Darqueau, I am all in favor of questioning authority and celebrating the power of the imagination. Merriam-Webster, and other "authoritative" dictionaries, are tools not edicts. The question you raise about the validity of such dictionaries compared to Wikipedia, Wordie, Urban Dictionary and other interactive user-created sources of information is an interesting question and well worth discussing. For me the question really is "valid for what purpose?" If I want to know how people are currently using a word, what connotations it holds for different groups, and how its meaning is changing, I will get more information about that from interactive web-based lexicons than from Oxford. But if the history of the word is important to me, how people have used it in the past, its range of established meanings, its etymology, the meanings that have encrusted to it over centuries, then I would turn to the established academic lexicographers as well as the writers, the users of English over the past millennium, whom I respect.
Authority exists so that we can question it and engage it, struggle with it and resist it, accept it when it has proved its merit, and reject it when it has proved its folly; this is the way to combat passivity, and to grow in our lives while interacting not only with our peers and those we agree with and identify with, but also with other eras, other cultures, with the strange, the different, and indeed, with the queer.
well, okay. I'm no preacher or zealous adherent of ideologies either. Its usually a bad idea to turn a verb into a noun... but... some gay men are sick of being asked if they are a "top" or a "bottom" and have no desire to be either... This concern has lead to the usage of the word frot in the way originally described by the anonymous urban lexicographer...as well as others. Thats all.
Referencing other cultures, and earlier epochs can only go so far. The imagination is more powerful than the memory. We all possess the propensity to develop new terms and languages, & It is preferable to do so in order to avoid stagnation and more importantly, domination. There is no omniscient lexical authority which we must obey. The so-called authority of mirriam-webster is no more valid than that of all the contributors on wikipedia, wiktionary, wordie, or urban dictionary.
interactive sites such as these, in my opinion are even more valid, as they help to eliminate authority and passivity.
"burn all libraries, and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of legend will then begin!"
Thanks, reesetee! I'm afraid I'm in a writing mood, so here's more.
Darqueau, I am very familiar with the tendency in the gay community to stereotype ourselves, and I agree that it is important to combat it. Too many gay men worry about "roles" (top, bottom, butch, nelly, bear, twink, boy, daddy, leather, etc.). It's so tedious, though I know that people who have often felt excluded or rejected find comfort in such roles, as a way to feel part of a community, as a way to define themselves clearly. I am more of a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may sort of guy (I have got to stop using these hyphenated phrasal modifiers!).
I think it's important not to get too hung up about what body parts go where, when discussing sex, whether hetero-, homo-, or I'll-have-a-little-of-everything-please (there I go again).
Still, the fact is that in many cultures, historically and currently, a man who lets himself be anally penetrated by another man is despised for adopting the position of women, who are considered to be inferior to men. Curiously, in these cultures the problem is not so much that anal sex is associated with the anus (and hence with shit), because heterosexual anal sex has always been an important, widespread, and acceptable form of birth control (btw, I was surprised to see what a prominent role hetero anal sex played in the Italian hardcore porn they used to show on late-night Slovene TV when I first came here). Also, in these cultures, a man who penetrates another man is not especially stigmatized. So the opprobrium around gay anal sex comes not from its association with the anus or shit but from its association with a man being penetrated and thus relinquishing his manliness. In super-hygienic America, however, I expect the association gaysex-anus-shit does influence some people's homophobia.
I certainly would never say that a man isn't a "real" gay man until he has taken it up the ass, or even (as one Canadian judge once said) that writing about gay sex without mentioning anal sex is like writing the history of Western music without mentioning Mozart. There are many delightful ways for men to have earth-moving sex.
And I suppose it's good for people to realize that we gay men do other things in bed besides stick our penises in each other's rectums. But I would rather they accept the fact that many of us do in fact do this (just as we do our best to accept the fact that many hetero men put their tongues in vaginas – only kidding). And it would be really cool if they could remember that we do many other things besides sex, like love and support each other faithfully, raise healthy and happy children, take care of our aging parents, worry about the environment, pay taxes, vote, and water our neighbor's plants for them when they go on holiday. A couple of us even run cities like Berlin and Paris.
I can certainly respect the fact that many men sincerely enjoy anal penetration, however, "gay" and "anal" have almost become synonymous. Unfortunately, this notion is quite stereotypical and erroneous. The term frot is important, i feel, because it helps to dispel this myth, and open up the possibility for young gay men (and everyone else) to realize that there are other things that men do in bed together... and "frot" is not meant to simply be just the next best thing to the "real" way to have gay sex... Nonetheless, I'm pleased to see that good old-fashioned Man Lovin' has received such attention on this website!
as for "Darqueau"... I guess it could be called quasi-gallic, or rather, anglo-gallic. i.e... I made it up. Nadeau is my real name... which I have been told means "Darkwater"... So I took some liberties with these two words and formed a new one that essentially means the same thing, but as Rolig pointed out, can be pronounced "Darko"
Ah, but I have my suspicions as to just how Gallic the name Darqueau really is. After all, it sounds an awful lot like the not-uncommon South Slavic name Darko.
I'm totally sure you're right about Darqueau. Nobody with a French username can be a bad person.
I was actually talking about the thumb-up/thumb-down option, but...
Thanks, Prolagus. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the "thumb-me" option. Is this a convenient way to tell UD "up yours!" (i.e. the classic thumb-between-the-index-and-middle-finger sign)? That would hardly be demasculinizing!
Actually, I like Urban Dictionary, and use it occasionally in my work as a translator when I need to find or invent a workable English equivalent for some Slovene youth slang. It's just that I bristle a bit when sites like UD or even Wikipedia are cited as reliable authorities (though I don't really think that is what Darqueau was doing; I suspect he merely wanted to cite a curious opinion about the word).
Not here, not now, bilby.
rolig, I guess we all agree. UD has a "thumb-me" option that all Wordie users are now formally invited to use - it's anonymous and, believe me, painless. And it doesn't demasculinize your self image.
A couple of thoughts here. First, a technical matter: "frot" is not so much a contraction of frottage as a back-formation of the same (though it is fair to say, I suppose, that back-formation is a particular kind of contraction).
Second, the UD definition of the word disturbs me because the writer is saying (if I unpack the sentence correctly) that gay men's lives have been dominated by a self-image that has been "feminized" in an unhealthy, excessive way, and as a result, some gay men are deliberately (and not only for the sake of sexual pleasure) refusing to let their bodies be penetrated anally. In other words, they believe that being anally penetrated has something to do with "feminizing", or to put it less arcanely, "being made to play the woman". (A personal reminiscence: when I came out to my avowedly heterosexual brother, his first question, asked with much concern, was: "Are you the guy or the girl?" Apparently, inquiring minds want to know things that are none of their business. My brother, I suspect, wanted to be reassured that his close kinsman was still somehow a man despite his "irregular" attraction to other men.) I find the UD commentary disturbing because it reflects attitudes rooted in misogyny, and, in my view, misogyny has been one of the major causes (if not the major cause) of the modern oppression of gay men and lesbians. Also, in my experience – both in my own life and in the lives of friends – the ability to appreciate one's feminine side (if that is what you want to call it) is essential to being a happy and psychologically healthy homosexual man, though I agree that it is also important for gay men to accept themselves as being fully men (and not somehow "deficient men"), and to realize that as gay men we help shape the definition of what a "real man" is, and we have no need to shape ourselves to fit some artificial or exogenous definition of masculinity.
My third thought, a more general one, is that we should always be somewhat wary of definitions and other quasi-authoritative pronouncements on Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia, and other user-created lexicons. At the very least, we should keep in mind that while such definitions may tell us something about the current usage of, and attitudes about, a word, they may be nothing more than personal opinion, however valuable personal opinion might be in itself.
Thank you for helping me, Darqueau. Believe me, I didn't have any problem in understanding the first part. But this overly and unhealthily feminized self image... oh, wait, now that it's in brackets I know what it is!!!
this definition requires one to use the imagination a bit I guess... maybe it's somewhat esoteric. It made perfect sense to me when I originally read it on the UD website... but without a prior knowledge, I can now see the possible confusion. To be straightforward (for all the straight folks)- Frot is when two men achieve orgasm by rubbing their cocks together. The second paragraph is trying to explain that some men consciously choose frot as a sexual preference... especially over anal sex.
Well, it does come from Urban Dictionary, which gives it a fairly low standard to live up to (not that I don't love UD, sometimes). I admit I had to read it a couple of times myself to understand exactly what it was saying.
Maybe it'll make more sense if I read when it's not 4 o'clock in the morning?
I don't understand the whole 2nd paragraph, apparently. But I think it's a mixture of problems with the single words used and incapacity to interpret its meaning as a whole.
This one? "This growing movement of men into frot who disown anal sex is not simply a matter of sexual taste."
Poorly worded, I think. But I believe it means that there's a growing number of men who don't have anal sex any more, and it's not necessarily because they don't like it.
Used in the gay community as a term for an activity involving sexual gratification by rubbing that occurs between two men who do not wish, usually out of preference, to engage in anal intercourse. etymology: contraction of 'frottage' This growing movement of men into frot who disown anal sex is not simply a matter of sexual taste. It goes farther than that, for it's a rejection of the overly and unhealthily feminized self-image of gay men that has dominated our lives for generations (urban dictionary)
By the way, Catherine Frot is practically a grown-up sosia* of Hayden Panettiere.
*Look-alike. But I want to tell you the story of the word "Sosia" someday.
Darqueau, I am all in favor of questioning authority and celebrating the power of the imagination. Merriam-Webster, and other "authoritative" dictionaries, are tools not edicts. The question you raise about the validity of such dictionaries compared to Wikipedia, Wordie, Urban Dictionary and other interactive user-created sources of information is an interesting question and well worth discussing. For me the question really is "valid for what purpose?" If I want to know how people are currently using a word, what connotations it holds for different groups, and how its meaning is changing, I will get more information about that from interactive web-based lexicons than from Oxford. But if the history of the word is important to me, how people have used it in the past, its range of established meanings, its etymology, the meanings that have encrusted to it over centuries, then I would turn to the established academic lexicographers as well as the writers, the users of English over the past millennium, whom I respect.
Authority exists so that we can question it and engage it, struggle with it and resist it, accept it when it has proved its merit, and reject it when it has proved its folly; this is the way to combat passivity, and to grow in our lives while interacting not only with our peers and those we agree with and identify with, but also with other eras, other cultures, with the strange, the different, and indeed, with the queer.
well, okay. I'm no preacher or zealous adherent of ideologies either. Its usually a bad idea to turn a verb into a noun...
but... some gay men are sick of being asked if they are a "top" or a "bottom" and have no desire to be either... This concern has lead to the usage of the word frot in the way originally described by the anonymous urban lexicographer...as well as others. Thats all.
Referencing other cultures, and earlier epochs can only go so far. The imagination is more powerful than the memory. We all possess the propensity to develop new terms and languages, & It is preferable to do so in order to avoid stagnation and more importantly, domination. There is no omniscient lexical authority which we must obey. The so-called authority of mirriam-webster is no more valid than that of all the contributors on wikipedia, wiktionary, wordie, or urban dictionary.
interactive sites such as these, in my opinion are even more valid, as they help to eliminate authority and passivity.
"burn all libraries, and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of legend will then begin!"
Together with a lot of bad, illegal, clumsy, and stupid things, just as heterosexual people. Bravo rolig.
Thanks, reesetee! I'm afraid I'm in a writing mood, so here's more.
Darqueau, I am very familiar with the tendency in the gay community to stereotype ourselves, and I agree that it is important to combat it. Too many gay men worry about "roles" (top, bottom, butch, nelly, bear, twink, boy, daddy, leather, etc.). It's so tedious, though I know that people who have often felt excluded or rejected find comfort in such roles, as a way to feel part of a community, as a way to define themselves clearly. I am more of a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may sort of guy (I have got to stop using these hyphenated phrasal modifiers!).
I think it's important not to get too hung up about what body parts go where, when discussing sex, whether hetero-, homo-, or I'll-have-a-little-of-everything-please (there I go again).
Still, the fact is that in many cultures, historically and currently, a man who lets himself be anally penetrated by another man is despised for adopting the position of women, who are considered to be inferior to men. Curiously, in these cultures the problem is not so much that anal sex is associated with the anus (and hence with shit), because heterosexual anal sex has always been an important, widespread, and acceptable form of birth control (btw, I was surprised to see what a prominent role hetero anal sex played in the Italian hardcore porn they used to show on late-night Slovene TV when I first came here). Also, in these cultures, a man who penetrates another man is not especially stigmatized. So the opprobrium around gay anal sex comes not from its association with the anus or shit but from its association with a man being penetrated and thus relinquishing his manliness. In super-hygienic America, however, I expect the association gaysex-anus-shit does influence some people's homophobia.
I certainly would never say that a man isn't a "real" gay man until he has taken it up the ass, or even (as one Canadian judge once said) that writing about gay sex without mentioning anal sex is like writing the history of Western music without mentioning Mozart. There are many delightful ways for men to have earth-moving sex.
And I suppose it's good for people to realize that we gay men do other things in bed besides stick our penises in each other's rectums. But I would rather they accept the fact that many of us do in fact do this (just as we do our best to accept the fact that many hetero men put their tongues in vaginas – only kidding). And it would be really cool if they could remember that we do many other things besides sex, like love and support each other faithfully, raise healthy and happy children, take care of our aging parents, worry about the environment, pay taxes, vote, and water our neighbor's plants for them when they go on holiday. A couple of us even run cities like Berlin and Paris.
As for me, I am simply a reader of texts.
All-righty then.
By the way, I prefer the second, funnily explicit UD definition!
I can certainly respect the fact that many men sincerely enjoy anal penetration, however, "gay" and "anal" have almost become synonymous. Unfortunately, this notion is quite stereotypical and erroneous. The term frot is important, i feel, because it helps to dispel this myth, and open up the possibility for young gay men (and everyone else) to realize that there are other things that men do in bed together... and "frot" is not meant to simply be just the next best thing to the "real" way to have gay sex... Nonetheless, I'm pleased to see that good old-fashioned Man Lovin' has received such attention on this website!
as for "Darqueau"... I guess it could be called quasi-gallic, or rather, anglo-gallic. i.e... I made it up. Nadeau is my real name... which I have been told means "Darkwater"... So I took some liberties with these two words and formed a new one that essentially means the same thing, but as Rolig pointed out, can be pronounced "Darko"
Ah, but I have my suspicions as to just how Gallic the name Darqueau really is. After all, it sounds an awful lot like the not-uncommon South Slavic name Darko.
I'm totally sure you're right about Darqueau. Nobody with a French username can be a bad person.
I was actually talking about the thumb-up/thumb-down option, but...
Thanks, Prolagus. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the "thumb-me" option. Is this a convenient way to tell UD "up yours!" (i.e. the classic thumb-between-the-index-and-middle-finger sign)? That would hardly be demasculinizing!
Actually, I like Urban Dictionary, and use it occasionally in my work as a translator when I need to find or invent a workable English equivalent for some Slovene youth slang. It's just that I bristle a bit when sites like UD or even Wikipedia are cited as reliable authorities (though I don't really think that is what Darqueau was doing; I suspect he merely wanted to cite a curious opinion about the word).
Not here, not now, bilby.
rolig, I guess we all agree. UD has a "thumb-me" option that all Wordie users are now formally invited to use - it's anonymous and, believe me, painless. And it doesn't demasculinize your self image.
It's always 2.41pm somewhere.
A couple of thoughts here. First, a technical matter: "frot" is not so much a contraction of frottage as a back-formation of the same (though it is fair to say, I suppose, that back-formation is a particular kind of contraction).
Second, the UD definition of the word disturbs me because the writer is saying (if I unpack the sentence correctly) that gay men's lives have been dominated by a self-image that has been "feminized" in an unhealthy, excessive way, and as a result, some gay men are deliberately (and not only for the sake of sexual pleasure) refusing to let their bodies be penetrated anally. In other words, they believe that being anally penetrated has something to do with "feminizing", or to put it less arcanely, "being made to play the woman". (A personal reminiscence: when I came out to my avowedly heterosexual brother, his first question, asked with much concern, was: "Are you the guy or the girl?" Apparently, inquiring minds want to know things that are none of their business. My brother, I suspect, wanted to be reassured that his close kinsman was still somehow a man despite his "irregular" attraction to other men.) I find the UD commentary disturbing because it reflects attitudes rooted in misogyny, and, in my view, misogyny has been one of the major causes (if not the major cause) of the modern oppression of gay men and lesbians. Also, in my experience – both in my own life and in the lives of friends – the ability to appreciate one's feminine side (if that is what you want to call it) is essential to being a happy and psychologically healthy homosexual man, though I agree that it is also important for gay men to accept themselves as being fully men (and not somehow "deficient men"), and to realize that as gay men we help shape the definition of what a "real man" is, and we have no need to shape ourselves to fit some artificial or exogenous definition of masculinity.
My third thought, a more general one, is that we should always be somewhat wary of definitions and other quasi-authoritative pronouncements on Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia, and other user-created lexicons. At the very least, we should keep in mind that while such definitions may tell us something about the current usage of, and attitudes about, a word, they may be nothing more than personal opinion, however valuable personal opinion might be in itself.
Thank you for helping me, Darqueau.
Believe me, I didn't have any problem in understanding the first part. But this overly and unhealthily feminized self image... oh, wait, now that it's in brackets I know what it is!!!
this definition requires one to use the imagination a bit I guess... maybe it's somewhat esoteric. It made perfect sense to me when I originally read it on the UD website... but without a prior knowledge, I can now see the possible confusion.
To be straightforward (for all the straight folks)- Frot is when two men achieve orgasm by rubbing their cocks together. The second paragraph is trying to explain that some men consciously choose frot as a sexual preference... especially over anal sex.
Don't lie, plethora, it's 2.41 pm.
Well, it does come from Urban Dictionary, which gives it a fairly low standard to live up to (not that I don't love UD, sometimes). I admit I had to read it a couple of times myself to understand exactly what it was saying.
Maybe it'll make more sense if I read when it's not 4 o'clock in the morning?
I don't understand the whole 2nd paragraph, apparently. But I think it's a mixture of problems with the single words used and incapacity to interpret its meaning as a whole.
This one? "This growing movement of men into frot who disown anal sex is not simply a matter of sexual taste."
Poorly worded, I think. But I believe it means that there's a growing number of men who don't have anal sex any more, and it's not necessarily because they don't like it.
I don't get the second sentence. Can anyone "translate" it?
Used in the gay community as a term for an activity involving sexual gratification by rubbing that occurs between two men who do not wish, usually out of preference, to engage in anal intercourse.
etymology: contraction of 'frottage'
This growing movement of men into frot who disown anal sex is not simply a matter of sexual taste. It goes farther than that, for it's a rejection of the overly and unhealthily feminized self-image of gay men that has dominated our lives for generations (urban dictionary)