Recently I had a conversation with someone about what I saw as the difference between traditional (ie, gay) leather and straight leather. After explaining that my familiarity with the straight leather community was limited and struggling to find a good explanation for the different ‘energy’ I see, I eventually hit on something that gets to at least part of what feels different about gay and straight kink in general. And it’s connected to the Gaze.
The Gaze is an idea that emerged (so far as I know) out of feminist scholarship in the 60s and 70s. It deals with the issue of who gets to look and who gets to be looked at. Traditionally, Western culture associates gazing with masculinity and being gazed at with femininity. In other words, men do the looking and women are looked at. As feminist scholars and artists see it, the act of gazing imposes meaning on the target, reducing it to a passive object and recipient of the gazer’s meaning. In other words, gazing is the power position in the dynamic and being gazed at is disempowering because, for example, it reduces the woman to a sex object for the man’s erotic fantasies to shape.
The horrible murders of Asian women at massage parlors in Atlanta a few years ago is an example of this. Instead of seeing these women as full human beings, the shooter stripped them of their humanity and imposed his own meaning on them, that they were ‘exotic’ sexual temptresses who had to be removed so he could remain free of sin. This demonstrates part of the problem with the Gaze. Christian fundamentalists are constantly saying that women need to police their bodies because those bodies are too dangerous to men, so the Gazers are imposing not only meaning, but rules about dress codes and the like onto women. (Incidentally, that’s pretty much the opposite of what Jesus says people are supposed to do when they are sexually tempted; Matt 5:29 “If your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it away from you.” In other words, if you can’t handle being tempted by what you see, blind yourself because you’re the issue, not the person you’re looking at.)
Some women find that being looked at can be empowering, because being desired gives them a measure of control over the guy who is looking at them. Whether or not using sexual desirability as a tool to be empowered is a good thing has been a subject of debate among feminists since the 80s.
But in the gay community, the dynamics of the Gaze strike me as quite different from the way they operate between men and women, perhaps because by default men start out in the empowered position. In the gay community, men are both Gazer and Gazed simultaneously. Because gay men desire other men, there isn’t a simple subject/object binary. Thus gay men often display themselves and their bodies as objects to be looked at. The more other gay men look, the more powerful the Gazed is. Being desired that way tends to empower the gay man’s Gaze, because when the hot guy is looking at you, you’re likely to give him what he wants, which is you. You see a similar phenomenon at work on gay social media accounts, where the more desirable a guy is, the more likely he is to get Likes and Followers, which for many gay men serves as a form of social capital and emotional validation.
You can also see this dynamic at bath houses, where the whole goal is very nakedly sex. As guys circulate, there is a lot of looking going on and the rule tends to be simple and rather brutally Darwinian. If you’re interested in playing with a guy, you look at him. If you’re not, you completely ignore him, as if he’s not there. When two guys are obviously looking at each other, they’re likely to hook up.
For men who are undesirable (because they’re judged too old, too fat, too twinkish, too non-white or otherwise not attractive as a sex partner), Gazing is often the disempowered position. Looking and wanting but not getting creates a feeling of exclusion, of loss of power. For some subs this can be validating of their status as inferiors, but for many it creates a sense of being worthless in a non-erotic sense. Finsubs sometimes interpret their tribute as paying for attention from a man who is so hot that he’s entirely out of their league and would never give them any notice unless they have a financial incentive to do so.
So what does this have to do with leather? Guys in leather (and other fetish gear) want to be looked at. Leather can simultaneously conceal the body and reveal it, and it serves as way for a leatherman to demonstrate his dominance or his submissiveness. Hot leathermen are likely to be Gazed at, giving them a great deal of power. For doms, this means that being looked at by subs is already initiating a degree of power exchange, whereas for subs being Gazed at means you might be worthy to serve (although there are lots of bottoms for whom being desirable is just a means to getting fucked). Hot subs may not feel empowered because what they want is the opposite of that.
Among straight leatherfolk (again, in my more limited experience), the dynamic seems quite different. Because the men start out more empowered by default, many femdommes are expected to meet the standards of the Male Gaze, for example by wearing uncomfortable corsets or bitch goddess heels. What for a gay dom would be an entirely empowering dynamic seems for many femdommes to be less so because they still have to negotiate beauty standards dictated by the men who serve them. Bitchy Jones, whose wonderful blog from a decade ago has now been largely taken down, used to complain about this issue; why should she, as a domme, be forbidden from domming in pyjamas and fluffy slippers simply to fit a fantasy some of her male subs had? Her comfort as the domme ought to take priority over her sub’s ideas about how she dressed.
I’m sure that this is not the only significant difference between gay and straight leather, but I think it’s probably one of the deepest.
Do you have experience with the straight leather scene? I would love to hear your thoughts about it!
Leather-Bound Press 