Posts tagged it's like encountering lesbians who try to slut shame
TV taught me how to feel Now real life has no appeal
Prose; pop!: Gay men and the way we talk about and to women.
I was having a great back-and-forth with a feminist today and we were talking about how in New York City, in 2012, gay men need to start taking responsibility for their behaviors and their actions. Chiefly, this: You can’t say horrible misogynistic crap and file it away under LOL I’M GAY. We live in a time when the President has endorsed gay marriage, when one of the most influential cities in the world has legalized gay marriage, when we can probably be thrown up against the side of a big building on Broadway and make out with some dude and not get assaulted. We live in a tremendously hopeful time. Being gay is normal. Being a gay victim is lazy. Stop being lazy!
And yet, my skin crawls when I see how oddly a lot of gay men treat the women in their lives. We all might issue out into the world a casual, light-hearted, “Bitch,” but in gay male-centric habitats, b-words and c-words fly like locusts—and never to describe someone who might be mean enough to earn such an insult, but just to casually refer to a member of the opposite sex. But more than that, there are comments about body parts, physical appearances. By hiding under the LOL I’M GAY cloak, a lot of folks stop being friends and become bullies themselves.
I don’t know where the antagonism stemmed. The relationship between a woman and a gay man is perhaps among one of the most sacred—by and large, it’s one that’s largely established free of ulterior motives. And when such a relationship is constructed where one or both parties has no plans but to use, it quickly implodes.
Maybe it’s diva worship; maybe it’s Fashion Week; maybe it’s the stupid make-up counter at Macy’s—but I see gay men as worshiping strange materialistic tokens of femininity without respecting feminism. Gay culture has effectively distilled the accessories of feminism so that loyalty to the people who those accessories are built for starts diminishing.
There is this horrible sense of entitlement in gay culture, I think, that after you come out, come of age, after you start forming your own true identity, you are released from your responsibility to continue learning from the world. What a horrible way to live!
This year, as gay marriage has earned a big thumbs up from the big O, we’ve seen women’s rights suffer a few serious blows. Gay men especially need to pay close attention to women’s rights because more than the MLK-administered civil rights movement that gay rights is erroneously compared to, the precedents established with women’s rights will, in ways, be very telling of where gay rights also ends up.
But I mean can’t just being considerate for the sake of being considerate be an incentive in itself?
