re: #756 ~Fianna

It’s amazing how we’re all conditioned to attack our own groups and other sub-groups to defend a system that very, very few people actually conform to. Gay bashing is just sublimated misogyny - the real problem with being gay in our culture is that it’s feminizing the masculine, which makes gay men traitors to straight men.

Absolutely. Take this as a superficial—but revealing— example: suppose you’re angry with a man: what are the worst swear words we can call him?
Virtually all of them are some form of calling him gay, or some way of saying something bad about his mother.

Now consider a woman. What are the swear words we apply to women? They’re all some version of calling her a slut or an animal — and by common consent in the US, the worst word of all to call her is a word that reduces her to nothing but her genitalia— and we consider that word FAR worse than equivalent ones for men, like dick or prick.

This is not meant to be a formal argument, mind, but the way we use words is highly instructive.

(similarly, part of the peculiar horror of male rape in prison lies in the forced feminisation of the victims).