{"id":54390,"date":"2013-03-26T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T17:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=54390"},"modified":"2017-09-17T08:38:29","modified_gmt":"2017-09-17T13:38:29","slug":"cultural-messages-in-a-safer-sex-pamphlet-for-transmen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/03\/26\/cultural-messages-in-a-safer-sex-pamphlet-for-transmen\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultural Messages in a Safer Sex Pamphlet for Transmen"},"content":{"rendered":"

The representation of sexuality and safer sex in public health campaigns is fascinating given our simultaneous cultural obsession with yet pathologization of sexual behavior.\u00a0 Safer sex campaigns and materials not only seek to increase prevention behaviors but also produce a range of social meanings surrounding gender, bodies, and desire.\u00a0 Most are produced by organizations that fall well within the mainstream; others are not.\u00a0 This post is about one of the latter (warning: sexual explicitness).<\/p>\n

The following resource, titled \u201cTop 5 Reasons to Fuck a Transguy\u201d was produced and distributed by a collaborative project of the San Francisco-based Asian and Pacific Islander Wellness Center.\u00a0 tm4m<\/a> is a group for transgender men whose goal is to \u201cprovide information, education and support to transmen who have sex with men (both other transguys and cisguys).\u201d<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This material is interesting for two main reasons.\u00a0 First, it combines traditional health education with an erotic, sex-positive context that is missing from most public health campaigns.\u00a0 For the most part, public health approaches to HIV prevention and sexual health promotion utilize a \u201csex-negative\u201d approach to sexual behavior; in other words, sex is represented as potentially dangerous or problematic and focus narrowly focused on its negative aspects, such as disease transmission.\u00a0 Even more progressive \u201ccomprehensive\u201d approaches to sexual health education (that is, approaches that do not focus solely on abstinence) tend to center on the potentially dangerous outcomes of sex and how to prevent them while ignoring the pleasurable and fun aspects of sexuality.<\/p>\n

In contrast, \u201c5 Reasons to Fuck a Transguy\u201d depicts a naked transman with safer sex barriers (condom and a glove) and uses explicit language (\u201cfuck\u201d instead of \u201csex\u201d and \u201ccock\u201d instead of \u201cpenis\u201d) and imagery.\u00a0 For example, in reason #2 we see two people about to engage in strap-on play and in #5 we see a guy that appears to be receiving oral sex or relaxing in a state of post-sex ecstasy.\u00a0 This sort of language and imagery is absent from the vast majority of sexual health promotion materials aimed at a wide variety of populations.\u00a0 Thus, in \u201c5 Reasons to Fuck a Transguy,\u201d safer sex is not presented as distinct and separate from sexual pleasure.<\/p>\n

Second, the material uses an embodied approach to highlight differences between trans and cisgender men while at the same time<\/i> eroticizing that difference.\u00a0 Starting with reason #1 (\u201ctrans guys are hot\u201d) we are invited to see the transmale body as the object of desire.\u00a0 Reasons #2, #3, and #4 call attention to the physical differences between cisgender and transgender male bodies and eroticizes the latter by emphasizing interchangeable cock sizes, more holes to penetrate, and smaller hands for fisting (or using the whole hand for penetration).\u00a0 Finally, reason #5 alludes to a fetishization of transmen: the transgender body incites curiosity that will ultimately pay off in enhanced pleasure.<\/p>\n

Not everyone agrees this is good.\u00a0 Some posts on Tumblr<\/a> challenged the idea that transgender men are a sort of erotic \u201cother\u201d or that they will necessarily consent to the activities depicted in the pamphlet:<\/p>\n

You better not assume I\u2019m comfortable using the one that \u201cother\u201d guys don\u2019t have and you better not assume that being a guy means I\u2019d be up for being fucked in the ass, either. Go fuck yourself and make your own goddamn third hole<\/em>.<\/i><\/p>\n

The \u201cyour dick can be any size you want!\u201d argument is like telling a female-identified survivor of breast cancer who\u2019s had a mastectomy \u201cyour tits can be any size you want!\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Just because I don’t have my own natural cock doesn\u2019t make me this insane sex toy thing that\u2019s such an anomaly and such a fetish object and so very very strange and different.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, despite the disclaimer that \u201cevery transguy is unique,\u201d some viewers saw the material\u2019s approach as a problemtic eroticization of their bodies and gender.<\/p>\n

In sum, \u201c5 Reasons to Fuck a Transguy\u201d moves beyond typical sexual health promotion approaches to include desire and pleasure, but doesn\u2019t avoid the problem of sending its own cultural messages about gender, bodies, and desire, ones that may be problematic from an entirely different point of view.<\/p>\n

Christie Barcelos is a doctoral candidate in Public Health\/Community Health Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The representation of sexuality and safer sex in public health campaigns is fascinating given our simultaneous cultural obsession with yet pathologization of sexual behavior.\u00a0 Safer sex campaigns and materials not only seek to increase prevention behaviors but also produce a range of social meanings surrounding gender, bodies, and desire.\u00a0 Most are produced by organizations that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,2103,2106,252,23704,120],"class_list":["post-54390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-transgenderintersex","tag-healthmedicine","tag-public-service-announcements","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54390"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71357,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54390\/revisions\/71357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}