Fat and sexuality and society

Consider this an idle rumination, if you would.

Not terribly long ago, a study came to my attention. It noted that among women, lesbians tended to be heavier than bisexuals who in turn tended to be heavier than straight women. This was curious to me, as also, I have seen many studies over the years that seemed to indicate that straight women seem to care more about a partner's body fat percentage than straight men did, and anecdotally, it seems to me that gay men appear to care the very most about it.

Lo and behold, Google provides a study suggesting that yes, gay men worry more about weight than straight men. And I am tempted to say there are two factors - being male, and being interested in males - that both somehow become a driving force, and if straight women care more about body fat than straight men, then being interested in men would be the stronger fashion.

Nevertheless, it strikes me as very odd, and it would bother me very much more if I thought this phenomenon was more biological than social.

The curious case of male sexuality and religion

Before I talk about any empirical evidence, indulge me in an anecdote, would you?

For about four years of my college career, I belonged to an all-male pop a capella group by the name of Higher Ground. Beyond any doubt, what held the group together was music, but I was always a bit of an odd duck. When I first joined the group, the core of it was from nearby Hickory, and most of the guys were fans of country music. Mainly country boys, but by the time I left, the founding old guard had all gone, and it had shifted from that to the more generic brand, the kind of fella who thinks about joining a fraternity.

Pigeonhole and stereotype away if you like. There were some interesting characters, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't, but the end result is that Higher Ground was the most "conservative" group I belonged to on campus, and also one of the more religious, at least nominally, and I learned a few interesting things.

One was that Campus Crusade for Christ meetings were apparently one of the best places to score. That was a surprise to me; less surprising was the constant locker-room talk. A very few were genuinely intensely religious, more interested in theology, and those few were willing to put sex aside until marriage. The rest? Conservative or not, religious or not, college was all about getting laid. Expressly and explicitly.

And it's from that experience, and the experience of liberal students who were very cautious about sex, that I started to wonder what exactly is going on here. There's no question in my mind that being told not to have sex until marriage over and over again should reduce sexual activity, but why is it that only some men (far fewer than women, it seems, and now I've gone and introduced empirical evidence) respond to this message, while others come out of the Southern Baptist church thinking that sex before marriage is sinful yet pursuing promiscuity as if it were the path into heaven?

Some of it surely is the traditional myth of hyperactive male sexuality, propagated in some abstinence-only programs and passed on unthinkingly by those who do not critically examine sexuality; but I cannot help but think that something else is involved. And what stands out is that in this day and age, more than ever, conservative young males fear being labeled as homosexual - and nothing is as effective at silencing locker-room backstabbers' quiet implications of homosexuality than having sex with a woman.

So now, whenever people jabber about men being unable to control their desires, I think about homophobia, and how it helps keep alive the idea that sex is some commodity that men demand and women supply.

To run like a girl

The other day, this phrase popped into my head. She's running like a girl. Then I shook my head. What was wrong with me?

But there wasn't anything else for me to say. "To run like a girl" was the phrase that directly captured what I was seeing, never mind that girls who run regularly usually don't run that way. Somehow, to run inefficiently, in that peculiar style with the forearms flailing out to the sides, the upper and lower body rotating sideways in opposition to each other, is to run like a girl.

If I just say her running form was bad, it could mean any number of things, but "to run like a girl" somehow captures that specific bad form. Which I, of course, last remember seeing done by a boy. Oh, to live in a language where the idioms are not gendered. What can I say that captures what I saw more specifically than She had poor form without reinforcing sexist beliefs?

And have we yet reached the point where little girls and little boys both participate equally in sports that require them to learn how to run?

What's wrong with "sorostitute?"

I feel like I probably should have spoken up more often when this came up in conversation - now that I'm leaving my old university, it'll probably come up quite rarely, but over the years, it's come to bother me more and more often when I hear people bashing sorority girls. It's not that I think social fraternal organizations have much - if any - of a net positive effect on campus life on the whole, or that I've ever considered joining one. It's not that I cringe similarly hearing people grumble about frat boys.

The problem I have is with the kind of criticism I hear about sorority girls. I enjoy reasoned critiques of any social institution, whether or not I agree with the criticism or not. "Reasoned" and "insightful" has nothing to do with what I keep hearing.

More often than not, the criticism I hear in person about sorority girls reduces to the accusation of slut. Such a loaded term. While having sex often may not always be advisable - for whatever reasons you might believe, and we could spend hours debating why or why not - it's not something we should be vilifying, and I'm especially tired of hearing women called "sluts."

There's a clear gendered double standard in how promiscuity gets talked about, and I'm just plain tired of it. "Fratmattress" and "sorostitute" may have sounded amusing the first time I heard them, but that was close to seven years ago. Now, they just sound derogatory, demeaning, and just plain mean. Think about it for a minute.