Hmm, I’m thinking about it this way which may make my use of “hit on” incorrect. So I’m just sitting at my spot and a girl comes and starts talking to me and touching me. She’s doing the initiating but in that case, neither I nor many other people, would mind it and actually enjoy that scenario. Replace that girl with a homosexual guy and that’s what I meant when I said “hit on”. This new situation is now one many people would be uncomfortable with and, in my current state of opinion, would be the main (not only) source of homophobia.
If you presented reason, then I would listen to it. You’re not though, you’re just making personal attacks which is something I have not done yet (except to you in return of you initiating it). Present your reasons calmly, and I’ll be more than willing to listen to them.
You’ve said so before in let’s see…
Well I’d say a lot of “non-normal” walking ways WOULD be physically disruptive as described by you. With one of the gays (could have been anyone, but this is just a specific example) I know, he walked in a “skippy” way with bells at his belt which was very much so physically disruptive. I don’t hate him for it but it did bother me to a small degree.
Yeah I was careless with my choice of diction in the first post, but you could have asked for clarification in astonishment of such irrationality rather than assuming I’m irrational based on one or two lines and attack me with me.
You’re not actually arguing against my point. You just keep reinforcing it. Men don’t want to be hit on because they don’t want to be seen as potential sexual partners. Why is that so horrifying? What about that causes such a angry, violent reaction? What is happening there?
What would be the point of a girl hitting on you? Presumably, she wants to get lucky, ie, she wants you to fuck her. What’s the point of a guy hitting on you? Presumably, he wants to get lucky, ie, he’d want to fuck you. The woman hitting on you reaffirms your position as the dominant male–that is, you beat out all the other males in the room for a chance at penetration. The man hitting on you inverts those roles, and thus, will put you in the position to be penetrated. Like a woman. One validates your strength as a man, the other literally inverts your role and place, as you understand it, in society. As though there’s nothing more terrible than being a woman.
I want to be clear about one thing. I’m not saying straight men are sexists if they won’t have gay sex. I’m not saying straight men are sexist if they rebuff unwanted sexual advances. I’m saying there is a kernal (or more) of sexism to actual homophobia.
But your presumption is that whenever a homosexual guy hits on another guy, they want to do the penetrating. I’d think it’d be more of a 50/50 thing than a 100% thing. By your definition, no penetration = no feeling of your roles reversed.
Anyways, if it was a women, you don’t need to comply to the attraction for various reasons, mainly devotion to another person. You would not feel offended because she hit on you and would actually feel proud that you were hit on. If it was a guy that hit on you though, you don’t need to comply either in which case there is no penetration. Some people do feel proud that they were attractive to homosexuals even if they have no desires to interact with them sexually. These are non-homophobics (not to say all non-homophobics think this way). Then there are people who are AFRAID that they gays would hit on them even though they didn’t. These are the homophobics to which I’m referring to and suggest is probably the majority of them. Honestly, not every gay person goes around hitting on every guy just the same as not every guy goes around hitting on every girl, nor does every girl hit on every guy. It is the fear of such a (unlikely?) scenario that defines the person as a homophobic.
My reasons for what, believing that you are irrational? Just look at your own posts. You first stated that you would hate anyone who walked “weird”. You clarified that by “weird” you didn’t mean merely in a “gay” manner but any unusual way, and offered as an example a man whose “weird” walking you yourself attribute to a mental disability. You further expressed doubt that anyone who walked “weird” could otherwise be “PERFECTLY normal”, and seem to think that failure to be perfectly normal is reason enough to hate someone.
Even if we substitute “be annoyed by” for “hate” above, you still do not come across as a very rational or tolerant person. You are bothered by people who in any way deviate from the norm, including not only homosexuals but even people with harmless physical mannerisms that may (as in the case of the disabled man) be beyond their control. Do you really need me to explain what is wrong with such a worldview?
*Is he knocking things over or running into people? If not, I don’t see what’s so disruptive about his manner of walking in and of itself. If he’s got bells on then that must be noisy, but it would be noisy regardless of his manner of walking.
I would share your annoyance with someone who insisted on going around jingling bells all the time, but I don’t see how this has anything to do with the guy’s sexual orientation. Wearing bells isn’t a “gay thing”.
*Again, if you say something you don’t mean then that is your fault, not mine. But if you look at my first response to you again, you’ll see that I did rephrase your statement as a question (a common way of asking someone if they really meant what they said) and then expressed astonishment that anyone would say such a thing. I did exactly what you say here that I should have done.
You chose to respond by getting angry that I took you at your word. You went on to defend the bizarre idea that people who walk funny are freaks who deserve the scorn of normal people and then accused me of being hostile and irrational because I did not agree with you.
I hope that’s brought you up to speed, because I do not wish to continue hijacking this thread.
Homophobia is not a well thought out, reasonable stance. Often, it’s a gut reaction. Most often, it’s a gut reaction that is the result of cultural training dating back centuries. Further complicating matters is the fact that we’re grappling with gender and sexuality designations that are entirely new in the great Human Drama. There were men in the 19th century who undoubtedly had sex with other men, but it would be incorrect to call them gay and incorrect to call the people who made sodomy illegal homophobes. I’m talking about centuries of baggage, of gender roles, and of accepted sexuality, not what happens when some guy gets hit on in a bar in West Hollywood.
Now, your argument is that when a homosexual hits on a straight person, the straight person isn’t necessarily going to be fucked. I don’t disagree. And I never said that a gay encounter always ends in penetration or even necessarily ends in penetration. But homophobes aren’t concerned with what will actually happen, should they come in contact with “teh ghey.”
Until very recently, women had a socially prescribed role that quite frankly could not be ignored. First, they were objects. They belonged to their fathers, and then to their husbands. They could not vote. They could not say no to sex with their husbands–there was no such thing as marital rape. For much of human history, women could not divorce their husbands. They had no role in the public. Their place was the domestic. In other words, they were second class citizens, and men, thus, had a very good reason to make sure that the lines between men and women, husbands and wives, never blurred. The patriarchy had to be maintained.
Only…“sodomites” really disrupt that view of the world. For one thing, it’s “unnatural” because it doesn’t lend itself to procreation. Which means, it’s sex for the sake of sex! Pure pleasure! We’re closer to the Victorians than we like to think we are (actually I think we out-Victorian the Victorians in many ways) and sex for pleasure’s sake is still unsettling to people. For another thing, if a man could be in the woman’s position (and even if there is no anal intercourse, there could be oral sex, which still has penetration), what on earth would stop a woman from taking the man’s role? Once you start blurring those gender lines and expectations, you can’t really stop. It’s very disruptive.
This isn’t something that people think logically about. These are deep-seated fears that may or may not be held up to scrutiny. And phobia, and hatred, is often illogical on its surface, by none the less real. That doesn’t mean homophobes logically think “Oh no! I don’t want to be penetrated!” That means they think there is something wrong, sinful, and evil about homosexuals.
No. And I never said that it did. If I go out to a bar and I don’t want to be hit on, I’m not some sort of rabid man-hater. You’re taking an extremely microscopic view of a very large, very broad cultural phenomenon. One with a huge amount of baggage, especially religious baggage (another hugely patriarchal institution). I believe it is tied completely with the historical definitions and expectations of gender. I haven’t yet seen an argument that convinces me that homophobia developed independently of the fact that women were second-class citizens and in order for that to remain true, men needed to keep the lines between the genders firm and immutable. Just because that’s no longer entirely the case doesn’t mean we still don’t have remnants of that baggage.
I understand your confusion and how you might think that way but you must understand that we men just don’t think that way. We are the pursuers in our minds and someone hitting on us is NEVER going to change that. Even if a heterosexual girl hits on us, we still believe that we are the pursuers. We still have to play our cards right. We are still on guard, even if a woman is actively chasing us, we could still blow it. So we are ALWAYS the pursuers.
If a woman that we are not attracted to hits on us we might be disgusted by her but it’s not because we feel like a woman. If there is any role reversal, it might be (though it is not) about the other person. If it were a woman chasing us, it would be about how she is not the pursued. Not that we think that she wants to penetrate us, and certainly not that we are the woman. We are not assuming that our roles are going to switch. We are thinking about the other person switching roles. And we do not connect their role-reversal with our own. We are the pursuers. We are the penetrators. You can’t make us think otherwise unless you sexually harass us. (Hitting on us is not necessarily sexual harassment.)
If a man hits on us, we aren’t feeling as if we are the woman. We are feeling as if HE is the woman because frankly, if I were gay (yuck) I would not be the one penetrated. I am a man and I do not get penetrated. No one just hitting on me is going to make me think like that. It’s just not going to happen. Being the penetrator is just too hard wired in me.
And I believe it’s too hard wired in all heterosexual men.
So you believe that all real heterosexual men are hardwired to perform certain sexual acts. No real heterosexual men would submit to something so “yucky” (which is actually pretty far removed from the actual truth). Even though women submit to it all the time–of course, it’s hardwired in women to want to be penetrated, right?
And yet, there’s not even a hint of sexism in homophobia? You just hate what gay men do, which just happens to be what women are (presumably) hardwired to do.
There is also another factor in homophobia: the same factor that makes people avoid the knowledge that their parents and children have sex. Thing is, if you take the “I’d never want to have sex with XYZ, so anybody who wants to have sex with XYZ is sick” too far, well… either you’re a narcisist, or you’ll die a virgin.
And that right there perfectly encapsulates pepperlandgirl’s entire argument. You are a men. Men do not get penetrated. Therefore, anyone who does get penetrated, is not a man. If it’s a woman who’s being penetrated, that’s okay, because women are supposed to be penetrated. If it’s a man who’s being penetrated, it’s disgusting, because he’s violating his assigned gender role. And here we see explicitly the roots of homophobia as gender bias: not specifically in the hatred of women, but in the rigid application of a social construct that insists that women play the secondary position to the “naturally” dominant male, and that reacts in revulsion to anyone that challenges that construct.
There seems to be a perception among many homophobes (and even some not-very-homophobic people) that homosexual relationships still follow traditional heterosexual gender roles. One of the men in a gay couple must serve as “the woman” while one of the women in a lesbian couple must be “the man”. I won’t claim that there aren’t any homosexual couples that fit these stereotypes in one way or another, but it’s a minority of couples who fit them perfectly all the time.
These assumptions extend to notions about the bedroom practices of homosexual couples. It seems to be pretty commonly assumed that gay men are always having anal sex (with the more macho fellow on top, of course), while lesbian sex always involves one of the women (the butch one, of course) using a strap-on to penetrate her partner*. Again, I won’t claim that no couples are this way, but it’s just a fraction of a much broader spectrum of sexual behavior.
I think there are people who believe so strongly in traditional gender roles that they can only understand homosexuality as a sort of grotesque parody of heterosexuality. Again, I’d say such an attitude is ultimately rooted in a sexist belief that there’s one correct way for men to act and one correct way for women to act.
I do have doubts as to whether it’s helpful to refer to this sort of homophobia as sexism, at least not when arguing with someone who holds such a view. They’re unlikely to find it persuasive, and may strongly disagree that there’s anything sexist about saying that men and women are meant to play different roles in society/the family. But I have wondered if homophobia could legally be considered a form of sexism when it came to discrimination lawsuits.
In many parts of the US sexual orientation is not a protected class, but sex is. If say a female football fan working in an office full of male football fans lost her job solely because her boss thought such interests were “unladylike”, she’d have good grounds for a sex discrimination lawsuit. Could a lesbian who was fired by a homophobic boss successfully argue in court that she was also the victim of sexism?
*Alternately, there are some who claim that whatever lesbians do together isn’t “real” sex at all. I have never heard this said of gay men, so I think it must be rooted in the idea that sex is something that men do but that is done to women.
As somebody who is mildly homophobic at an automatic level (don’t worry, I don’t vote it), my instinctive response to the OP is that it’s laughable. The reason that homosexuals are vaguely disturbing is that they are different - they do not slot neatly into the classic gender roles with regards to expectation of preferences and behavior. Having failed to fit the mold in one regard, it’s very easy for them to fall completely through the cracks of my classification system, and be labeled with a big scary “?” - they could do anything; I can’t predict them.
This obviously has nothing to do with hatred of women at all.
It’s funny you posted this right after my post above. There’s a lot more to sexism than hatred of women. But you bring up an interesting point.
If I may indulge in a minor personal anecdote here, when I was in grad school I used public transportation a lot and sometimes wound up riding with people who were obviously crazy. There was an older man who started loudly asking if anyone knew whether Shakespeare lived before or after Queen Victoria, a woman who muttered to herself about God, and another man who began telling a long story about how someone had stolen his identity – not in the credit card sense, but was actually disguised as him and going around pretending to be him – and how he was going to need to go to California to track this impostor down.
None of these people seemed violent, or even angry. I had no reason to believe that any of them wanted to harm me. Yet although I like to think of myself as a tolerant and understanding person, I did find these incidents rather frightening. When I thought about it I realized this was because I (mostly subconsciously) felt that a stranger willing to violate certain obvious social norms in public was unpredictable and potentially capable of anything. This isn’t entirely rational, but it isn’t entirely irrational either. When strangers in public begin behaving in an unexpected manner, it’s often a sign of trouble.
It occurred to me then that this might be a factor in homophobia. From early childhood we’re aware of social norms that say “boys kiss girls” or “marriage is between a man and a woman”. Most people we meet growing up fit these norms. It’s certainly possible to reach adulthood without meeting anyone who doesn’t. I can believe that for some people a man who kisses other men seems so far outside the boundaries of expected behavior that he might as well be wearing his trousers on his head. This behavior might be harmless in and of itself, but who knows what he might do next?
Of course, most sensible people would, like you, recognize that this fear is irrational and would not act on it. I’m sure you know on an intellectual level that homosexuals are no more unpredictable or dangerous than anyone else with a personal preference you do not share. But this same fear of the unexpected could act more powerfully on someone who knew very little about real gay people or had some additional motivation for disliking them.