#And because Shane did not really show any reciprocal cues my friend said his first reaction to Ilya escalating was:#‘Oh. So we just throwing away careers now. Oh wait— this is hockey. 🙄’
There is something that I think many women-- or really anyone who has never existed in exclusively male spaces due to being segregated into exclusively female spaces in contexts like this-- miss with this scene. For the same reason a lot of men may fail to recognize the "mean girl tone" and the subtleties of harassment in female-exclusive spaces.
There are women who treat a men's locker room or bathroom as something as alien and unrecognizable as Mars. An analogy to paint a picture: I went to an all-girls leadership camp in HS. We got 10-minute "bathroom breaks" for 500 girls between seminars. The lines for the "women's" were outrageous. I decided that waiting was stupid; I'd never get in a piss if I waited, so I started using the "men's" infrastructure that was not being used. I remember the other girls 1.) telling me this was morally wrong, 2.) expressing horror and bewilderment over my decision, and 3.) speaking of the "men's" room like a curious oddity. I remember one girl telling me that she'd never seen a urinal before, and speaking about men standing to piss like it'd be a zoo exhibit.
They matured from the age of 16, I'm sure, and are probably now as normal about genitals as cishet women (many of them I know are married to men and have sons) probably can be under our sex caste system. This is all just to say that there is a certain foreignness to men's spaces that makes whatever happens inside feel like a fantasy. Not inherently a fantasy in the same sense as the way pervert men like to imagine their girlfriends' sleepovers, just ot be clear. Mostly fantasy in the sense that whatever happens within would be entirely imagined because they've never seen an all-male space from within, as a man. There's a certain feeling of removal from the space and its dynamics.
Professor Neil, a College English Professor in Sudbury, opened up about how the shower scene, specifically, made him feel very anxious. Crucially, not because of Ilya's coming onto Shane, but because he is familiar with all-male spaces and the way the gender panopticon acts within them. He felt a sense of dread for Shane because he has been the "little guy" in all-male spaces or the odd one out, singled out for immutable characteristics (and personality) and harassed in very vulnerable and inappropriate ways. He recalled being psychologically abused in these spaces. He also recalled how, within these spaces, other men (or boys) will constantly question your masculinity, often by desexing you (which usually takes the form of being likened to a "bitch" or "fag"; misogyny and homophobia are pervasive forces).
He's seeing a half East Asian man within a racist system (hockey, white supremacy) that feminizes-- desexes-- East Asian men, facing down an asshole white man who's been built up as someone who likely hates him in an environment (hockey, all-male spaces) that proliferates sexual harassment and assault, especially of men deemed too "different" for the space. And he's hearing this character say "no" while the other presses anyway, all while deeply understanding the heavy-- and often violent-- gender surveillance and policing in these spaces. He knows what it's like to be hazed, and had to remind himself of the genre (gay romance) because Ilya-- the character-- is not *intended* to be that cishet bully from high school, about to enforce his place in a hierarchy; the intention is that they're actually "gay" for one another.
For some men, this scene brought with it the trauma of being hazed in the past, and they felt anxiety for Shane (because they're familiar with hazing rituals in all-male spaces, they consciously reminded themselves of the genre and scene intention: two men find each other in an environment hostile to men being together; not harassment). For other men-- mostly those who are queer and familiar with the intricacies of cruising-- the scene left them with a sense of bafflement and injustice, with it coming across more like a homophobic stereotype than something genuine (because they're also personally familiar with the homophobia pervasive in all-male spaces-- and continually kept the genre in perspective within our larger social context-- it doesn't matter the scene's intention, the impact is that it comes across as a pervasive homophobic lie).
And I find the different ways different people felt during that scene fascinating. I especially find fascinating how many men did not interpret that scene as good-faith flirting between queer men, but rather as harassment (with some interpreting it as a "fags make passes" homophobic stereotype and others interpreting it as a [het] bully about to enforce his place in a hierarchy against a marginalized, likely gay, man).
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