We Were All — Pun Intended — the Butt of the Joke

Empowering the Sexually Submissive Man in the Movies

On his fantastic podcast “Films to be Buried With,” Emmy-winning “Ted Lasso” star Brette Goldstein interviews actors, directors, and comedians about the films that mean the most to them. His question “What’s the sexiest film you’ve ever seen?” has a sub-category:

“Troubling Boners, Worrying Wide-Ons: a film you found arousing that you weren’t sure you should.”

Reasonably enough, most guests don’t take it seriously. The most common answer is Jessica Rabbit. But I always wonder “Where does the ‘trouble’ reside?” Is it with me, or the movie… or the movie-making system?

My top contender for the “troubling boner” is the 1999 teen-horror movie “The Rage: Carrie 2,” a belated sequel to the film classic “Carrie”. Most of the film is so horrendous, I’ve never re-watched it. But when the DVD first came out when I was 13-years-old, I watched one scene over and over.

The bully is talking in the back of football practice, until the coach gets in his face, shouting “On your feet, turn around, drop your trow, shorts and all.” Reluctantly, the young man obeys, turning around, unbuttoning his pants and pulling them down. The camera cuts to a tight profile of his bubble-butt, and the coach kneeling to look at it.

“How do I reckon with the fact that something so cringey used to turn me on?”

Revisiting this scene as an adult, I realized the power imbalance is clearly inappropriate. And the coach’s line of dialogue — “After that half-assed block, I just wanted to check and see if maybe you had any tampon strings hanging between your legs” — is grossly misogynist (implying women aren’t good at football) and transphobic (implying men can’t use tampons).

But as a kid, all I saw was a man telling another man, “Turn around, show me your ass.” I was a horny teenager, starving for this kind of dynamic.

And it wasn’t just the modest nudity. What made me so hot-and-bothered was that it seemed like this gorgeous young man was yielding, being submissive, being dominated by another man who wanted to see his ass.

But now that I’m old enough to know the difference between dominance and humiliation, how do I reckon with the fact that something so cringey used to turn me on?

“I wonder what a more healthy and affirming version of that content would have even looked like in those days?”

Millennials across the sexuality spectrum are looking back with a shudder at movies from our childhood that haven’t aged well. Comedy franchises like “Police Academy,” “Revenge of the Nerds,” and “American Pie,” solicited laughter and titillation from scenes of blatant sexual assault. And now we’re asking ourselves, “Why on earth did I think that was okay?”

But as a queer person, I’m always combatting the cultural narrative that my sexual desire is wrong, so I’m trying not to conflate ‘90s-retrospective guilt with the residual shame a queerphobic society has instilled in me.

So again, the important question is — Where does the “trouble” reside?

When it comes to the misogyny in “The Rage,” I can blame the filmmakers for thinking that was ever acceptable to begin with. As for what transfixed me — a hot young man yielding his naked body… I wonder what a more healthy and affirming version of that content would have even looked like in those days?

“Big-budget movies only showed us a sexually submissive man if he was — pardon the expression — the butt-of-the-joke.”

Hard as I try, I can’t think of a single widely-released movie from the 90’s or 2000’s that empowered a sexually submissive male. Any time a man was naked or in a sexual situation where his butt was the focus of attention, or where he was in some way submissive or vulnerable, it was hardly ever consensual. It was almost always a scene of humiliation or abuse, or at the very least, designed to make a heterosexual audience laugh.

Another strong contender for my troubling boner is the sperm bank scene in “Road Trip,” in which Seann William Scott from “American Pie” tries to get a nurse to give him a handjob. Instead, she asks him to turn around and drop his pants, and then she lubes up her fingers and milks his prostate, inducing a colossal anal orgasm.

Now, this scene is not troubling in the same way as “The Rage,” because the character consents and feels pleasure. But it’s still another example of male sexual submission being treated as a joke. The film is a a gross-out comedy, the actor’s orgasm is absurdly over-the-top, and the film’s perspective is: “Look at this dude getting fingered in the butt! Hysterical, right?”

It probably never occurred to the filmmakers that I’d be sitting there in the theater, at 14-years-old, feeling insanely turned on. As an adult gay man, prostate orgasms are one of the great joys of my life, and this was the first time I got to see one on film.

And everyone around me was laughing.

This is where the trouble resides.

Filmmakers of that era rarely had queer audiences in mind. Whether the character drops his pants willingly or unwilling, to make the characters laugh or the audience laugh, big-budget movies only showed us a sexually submissive man if he was — pardon the expression — the butt-of-the-joke.

When homoerotic content is presented solely in scenes of ridicule, humiliation, or abuse, it not only makes a queer-pubescent viewer (and their nostalgic older self) ashamed of their arousal, it reinforces the toxic stigma queer people have been fighting all our lives — that our sexual expression is something the rest of the world should either mock or fear.

Thankfully, we’re making progress. There is a lot more queer visibility onscreen nowadays, and queer audiences can find a lot more healthy, canonical expressions of sexual desire. And we’re finally seeing stories (like Goldstein’s “Ted Lasso”) where men of all sexualities are allowed to be vulnerable, and to find empowerment in yielding their power to others.

But still, I can only imagine how meaningful it would have been, for the affirmation of queer youth, and the emotional edification of young men in general, if we all got to see a movie in the late-90’s where the heroic male protagonist was an unapologetic power-bottom.

Gosh that would have been good.

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