- Joined
- Dec 27, 2014
In general yes, but he also believes that all males are "brutes" and "neanderthals." Yet when he's put in certain situations, he's every bit as neanderthal as he accuses men of being. For example, during the Catie saga he was possessive, jealous and sexually aggressive. And his behaviour over the blue arms saga wasn't exactly in line with his ideas of peaceful femininity.
I've often wondered if there was an element of bi-curiosity there. I don't know if he's actually bi, I'm inclined to agree that he isn't on the whole. But I do find it interesting that he's so violently repulsed by men's bodies. He's mentioned having intrusive sexual thoughts about men in one of the Mailbags, and his fears of "falling off the straight path." My guess would be that he had some thoughts involving men that he found sexy and, being heterosexual but not clever enough to understand the intricacies of sexuality, was repulsed by the fact that he wasn't repulsed. If that makes sense. It's quite late at night and I may not be coherent.
He doesn't really believe in peaceful femininity. Like, Chris likes Rosie the riveter cliches and girl power and shit like that. At the end of the day, girls are good, boys are bad. The specifics don't matter until Chris decides to bring them up in an argument.
I don't think this is intentional on Chris' part either. He's just way too dumb to identify the biases in his behavior/speech.
Chris hasn't mentioned any explicitly sexual thoughts involving men, just nudity. (Small difference, I'll admit. But to an autist, even non-sexual nudity might be seen as elaborate gay porno.)
This is probably what happened. (Although I don't have reason to think he thought whatever kicked this off was sexy. It would be sufficient for someone to have mentioned dicks, and he thought that not being violently offended implied a tolerance of dicks.)
Where I disagree with most people, is when they take this likely series of events to mean that Chris' aversion to male nudity is something of a put-on. People think that he's faking it or at the very least, homosexuality is lurking under the surface.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Chris is seriously traumatized by male nudity. It isn't fake or overacting on his part. Chris is seriously disgusted by male nudity. He freaks out, he gets shortness of breath, his heart rate goes up. He panics. His behavior reminds me of a rape victim at times. It's pathological at this point.
Because of this, I genuinely believe it's impossible for Chris to be gay. He cannot be attracted to men's bodies.
Its easy to assign Chris's intense fear and repulsion of males as latent, closeted homosexuality. After all you see that a lot in other people who are not comfortable with their own homosexuality. However, in Chris's situation, I think its sadly just a matter of him being extremely intimidated by male sexuality/behavior. He can't fit in with it, much less compete with it.
I'm sure he resents the word "fag", because he got called fag a lot as a kid, for well... acting like a fag so much. A lot of people assume fag means gay, and thats it. To millenial males it simply means "unmanly". If you miss an easy shot in basketball, fag. If you get scared of a sudden sound, fag. If you're nervous in a social situation for any reason, fag. You can be called a fag for literally anything at anytime. I wonder how Chris's autistic mind took that as a kid, not being able to separate the connotation and denotation of that word after being called it so much.