Thirst: Culture Shift
- Objectifying Prince Charming
- Share

Objectifying Prince Charming
āThe Male Gazedā offers an imperfect reflection on pop cultureās queer influence.

To me, Disney and durian are one in the same: nauseatingly sweet. The first essay in Manuel Betancourtās , a collection of essays about the authorās coming out and of age, is similarly saccharine. Betancourt is not only partial to Disney but grants it unbridled weight in his adult life, arguing that he has āsmuggledā some sort of queer ontology out of its āoppressively heterosexual fairy tales.ā
Unremarkably aroused by Disneyās gambit of meatheads, Betancourt foregrounds his nascent sexual proclivities to stake an ambitious claim: āAs Disney gave its female heroines agency in their desire, it also allowed audiences to objectify its male characters.ā Apparently, the pressures of heterosexual love are incidental to personal freedom, and patent displays of male musculature are a radical inversion of the male gaze. Betancourt is all too aware that neither of these statements is trueāhe explores dress codes and body policing in the next essay. His myopia is selective insofar as it serves his argument.
Betancourt portends my skepticism until he doesnāt: ā[I]tās unclear if these childhood moments ⦠predicted the gay man I would become, or if I have simply warped them to do so in my mind. The result, I guess, is no different either way.ā Um⦠isnāt it? Betancourt subbing personal experience for analysis echoes Kay Gabrielās argument in a 2022 article for : Queer memoirists who satiate nonqueer readers with snapshots of personal hardship rather than illuminate shared social formsālike, say, joyāeffectively neuter themselves. Betancourtās Disney nostalgia, precisely: Furiously hard in the tenebrous recesses of the theater, his boner works itself out, as Gabriel puts it, āin powerful but highly limited ways on some strange people over there.ā

Granted, Betancourtās childhood, piddled away in front of the TV, seems lonely. And hornyāso much so that, by his own admission, it hampers his analytical faculties: āI canāt deny that sometimes my shallowness (or my horniness, more like) gets the best of me.ā For example, the āhairy,ā ārippling,ā and ālovingly definedā pecs of Hercules; the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; Buffyās Xander; and, in the real world, Ricky Martin inundate the pages with a dull libidinal yearning. Saved by the Bellās A.C. Slaterāall-star wrestler and general harbinger of Jersey Shoreās later grip on millennial sexualityāis, in particular, āa revelation.ā
Reflections on Slater metastasize into lascivious musings on how wrestling garb and related imagery can ārewire the markers of masculine ideals as inherently homoerotic.ā These ideas are both fantastical and heavy-handed; allusion is not our Slater-satyrās forte. ā[T]ight asses arenāt mere by-products of arduous training but open invitations (in ways more literal than you can imagine).ā Surely any self-described gay man and the most cursorily adventurous heterosexual couldāve gleaned the anal reference without the parenthetical appendage; if not, why do they need to? Clamoring for readership, Betancourt casts a wide net, letting slip lithe catches for the clumsier philistines mucking about.
Stylistic issues aside, Betancourt acknowledges that desire and self-expression are āhard to disentangle,ā yet he doesnāt recognize that this very entanglement may be confining his own view. As a gay man, I see little of my own urges in Betancourtās. āTo explicitly deny the sexual pull such images [of shirtless amateur wrestlers] can have ⦠is to feed into a toxicity that refuses to let men be unwittingly desired (by other men).ā This leaves me sexually and theoretically marooned. I do deny it (wrestling doesnāt turn me on!) and regardless: How would my lust anchor my masculinity? Despite acknowledging that āwhat men want and what men look like arenāt questions to be asked in a vacuum,ā Betancourt doesnāt make context central to his analysis. I am all for finding teleological value in desire, but Betancourt is thinking with the wrong head.
Betancourt does, at times, escape his cognitive cul-de-sac. In āHombres,ā Betancourt explores the titular Colombian telenovela as a āglimpse into a possible future and a rare window into an alien present.ā Hombresā seemingly āprogressiveā male characters were facsimiles for the professional class of men Betancourtās classmates would become, boys whose masculinity relied on his torment. Marshaled against the showās larger, systemic pitfallsāsuch as its infinite forgiveness of male fragility and total inability to pass the Bechdel testāwe learn that Hombres was essentialist down to its title, its denotations of masculinity contingent on who was and wasnāt meant to watch. Here, Betancourtās personal experience is couched in a clear exploration of Colombian masculinity, augmenting close analysis of Hombres and its social mores rather than the other way around.
Betancourtās final essay, āA Cock in a Frock,ā proves the limitations of those preceding if only by showing that, done right, personal experience can pose some epistemic value. Taking a RuPaul tagline (āweāre all born naked and the rest is dragā) as an ontological launchpad, Betancourt weaves between cross-dressers, women in pantsuits, straight men, and queers to make a simple but convincing point: Sex and gender are irreducible from desire. Itās here where his writing is at its best. Building solidarity across disparate experiences rather than leveraging them for intellectual cachet, Betancourtās analytical power rests precisely in the space between what he and other queer men do and donāt share.
Promulgating oneās trauma is increasingly necessary to ālegitimateā subjectivity, conveniently obfuscating the various shapes power can take. This compromise reduces bodies into messages, or masculinity into culture, rather than seeing either as a multi-operable tool of violence, oppression, or liberation. Such is my issue with The Male Gazed: Betancourtās trauma stalls his analytical propulsion. Victimhood is no stand-in for culture, less still an engine for hot takes. As glimmers in the final pages, Betancourt is capable of cultural critique that weds his life to larger observations about masculinity and queerness. To this end, being called a āfaggotā is ancillaryāif only he would realize that.
Reece Sisto
is a writer and potentially the worldās youngest snowbird. When heās not writing, heās lifting, hiking, dancing, and otherwise risking long-term joint damage.
|