Not So Nasty, and Not So Brutish

On November 26, Stephen Marche published an op-ed piece, “The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido,”  in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times.  The column was as ham-fisted as its title. Marche springboarded from the currently omnipresent issue of sexual harrassment  into the main body of his argument with the declaration, “Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.”

Marche presumably should know better than to crank out this kind of hackneyed reductionism. He’s a regular columnist for Esquire and a prolific author with four novels and two non-fiction titles to his credit. One of those books is an essay on relations between men and women, written in collaboration with his wife, Sarah Fulford. But in this screed, he trots out Victorian platitudes of unbridled, destructive male lust, and, by implication, the civilizing effects of womanhood. It’s as though thirty years of gender studies hadn’t happened--as though activists and historians of sexuality hadn’t spent decades pointing out how we’re shaped by the cultures we live in, and by the specifics of our personal histories, arguably far more pervasively than we are by biological hard-wiring. What the column gives no space to consider is that when men behave callously or brutally, as they do so often, we need an explanation more fine-grained than a retreat into the stereotype that that’s just how men are.

While I was still stewing in my reaction to Marche’s column, I found what seemed a near-perfect rebuttal in the best gay film I’ve watched in five years, Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country. To be flippant just for a moment, imagine Brokeback Mountain meets All Creatures Great and Small. John (played by Josh O’Connor), the son of a Yorkshire farmer disabled by a stroke, struggles to keep the family cattle farm together. But his out-of-control drinking results in one fuckup after another, each of which leads to a dressing down from his father, enraged by his own impotence even more than by John’s behavior.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1YAhyU6-tA&vl=en

(I’ll warn you now that if you read on, you’re going to hear a lot about the plot.)

Into the mix of frustrated entrapment, class resentment, and emotional malnourishment in which John is mired, add his homophobic self-hatred, which expresses itself most vividly, during the opening minutes of the film, in a washroom tryst with another young man at a cattle auction. Seen from the outside, it looks to border on rape--though the emotional brutality is consummated in John’s stone-cold rejection of the other lad’s surprising desire for some further contact, as they leave the loo and John gets into his truck.

At  this point, you don’t see how that much can change for John. It’s challenging to feel much empathy for someone so lost in self-pity and heartlessness toward others, for the first third of the film. By that time, a temporary farmhand has arrived, a Romanian named Gheorghe (played by Alec Secareanu), whom John verbally abuses as roundly as he does everyone else who gets in his way, at least until they find themselves at the other end of the farm for a stay of several cold nights with the sheep in a ruined stone barn. There, the sexual tension between them turns abuptly from physical hostility into passionate rutting, and from there into the first signs of John’s capacity for tenderness, which have space to emerge only because Gheorghe pushes back against John’s impulse for another fast, rough fuck.

The bond between them grows stronger and softer when Gheorghe succeeds in saving a runt by tricking a ewe whose own lamb is stillborn into nursing the orphan. You can see the two men unfolding into their desire to nurture and be nurtured, mediated as it is for the moment through the sight of the rescued lamb. Their sidelong smiles at one another, as they watch foster-mother and nursling, token what’s beginning to flow between them.

John’s a damaged enough soul that I spent the next half hour of the film bracing for the moment he’d revert to type. But things in the end turn out with a utopian sweetness that for all its romanticism, rings true about a broad truth of male sexuality, at least as I’ve experienced my own and as I’ve witnessed that of others. Men aren’t by nature sexually indifferent or brutal. We become callous and brutal when we’ve been brutalized. And the effects of shame, constriction, and ridicule can be reversed. We’re capable of forgiveness, and capable of redemption. My experience of male sexuality in environments of open, loving acceptance--in safe, sacred erotic space--is that we become increasingly playful, loving, open to experimentation, flexible, tender, considerate. 

My response to Stephen Marche is that if he hasn’t experienced that for himself, I’m sorry for him. My modest proposal is that maybe he needs a stint on the Yorkshire moors--or at least needs to watch the movie.