Why is it in this thread, and another recent thread (“Why are stupid-looking people stupid”), are there so few people saying not to fucking prejudge (ie, be prejudiced) based on how someone looks. Shouldn’t this be a staple of liberal ideology?!
The human race prejudges and stereotypes because it’s effective to some degree. Even infants form opinions and prejudge adult faces. We seemed to be hardwired for it. Our reptilian brain continues to prejudge while our cortex keeps trying to convince our civilized ego not to stereotype. The cortex seems to be losing that battle.
I’m a heterosexual female, and that describes me, and the kind of guys I want to date, in the reverse order. Does that mean I’m secretly a butch lesbian who likes gay men?
I have a friend, we’ve been friends for 25 years or so. When we first met she was married, but she got divorced. Since then, pickin’s have been slim for her.
Why? Because she looks like a lesbian.
We’ve sat around on more than one occasion trying to figure out how to fix this. Longer hair? She doesn’t like longer hair. Anyway it’s not just her hair. It isn’t particularly butchy hair, and not even that short. And she wears makeup, not a lot, but she’s a blonde so…mascara, eyeliner. Dangly earrings.
At one point she worked in a bank where they had uniforms, a different one each day. A couple of them featured frilly blouses. The frilly blouses on her were just…wrong. Bad bad wrong. (I should note that each separate version of the uniform was wrong for somebody in that bank, so it was equal opportunity fashion oppression.) The frilly thing looked like if you put a dog in a tutu, to use a really bad similar, because my friend is not a dog. That just wasn’t her good look. The tailored navy blue suit with the buttoned-down Oxford shirt was her good look.
She ended up getting the dress code changed because she finally pointed out that the GUYS didn’t have to wear the frilly blouse, so it was discrimination.
She is a tall blonde, and for awhile the only guys who were asking her out were shorter than she was, which she found unacceptable. But taller guys never asked her out, and at least once a guy she worked with told her, years later, that he didn’t, because he thought she was into women.
If we assume that more people are heterosexual than aren’t, attitudes such as this end up having a political agenda whether you intend them or not: “Conform to sex role expectations, or our expectations of you will make you heterosexually ineligible”.
Having been through that gauntlet most of my life, I tend to resent it. I suppose I probably overcompensate by being uninclined to categorize someone unless they conform to so many simultaneous stereotypes that I end up thinking that any person exhibiting that behavior is either emulating gay culture from being a part of it or is deliberately adopting signals for the explicit purpose of making the social statement “I am gay”. Moving in graceful flowing ways, caring about things more conventionally considered womens’ concerns, not trying to be ‘tough’, would NOT be anywhere near enough. Dub in certain emotive speech patterns, specific gestures, facial expressions, clothing choices, and eventually I do draw the conclusion, but hell, there has to be room for a person to flip off sex role expectations and not conform to that without failure to do so being equated with being gay.
I agree (like you, mostly because of my own experiences with sex role expectations). But those who may want to inhabit that “room” may not get much sympathy from the gay community - at least not the activist, thinking/theorizing, identity-politics segment of it. That segment is probably not much troubled by the stereotyping of nongay people as gay - it raises consciousness as to what they’ve been up against through most of history.
It’s too bad in some ways, but when a group addresses discrimination, group identity and consciousness tend to take precedence over the individual - just as it did with the people doing the discriminating.
There is also, in identity politics, a strong pressure to assume that all discrimination is more or less alike, and to draw a hard line between oppressor and oppressed groups. This helps form solidarity between oppressed groups, but if you’re a disadvantaged member of the oppressor group, you really don’t matter. Again, group trumps individual.
I dunno, I’ve found some gay folks to be strongly supportive. Sure, I’ve seen some of what you describe, also, but not as often among those who seem truly politically active. (The gay guys are also usually pretty supportive of women’s struggles against patriarchy, btw)
OK. I’m probably selling them short. I’m a grad student and read all kinds of polemical twaddle. The gay friends I have had have all been very accepting of individuals as individuals - even the one or two who were academics.
For younger guys, here’s the look I have in mind: tight designer jeans, a button-down long-sleeve shirt of silk or some other showy fabric, with a striped or decorated design; a toned, trim physique; tanned skin; and “done” hair. That last part is particularly important because few straight guys around here seem to “do” their hair anymore. The shaggy mop style is very much in fashion for run of the mill straight guys.
███** SIT NOMINE DIGNA **███
In other words, hot guys who dress up are gay. Thus making the straight guys even less willing to put any effort in. Sigh.
Christian Siriano
No, not at all. There are different ways of “dressing up” and being “hot” than having gelled hair, tanning-bed skin and some showy silk shirt and pre-faded designer jeans. The look I’m talking about is slick, but IMO fairly gauche and lacking in any subtlety. There are like 100 clone-like guys that wear this “young, well-off, gay” uniform around here.
This kind of look used to be associated with frat guys, jocks and macho straight men, but this is not really any longer the case. The “metrosexual” thing was not really a long lasting fashion trend among younger men. Shaggy mop hair, beard stubble, khakis (or tight jeans, for the skinny hipsters) are “in” now, at least it seems to me. The “done up” look says - “gay, gay, gay.”