Women's Shoulders

The November 21st online edition of Writers Almanac features a poem by Jeffrey Harrison called "White Shoulders."  I think it is a great illustration of the fundamental erotics of the human male, and something to ponder.  The poem describes a male at a fundraising banquet who diverts himself from the boring speeches by gazing at all the bare shoulders of the women in the crowd before him, and the poem is an amusing riff on the quasi or should I say semi erotic gaze and appreciation of various shoulders, one after the other, which gives him great pleasure to the point that he ends by saying that when he stood with the others to applaud, it was not in appreciation of what had been said, but "for the shoulders they [the women] have so generously given."  I read this as a statement of the fact that men are always on the prowl. I know that if a male speaker stands before an gathering in tight trousers every gay person in the audience will say to each other at the reception later "Wow, did you check out his crotch?" Same thing.  An entirely different biological or psychological dynamic is the horrific incidents of male gang rape of some female victim at drunken fraternity party.  I think along with Eve Sedgwick that this is essentially male homoerotics in action, males who can't get it on with each other-- out of inhibition first of all--live together in frat houses and then have sex together by raping a woman. It's two men screwing each other except in fact.   Moral idiots would call it bonding.  Somewhere in the range of homoerotics is the urge for a violent collision of bodies which is football.  The fans want it more and more violent, and the half time entertainment more and more the vision of women just this side short of pole dancing acting as sexy cheerleaders.  It's strange that with all the current talk of brain damage, the American moms and pops continue to want their boys to have their brains bashed in.  And those Little League events, adult males and their surrogates playing, the fathers yelling harshly and obscenely barking commands out to the kids. Strange the way that newspapers segregate into the sports page section the details of the wife beatings, the drunken misbehaviors, and then grossly, worst of all, the coach who sexually mishandles his youthful athlete charges.  So these are key to what sports is all about?  I would think it was more like criminal human living and misbehaving, hence stuff for the paper's front section.   As someone who was a crippled child and never has played sports, and was gay to boot, the world of "men" is alien to me.  On the plane coming to Florida I sat next to an extremely affable, and very witty fellow, maybe fifty, with whom I struck up a great conversation. He had been a firefighter whose career ended early when he survived a heroic action with extremely damaged lungs; it was a fire in which five colleagues perished.  As we separated on arrival, I reached out to shake his hand, and was startled to be taken into a giant hand with incredible strength.  That hand!  He was a real guy.  It made me think back to another revelation of maleness.  I was lying in post coital repose staring at the ceiling of a room underneath a giant of a man, a professional basketball player, who had fallen into a deep momentary post orgasmic sleep, and for a brief time, unwittingly relaxed all of his weight on to me.  And I realized then that I had no way to get out from under him, except with his permission and good will, and I thought for the first time what it must be like to be a woman in such a situation, and about power, and the dangerous temptation to abuse it, and the threat of not noticing its potential. This Sunday November 30th New York Times Magazine describes military officers convicted in a courts martial of raping fellow soldiers who were women, and then having the commanding officer dismiss these charges and return them to active service.  Same thing all over again.