on Celegorm and sex
My interpretation actually holds Celegorm as very squarely bisexual, a solid Kinsey 3.5 because it's absolutely secondary to him as to what the sex and gender of the recipient of his enlightened fëanárian cock is, as long as he gets to be on top; the primary pointers of his sexual orientation are sadomasochistic dominant, and the rest is set dressing. In theory this should lead to Celegorm being an equal opportunity fucker.
However: he is chauvinistic, and he is accustomed to living in his little boys club, between his family, the patriarchal house of Finwë as a whole, the royal court & the hunt of Oromë which is in its own way a place where perverted aristocratic boys that won't play nice at court and get nicely court married go to escape scrutiny, be perverts, eat raw organs, and engage in mutual masturbation outdoors under the guise of technical celibacy because they're not getting married and/or having LaCE compliant heterosexual intercourse that produces children. It's not the hierarchy itself he takes issue with; it's the presumption of future sexual life in a productive marriage that he dislikes (and avoids through the Hunt). And he exists in multiple spheres throughout his life where masculinity is praised & desirable & aspirational, and generally by proclivity avoids ones where this viewpoint would be challenged, or even ones with a more mixed gender ratio, thus mentally affirming the hierarchy.
And he loves being part of the hunt and is fulfilled by his participation and the position in society he occupies through association with it (where he is given an out from being pressured to take up court office or marry through religious monasticism, and the prestige awarded by Oromë's favour compliments the role in social life he chooses to take), although the huntsmen's private lives (not just sexual) are monastic, insular, non-normative and in some ways taboo in polite society in multiple directions (both due to the homoeroticism & due to the violence and unusually close relationship with death that mainstream Amanyar society doesn't tend to partake in habitually); as a response to this perceived lack of acceptance of those parts of himself that he doesn't see a functional flaw in, but which are unacceptable to openly espouse, he over time comes to tout his own lack of compliance, presents himself in polite society as the virgin prince while simultaneously becoming progressively more open and provocative about his war fetishism and violent, gory symbolism being worn proudly and used in iconography related to him (Fëanor's example of deciding if society disagrees, clearly it is society who's in the wrong, may have given him some not-insubstantial ammunition). The hierarchy still isn't what he takes issue with, in fact he benefits from it and its value is further entrenched in his mind; it's only the end goal and the gamut of sexual expression he, as a man in a position of aristocratic power, is allowed to espouse in public that he disagrees with and that he transgresses in.
It is in no small part this insularity of the hunt's practices and symbolism and ethos that makes it progressively harder to relate to non-hunt-riders, or even those not directly under oath, and see them less as equals, and almost all the people he does see as equals wrt/ his value framework and field are squarely masculine men, leading to a kind of partition:
- there is sex with Real Men (huntsmen, military leaders, princes, high nobility, who espouse the same qualities he fosters in himself: strong, martial, noble, respectable and independent) fucking them is a sex-exchange on equal grounds where they can trade violence and pleasure on more or less even terms, and which can entail real emotional depth and mutual enjoyment. sex between equals.
- there is sex with subordinate men (men who don't fill these categories; servants, those uninvolved with the military, those seen as lower class or racial lessers) and women, which is about power, domination and his own pleasure first and foremost, and which by default cannot be sex with equivalent psychological input. sex on an unequal power axis.
leading to scenes like him having a genuine in-depth conversation mid-wrestling-fuck with his best friend, and the conversation is about objectifying Lúthien into what is essentially a meal ticket to Thingol's resources, because the emotionally vulnerable and reciprocal component of sex can only be enacted with an equal. Sex with the constructed lesser is not inherently impure, can be permissible and may be physically enjoyable, or it may simply be necessary for dynastic & nationalistic reasons, but it is a hierarchical affair in which he is always on top and his pleasure, his aims are the only metric that he considers in this scenario; to pretend it is reciprocal would be personally humiliating to him.
There are occasional, vibes-based exceptions esp. among Noldor women and Ainur in female/feminine forms that partially transcend this boundary, but they straddle a narrow line of positions that are class-appropriate, masculine-in-demeanour but not actually trying to cross the boundary of social hierarchies to occupy a traditionally male station.
And as everything in Beleriand gets progressively worse under the pressure of the Noldorin kingdoms' project decaying, Celegorm and his circle become more insular and more enabling to each other, and thus the difference between what they do with each other and what they are willing to do with other people increases to the point where there isn't even direct physical sex necessarily involved, just satisfaction from domination and violation taking first place.
Core to my headcanon here is that sadomasochism is an innate characteristic and not a later adoption or adaptation to the mores of the Hunt but in fact the primary driver behind his construction of sexual desire that colours fundamentally how he interacts and internally construes a framework around what is innate, normal, normative, or natural; finding his place in the Hunt offers a framework by which he can understand the gap between his experience & those of others similar to him vs the social and legal norm, and a method by which living both is possible. The problem is that the huntsmen, by undertaking an oath to Oromë, were given an outlet for needs and wants not in line with Amanyar society by Oromë, but their entire organisation was not meant to exist outside Oromë's purview and he did not also impart upon them the regulatory measures he was using to keep them from descending into an echo chamber sadistic supremacist death cult when enmeshed with the worst of Noldorin authoritarianism. Additionally, they were always meant to be a separate, religious order without an internal top-down hierarchy; however, in Beleriand they become a hierarchical institution enmeshing the military and the state and the Hunt all into one entity in which Celegorm himself is unassailable and immune to criticism, further allowing himself to be enabled & enable his brothers in arms in turn. Hence, even the blasphemy of a (legal, if not consummated according to LaCE) marriage to Lúthien is permissible if it serves the purpose of the state; even if he doesn't actually desire her as a person, even physically, and rather sees in her a substitution for a source of power and resources, he is 'allowed' to desire her as a tool for his ends, and in that sense he is also allowed to take pleasure from domination.
