Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

How many genders can a society have? Just two? Well, in Tonga they've got three, thank you very much. And if you think that sounds good, just read on.

Tonga, you will recall, is one of the Polynesian islands of the South Pacific, not so far from the better known Samoa. Anthropologists interested in how a society might organize sex and gender have been fascinated by Tonga, where a third gender role is recognized, the fakaleiti. Fakaleiti are men who dress in women's clothes, do women's work, and have sex with other men. The male partners of the fakaleiti always take the active/top role and do not consider themselves gay, nor does society in general consider them gay.

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In a Tongan world with three genders, fakaleiti are strictly heterosexual, because they always have sex with members of a different gender. Fakaleiti never form romantic relationships with each other. As one fakaleiti said, "That would be like lesbianism!" Many Tongans consider sex with fakaleiti a transitional stage in a man's life-- appropriate for the years before marriage and children, but essentially kid stuff.

Three genders was one too many for the European missionaries. They tried to eliminate fakaleiti, but were unable to do so. Instead they managed to convince a substantial part of Tongan society that the fakaleiti were evil sinners. This reinforced a macho strain in Tonga, and encouraged men to prove their heterosexuality by abusing fakaleiti. Tongan society increasingly seems to have a sharp dichotomy between two kinds of male behavior.The macho Polynesian warrior typified by the half-Samoan wrestler, The Rock, is one extreme. The transgendered cross-dresser is the other.

So Tonga is unfortunately no island paradise. Fakaleiti find life tough in today's Tonga. Their straight partners often beat or abuse them, and inevitably leave them when the time for marriage arrives. Researchers have found the fakaleiti increasingly marginal and victimized by a culture of machismo.

The Tongan rugby player John Hopoate epitomizes this sort of machismo. Hopoate, a player with the Australian team the Wests Tigers, was forced to resign from the team after several incidents in which he purposely stuck his finger up the asshole of an opposing player.

Hopoate's modus operandi was to tackle other players, then shove his finger up their asses while grinning demonically at them. Hopoate apparently meant the fingering to be a way of intimidating the players on the other team. In the hearings on the incidents, Hopoate claimed that rugby players routinely get wedgies and jabbed in the stork (punched in the groin) during tackles. His penetrations, he said, were merely mistakes that happened while he was trying to maul his opponents' genitalia in other ways.

No one believed Hopoate, and to his misfortune, the videotape from one match showed him quite clearly and intentionally sticking his finger up another guy's ass. This clip was replayed endlessly in Australia, and led to a whole round of Hopoate jokes. One wag suggested that the clip be titled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Finger. An editorial cartoon suggested that the best way to clean up rugby would be rubber gloves for the players. Hopoate was suspended, and eventually resigned from rugby all together.

From Miss Poubelle's reading of the story, it seems that Hopoate did not engage in his fingering of the other players for conscious sexual pleasure. Instead, it seems that he saw the fingerings as a way of attacking and humiliating the other players-- penetrating them as a way of demonstrating his power over them and thereby gaining a psychological advantage on the field.

It is natural to wonder whether there was also some deeper, unconscious motivation on Hopoate's part. In some part of his mind, did he enjoy "digitially raping" his opponents? That we will never know. But Miss Poubelle suspects that the explanation for Hopoate's behavior doesn't lie so much in Freudian repression as it does in Tongan culture. Hopoate was proving his heterosexuality through sexual abuse of other men. That's the way that macho guys behave in Tonga, so why should it surprise anyone on an Australian rugby field? Hopoate was only treating his opponents the way a Tongan tough has been taught to treat a fakaleiti.