If two men take to the woods behind a highway rest stop to engage in homosexual acts, but no one is there to see--do they make a sound? What is the sound of one hand clapping against the rear of another (in the woods behind said rest stop)? How much wood could a...
You see where we're going.
And the answer is yes.
Cue Conner Habib: writer, teacher, gay porn star (ah, now you remember where you've heard the name), and lover of rest stop sex. Yesterday, Habib took to Salon.com ("Rest Stop Confidential") to present a manifesto, of sorts, on the culture of men who have sex with men in the public restrooms that dot highways all across the United States.
Habib's nuanced, heartfelt article presents a complicated picture of who participates in this phenomenon, and why, using personal anecdotes and by making these family hating, seething sex-seekers look almost...human.
Cue the commenters.
Chuck W. kicks things off by suggesting that it is better to wet one's pants than risk walking in on two men mid-coitus.
"Ew! I thought this was some joke that the Farrelly brothers wrote for There's Something About Mary. A friend told me otherwise and said that certain rest stops that I often drove past were infamously popular. Now I make a point of avoiding highway rest stops when I travel alone."
Interesting, Chuck. But what do you do when you're not traveling alone?
Commenter reader reader doesn't seem to believe that such an unfathomable thing could ever, possibly exist, and wonders, "Is there any reason to believe that Conner's story is true? That he has had sex 100s of times in rest stops?"
Ludicrous...
Thankfully, the comments section has as many disbelieving folks with angry words for Habib as it has people who seem to understand how frequently rest stop sex happens.
Friend of the Court jumps in with this judicious comment: "Gross. Pathetic...It will make mothers wonder whether it is safe to send their boy children into public men's...bathrooms that are provided by the state government for the use of the traveling public, not for predatory perverts who are obsessed with other men's and boy's penises."
And angelodp agrees, "How sad. Get help."
Meanwhile, Steerpike maneuvers things back to reality, writing "Or maybe this is a completely ordinary occurence. men screwing in places like this is about as revelatory as finding out that people smoke in their cars, or that people have sex with their girls in the back of cars."
And those are all just from the first couple of pages. The article has incited dozens of responses and responses to responses that bluntly illustrate just how distasteful many people find the idea of two men having sex.
And that is a shame because the article doesn't actually sexualize the act of getting caught, as it were. It sexualizes anonymity. A similar idea to what's offered by internet screen names. Right, angelodp?
