear community with enabler status is just too easy. How often do we look at the ads of men with six-packs and muscles and think: oh, steroids, or crystal meth and cigarettes? Quite frankly, the amount of body fat that a person has when having a six-pack falls generally in the realm of an eating disorder. If it truly were about being healthy and not this body, then why is there so much focus on how to get the body instead of how to be healthy in the gay community? The reason why it’s so easy to do this with bears is because we have been conditioned to find these bodies unacceptable. An unhealthy fat person is far more easily criticized than an person on steroids or that is extremely low in body fat to an unhealthy level (although this is changing if the muscle doesn’t accompany the low body fat %).

I’m well aware that bears can be somewhat unkind to those they feel don’t “fit in”. Usually I think this is because they are so used to feeling marginalized that they protect this space where they finally seem to have some status. I’m not saying that this is a good thing. Often the complaints I hear are from someone who doesn’t consider themselves a bear, but would like hairy, muscle-guys to see their profile and contact them. To me this is exploitation. While I might say that I’m not fond of any one “group” being isolated, I think the changes that are inherent are good ones. Often I have read of how most anyone can fit into a leather bar or a bear bar. This isn’t the case for pretty gay places. And as for bears talking behind each other’s backs, they are after all still gay. I personally hate how A Bear’s Life so obviously identifies itself as being “butch” and “masculine”.

Lots of people wrote about labels, and how they like to avoid them. I choose to use them. All words are labels, and all words are indeterminate and mutable. By use of words we can empower, change, reimangine, shift and alter things. Expressing who you are without words and by actions may be possible, but it strikes me as odd in an environment that is entirely constructed by words. That’s why I take the cub label on. To change and play with it. Just like I use gay, man, student, everything like that. Why should I even say I’m male? What does that mean? Does it have to do with how I act? (masculine v. feminine?) My chromosomes? (XY, XX, XXY, XYY, etc.) My genitalia? (penis, vagina, reconstructed organs, and intersexed people) If I were being overly precise I can’t even begin to use words as simple as that. We all do, and I say we embrace the power of words and renaming. Gay the word itself is after all an example.

Episode 3

I talk about IBR craziness, the human urinals, mardi gras, and LA. Hmm…

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About Bears

I found this quote and it says what I feel.

“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.
SALON | March 17, 1999 “

Attempt 2

This is another attempt. I talk about age in the gay community, politics, bears, and labels. It’s about 30 minutes.

Go to hellowaffles(dot)podomatic(dot)com to download.

An Attempt

My first attempt at a podcast. It’s about 20 minutes or so.

Click here to download.

Ho…Hum…

Things have been average. Nothing really too much going on here. I went to an intake yesterday, and why is it that I would usually benefit more from 1-on-1 than group? I’m starting to get better at recounting my entire life in a 50 minute time-span highlighting what I think is pertinent information. Am I that talkative for a group though? Or am I that bizzare? Anyway, probably won’t find out anything really until several weeks from now. Otherwise, school is school, and life is life. The weekend was relatively uneventful. We went for the hike, and it was really quite pleasant. There are even pictures of the locale on the website. The hike was a little too difficult for some of the members, and I’m hoping that JR will see that the next ones aren’t quite so rigorous. And I finally made it back to Korean food. Why is it that I love it so much? Even JR had to admit that Kim Chee isn’t quite as bad as he had remembered. Haven’t been dancing in the streets either. Apparently that was a one-time fluke. I’m a bit excited that I don’t have any class on Thursday, and I usually don’t come into work on Thursday, so I’m contemplating what I might do with the free time.

Slow news day…

Maybe drinking does have serious effects on your brain. JR and I went to dinner last night with a friend of ours (who started the hiking group sfgayhikers.com which is having a hike on Saturday, if you are in the bay area, sign up as it will be lots of fun, and well, I will be there for certain as for me it’s not optional) who recently moved to Wisconsin. I had fun asking all about the gays out in the midwest.

Anyway, I got up this morning and was a bit hungover, and I was feeling like I don’t ever want to drink again. Not that the hangover was that awful, but after not having any for almost a month, I’ve started to dislike them even more. However, this evening I feel positively great. I’m very upbeat and almost felt like dancing on the way home from the grocery store. Strange indeed.

Oh, and this is an excellent tutorial and how to deal with searches and seizures and how to deal with police in general. FLEX YOUR RIGHTS. You probably won’t have time to watch the whole thing.

Just what is a kitchen aid mixer anyway?

Last night JR and I went to Costco. We were out of cat litter, and the pans needed changing. As we went in, we found ourselves by the kitchen aid mixers. JR was fascinated yet again, and said that he really wanted to get one. They had the correct color, but the box was somewhat damaged. I argued against it. Yes, I know that he has wanted one for years, but I asked him, what would you actually use this for? Honestly, I have little use for a mixer, and JR does so little cooking that it would be little more than a status symbol on the countertop to me. Eventually, he relented. Part of my more sinister motives is that I always worry that we will run out of money and I constantly feel that fear whenever a large purchase is involved. I guess I should learn that there will never be complete security.

A couple steps later we saw this one guy that I just think is so incredibly dreamy. He’s probably only 5′10″ but he has a great face, with a full beard, salt and pepper hair, and is just pain and simple extremely thick and rugged looking. I found myself secretly wanting to see him every time I turned a corner and would spy when I did.

Yesterday was also really depressing for me. I went to a fair and was hoping to make some contacts for an upcoming vocation. Sadly, it was just the mega-businesses that care about one thing alone: your GPA. After talking with the organizer and telling her my concerns (and her asking whether I had a masters, PhD or MBA) she told me that I should try alternate routes. So it was a huge waste of time.

We also watched the movie Available Men last night. It was a collection of shorts. I was surprised to see Jack Plotnick (who I knew I should have known, and didn’t realize until JR said it that it was Evie from Girls will be Girls) and really enjoyed the story. It was strange to me how it was about Hollywood, and seemed to imply that the system is broken and was a kind of wish fulfillment in the end results. I wonder how often the things I put on my blog or in daily life are more wish fulfillment about myself than reality as it really is (not that I intentionally do this, but maybe I do try and make myself look better (or at times worse) than I really am).

GayProf’s post on Astrology has really got me thinking as well. For me, so much is dependent upon context. I think that meanings are highly dependent upon context of the object, subject, and other factors as well. I find myself occasionally making analogies, and then I think, but I hate analogies. I think I’ve come to realize while I hold to the maxim that “all analogy is suspect” that doesn’t mean that all analogy is useless. In many ways, it is where the analogy breaks down that is most telling about the speaker, and perhaps the subject matter as well.

JR and I started talking about repetition as well. A Christina Aguilera song came on the radio, and as I understand it the song is about her father. JR was opining that it must somehow help people work through things to sing them over and over again. Similarly, I’m wondering if being so repetitious might be a bad thing after all on the blog. The repetitions might show my evolving understanding of subjects (emotionally and intellectually) and help me to process them.

I also had an awkward moment in one of my classes. One student came in with a sleeveless t-shirt and ice wrapped on his shoulder. It came off and he asked me to help him with it. While doing this in front of the professor, I started to wonder about appropriate distance, touching etc. He had really hairy underarms, and I wondered if my apparent comfort with doing this would code me as queer. I didn’t really care, but I was curious nonetheless. Too bad this guy is so repellent to me.

I’m also feeling a bit anxious. I found myself suddenly wondering if I had missed a day in my experiment today. Even while I type this I’m wondering and feeling anxious. I’m just such a slave to the most ridiculous things which makes me think more and more that I just have generalized anxiety disorder because I don’t necessarily have a compulsion about things (usually), but I start to worry about diverse and sundry things without any reason, or sometimes good reason.

I woke up during the middle of the night last night suddenly feeling petrified that I would never find employment. I’m feeling the pressure of my very large amount of student loans hovering above my head like the sword of Damocles (huh, I just looked this up out of curiosity and apparently a more appropriate comparison would be the very tentative nature of those in power and upheaval, I hope you’ll forgive my less than precise usage).

And I have been thinking more and more about the podcasting thing. Perhaps I will do it after all, but I usually take my dear sweet time in doing anything.