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233 CHAPTER 13 What Do Heterosexual Men Want? Or, “The (Wandering) Queer Eye on the (Straight) Guy” THOMAS WAUGH I’ve always been curious about heterosexuality, the fact that heterosexuals exist seems to me improbable. But you just have to throw a rock and you’re likely to hit one. They’re everywhere. I’ve tried asking them about their roots, the genesis of their heterosexuality, but they’re unable to understand the question. It seems that they think of heterosexuality, a term incidentally they rarely have any reason to use, as the degree zero of sexual identity, so normal it is completely without qualities or attributes. Recently though I found this magazine, it’s from 1977, it’s called The Rendezvous, the Midwest Voice of Swinging, and I think it sheds some light on the phenomenon of sexuality. I’ve been using it as a guidebook to the spectrum of heterosexual behaviour. Like many strange and foreign things it is simultaneously alluring and repulsive––mostly though it’s repulsive . I’m fairly appalled that the continuation of the species seems predicated on certain types of heterosexual behaviour. But I look forward to a more biotechnologically advanced future, when this will no longer necessarily be the case. –– STEVE REINKE, UNDERSTANDING HETEROSEXUALITY (1994) INTRODUCTION In the winter of 2004 I spent seven weeks in India, unfortunately during the never-ending cricket tournament between that country and their nuclear rival Pakistan. With roughly two billion eyes glued to the urgent television spectacle of strained and sweaty men hurling, batting, and desperately chasing a hard round object, it was hard to get service in a restaurant, or even have a 234 ABJECT MASCULINITIES conversation with a male person. I came back to Canada just in time to experience 60 million eyes here glued to the spectacle of strained and sweaty men swiping and desperately skating after another hard round object, a puck this time, and furthermore doing what they don’t in cricket– –blocking and hitting each other with sticks and fists, and plotting to kill each other. Meanwhile , the big-screen box office smashes of the season were Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson , 2004), and Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), spectacles about strained, sweaty, and bloody men fighting and flogging each other over round objects. (Admittedly only one of these epics revolves around a ring, but there is a crown of thorns in one of the others, and an apple of discord offstage in the other.) It’s not completely clear from all of these films what stakes the sweaty bloody men are really fighting over– –whether property, land, women, status, the redemption of transgression, or the shame of defiled bodies and murdered “cousins.” Not that it really matters– –they’re just doing these things because they’re men. Meanwhile the small screen had been full of the spectacle of real wars rather than fictional ones, men fighting, killing, and torturing each other. The domestic news was highlighting an election, yet again, full of men arguing with each other about tax cuts, health care, and women’s reproductive rights (as well as scandals, now forgotten, about men sending each other to jail for sexual abuse of girls in British Columbia or avoiding sending each other to jail for sexual abuse of boys in New Brunswick). We saw a flurry of full-page election ads from the Defence of the Family foundation, mostly of one white dad holding one white boy child and cheerfully accompanied by one white mom. All in all, that year that saw the triumph of samesex marriage turned out to be a very big year for heterosexuality, for heterosexual men in particular. As a queer outsider to this phenomenon, I’m so mystified by all these competing spectacles that, like Toronto video artist Steve Reinke before me, I initially wanted to investigate heterosexuality, heterosexual men in particular , and share with you the question of what heterosexual men really want. I don’t really believe that heterosexual men really want the eyebrow waxing and other consumerist makeovers that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy wanted us to believe that season, so a reflection is in order. Since I am a film scholar and the hook for this essay was an arts conference, exhibition, and festival, I would like to do so through the realm of representation. Reinke’s 90-second commentary for his 1994 tape is spoken over...

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