Not long ago, I returned to living in Palm Springs, California where I had once lived ten years earlier. The dramatic desert valley where Palm Springs hugs the base of a rugged mountain that rises from sea level to 9,000 feet has always been a blend of the bizarre and beautiful, an accidental meeting of opposites. In everything from the gay men who settle here (every member of the city council is either gay or lesbian) to the neighboring communities where the staunchly conservative come from all over the globe to play. It is here, in this dialectical desert, I make my home.
It was here, a decade ago, I was involved in starting what is known as an “intensive outpatient program” for drug and alcohol addiction across a courtyard from a very popular coffee shop that is frequented by many gay men in town. They come here, as do I, to start their mornings with a warm cup of coffee and lively conversation with friends, new and old. Here, in this little slice of heaven, I sat recently and chatted with a friend I’ve known for more than a decade. He’s a big, handsome guy—the kind of gay man that quickly became the focal point of passerby’s who stumbled upon the two of us chatting away at a corner table. He was oblivious to the attention, as he always is, and we lingered as we caught up on each other’s lives from the past few years. At one point, the discussion turned to the “dating apps” which are commonly used by gay men to find mostly a casual hook-up for sex. My friend said “I’m not on those apps any more. I got tired of being treated like a piece of meat.”
His comment got me to thinking, “could it be there truly is something at least vaguely pathological about spending hours of each and every day scrolling through pictures of body parts and headless torsos on my phone?” Many gay men, perhaps even the majority, do just this, searching the thousands of anonymous profiles so that they might “order in” to satisfy their sexual appetites. Are these just shame-free gay men hungry for a good time, or is there something more sinister at play?
Therapists, often given to using confusing jargon, have longed called this kind of behavior “objectification”. I must admit that I too have been known to use this term with little or no clear explanation of what it is, or for that matter, why it might be harmful. After all, we’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t admit that each of us has particular “tastes” in men, so how could it be that focusing on an “object” or a featured part of a man is wrong?
Where all this confusing tangle of tastes, appetites and objects goes awry, can probably best be explained by a simple analogy of peeling an onion. When we “objectify” a man, we peel back the layers of the onion until we find just the perfect part that we seek. The peeled off layers are discarded, and we only enjoy that part we have desired. What this means in real terms is that when we objectify a man, we peel back the layers of his being and discard all but what we find useful, or what we desire that might bring us pleasure. Every man, gay or straight, is a wonderful creature who is made up of far more than his body parts, muscles, success, wealth, access to power, or sexual charism. He has dreams for the future, a complex history, fears, and a family. But these parts of a man are not often found on the desirable menu, and hence, they are tossed to the floor by a hungry seeker who only engaged the parts that he imagines will satiate his rumbling appetite.
It may feel good, at least in the moment, to be objectified for some part of yourself. But the problem—and here’s where things so often go wrong—none of us wants feel as if we are just a piece of meat, a wallet, or a caretaker. At the core of every man and woman is the yearning to be loved for all that we are, not just the parts of ourselves that show well in the light of day. The lifelong embrace we seek is one that accepts both our dreams and our tears, our triumphs and our failures, our days of strength and illness. How and where we find that embrace is up to each of us, and not mine or anyone else’s to dictate. For some it may come in the form of a lifelong relationship with the same man, and for others it may come from relationships with many men sequentially or simultaneously. Regardless of the source, it is the authenticity of the love we crave to augment our individual journey through this life. In that love, we find ourselves seeking to give of everything we are to savor the spark of joy it created in the beloved man’s eye.