Victor's likeability: hmmm, 'fraid his self-aggrandising twattishness (albeit expressed in a fairly limited way) trumps any perceptible good qualities, for me anyway. He's just sooo all-mouth and nooo trousers, I find it hard to see beyond that.
As has been mentioned many times previously, there's nothing sexual about Marco at all. His only real addition to the house is his rampantly cliched limp-wristed squealing with a side order of vicious bitchery, do you honestly want that tipping any kind of balance? I put it to you that his departure wouldn't change the 'sexuality' of the house as a whole because he's not currently adding anything to it.
I see what you're saying, but I'm not talking sexual activity so much as the perceived spectrum of sexual orientation(s) in the house, and how this affects the way individuals and groups organise themselves.
At the start of this year's Big Brother, I drew a distinction between the phenomenon of a 'token homo' among straights (as has tended to be the case most other years) and contriving a more equal balance. Initially, we had Marco, Dan and Kitten providing the obvious non-hetero Other - and there was Nadia (whose presence at least evoked the spectre of gender fluidity, and led to questioning/discussion) and a number of others who defined themselves in varying shades of bisexual. This was very different from the more usual 'poof among hets' scenario, and perhaps provided an appropriately 'polysexual' environment in which the likes of Jason felt able to discuss his own sexual anxieties/dissatisfactions/ambiguities - in an intriguingly honest way.
If this situation had continued, perhaps some of the other maybisexuals would've explored their complexities a little more thoroughly. As it happened, Kitten was evicted, leaving only two self-defined homos. The bisexual contingent seemed to draw its horns in (or was, perhaps, never that adventurous in the first place) and expressed flirtatious desire along predominantly hetero lines. The heteros (particularly the hetero males) appeared to consolidate as a group, ludicrously christening themselves the Jungle Cats (as opposed, presumably, to the sexually Other 'pussies'). Jason - who is, I think, a sensitive barometer of such things - quit the soul-baring, allied himself with the most panto-obvious Alpha Male, Victor.
Since then, we've lost a straight female and a supposedly bi female - and gained one of the latter. Becki, as appears to be the way with Big Brother bisexuals, has expressed 'fanciability' only for the opposite sex, so she doesn't tip the balance much. Her entry to the house did, however, seem to up the ante with the Alpha Males, with Jason not merely retreating wholly beneath his hetero facade, but actually denying ever having claimed to be bisexual. Dan commented that he'd met loads of guys like Jason and, sadly, I'd have to agree; as with many 'hard men', it takes an artificially accepting (hothousing polysexual) environment to coax him into admitting any degree of vulnerability/ambiguity. The more hetero his surroundings, the more he conforms, becoming an exaggerated (but ultimately failed) stereotype of masculinity.
So... this is why I think the mere fact of Marco's presence in the house has wider implications - even if Marco himself is uniquely irritating. He's one half of the house's Queer Pole and, if he goes, I envisage further conforming to rather bland heteronormativity, all ambiguity squeezed out. He doesn't contribute anything directly, no, but the fact that he's there, and so blatantly (if asexually) non-hetero helps produce a more interesting environment. For me, anyway. |
