When Heteropatriarchy Turns You On

A tenacious heteropatriarchal logic of gender normativity continues to script the behaviour of Chinese gay men. It was a decade ago when Tiantian Zheng (2015) made the anthropological observation that the kind of gay sex that Chinese homosexuals were having was, essentially, not about sex. The bottoms she interviewed confessed to a lack of sexual pleasure, accompanied by an entrenched belief that they had to satisfy the sexual needs of tops to make their relationships work. Gender, according to Zheng, structured gay intimacy around clearcut binaries: masculine and feminine, financially independent and dependent, and physically and emotionally strong and vulnerable. Almost a decade later, this binary logic has only intensified. Addressing the queer myth that ‘there are more bottoms than tops’ in China, Zhiqiu Benson Zhou attributes this perceived prevalence of bottoms to the belief (revealed by his informants) that being penetrated even once disqualifies one as a top in most cases. This reinforces ‘the alignment of the gendered role with the sexual position in the dominant side’, usually ascribing masculinity to tops, within a culture of ‘intensifying effeminophobia, fetishization of masculinity, and emasculation of 0s [bottoms] in gay communities’ (Zhou 2024: 1679).

This presents a stark paradox: the kind of masculinity that functions as a mode of gay male desire is precisely the normative force that renders legitimate both material and ideological oppression against homosexuality. Gay men’s erotically charged valorisation of that masculinity is thus pursued to their own detriment, socially or anally. In what ways can we make sense of the Chinese homosexual subject, if we reject—as we must—this subject simply as a victim of internalised homophobia or as a masculinist, heterosexist accomplice?

In this essay, I answer this question by arguing that gay men hold on to normativity because they derive intense pleasure from eroticising heteropatriarchy, as a practice of radical desubjectification. Faced with a regime that renders political agency impossible, these men find erotic vitality not in resisting their powerlessness, but in intensifying it—seeking the ecstasy of self-shattering by becoming the willing objects of a normative power they cannot overthrow.

Normativity Eroticised

Recently, a gay sexual subculture of S&M—sexual activities in which pleasure is derived from dominance and submission and the inflicting or receiving of pain and/or humiliation, physically or psychologically—has flourished on China’s highly censored and surveilled internet. This can appear paradoxical as homosexuality is almost never explicit on Chinese social media. Characteristic of this online S&M culture is the eroticisation of feet, socks, and sports shoes. On Douyin and RedNote, hashtags such as #s, #top, #1, #goon, #student athlete, #feet, #socks, or emojis that depict feet or socks reference a turn-on for gay men. The socks are associated with an image of an athletically toned, hetero-presenting man—one can imagine the smell of dirty socks in worn-out basketball shoes. Sometimes the sexual innuendo is discreet. For instance, a video will show a man playing the piano, but with his feet in white socks stepping on the pedals. Sometimes images are provocatively explicit. More adventurous gay men post pictures of bottles containing urine or blurred pictures of their ‘dogs’—the person playing the submissive part during sex—kneeling in front of them, either sniffing shoes or socks or licking feet. The blur creates a hazy eroticism while avoiding being flagged by the system. The association of socks with gay male subculture is now so well established that when a heterosexual gym-goer posts a selfie wearing white socks, the comment section quickly fills with jokes, questions about his sexuality, or offers to buy the socks, preferably smelly and sweaty.

One might be tempted to believe that it is a good thing politically for a straight man to be questioned about his sexual orientation, that this is an indication that heterosexuality is no longer taken for granted and that straight people are developing a sort of ‘hetero-reflexivity’ (Roseneil 2000). Some might even see this as a sign that queer culture has carved out its own niche within/against heteropatriarchal cultural hegemony. Sadly, in the Chinese context, such optimism is misplaced. Identity profiling based on sexual fetishes, especially when that fetish involves a common sartorial choice such as wearing white socks, not only risks reducing gay subjectivity to a taxonomic caricature, but also fundamentally misidentifies the source of the eroticism. It is not the socks or their scent in isolation that compels desire; detached from the symbolic weight of youthful, athletic virility, these objects hold little erotic currency. It is the men who wear these socks who are the real turn-on here; it is their macho masculinity that conjures images of virility, even violence, that speak to the masochistic desires of gay men who find it irresistible to worship socks, feet, and shoes, as symbols of a kind of masculinity that reflects ‘a socially determined and socially pervasive definition of what it means to be a man’ (Bersani 1987: 209).

It is not so much that straight men fear being mistaken as gay because of growing queer visibility that gives rise to a sense of ‘homosexual panic’ (Sedgwick 1990), but that gay men’s sexual desire actively eroticises macho masculinity. Expressions such as ‘straight man daddy’ (直男爹) articulate a desire for domination and humiliation by conventional embodiments of heterosexual masculinity. In their profile bios on Douyin, for example, many men say they are straight to ‘fend off’ private messages from gay men trying to flirt—a strategy that appears to be unsuccessful as their comment sections remain filled with salacious advances. Besides the common appellative ‘daddy’, these comments often ask: ‘Do you need a cup [缺杯子吗]?’, with ‘cup’ referring to a male masturbator. These gay commenters volunteer a ready self-objectification, identifying themselves as heterosexual men’s sex toys that exist only to please them with no desire to be desired in return. It is not sexual attraction that they are seeking, but to be used by people who simply do not care. The ‘goon’ hashtag mentioned above well represents this dynamic. The term refers to a man who rolls his eyes with intense pleasure, who often finds sexual gratification by being ‘a brainless dog’ (无脑狗), and who, above all else, craves degrading slurs and demeaning treatment, if only in those brief moments leading up to ejaculation.

Abjection, Pleasure, and Subjectivity

Michael Warner (1995) famously claimed that ‘abjection continues to be our [gay men’s] dirty secret’. This secret, as elaborated by Halperin (2007: 65), is that gay men can find pleasure ‘in being the lowest of the low, in being bad, in being outlaws, in betraying both our own values and those of the people around us’. One might read Chinese gay men’s voluntary descent into the status of a ‘thing’—a cup, a dog, a pair of eyes rolling back in mindless ecstasy—as a form of abjection. To submit oneself to the masculinist appeal of (straight) men, to feel excitement at being used and at volunteering that use, and to embrace—crave, no less—verbal, and sometimes physical, abuse that usually has homophobic and misogynistic connotations, as some Chinese gay men are doing, appears to be exactly that.

In some theories, abjection enacts a reversal of power relations, which can ‘deprive domination of its ability to demean’ by escaping its logic (Halperin 2007: 80). In this account, abjection is an exit strategy for a subject who already has a political identity as a member of a social group, and a form of queer optimism, with a liberatory potential. Far from an individual pathology or masochistic indulgence, it is a political gesture that is also a transformation of subjectivity.

Using this interpretative frame, reading S&M erotics on Chinese social media as a politics of abjection suggests a transformative giving up of power, status, and identity that were never theirs to begin with. In China, the political route to claiming a legitimate homosexual identity has already been foreclosed. Expressions of sexuality remain governed by the Party-State’s authoritarian and neoliberal governance logic, in which dissident desires are not recognised as a legitimate category (Ho et al. 2018). This ‘queer unintelligibility’, to borrow Petrus Liu’s (2025) phrasing, makes it clear that questions of gender and sexuality are not ‘merely cultural or identity-based issues’, as framed in Western liberal discourse, but require our attention to structural conditions that sanction, reject, or (un)name queer liveability. The homosexual subject is not politically legible but must remain normatively compliant and ideologically undisruptive. Under these conditions, abjection has no material with which to work. Gay desire can only survive within the framework of heteronormative existence, depriving it of a status of its own and depriving abjection of its transformative power.

Without transformative potential, abjection collapses into masochism—the ‘enjoyment of being dominated’ in an inescapable situation of humiliation and subjugation (Halperin 2007: 79). Masochism, in this sense, does not deconstruct, subvert, or overturn hierarchy; it eroticises the very reality of domination. When Chinese gay men fetishise the smell of a straight man’s socks or identify as a ‘brainless dog’, they are not ‘depriving domination of its ability to demean’. Power eroticised is not power defied. Instead, it is a validation of hegemonic masculinity deemed unassailable.

Within this paradigm, the worship of the straight male body can only appear as masochistic capitulation rather than subversive reappropriation. In this reading, the S&M erotics among Chinese gay men would amount to a self-defeating indulgence in heteropatriarchal power—one that eroticises domination without ever unsettling it, rendering gay men little more than heterosexist accomplices in their own debasement, as though engaged in a self-annihilating project simply for its sexual irresistibility. This harsh verdict, however, rests on the assumption that masochism must be evaluated in terms of power, resistance, or political efficacy. It would hold if we understood masochism literally—that is, if the masochist’s renouncing of his power meant submitting to the all-powerful sadist’s sovereignty. But what if the renunciation of power is precisely the point? What becomes of domination when power is not sought, resisted, or reclaimed, but willingly relinquished?

Powerlessness and Desubjectification

While the sadist appears to occupy the position of power, this appearance is precisely what obscures the structure of sadomasochism. As Leo Bersani (1995) insists, it is the primacy of masochism that reveals the intimate relation between pleasure and power—not as domination exercised over another, but as a pleasure generated through the dismantling of the subject that would otherwise seek power as a condition of social legibility. Read in this light, Chinese gay men’s erotic submission to masculinity cannot be understood as mere objectification by a dominant other. It is instead an affective investment in the pleasures of desubjectification, in which the renunciation of agency, coherence, and mastery becomes the condition of erotic intensity.

This aligns with Bersani’s (1986: 38) earlier argument that sexuality itself is ‘a tautology for masochism’ because the human organism survives the shattering stimuli of the world only by eroticising that shattering. When Chinese gay men worship the ‘straight man daddy’ or identify as ‘brainless dogs’, they are not merely replicating a social hierarchy; they are dismantling the defence mechanism of the self. They are exposing the phantasmatic potential of powerlessness that is often obscured by Western queer theory’s overdetermined investment in agency and resistance as the preconditions of political intelligibility. For Bersani (1987: 218), the ‘self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power’, but this self can only be made into a legitimated political subject once it is enmeshed in heteropatriarchal relations. If these relations are always already foreclosed, the gay subject continues to be denied political subjecthood. Yet, in this denial, it becomes an unlocatable being—a state of becoming that evades the Party-State’s desire for fixed, governable identities—not through resistance, but through dissolution.

We must, therefore, reconsider the hierarchy of the act. Why has power always been granted to ‘active’ thrusting rather than ‘passive’ reception? Why must power be sought over powerlessness? In the digital ecology of Douyin, the macho man in dirty socks is, after all, being absorbed into a fantasy that does not confer sovereignty on the fantasising subject. The erotic valorisation of masculine dominance does not detract from male power, but it does fundamentally transform the experience of that power. It shifts the locus of intensity from the one who holds the sovereignty to the one who is shattered by it.

If we reject the framework of ‘identity’ because the political sphere forecloses it, and we reject Halperin’s notion of ‘abjection-subjectivity’ because these acts do not offer an escape from shame, with what are we left? What becomes visible here is a form of radical desubjectification. In the context of an authoritarian neoliberalism that demands total compliance yet offers no political agency, the attempt to maintain a coherent subjecthood is a source of constant psychic strain. Through desubjectification, the political subject welcomes its own erasure, finding pleasure in giving up the attempt.

Living with, Not Against, Power

Ultimately, the S&M erotic practices on Douyin—the transformation into a ‘cup’, a ‘dog’, or a worshipper of dirty socks—are not attempts to build a new gay subject. Rather, they are technologies of self-dissolution. By affectively investing in their own reduction to a utilitarian object (a masturbator for a straight man) or a sensory receptor (for the smell of sweat), Chinese gay men are not seeking to redeem their social status. They are finding erotic intensity in the abandonment of the status altogether. If the Party-State depends on recognisable, governable subjects, the erotic project unfolding in these masochistic practices stages a quiet but profound deviation: the subject becomes diffuse, emptied out, sensorial rather than political. This diffusion does not escape governance; it simply ceases to matter to it. This is neither liberation nor rebellion. It is a refusal of the moral demand that queer pleasure justify itself through its anticipated political promise, under conditions in which political subjecthood has already been foreclosed. If one cannot escape power, one can become a vessel for it, in a way that empties it(self) out.

I am not sublimating sex. I am taking these erotic practices seriously on their own terms to show how, in the absence of viable political subjecthood, Chinese gay men fashion ways of living with power rather than against it. The point is not that masochism redeems heteropatriarchy, nor that it subverts it, but that it offers an idiom through which powerlessness becomes erotically, affectively, and sensorially bearable. To come closer to power by becoming its object is, in this sense, less a failure of queer politics than a recalibration of what it means to live, and to enjoy, when the very aspiration to a coherent ‘I’ is out of reach. The Chinese gay man’s masochistic play with power is ultimately a diagnosis of his irrelevance under conditions in which politics itself has been foreclosed. Without a future, the present moment of sensation—no matter how abject—becomes the only timeline that matters. In this light, the ‘brainless dog’ is not a failure of the gay subject, but a paradoxical survivalist: a creature who has learned to extract ecstasy from the very machinery of his erasure, not as resistance, not as critique, but as a mode of living on when political futurity has been structurally withdrawn.

Featured Image: White Socks. Source: Marcus Kern (CC), unsplash.com

References

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