What Can Men Want?
So straight you’re gay
Nathan Rochelle DuForD
On a recent stream, far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes ranted about his virginity to defend himself from attacks that he is “gay.” Fuentes is somewhat well-known for his volcel (voluntarily celibate) position, which he advocates for all young men on the far right. In the course of this rant, Fuentes argues that, in fact, it is men who have sex with women who are the real gay ones. This seemingly puzzling tirade draws laughs and confusion. What does it mean for a man to fuck a woman in a way that makes him gay? Many seem to believe he’s just committed some basic error, as if he simply doesn’t know what being gay is. I’m going to treat this claim as if it isn’t an error but is instead a coherent expression of the right-wing politics of desire. In other words, what if it really is gay to be straight?
Through a psychoanalytic understanding of desire as something that makes us what we are, I want to rethink Fuentes’s claim that it would be gay for him to sleep with a woman. One of the basic contentions is that to be a person, like we are, is always to fail to have what we need. We’re born young and helpless. We require a long period of care, wherein we often cannot even clearly articulate what it is that we need (we often hold the fantasy that we can in adulthood, but even that is suspect for many of us). During this long period of need, a mother (or mother figure) both supplies the object of our desires and frustrates our needs. Sometimes she knows what we want, and sometimes she doesn’t. This period of time is what’s understood as infantile sexuality. In the first few years of our lives, we have wants that need to be fulfilled, and their fulfillment give us pleasure. This is a more expansive understanding of sexuality that doesn’t focus on genital pleasure but on the holistic ways we can experience pleasure.
Routing Fuentes’s claims through a psychoanalytic understanding of desire and subjective creation reveals that, at its most basic level, heteropatriarchy requires men to be averse to nongenital sexuality. As Freud understands it, genital sexuality posits that someone who has matured will experience desire and pleasure only genitally and only for a heterosexual object-choice outside of the family. Genital sexuality is when you let go of your mother to find your wife. So the story goes: we lose our attractions and desires for our parents and instead seek to fulfill our desires in the psychosexually developed way. Sexuality isn’t solely made up of what we tend to think of as sexual activity but includes the whole of how and what we desire, as well as the objects that fulfill those desires.
Genital sexuality is when you let go of your mother to find your wife.
Sexuality, instead, is the dominant way of conceiving the bodily satisfaction of desire–not even always for pleasure. Foucault, in a well-known interview titled “Friendship as a Way of Life,” articulates it thusly: “The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality, henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.” In other words, sexuality, as a broader way of understanding desire, can lead us to all sorts of relationships. Contemporarily, there are a few well-known relationship forms considered to be the norm—most prominently among them marriage and platonic friendship. These forms, though, aren’t the whole of what our relations to others could be. The challenge Foucault presents here is that determining the truth about our sexualities in terms of figuring out an identity and its origins (like scientific studies into homosexuality) is less important than what new ways of living are opened up by following and fulfilling our desires. In other words, what would it be to make friendship our predominant mode of life?
Though the two had a long-standing disagreement over the repressive hypothesis, Foucault’s formulation mirrors, in some ways, Herbert Marcuse’s advocation of a polymorphous perversity in which the libido has no proper object, no proper boundaries or temporalities. It’s no mistake, here, that infantile sexuality is also understood as a time of polymorphous perversity. A multiplying of sites of pleasures that can be fulfilled by many people, possibly any of them. In each case, sex and sexuality involve desire and pleasure in ways that multiply those who can participate in them with us, and multiply the possibilities for what exactly it is that we are doing with each other. In the next breath after the above passage, Foucault submits: “No doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable.” In this way, homosexuality is desirable because it moves us away from genital sexuality; it lets us stop looking for a wife.
Sexuality can function as an index of desire and pleasure that involves others, even if only in fantasy. Raising the potentiality of pleasure totally dislodged from biological necessity or imperative, homosexuality as something desirable denaturalizes desire. Once desire is denaturalized, we lose access to the normalizing standards of a so-called natural law of sex, gender, or sexuality. We no longer need sex purely for reproduction, and reproductive function cannot inform us about what sex, gender, or sexuality themselves are. Alenka Zupančič writes clearly about this in her work on Christianity and polymorphous perversity. As she outlines it, “Culture is not something that mediates, splits, denatures natural sexuality (as supposedly present in animals, for instance); it is being generated at the very locus where something in nature (as sexual nature) is lacking. One way of putting this would be to say that there is no sexual instinct, that is, no knowledge (‘law’) inherent to sexuality which would be able to reliably guide it.” In other words, we generate cultures of sexuality specifically because there is no natural law concerning it. If there were, we could be guided by it, rather than by the human-generated restrictions and rules concerning sex, gender, and sexuality.
In the crisis of lacking any natural rule or order for sexuality, we normalize then naturalize sex, gender, and sexuality through moral, political, religious, and cultural rules concerning them. The clearest example of this is the conservative refrain that homosexuality or transsexuality are “unnatural.” This isn’t simply a statement of ignorance that other animals change sex sometimes or that they often copulate with members of their own sex. Rather, it’s the generation of a rule specifically because nature has failed to give us one. If we had a rule from nature, we simply couldn’t have gay sex or change sex. Gravity pulls me to the earth regardless of my wishes, which is why there’s no law that I need to follow it. But natural laws about sex are not like natural laws about physics, no matter how much conservatives attempt to make them so. Unlike gravity, restrictions on sexuality need to be strictly enforced, and that requires gaining social, political, and moral power.
The need to generate rules and regulations for sex, gender, and sexuality is part of an authoritarian impulse to control desires that could lead us away from respect for authority and normalcy. As a political project, authoritarianism is a conservative ideology. Authoritarianism is based on a fundamental submission to authority, as the name implies. This means democracy—including things like thinking for yourself and developing your own ideas or opinions—is devalued in favor of obedience and law following. Historically, authoritarian regimes have also had extensive legal regimes regarding the proper way to be or to have a sex, gender, and sexuality. In particular, sexual deviance was considered equivalent to other forms of law breaking or disrespect and therefore deserved the harshest of punishments, including castration, public beatings, or even death.
Sexual deviance seems particularly disturbing for the authoritarian because it can occur privately and leave no lasting evidence. You may be able to control someone’s actions but you cannot control their desires. This places the onus of psychological control onto individuals, who then are responsible for managing (usually in the form of repressing) their wants.
When authoritarians admit of desire at all (including the presumably traditional desire for a genital sexual relationship between a man and a woman), they open up the radical possibility of a sexuality that includes potentially anyone and everyone, any and every bodily or psychic satisfaction from pleasure to pain and whatever lies between or outside them. This also breaks open the possibility of new forms of relationality, of intimacy, of friendship—it presents us with potentialities for social relations that are different or other than the regressive traditionalist fantasy that authoritarians hold of a normal family in which all desire can be fulfilled. As a result, fascism requires a set of seemingly confused norms surrounding gendered sexualities that begin to expand to include all elements of life, not just genital sexuality.
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If you pay attention, people will claim many puzzling things are a sign that a man is gay: using an umbrella, drinking lemonade (or even just lemon water), ordering dessert, wiping his ass after defecating, eating breakfast, recycling, and having sex with too many women or too many times. Many of these things seem to have some kind of feminine signifier attached: not wanting to get wet and ruin your hair or clothes, for instance, hews to typically gendered norms of self-care and presentation. Men aren’t supposed to be concerned with their looks because they aren’t objects to be seen and appreciated, but subjects to see and appreciate. The final two might give pause to anyone uninitiated to the stranger norms of heteropatriarchal masculine sexuality: that sex with women or wanting to have sex with a lot of them is, in effect, gay.
Theories of how to get yourself twisted around enough to find yourself in this position abound. People sympathetic to evolutionary biology or psychology will talk about the feminizing environment of the vagina—supposedly putting a penis in there bathes it in feminizing hormones. Those who favor a psychosocial explanation will talk about homosexual tendencies. This follows from the supposedly perverse desire to have sex too much. As a man, you are going to have sex with women so much you get bored and need to switch to men (delightfully, this theory taps into the original use of the term “heterosexual” as a kind of hypersexual perversion of “normal” desire). Lastly, people who have a straightforwardly reactionary political orientation will get right to the point: you, as a man, admit that a woman has something you want? Sounds gay. Only a gay man would want something a woman has.
Take, for example, the following meme, posted to Know Your Meme by the user Nuggethead. This is an inverted version of the typical “virgin vs. chad” meme genre, which juxtaposes two types of masculinity. Usually, the negative depiction is of the virgin and the positive depiction is of the chad. This image shows us that the penis of the virgin is much thicker and more satisfying to women, because it hasn’t been “crushed inside dozens of vaginas.” Whereas the penis of a man with multiple sexual partners is much longer and thinner “and will no longer be able to pleasure any woman.” In this case, the crushing pressure of the vagina is cited as the reason to avoid too much intercourse with too many women, as this will deform men’s penises and ultimately leave them unable to satisfy a woman’s future desires. The comments to the post even feature users arguing over whether the post is intended to be ironic or a simple evolutionary explanation of human pair bonding.
To desire women, in this reading, is not to desire masculinity, the only approved form of heterosexuality. Heteropatriarchal masculinity is, in this way, a kind of self-affirming self-love that operates through self-denial and punishment. After all, in the above meme, it isn’t that the virgin doesn’t desire women, but the virgin knows that their desire shouldn’t be satisfied lest it literally crush their penis. This is a rejection of pleasantness, pleasure, comfort, care, or affection. Men are not allowed to want these things because they are coded as feminine in our society. Admitting of desiring—perhaps even needing—them is tantamount to an admission that one’s masculinity is insufficient.
This is reinforced in plenty of odd plays concerning sexuality on the far right. While white supremacy requires cis men to have sex with cis women to reproduce a white society, it doesn’t require that they like it. Desire and pleasure do not need to be part of the fascist reproduction of a pure race—in fact, their influence may distract from the goal of an ethnonationalist movement. That’s because even the right (and perhaps especially the right) recognizes that desire and the pleasures that satisfy it are unbidden and out of our control. The heteronomy of desire and its satisfaction is a threat to the subject and the world that the far right needs for its political project.
As Lacan puts it, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” It isn’t only desire for the other, but desire of what the other desires—when one desires, one desires recognition in and through the other’s desire. From this provocation, we arrive at a doubling of lack and insufficiency. Admitting of desire, to want at all, is also admitting to insufficiency and an insufficiency we will never be capable of fulfilling for ourselves. We can see here the organic connection between the idea that having sex with women is gay and the idea that men should not masturbate. In each case, sexual desire, especially in its fulfillment, demonstrates the absence of completeness and the presence of need. This need for the other (even in fantasy) is a fundamental form of weakness because it’s possible that it won’t be fulfilled, showing the insufficiency of the person in need. In both cases, sleeping with women and masturbating (what you may think of as typical straight-guy activities) are demonstrations of a failure of self-control. This is a true failure for the authoritarian because if we have to desire, at the very least we should be in control of it, rather than guided by it. Each of these seemingly normal activities is actually an admission of failure.
St. Augustine argued that in the Garden of Eden, Adam had control of his erection. The lack of control of this intimate organ came about as a result of original sin. The very symbol of men’s manhood was taken from them by God, forcing them to be under the spell of the other. The untimely erection (or the erection that doesn’t arrive when called up) serves as a constant reminder that desire and its consequences are not theirs to control. This fundamental heteronomy at the heart of cis manhood at the same time threatens the construction of a normative heteropatriarchal masculinity that is focused on control, strength, and independence.
The authoritarian man simply needs to avoid touching his penis at all.
The prohibition on onanism—on self-pleasure—is a common authoritarian restriction. A good deal of fuss was made about the Proud Boys’ propensity for abstaining from masturbation. These ideas have spread into the right-wing sectors of new age beliefs through the concept of “semen retention” (a practice that supposedly allows cis men to harness the energy of their semen by not ejaculating and releasing it into the world, where it becomes inert). Much of the semen-retention discussion online bleeds into outright misogyny, expressing fears that the power of semen should not be released into women or they might become powerful in ways that only men should be. Alternatively, sex with women is framed as overly comforting, as user ServiceGreedy9037 puts it in a comment on the r/Semenretention subreddit: “I agree that women aren’t enemies but the idea that feeds to the culture of comfort, consuming, and pleasure is the problem and many of these promiscuous women just so happen to like living that way.”[1] Here we see someone drawing the explicit connection that sex with women provides men with too much comfort, when men ought to be strong by relating to each other. As the same user says, “iron sharpens iron,” a common phrase used by practitioners of semen retention to signify that being with other men who engage in the practice will make them stronger. It’s hard not to see a reflection of the common fascist line that “hard times make strong men” in these users. As radical psychoanalyst–turned–sex-energy theorist Wilhelm Reich hypothesized, authoritarians believe that the maintenance of sexual control serves as a kind of internalization of authority and expression of appropriate control over the self that will make men stronger.
It also serves to avoid the potentially queer outcome that maybe, as a man, you enjoy touching a penis and having your penis touched by a man (in this case, yourself). As many people have asked on Reddit, “Would sucking your own dick be more like sucking dick or getting your dick sucked?” This fundamental confusion about whether the penis is the subject of enjoyment or the object of desire yields to the dictum that one ought to never sexually touch one’s own penis. In this scenario, not only does masturbation demonstrate the unruliness of desire, it also expresses both the wish to touch a man and the wish to be touched by a man. To avoid the potential surprise that he is turned on by dick, the authoritarian man simply needs to avoid touching his penis at all.
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The language we casually use to articulate desire—want, need, crave, yearn—is a language of lack or loss. We desire because we do not have, because we lack or have lost something integral to ourselves. Needs, then, occur when we experience a desire for satisfaction. A need is something that at a minimum can be fulfilled. To identify with the absence of what we desire, though, requires we incorporate it as a part of ourselves. We must admit that we don’t have everything we need, and some of our needs cannot be self-satisfied. Desire itself needs to be extinguished in the heteropatriarchal fantasy of masculinity. A man cannot both be a man and be in need. It’s women who are missing something they can only get from men (the fabled biblical missing rib is only one iteration of this lack, the “emptiness” of the vagina is yet another). Desire is what you have when you’ve failed to be sufficiently independent and recognize you need something from someone who is not you, and who can refuse to provide it, leaving you without.
This feature of desire, and the one who lacks it—the one who lacks lack—have been the subject of analysis by authors as diverse as Klaus Theweleit in his analysis of the proto-Nazi freikorps and Gayle Salamon in her consideration of what it is to be a transmasculine subject. In each case, the subject without desire, the total and complete subject, is nihilistic—because the absence of desire is death, the end of being what we are. The completeness sought in the elimination of desire mirrors the fascist or otherwise far-right political project. As Salamon puts it, “to be characterized by total plenitude and without lack is to be outside of language, outside of meaning, outside of the symbolic, outside of relation, outside of desire. It is a motionless and meaningless stasis equated with radical abjection and death–not a productive position from which to theorize subjectivity trans or otherwise.” In this way, we can read Fuentes’s discomfort with an other- or even self-directed sexuality as a negation of subjectivity itself.
This is why, as Theweleit theorizes, homosexuality and heterosexuality aren’t helpful frameworks when it comes to understanding this type of man’s sexuality. The far-right theory of desire doesn’t involve sexual orientation insofar as orientation is a structure that orients desire. The gayness of a cis man having penetrative sex with a cis woman, straight penis-in-vagina sex, can’t be conceptualized through these quasiscientific identity classifications. Instead, we need to switch to concepts of homosexualism and heterosexualism. As -isms, these aren’t sexual orientations (or a psychosocial coding of desire combined with a specific understanding of normatively embodied sex), but are instead political structures of desire. Not just for sexual desire, but desire itself. As -isms, homo- and heterosexualism give us a framework for conceiving of a way of encountering, affirming, and desiring either sameness or difference. Unbounded from particular sex acts or sexual configurations, homo- and heterosexualism are proxies for forms of wanting that affirm what we are and forms of wanting that affirm what we lack.
Heterosexualism, in this context, is a desire for difference—not to assimilate it into oneself and make it sameness, but to cultivate a closeness with and affirmation of what one directly lacks. As Sophie Lewis puts it in her essay “If Heterosexualism Existed, We Wouldn’t Have to Make It Up,” “Heterosexualism, as an impossible demand, calls on us to extend radical love towards that which is as unlike the self as possible. If you want to be a heterosexualist, then, you must direct your love and desire towards that which is different, strange, and other.”
The heteropatriarchal man, with an investment in the authoritarian dominance this identity gives him, cannot participate in heterosexualism. This is something Fuentes seems to understand intuitively, even if he cannot articulate it clearly. There’s something decidedly anti-fascist about love and desire for what is “different, strange, and other.” The progress of white nationalism requires we expel, exterminate, or annihilate what is different, strange, and other. In this way, the desire for difference (as heterosexualism) becomes both a personal and political failure. As a man, one must admit a lack, and then attempt to fulfill the desire with what is different—the very thing that must be expelled or annihilated. The desire thus becomes “gay” in a pejorative sense of “perverse”—it’s a desire one ought not to have or, at the very least, one should know better than to act upon.
In this context, homosexualism would be the inverse: radical love toward what is most like oneself. You could read this as a type of narcissism. Rather than seeking to fulfill desire outside itself, the narcissistic ego-libido seeks to fulfill its own desire within itself. Freud posits that this is a normal stage of human development, but the homosexualist is stuck in this phase. It is thus not for reasons of sexual orientation that the fascist needs to refrain from sex with women, but for political reasons: men are required to be complete subjects all on their own and to affirm only what is like them. Each of these rules out the potentiality of a desire for a woman.
In the much-criticized aphorism “Tough Baby,” Theodor Adorno proposes the following: “Totality and homosexuality belong together. While the subject falls apart, it negates everything which is not of its own kind.” In this aphorism, long thought to be a homophobic statement akin to the idea that the real homophobes are homosexuals (and thus homophobic domination is a self-imposed discipline and damage), Adorno is making claims about the disintegration of the subject. As noted above by Salamon and Theweleit, in the denial of desire itself, the subject ceases to exist as the kind of thing they are. Instead, the subject turns toward a form of nihilism that seeks to destroy everything that isn’t like them—the elimination of anything that could serve to highlight a desire for what one isn’t—that is, that could provoke desire itself. The authoritarian masculinist subject keeps everything like him in order to protect himself, but in the process, destroys himself.
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But the affirmation of desire for what is similar is still desire. While one might be tempted to draw out the homoerotics of authoritarian masculine camaraderie, this would be misleading. If heterosexualism is a radical desire for difference, then homosexualism could be understood as a radical desire for sameness. But in many ways, even this cannot be permitted in the far-right structure of desire. Homosexualism, as a kind of negative desire for what is not different (not to be confused with homosexual desire, a desire for what is not the self but is in some relevant aspects akin to oneself), remains desire nonetheless. As such, it points the subject away from themselves, toward what the other can provide and the subject lacks.
The possibility of a generative love of difference cannot be maintained with authoritarian politics and so, for the fascist, even heterosexuality is off the table.
Dangerously, extinguishing the potentiality of desire as desire of the Other’s desire places the far-right man into an implacable bind. He cannot tap into a sexuality as desire whatsoever. Desire for what is like oneself is queer; desire for what is other is queer. Desire itself is symptomatic of an unthinkable incompleteness for this subject. There is simply no route for human sexuality here, in either the restricted or expansive sense. Theweleit identifies this clearly in Male Fantasies, arguing that, for the fascist (or protofascist) man, sexuality is experienced more as an attack on sexuality itself rather than an expression of desire. The erotics of authoritarian desire are thus short-circuited, routed instead toward hatred for what is outside, destruction of the body of the other, and brutality toward difference. The rejection of a desire for difference, as a rejection of desire, full stop, can be read through all kinds of authoritarian urges to expel, exclude, or annihilate.
In a context where the only approved political desire is for narcissistic egoism—and therefore identity is the identity of a man with himself—desire for difference disturbs identity. Put this way, it’s obvious why white nationalists, infamously anti-immigration, cannot admit even of heterosexuality. In some way, they can see the utopian possibilities of an enduring desire for difference that cannot be assimilated. The possibility of a generative love of difference cannot be maintained with authoritarian politics, and so, for the fascist, even heterosexuality is off the table.
To say, then, that for far-right figures like Fuentes sex between a cis man and a cis woman is “gay” is just to signify how radically queer he believes it is that someone’s subjectivity could admit to being incomplete. For him, and the men who hold his political views, to desire anything at all is a true sign of queerness, whether your desire is for what is alike or what is different. The need to assimilate something into yourself (to take what is outside in) requires a kind of queer receptivity that simply cannot be permitted. Instead, sexuality, on this register, must be about the destruction of sexuality itself—the destruction of desire—and about the replication of the nation.
[1] ServiceGreedy9037, “Promiscuous women aren’t the enemy,” January 24, 2022, comment on “Can we stop with the anti-women shit?,” https://www.reddit.com/r/Semenretention/comments/sbhevx/comment/hu033u9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3.