The Sick Romance of Homophobia and Misogyny
...and why if you slay the dragon of homophobia you ALSO strike a killing blow at misogyny. (Yes, I've turned my response from this thread into an OP at the suggestion of several responders.)
Start with this beautiful image, the cover of today's TIME Magazine:
Sure, homophobia is definitely its own thing, and the whole "ick factor" of straight insecure males being terrified that they're going to be hit on by other guys... or that their daughters are going to take to comfy shoes and shack up with another woman... is rooted in its own existential inadequacy.
But homophobia is ALSO rooted, very deeply, in patriarchy, which rigidly defines gender roles, assigning them based on the supposed 'superiority' of the male and the 'inferiority' of the female.
The whole "traditional marriage is one man and one woman" thing goes back to that patriarchal requirement, heavily bolstered by (in the Abrahamic religious traditions and particularly the Catholic and Orthodox Churches) the tangled legal and economic webs of property assignment and inheritance.
I remember my genuinely ignorant but truly well-intentioned grandmother asking my gay sister, after she came out, "but if you and another woman are together, which one of you is the man?"
Cue a whole range of half-scared, half-mocking comments and queries about "tops" and "bottoms" in gay and kink relationships and a whole range of misogynist and patriarchally-fixated assumptions about "pitchers" and "catchers" in gay male relationships.
The assumption that a patriarchal misogynist culture has attempted to hardwire into us is that in any relationship involving sex, there is one party who "does it to" the other party. And the implication there is that the "doing it to" party is "the man" in the relationship, and the "done to" party is "the woman" in the relationship.
Gay people- and kink people- know that's bullshit. And that's a huge part of the reason that such sexual relationships have been outlawed and regarded as transgressive. It squicks the hell out of people who think in the patriarchal misogynist mindset that any two people in a sexually intimate relationship might actually both "do it" to each other and have it "done to" them in equal measure as their fancy dictates at any given time. That there might be a regular exchange of roles, and that power as expressed in sexual giving and receiving, soliciting and responding, might not be dictated by gender AT ALL!
HORRORS!!
And that is an often-unspoken but deep-rooted part of the objection to gay marriage- it does, indeed, 'destroy' the "traditional marriage" model in which gender dictates who does what and why.
Every gay marriage is also a blow at misogyny. I'm delighted for us all.
appreciatively,
Bright
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