I love Mary Beard and her work and do not hide that fact, so I love this interview with her by William Dalrymple. I’ve seen her face up to rude people on Twitter and yes, she does get them to back down usually…a force to be reckoned with!
Her comments on the sexual violence of Rome and Ancient Greece is fascinating, and I agree with her, like a lot of other things (beauty and body types, politics, even war) it still informs the modern day…but also that a lot of the nastiness on Twitter is just drunk or stupid young guys.
Misogyny has been talked about a lot, but I do think there is a strange quiet about ageism, as she raised with the AA Gill review and response to her appearance (academic men can, as Open University attests, look dishevelled, grey and have leather patches on tweed jackets on TV and be not commented on, there is a double standard here).
This ‘squickiness’ about age and indeed nudity is something that a friend pointed out rears up sadly in the Oatmeal by Matthew Inman several times, most recently in a new comic. It’s like the fat joke, the ‘ugly’ naked old person – usually a bloke with added commentary about testicles, or women about nipples down to the ground. It’s a really lazy sad trope – and says more about how ‘millennial bros’ see old or naked people than anything.
All Hail The New Puritans!
But like gay jokes, it seems currently ‘OK’ to mock the aged, or any form of nudity which is odd when this new generation is so righteous about other rights such as trans issues, black lives matter, LGBTQ rights – but it seems very much in the abstract.
Like, hey, I support LGBTQ rights! But…EWW! Don’t do that shit near me! No: I want beautiful blue/pink-haired Mileyesque queer/genderfluid young people I can objectify, appear in branding campaigns and/or be YouTube stars, that aren’t threatening or can be my token friend! Not furry old queer naked men! UGH! NO!
Sorry, that’s not progress? That’s not being fine with it. Being fine with it is just ignoring others and getting on with your own shit?
That’s not to say you should have to have naked old people all around you to be progressive, but a bit like the homophobe that constantly points out that ‘it’s OK for you two to kiss, no really, it’s fine! I don’t mind! Nope!’ (yes I have had that) you start to think maybe they AREN’T okay with it at all? And anyway – if like Matthew you seem to be fixating on what other people of the same sex are doing in the locker room, or have under their kilt, or are looking at old people’s genitals, I think you might have some explaining to do, at least to yourself about your sexuality.
Come out! Come out! It’s called gerontophilia / intergen relationships and it’s wonderful!
For as a queer man I just see this sort of awkwardness and think ‘welcome to the club!” – I’ve had heterosexuality and naked women thrown at me my entire life (not literally, thankfully) and had to deal with the fact that the world is not engineered around me. And that’s OK. Well actually it’s not really OK it’s rather disorientating/depressing/lonely sometimes, but the majority of the world won’t suddenly become queer and fabulous so you learn to cope. Anyway I’m not interested so I don’t even look. Certainly does nothing for me, but when I see a straight couple getting all humpy I don’t go ‘oh that’s fine! Keep doing that! It doesn’t bother me! NO!’ – I just ignore it. I just move on.
So maybe these ‘bros’ should learn that too?
Or come out, because like the closeted ‘phobes who make gay jokes or preach hellfire from the pulpit, if it didn’t bother them it wouldn’t even be an issue? Only closets really care about this stuff, only they obsess about gay sex and what people do in toilets and locker rooms. Most, if not all people just want to get on with their business. Certainly us queer people, because the porn fantasies might be nice, you’re more likely to end up dead pulling something like that with the wrong person. Yeah, that’s real sexy! :-/ And most of the time? Not thinking about sex at all, that male 60 seconds thing is a lie.
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