Emotionally detached and promiscuous or romantic and virginal?

Now living in a city with serious cultural dysphoria doesn’t help much if you are the kind of person who is intellectually and morally consistent.

In Cairo, people’s insistence on maintaining a faux Islamic morality, espoused by hideous cultural chauvinism greatly undermines one’s moral/ethical/emotional/sexual/physical/intellectual choices. Imposing a hegemonic moral discourse outside of which you are unintelligible and ostracized on one hand, and creating an alternative schizophrenic space where you circumvent all those moral restrictions leave me (and all of my kind) in no man’s land. Literally.
That the majority of gay people living in Cairo are doing a great a job getting by is no secret. But that this majority deserves an honor medal for standing up against extremism and bigotry is highly doubtful.

Most successful “gay” people who actually sustain a “healthy” (a hideous word, laden with value judgment. Who defines “healthy” and how can we actually tell if someone or something is indeed “healthy”?) lifestyle adopt this exact mind set. This cultural dysphoria. The “very straight gay” as someone puts it.
But one can not help but wonder how can same-sex attraction be understood through this lens? This heterosexual lens? The heterosexual matrix as Butler puts it.

Isn’t it considered a gender transgression? And how does compulsive heterosexuality fit into all that? And why should it fit to begin with?

That beauty is skin deep and shallow only takes a few years into your thirty when you realize no matter how physically beautiful someone is, they will age, and disintegrate as all mortals do. And start thinking there has to be something more substantial then a withering human body (face or ass or whatever it is that people perceive as attractive).

You can battle forces of nature up to a point, after which it does not make sense. You will have to stop the sun and the earth from turning and your cells from dying on their own (even if scientist are doing a great job reversing the life course of cell through minute biochemical manipulation).

Bodies are temporal by their very definition. But they are a powerful temporary constructions. They give meaning, create meaning, receive meaning and change meaning.
As humans we are unintelligible outside our bodies. In this lifetime at least.
And these bodies create/establish how all our social interactions will be like.

If you are fat, then you have eating disorders, most probably self-confidence issues and a depression-prone personality. If you are fit, you are a little narcissistic, vain and have serious conflict deriving self-confidence from a point beyond your physical existence.

These are not binary categories. They are diagnostic categories that help us understand the people around us.

The commitment people make to change heir bodies reflect a whole set of variables. So many factors, of which sexuality is a restrictive and constitutive factor.

So if “gay” men in Cairo are so beyond their “community”, so beyond their “society” (if such a fictitious construct ever existed) and now are scattered in individualized, isolated spaces and the only way to interact is to be sifted through the treacherous medium of cyberspace then this tells a lot how these same people think about their sexualities and desires.

The sifting does not stop at cyberspace. Then there sifting through the schizophrenic mentality of Cairo.

Compulsive heterosexuality is banal already.

Imagine religion and chauvinism added to it.

If you are not completely detached from emotional or intellectual burden and you want to be involved you risk a lot. Feelings and thoughts drag along a host of things most men would certainly love to avoid.

Or you have to be a virginal, romantic whose blind moral idealism was destroyed two hundred ago!

Or you could become invisible. Beyond “categorical analysis” or definition.

You don’t fit, you’re different why bother to think about it!

But to combine something of the two categories, promiscuity with romanticism that is serious transgression. And that’s the group most vulnerable. Not that anyone can sustain emotional vulnerability with promiscuity.

The two seem a contradiction in terms.

The two might be a result of each other. The two might be correlated. One condition might ultimately lead to the other (desperation does wonders!).

Overlooking my busy, commercial street, in my “nasty-middle-class-area”, composed of those people who woke up rich in the eighties, I wonder how restrictive space (moral, physical, sexual,…etc) completely alters gender and identity configurations and the choices people make to fit in that space.