subject/object relationship
I've mentioned this before -- When I was listening to KPFK one day, I heard a gay man talking about homosexual relationships vs hetersexual relationships. He said that in a relationship between a man and a woman, the man is the subject and the woman is the object, but when two men are together, it is a subject/subject relationship instead of a subject/object relationship. At the time, that sounded plausible, but now I tend to disagree. When adult gay men pursue young men and teenage boys sexually, the existing power dynamic resulting from age difference automatically sets up the relationship as hierarchical, inequal, and, therefore, subject/object, where the boy is the object, the other, and seen as "less than." The adult male proceeds to use the boy as a sexual object the same a way a heterosexual male would use a woman. Perhaps equality is impossible in sexual relationships. As my ex so elequently put it: "who is fucking whom?"