The Sexual Politics of Voyeurism

I was teaching a session on ‘Gender in Performance’ on Monday. We did much of the kind of stuff you might expect: a discussion of the week’s reading (extracts from feminist writers like Butler and Cixous), a practical exploration of ‘gendered’ movement (How does one move ‘like a girl’? ‘Like a guy’? What lies behind these distinctions?), and a further discussion regarding some of the ways in which we create our genders, or have our genders created for us (talking of which, check out this clip for an amusing and rather terrifying example of the ways in which we force stereotypical gender roles on kids at a ridiculously young age - it's a few minutes in).

So far, so enlightened. Everyone seemed to be getting it: yes, that’s it, we’re coerced into adopting patterns of gendered behaviour according to social norms, and that is Not A Good Thing. Then I played a DVD of DV8 Physical Theatre’s excellent dance-theatre piece Enter Achilles (video here), a performance which playfully deconstructs British ‘masculine’ behaviour. At one point, two of the male performers almost kiss. A classroom full of enlightened university students cringed, and one student emitted an audible ‘Ew, no!’

Why this bizarre taboo about men kissing? Why does it (much like kissing between older people) seem to prompt involuntary shudders among onlookers, not to mention laughter, catcalls and exclamations of protest? Certainly it breaks a social norm, but that doesn’t quite seem to account for the physical effect it appears to have on a large number of people.

I suspect it’s something to do with the way we’re primed to view physical expressions of affection between people. On television and film, we’re encouraged to identify with the character of our own gender when watching a heterosexual love scene. Sometimes it’s straightforward: boys empathise with Ross, girls with Rachel (theoretically, anyway – of course this doesn’t account for gay viewers, and their perspective tends to be marginalised on mainstream TV). Sometimes the film only really gives us one point of identification: in action films, for example, it’s generally the (young, heterosexual) male lead, so the (young, heterosexual) female character with whom our hero engages in sexual activity becomes an object rather than a subject. The female/other viewer is excluded from the film’s assumptions regarding the desires of its audience and thus the film takes on its identity as a (young, heterosexual) ‘boys’ film’. And the same thing works in reverse: in many romantic comedies, for example, our central character is a (young, heterosexual) female, the object of her affections is a (young, heterosexual) male, the male/other viewer is excluded, and the film becomes a ‘chick flick’.

Naturally there’s something depressingly black-and-white about all this. But there’s also something oddly voyeuristic. We seem to be primed by the media now to imagine ourselves in the position of one of the sexual partners in any physical expression of sexuality we may witness. The implication of any public display of affection seems to be: I may be engaging in this activity, but you, the watcher who is like me, must imagine you are in my position.

Watching gay men kiss, we feel the voice of television telling us we must imagine we are one of those gay men. And because of social taboo, many of us are unwilling to play that role – to the point that we shudder as if we are being forced to put our own bodies through such taboo-breaking. In a sense, we are.

Why, incidentally, does the taboo seem to be heavier around male-male kisses than female-female ones? (Of course both are taboo, but the latter seem to be actively encouraged at drunken student parties, for example - widely construed as ‘hot’ - while the former occur more rarely and are seen as comic or disgusting.) I suspect it may be something to do with the mediatisation of kissing again: it’s more usually the female character who is objectified in filmed love scenes, and in our culture, women are more used to being forced to adopt the position of the y-h-male viewer than the male viewer is of adopting the y-h-female (or any other) perspective. Put simply, we’re more used to the objectified female figure than we are to the objectified male. Objectifying the woman rather than the man is our cultural default position.

In any kiss, then (screened or otherwise), the imagined voyeur – regardless of his or her actual gender or sexuality – is a young heterosexual male. The female-female kiss says to this voyeur: ‘Identify with one of us! Either of us! Both of us are kissing an objectified female! You’re overloaded with choice!’ Whereas the male-male kiss says: ‘Neither of us are kissing an objectified female! We refuse the cultural assumption behind voyeurism! Your position is untenable! You can no longer imagine you are a young heterosexual male!’

So that’s why boys kissing is gross. ;)