In the Men’s Locker Room
played organized sports for 15 years, and they were as much a part of my growing up as
Cheerios, television, and homework. My sexuality unfolded within this all-male social world of sport, where sex was always a major focus. I remember, for example, when we as prepubertal boys used the old "buying baseball cards" routine as a cover to sneak peeks at Playboy and Swank magazines at the newsstand. We would talk endlessly after practices about "boobs" and what it must feel like to kiss and neck. Later, in junior high, we teased one another in the locker room about "jerking off" or being virgins, and there were endless interrogations about "how far" everybody was getting with their girlfriends.
Eventually, boyish anticipation spilled into real sexual relationships with girls, which, to my delight and confusion, turned out to be a lot more complex than I ever imagined. While sex (kissing, necking, and petting) got more exciting, it also got more difficult to figure out and talk about. Inside, most of the boys, like myself, needed to love and be loved. We were awkwardly reaching out for intimacy. Yet publicly, the message that got imparted was to "catch feels," be cool, and connect with girls but don’t allow yourself to depend on them. Once when I was a high school junior, the gang in the weight room accused me of being wrapped around my girlfriend’s finger. Nothing could be further from the truth, I assured them; and, in order to prove it, I broke up with her. I felt miserable about this at the time, and I still feel bad about it.
Within the college jock subculture, men’s public protests against intimacy sometimes became exaggerated and ugly. I remember two teammates, drunk and rowdy, ripping girls’ blouses off at a mixer and crawling on their bellies across the dance floor to look up skirts. Then there were the Sunday morning late breakfasts in the dorm. We jocks would usually all sit at one table and be forced to listen to one braggart or another describe his sexual exploits of the night before. Though a lot of us were turned off by such kiss-and-tell, ego-boosting tactics, we never openly criticized them. Real or fabricated, displays of raunchy sex were also assumed to "win points." A junior fullback claimed to have defecated on a girl’s chest after she passed out during intercourse. There were also some laughing reports of "gang-bangs."
When sexual relationships were "serious," that is, tempered by love and commitment, the unspoken rule was silence. It was rare when we young men shared our feelings about women, misgivings about sexual performance, or disdain for the crudeness and insensitivity of some of our teammates. I now see the tragic irony in this: we could talk about superficial sex and anything that used, trivialized or debased women, but frank discussions about sexuality that unfolded within a loving relationship were taboo. Within the locker room subculture, sex and love were seldom allowed to mix. There was a terrible split between inner needs and outer appearances, between our desire for the love of women and our feigned indifference toward them.
Source: Adapted from Sabo & Runfola, 1980.
However, some evidence indicates that the differences in attitudes between the genders may be changing. The women’s movement and, more recently, the men’s movement have tried to challenge old stereotypes of gender and intimacy. Although in the past women were more comfortable with intimate encounters and men were more comfortable taking independent action, now a new, more androgynous breed of men and women may be emerging who are more comfortable in both roles (Choi, 2004). If so, maybe we can expect greater ease in intimacy between and among the genders in the upcoming generations of men and women.
Intimacy in Different Cultures
Love seems to be a basic human emotion. Aren’t “basic human emotions” the same everywhere? Isn’t anger the same in Chicago and Timbuktu, and sadness the same in Paris and Bombay? Although there is evidence that the majority of worldwide cultures
experience romantic love (see Sex in Real Life below), we do know that one’s culture has been found to have a more powerful impact on love beliefs than one’s gender (Sprecher & Toro-Morn, 2002). For example, passionate love as we conceive of it is unknown in Tahiti (Peele, 1988). Although we in the United States consider dependency to be a sign of a problem in a relationship, in Japan dependency on another is seen as a key aspect of love, a positive trait that should be nurtured.
In China, people’s sense of self is entirely translated through their relationships with others. “A male Chinese would consider himself a son, a brother, a husband, a father, but hardly himself. It seems as if. . . there was very little independent self left for the Chinese” (Chu, 1985, quoted in Dion & Dion, 1988, p. 276). In China, love is thought of in terms of how a mate would be received by family and community, not in terms of one’s own sense of romance. Because of this, the Chinese have a more practical approach to love than do Americans (Sprecher & Toro-Morn, 2002).
Culture has a large part in determining how we view love. In a study of France, Japan, and the United States, intimacy style was directly related to whether the culture was individualistic (United States), collectivistic (Japan), or mixed (France) and also to how much the culture had adopted stereotypical views of gender roles (how much it tended to see men as assertive and women as nurturing; Ting-Toomey, 1991). The Japanese, with a collectivistic culture and highly stereotypical gender roles, had lower scores in measures of attachment and commitment and were less likely to value self-
SEX in Real Life