However, that was over a sexual matter as well, albeit not homosexuality.
I haven’t heard any such sermons.
If “homophobia” was about rejecting norms, why is it pretty much exclusively directed towards gay men and not gay women? Most men seem to get pretty excited about the idea of lesbians, and not in the go out and beat them up kind of way.
I’ve never met any women who were offended in any way by either male or female homosexuals, but I suppose they might exist.
I’m going with the “closet gay” theory of violence towards gay men.
A 2002 study (Herek, below) found there is a sizeable gender difference on all sides of the issue. Respondents to the survey generally viewed lesbians more favorably than gay men, and women viewed homosexuals in general more favorably than men did. The big take-away of the study is that the incidence and degree of antipathy straight men hold for gay men is disproportionately larger and more severe than any other combination.
Herek cites a few examples of this, among them:
(1) A greater proportion of the population believes that gay men are mentally ill or more likely to be pedophiles but do not believe the same of lesbians
(2) People are more likely to view lesbians as being capable mothers because they are female
(3) Men are more likely to feel scorn for gay men because they perceive them as having abandoned manly values and abdicated the male’s traditionally privileged role in society
(4) As discussed above, men fear that they will be the target of a gay man’s advances, but for obvious reasons do not perceive a similar threat from a lesbian
In short: Surveys indicate that antipathy between straight women and lesbians is less frequent and less intense than man-vs-man conflict.
From an anecdotal perspective, I’ve often perceived that lesbians are far more acceptable than gay men. I think a big part of the reason is that men find lesbian or FFM pornography to be titillating, and therefore they are more likely to be exposed to it and perceive it as normal. I’m sure many people would argue that straight men are the primary audience for lesbian porn. Yet I have never known a straight man to seek out gay porn. If they are anything like me, they actively avoid it.
Or as one friend of mine put it: “I don’t get how all women aren’t lesbians. They’re just so beautiful.”
Cite: Herek “Gender Gaps in Public Opinion about Lesbians and Gay Men”
The Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 40-66
I’ve seen three episodes at this point so there is a lot I must admit to not knowing. But actual reports of violence against lesbians seems more in other countries; at least as the show portrays. I believe there is supposed to be an episode in the US but I haven’t seen that one yet. And while I respect both hosts, I don’t follow blogs so I can’t say what they report there.
But like I said ----- it caught me by surprise and it is going to lead to some extra searches and reading on my part.
Well, because - gender. Lesbian = depicts a woman. Gay = depicts men.
I have. I go to what passes for a liberal church here in my area (east Texas) and they do a pretty decent job of not promoting bigoted behaviors. However, I have upon occasion gone to other churches from different denominations with family or friends. Some, right after the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same sex marriage. And it wasn’t pretty. What Zsofia described was only the tip of the iceberg and extremely common still in more predominantly conservative places.
In Texas (big surprise) but it’s men attacking women. Not women attacking women.
All of your examples involve voluntary viewpoints that people choose and can, if they wish, change. But sexual orientation doesn’t change just because someone provides persuasive evidence for the other attitude/opinion.
Besides, Democrats don’t NEED to be closeted Republicans - they can simply express the view of their choice, secure in the knowledge that there are no religious or societal rules against being a member of the other party. Same with most of your examples above. Most parents wouldn’t kick their child out for being an AGW skeptic even if they disagreed.
To those of you wondering about the female side of things:
No, women don’t commit as much physical assault of gay men and women. But a definite yes to women being nasty and pouring out an enormous amount of criticism and hatred to both gay women and gay men. This sow actually shows a fair bit of it. This is true in many places.
Religion does account for some of this type of violence (male and female) but definitely not all of it. Witness the life of gays in parts of Asia where the factor is HUGE social pressure to have a traditional family. Again, you get pretty nasty attitudes (and verbal, and occasionally physical, violence) toward both gays and lesbians.
I was queerbashed quite a bit as a young teenager through young adult. I think this is close to being it but not quite. It’s definitely mostly male homosexuality that inspired violence and the people it inspires violence in are other males.
I think straight men, when they view an attractive woman, do not feel like they are in control of their appetite. (I don’t mean they feel like they can’t control themselves, I mean that it feels like the sexual hunger is being incited in them by the woman, as if it is someting she’s doing to them).
The prospect of some guy being able to grab them by that handle is frightening.
Note that it isn’t just gay guys who inspire this. It’s feminine guys as well, sissy guys. In the same way that such males tend to attribute their sexual attraction towards women to something the women are doing, they claim that girlish guys are doing things to them, that we’re tricking them into being horny for us, hence we’ve doing something practically akin to sexually molesting them.
Seriously. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told to quit acting innocent, told that I should be ashamed of myself because I’m doing something disgusting (all the while I’d be going ‘WTF did I do’?) and they totally feel justified in assaulting us because after all whatever they feel is incited by the other person.
You see this reflected in how they sing about or otherwise discuss female sexual attractiveness. So many of the descriptives are about her being attractive on purpose, it’s a behavior on her part not just his active consumption of her passive good looks. She’s a knockout. She’s got legs and she knows how to use them.
Part of it is like a fetish: they have these strong sexual feelings about girls and women and anything that evokes their general sense of girls or women becomes sexualized. They get the hots for spike heeled shoes and lacy camisoles, so yeah they get some degree of sexual reaction to someone whose personality and behavior evokes femininity.
In the case of gay guys, of course, there’s the specific knowledge that such guys do have sex with other guys. These masculine fellows feel potentially preyed upon to even contemplate some other guy who might wish to make a guy horny for them. Their comprehension of their own sexuality is all about appetite (not desirability) and their experience of their appetite is that the object of it is responsible for making it happen, it’s something being done to them.
This is a complicated topic and I’m sure there are a bunch of research papers that I’m too lazy to seek out.
In general (from the tv show) it seems that, yes, male-on-male violence is significantly more common. In the Jamaica episode specifically, a couple of times they talked about how male homosexuality was repulsive and should be shunned but female homosexuality was a “fantasy.” Obviously the fantasy is that these ladies aren’t actually homosexual at all but would welcome a guy who wanted to join in, but I digress…
I don’t think I quite believe that violence towards gays stems from repressed homosexuality-- at least not in a significant majority of instances. I’m guessing it’s more like “Gays are weak, effeminate and flamboyant. I don’t want my buddies to think I am weak, effeminate and flamboyant. Therefore I will make an obvious show of being aggressive towards anything weak, effeminate and flamboyant.”
There is a long tradition of violence against queer women as well, including rape and sexual assault. Please don’t just brush this off and say that it is mostly male-on-male.
I have sometimes encountered men whose understanding of queer women seemed to be derived entirely from pornography, and I have to say that I did not feel accepted in these situations. Being treated as “titillating” by straight men is at best annoying, and at worst there have been times when I feared for my own safety.
that’s very interesting. Never thought of it that way. Kind of explains why the crazies in the middle east force their women to wear burkas. Men are weird.
Because, if most people were bisexual, it would seem odd that aversion to both that and homosexuality spread so far. We tend to discriminate against the things we ourselves don’t do, and make excuses for the things we do actually do.
And because, being straight myself, I know how hard that wall actually is. The second I start thinking of you as male, any attraction dissipates. I’m actually experiencing it right now with two different anime reviewers who have come out as trans men. One looks totally male now, and my attraction is gone. The other still looks totally female, and I still am attracted to him, until I think that word “him.”
And then throw in that studies haven’t born out the idea that most people are bisexual, and those two bits of inconclusive evidence seem far more conclusive.
I mean, the only reason anyone thinks that bisexuality is more common than hetero- or homosexuality is Kinsey, and he specifically did not follow any sort of scientific method. He just interviewed people on the fringes.
Limit “straight men” to the type that react violently to gay people, and I think you’re on to something. Though I do think there’s also an element of people who react to fear with violence. And, yes, those who are afraid of being gay themselves and thus react with destructive masculinity.
I don’t think anyone is saying there’s no violence against gay women. What I was saying is that it seems like violence against lesbians is mostly by straight men, not by straight women.
AHunter3, thank you so very much for this post. As usual, your viewpoint is very enlightening.
And along with what you said, when a straight man is “under the spell” of a sexy woman, he knows he must exercise a lot of self-control that society imposes upon him. But an openly gay man – or a man who is unashamedly effeminate – has cast off society’s self-control, and is free to be himself. How does this affect the repressed (or at least suppressed) heterosexual man who must maintain that self-control over the lust that’s been forced upon him? How easily can this become actual hatred?
I think that is often just because women (as a rule, there are exceptions of course) don’t tend to express feelings with physical violence as much. They do express a lot of verbal and emotional hatred and disapproval, which assumedly comes from some of the same places as male rage.