Free Stand by Your Manhood by Peter Lloyd Page A

power comes from being vulnerable, they need an oppressor. That’s why men are constantly depicted as walking fragments of the patriarchy, not free-thinking individuals: it elevates women’s ranking in the hierachy of marginalised groups. This, in turn, gives them status and moral superiority via the state. It maintains the myth that men are bad, women are good, which tilts the PR axis in their favour.
    Meanwhile, the same women will happily use their ‘erotic capital’ – heels, make-up, push-up bras – to get what they want from men on a personal level. Why else do you think they dress in certain ways? To look and feel good, yes, but also to hypnotise. To have men fall at their feet. You see, a beauty that blinds is a power like no other. Something men can’t replicate or get from other men, which is why there’s so much fierce competition around women who want to be the source of it. Visit any northern city on a Saturday night and see for yourself. There’ll be scores of them walking around with no coatson, even if it’s freezing, because no time must be wasted with clothes that conceal. That would hide their magic and give rivals an advantage.
    Combined, this two-pronged attack targets male sexuality from both sides – on the one hand instilling guilt and shame, on the other offering release and vanity. What’s left in the middle is the increasingly narrow space where it can exist, and be expressed, freely. Then again, to keep it all going, even this orbits around a core, unspoken belief that failing to find women attractive is
the ultimate male shame.
    People pretend this isn’t true, but it is. Why else do you think closeted men in Hollywood sign up for lavender marriages? Because a man who comes out socially neuters women. Rationally, of course, these women understand it doesn’t matter – but subconsciously, primitively in terms of human instinct and fantasy, which Hollywood trades on, there’s an unspoken disconnect. A rejection. These men have nothing to offer at the box office because they have nothing to offer in the bedroom.
    Yes, OK, the film industry is mostly managed by men on an administrative level, but not really. It’s actually run by money. The money women spend. I personally know an A-list actor who’s gay – one who’s currently plastered over London’s buses because he’s the lead star in a major motion picture – but experts in LA still forbid himfrom coming out, even though everybody in the industry knows, because it’d be professional suicide. The roles would slip away. Not as a result of horrible homophobic men, which is just one huge heterosexist prejudice, but because women have no power in that exchange. And, for them, that’s a turn-off.
    This is why women don’t enjoy gay male porn
: because it means watching their obsoleteness right there on screen. It’s the same reason why straight men are conditioned to dislike gay guys. Everybody assumes it’s because they fear getting hit on – but that awkwardness, which is taught, can be between a father and a son. The fear isn’t sex. It’s the societal downgrading men get when they don’t fancy women.
    ‘Ah, but women love the gays!’ you’ll say. In some ways, yes, they do – because they cannot compete for a straight man’s attention. But ask her to date an openly bisexual man in the real world and I’d happily bet £100 the answer is no.
    Therefore, men can wield so much more personal power if they get wise to it all and play the player. The reason gay men have more freedom to sexually express themselves than straight men is because they’re not adhering to women’s rules. The more heterosexual men understand this, the more control they can possess over their own sexuality – both politically and personally.
    After all, they’re born with the same bodies, brains and biological drive for sex, yet approach it so differently. Gay men need not justify drinking in bars with go-go dancers, parkland cruising or