hey, anyone noticed that television is kind of weird about gay men?

[pocochina]

This is something that I think about a fair amount, but various media/fandom developments of the last few weeks have brought it to the front of my mind. The first half of this post is about ~stuff generally; the second half is specific to how it's apparently the Dean/Cas week of our ~cycle in Supernatural fandom.

Comments

[pocochina]

Yes. I think there's this implicit sense that a girl can "turn gay for a night" but then go right back to heteronormativity the next day? I feel like Katy Perry's, "I Kissed A Girl" sort of sums up ALL these issues: "I kissed a girl just to try it, hope my boyfriend don't mind it" and "It felt so wrong, it felt so right, don't mean I'm in love tonight." It's just ~experimentation, it's just for this one night, and it's all done with a view to the straight male gaze of the "boyfriend."

Yeah. This is a no-win situation for pretty much everyone. Arguably, insecure straight men have their egos momentarily soothed by being able to self-insert into the Matt-role, but IMO they're pretty poorly served by reinforcement of the "masculinity as constant dominance death match" paradigm. (THE POOR DEARS, SO BENT OUT OF SHAPE OVER THEIR ~FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS.) (But...for real though.)

You can see this even in the scene with Rebekah and Nadia, where we pan up from the girls to Matt literally observing them with a smug look on his face, and END the scene on HIS gaze. Like, the male gaze is there, explicitly, in the scene.

I kind of cracked up at how ham-fisted it was? This begrudging, tacked-on shot of Matt being an asshole. I would be kind of surprised if it was conscious framing that way. I think the instinctive take on the scene was just "oh, HIM, ugh."