Horseshoes, Anyone?:  Towards an Understanding of Male Sexuality

 

            There is more than meets the eye when it comes to the game of horseshoes.  Traditionally played by men gathered in social settings such as backyard barbeques or VFW halls, horseshoes is the quintessential male bonding activity.  Horseshoes, as a reenactment of the sexual chase, unites men in the shared experience of sexual follies and triumphs.  Each toss of the horseshoe represents a pass at a female of the species.  Inevitably, most tosses of the horseshoe miss their mark, just as in real life most male efforts to attract the opposite sex result in failure; were this not the case we males would all tout Wilt Chamberlainesque sexual resumes.  But the law of averages is with the male, and if he persists in the hunt eventually a female shall, ahem, succumb to his charms.  Throw enough horseshoes and eventually you will score a ringer, horseshoe wrapping itself suggestively around the post.  Bringing us to some rather obvious and unavoidable symbolism….

            

There is a common saying, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”  Leaving aside for the moment the implications of this phrase for the endeavor of warfare, it is a key marker of the importance of horseshoes as a male bonding activity.  In horseshoes, the ringer, while sublime, is not the only way to score points.  Get close enough to the target, and points are accrued.  What this tells us is that what brings individual men into the community of men is not the achievement of sexual conquest; you don’t have to get laid to be a man.  As always, the journey is far more important than the destination.  To enter the community of men one must simply make a reasonable effort to get laid.  This participation in the sexual hunt is all that is required to enter the realm of socially defined manhood.  Whether, or who, you’re shagging is beside the point.  Along these lines, not only does “close count” in horseshoes, one ringer is as good as the next. 

Perhaps this explains the general acceptance of the ideal of lifelong monogamy among heterosexual men.  Marriage, as permanent symbol of participation in the sexual hunt, stabilizes membership in the male social bond.  All hunts that end in marriage achieve, in the language of horseshoes, the never-ending ringer, elevating all married “hunters” to the same sublime status, at the same time defusing potentially destructive sexual rivalries among the hunters.  If all ringers are equal, and if all marriages bestow the never-ending ringer, then the community of men is ideally one of equals.  Unmarried hunters are granted full equality of membership, as long as they are engaged in the hunt.  Close DOES count in horseshoes.

The stability of the male social bond is problematized by the presence of the homosexual male.  The homophobic male fear of being labeled a homosexual is nothing other than the fear of being excluded from the male social bond.  The act of male homosexuality is, within the heterosexual male framework, the act of exiting the heterosexual male social bond.  This was illustrated in the famous Seinfeld episode when Jerry and George repeatedly and emphatically proclaim themselves not to be homosexuals, on each occasion adding “not that there is anything wrong with that” (i.e. wrong with homosexuality).  George and Jerry were clearly voicing the truth of heterosexual male homophobia.  From a heterosexual male perspective there is “nothing wrong” with sexual relations between men, in and of itself.  What is “wrong” with male homosexuality, the “threat” that exists in being perceived as homosexual, is the very real danger of being excluded from the heterosexual male social bond.  In the heterosexual male universe, male homosexuality only functions to mark off the boundaries of membership in the heterosexual male social bond. 

This logic is on display with the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the United States military.  “Don’t ask, don’t tell” specifies that there is nothing inherently wrong with the gay male soldier; he is the straight male warrior’s equal in every respect, just as long as his sexuality remains unstipulated.  Even if his sexuality is an open secret, the gay male warrior is accorded full membership in the heterosexual male bond which is the symbolic glue that binds the US military into a cohesive fighting force, an Olympic horseshoes team, if you will.  But once the gay warrior is formally unmasked, his sexuality revealed to the big Other, the symbolic order that maintains US military cohesion is destabilized.      

The instability of the heterosexual male social bond comes into further relief when compared to the rock solid stability of the female social order.  Unlike men, who must compete in horseshoes in order to be accepted as men in the social bond, females must simply achieve menses in order to achieve womanhood.  In this sense, there are no “gay” or “straight” women, just women.  This is why women’s sexuality is frequently and insightfully referred to as “fluid” in a way that the male social bond would never sanction in a man; a woman can sleep with whomever she wishes without ever endangering her status in the female social bond, a status guaranteed by the fact of her biology, while the male’s status as man is stricto sensu defined by who he is sleeping, or attempting to sleep with.   The same reasoning explains not only why men are turned on by “lesbian” porn (granted that the on-screen “lesbians” are of the male fantasy variety), but why it is acceptable in the male social bond to be turned on by hot “lesbian” sex, i.e. there are no “gay” women, just women, so the shadow of homosexuality, the shadow of social banishment, never intrudes on the straight male’s arousal.  In fact, it is said that the truth serum for a man’s sexuality is his arousal, or lack thereof, in response to (male fantasy) “lesbian” porn.  All of this to say that there’s only one kind of horseshoe, the kind that is to be tossed at the post.  It is completely irrelevant, from the horseshoe player’s perspective, why a toss misses the post.  You simply move on to the next horseshoe.  If two errantly tossed horseshoes happen to land on top of one another and intertwine, well the game just goes on as if nothing happened at all.  And, according to the rules of horseshoes, nothing really has.  

Gay males, by definition, can’t play horseshoes.  And, like it or not, for the straight American male in 2009, horseshoes remains the only game in town.  If, as Freud famously postulated, we humans are all actually bisexual, perhaps it is time for a new backyard barbeque pastime.  Tiddlywinks anyone?