Sexism and homophobia - Democratic Underground

Kurt_and_Hunter

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Tue Nov-16-10 06:13 PM
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Sexism and homophobia

Edited on Tue Nov-16-10 06:47 PM by Kurt_and_Hunter

Every time I see a "tutu" post I am struck that much of homophobia is actually a refraction of sexism. (Not all! Much.)

(I realize the particular tutu thing has some history. This post is not really about that phrase, but about a more general theme of slurring men as effeminate.)

What is presumptively contemptible (in the culture) about male same-sex orientation is that it is thought feminine. The inferiority/contemptibly of the feminine is so deeply ingrained that when a man suggests that another man is effeminate it is not always correct to think the suggestion is that the target is gay. It is often to say that he is a woman.

Saying that a boy "throws like a girl" is not homophobic, it is sexist. When a man cries and another man says, "Sheesh, don't be such a woman" it is a slur on his manhood, but not an implication that he is gay.

One time a quarterback sack in a Redskins game drew an unnecessary roughness penalty and broadcaster Sonny Jurgensen said, "Why don't they just put the quarterback in a dress?" He was not really saying anything about transvestitism. He was saying something about women.

There is interplay and nuance, of course. Even on DU, receiving a penis into one's body is a universal metaphor for weakness. "Bend over" "Chris Wallace is fellating John McCain in this interview." etc. Is the problem there that Chris Wallace is gay, or that he is a woman? It is far from obvious. The point is that a lot of prejudice against gay men is built upon a deep strata of sexism. It doesn't really matter whether Chris Wallace is gay or is a woman... they are both presumed to be weak, contemptible things to be. (I do not want to minimize homophobia in any way here--a speciffic gay slur carries the weight of the feminine with the fillip of the "unnatural." But in the Chris Wallace example it's really about fellatio itself, not gayness.)

One time (long ago) I said something in an OP about how Krugman had been right about something, but only in that weak, effeminate sense of actually being right. I was mocking the RW masculinity cult where actually being right is seen as lesser than being forceful and self-assured, though flat wrong. The OP was locked because someone complained that it was homophobic. (This is not questioning a Mod decision... I don't care about that. I cite this because it says something interesting about broad cultural assumptions.) If it was going to be locked shouldn't it have have been for being sexist? Would the same thing have been more acceptable if said about Christina Romer rather than Paul Krugman? Aha!

I have known very few men to wear tutus, gay or straight. And there are only a tiny number of adult ballerinas. The overwhelming majority of tutus are worn by little girls. And for an adult man that's the culturally worst thing to be... a little girl. The quintessence of passive, ineffectual femininity.

The contempt for the feminine is so deep in the culture that we take it for granted and then react when it is leveled against a man. That's a "man bites dog" story. (Hey, somebody said a man is as silly as a woman! That's out of bounds.) But it's not so great when leveled against women either, is the point.

If Hillary was President and appeared to be weak and someone said she should take off her tutu it wouild be at least as offensive precisely because she is a woman. Think about it. (It would be like someone saying something derogatory and race-specific about Obama.)