Twink culture

Desire, gender, and the hetero masculine gaze

Content Warning: this article discusses eating disorders and racism, which may be triggering for some readers.

It is with a reddened face that I confess that my first (fictional) gay crush was Anatole Kuragin from a manga adaptation of Tolstoi’s War and Peace. Those with conservative upbringings who are attracted to men may find the character’s dominant presence and its implications regarding agency especially compelling. While I can now look back and say that I’m disgusted by Anatole’s violence and shady methods of obtaining consent, the fact that I once found him attractive reveals an important insight into what I call “twink culture,” the broader culture surrounding man-on-man desire and sex.

This phenomenon, colloquially called a bodice-ripper fantasy, emerges from popular conceptions of men as insatiably horny and women as incapable of comprehending such a state. This obviously false narrative, born of cis-heteropatriarchy, permeates society and cannot begin to understand the concept of queerness. A man who is desired? Never. A woman who desires? Not in a million years. Someone who changes their gender, whose gender is fluid, or who has no gender? Please be serious. And yet, people like us exist! Every day we demonstrate in our words and actions that men can be desired by each other, women can desire each other, and that gender exists to be played with. Are the cis-hets watching? Have we broken the patriarchy yet? Girl, I wish. 

Life is not Greta Gerwig’s Barbie world and cis-heteropatriarchy still reigns. Women feel pressured to change for the sake of men now more than ever, with social media platforms like TikTok teaching young girls that Sephora is their friend and beauty equals value. I watch in horror as my youngest cousin demands a Stanley Cup, dresses ‘coquette,’ and idolises Regina George. How long until she hates herself? How long until she starves herself? Strangely enough, I fear she’ll go through the same things I did. When I was 15, I became so ashamed of my weight that I starved myself and spiraled through a series of binge-purge cycles until a walk in the summer heat was enough to make me pass out from exhaustion. I’m not a woman, and at the time, I still thought I was a man. How did that happen? 

This conflict between how I perceived myself and the role I was expected to fit into reflects the damaging impact of gendered expectations—where men are taught to assert control and women are confined to ideals of purity and modesty. I posit that in our society, to be attracted to men is merely to be the object of the hetero-masculine gaze. More simply, to like men is for them to be horny for you. When I was 13, before I experienced what it meant to be an object in the eyes of a man and the terrible violence that comes with it, I wanted straight boys to look at me the way they looked at the prom queen. Once I realised what that meant, I no longer wanted to be looked at that way, but I still revelled in the hint of panic I felt when it happened. I know I’m not alone. Every gay boy develops a crush on a straight man at some point in their lives. Some grow out of it, some don’t. What does a straight man want? A woman. What does a traditional wife do for her husband? She gets pretty and stays young. I rest my case. 

A short stay on Grindr will reveal that man-on-man interactions are not inherently divorced from the heterosexual dichotomy, nor from racial constructs which reinforce it. Preferences often gravitate toward either those who mirror or starkly contrast oneself, carrying with them the weight of racial and gender biases. I’ll give some examples of real bios I have seen: “Brown, Desi, Arab or Latino—ahead of the line” from a man seeking a dom top; a top  proclaims he is “Mostly into younger and small guys”; and an old and bearded top specifies he wants “East Asian and white […] slim build, not too hairy.” In spaces like Grindr, conventional standards of attractiveness dominate—whether it’s the preference for the slim, white, hairless twink or the muscular, hyper-masculine hunk. These rigid ideals create a breeding ground for body image issues, insecurity, and unrealistic expectations. The impact extends beyond the digital realm. It permeates the broader gay community and shapes perceptions of desirability and self-worth, regardless of whether one engages with hookup apps or not.

What to do, then, about this problem? Surely the solution isn’t puritanically cleansing away sexuality as our socially-trained impulses might have us do. No, I propose something far more radical. I propose that we abolish gender. The male/female division has long categorised  individuals into active and passive sexual partners. While queerness has the potential to shatter this division, it often falls short, at times leading to body dysmorphia and general toxicity within sex culture. Body dysmorphia and conservatism will continue to plague queer erotism until that dichotomy is eradicated. I cite as evidence the many queers who repeatedly shatter that dichotomy without even trying and the many who may unknowingly reproduce it. Only when all children are no longer brought up with gender will we truly be free to love whomever we want without feeling pressure to be anything other than exactly what we are. As a very intelligent friend once said to me, it is hard to imagine a world with gender and yet no genderism. Only by smashing gender will queerness achieve its radical potential. Until that day, I will continue kissing my boyfriend in public and uplifting the women in my life, always striving for a better and gayer world.