You’re right. I was rereading Stone Butch Blues the other day and the violence scenes in them are gut-wrenching.
As with homophobic violence, violence against queer women is also / especially violence against butch women.
I still think it’s at a lower rate of occurrence than violence against gay guys /sissy guys, although it may actually be that the latter is more visible, more boasted about. The perps in the case of violence against lesbian / butch women are nearly always masculine males, so the dynamic is very different. Competition? The need to not be beaten in the manly competition by some female-bodied person?
A lot of the personality-behavior spectrum that’s classified as “feminine” involves propriety, self-control, maintaining a standard. I’ve heard butch / nonfeminine women say that in addition to cliqueish ostracization, mainstreamy / femmy women and girls often express their hostile opinion in terms of “You are a bad girl, an obviously immoral slut tramp trailer trash wanton slovenly disaster area. You are going to get in SO much trouble and when it happens we’re all going to say ‘told you so’, and you’ll have brought it all on yourself. WTF is wrong with you? Can’t you at least clean your pig self up, make some effort?” etc etc. But yeah, seldom any violence.
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.
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Agreed with KayT. The problem is the use of the word “mostly.” * Most* violence is male-on-male, and the most intense anti-gay feelings are held by men against men. That’s just a fact and it’s supported by research. No one ever said there is no violence against gay women.
Back in the days (‘60s and earlier) when gay/lesbian bars were routinely raided by the cops, it wasn’t unusual for the patrons to get roughed up. In the case of the women, it was often sexual assault, so they’d know what a “real man” was like, and go straight. You know, in the cops’ tradition of “helping people.” :rolleyes:
If either of you had bothered to read what shy_kat actually wrote, you’d have seen that she didn’t say that anyone ever said there is no violence against gay women. She was objecting to this violence being dismissed as something barely worth mentioning – like you’re doing here.
My point was that if you are looking at reasons for violence against homosexuals, you do need to actually address lesbians at some point, rather than focusing exclusively on reasons that apply only to men on men.
And I assure you that in the situations described by panache45 and in many places today, being femme doesn’t get you off the hook (although yes, obviously butch women tend to get it worse in many – but not all – places).
This story on PBS postulates it’s not about sex at all, it’s about men trying to enforce certain gender roles:
“Thus, heterosexism is not just a personal value system, it is a tool in the maintenance of gender dichotomy. In other words, through heterosexism, any male who refuses to accept the dominant culture’s assignment of appropriate masculine behavior is labeled early on as a “sissy” or “fag” and then subjected to bullying. Similarly, any woman who opposes male dominance and control can be labeled a lesbian and attacked.”
and also about having fun by going after a socially acceptable target:
“It wasn’t because we had something against gays, but because we could get some money and have some fun. It was a rush. A serious rush. Massive rush. Danger, fight-or-flight syndrome, pumps up the adrenaline. And when we get over on someone, it really heightens the rush… It was nothing at all against gays. They’re just an easy target” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/roots/franklin.html
In terms of why so many societies condemn homosexuality, it’s the typical combination of
Immoral things are disgusting, so anything that disgusts me must be immoral and
I can show how good I am by how horribly I treat those doing “wrong”
That doesn’t necessarily spill into vigilante violence in all cultures though. I think for that it’s just like spamforbrains says that for some people it can be fun to bully / abuse other humans, all you need to do is pick a socially acceptable target.
And what I said was that I was not aware of much woman-perpetuated violence against gay women, not that there was not violence. Sorry if that was not clear. I would never dismissed violence against women as not worth mentioning.
It is very complicated and does not fit into a neat little package. First, this talk of physical violence is rare as a percentage of the population. Many, many more men are disgusted with homosexuality than commit violence against gays. Likewise, this argument about them simply being closeted homosexuals is, again, very rare.
I think the main issue is that sexual attraction invokes very strong feelings in people: physical, emotional, sometimes spiritual. Men are biologically trained to defend against other men coming into their village and stealing their stuff. A heterosexual man recoils at the idea of letting a man sexually touch him because he is now vulnerable to attack from the barbarian hordes and the others from the next village if he could ever, under any circumstance, let another man make him feel that way…
Likewise, a heterosexual man looks down upon a homosexual man because that man should be part of the protection of the village and not make himself vulnerable to attack from the barbarian hordes. The inclination towards violence may be a sort of hazing ritual.
Also, never underestimate the power of lower class people to look down upon other groups. Fifty years ago, I might be a poor redneck with no future, but at least I’m not black! Today, I might be a poor redneck with no future, but at least I’m not a fucking fag.
I’m just spitballing here and mean no offense to my gay friends, but I think that I am more in line with the correct response that those that suggest that we want to rape women or are closeted gays ourselves.
While on vacation I still rarely sleep in super-late. When I visit Key West I like to get out for a run fairly early because for a guy from Ohio it sure heats up quickly. And let me tell ya, if you’re out and about by 8:00 in Key West you pretty much have the island to yourself.
So about ten years ago – when I was still thin and fit – I go out for a run wearing shorts that, um, kept me cool. And after I passed by about the only people I saw, a trio of young men, one quietly said to the others “oh, yeah…” It was not meant for me to hear, but for a brief moment I still felt threatened. It wasn’t meant that way at all, but I kind of froze for a second. And I’m the kind of straight guy who likes to vacation in one of the gayest places in America.
I immediately understood how women feel when men leer at them, or whistle at them, or do other such things. I also immediately understood which men are most upset by the existence of homosexuality: those who are most invested in traditional gender roles and their power dynamics. Gay men upset those structures and it’s threatening to them.
While I’m certainly not an expert on the subject, I’ve done a bit of reading about homosexuality in pre-modern times and I don’t remember ever coming across any reference to barbarian hordes that went around looting the homes of homosexuals while sparing heterosexuals. What specific culture are you referring to?
I don’t understand the “power dynamics” that you are talking about. Let’s say that it was a group of three attractive young women you passed and they made a similar comment. You would have been on cloud nine the rest of the week. Even if it was a group of three ugly or otherwise unattractive women, it would have still been pretty good.
Certainly you didn’t feel that those three guys were going to forcibly rape you, even if they might have been physically able to do so, anymore than you would feel that, say, ten women could have raped you.
So, its not that you felt like a “piece of meat” like a woman might feel because you would have felt great if three hot bodied 22 year old women made the exact same comments.
And you use the term “them” as if those feelings of traditional gender roles or power structure don’t apply to you, but you admit you felt threatened. What specifically made you feel threatened as you are not like those Neanderthals?
To those of you who think that violence against gay guys is somehow linked to some evolutionary sociological root cause…
No. Only a small precentage of men react violently to gay men. In my HS only about 5% of people taunted or hit gay guys (me included, although I’m not gay, I was…unusual). The rest accepted you or didn’t care. I don’t know what the reason is. I think there may be more than one cause and in some cases I think repressed homosexuality has something to do with it, because years later a few of them tried to come on to me.
It comes down to this: some people are bullies. They’re violent arseholes who want to lash out at someone, anyone.
Anyone who isn’t in the in-group will do. Could be gays, could be foreigners, could be skin colour, could be just general unspecific outsiderness (which is what got me, a straight white male, endlessly picked on at school).
Anyone who’s outside the norm is fair game. Anyone who doesn’t have a gang who’ll back them up. Anyone who ticks the “potential victim” box. In my experience, which is considerable, bullies often don’t actually give a fuck what the pretext is, it’s just an excuse for their bullying.
Or, even more simply: most people like certainty. Some people are more freaked out by the lack of it than others. People who really can’t handle uncertainty are going to be very dependent on the idea that everyone must stay in their preordained roles: men must ‘act like men’, which includes being macho and being attracted to women, and women must ‘act like women’, which includes being girly and being attracted to men. Anyone who doesn’t follow those rules is a threat to certainty, which is a threat to the person’s whole sense of a stable world, and must be either brought back into line or eliminated.