Why on earth do you think this?
I think that has to do with the theorised “male gaze” in which most pictures/movies/etc presuppose a male observer. Thus, a picture of a hot guy is often homo-erotic and a picture of a naked woman is almost definitely hetero in nature.
Rimbo: Wait you think that Hispanics are being brought into the Republican fold because of the GOP’s stance on immigration?
IMHO, he is basically saying that the GOP and the radical right is filled with wannabe leather-boys, looking for a master daddy to tell them what to do. Part of that schtick is to be “manlier than thou”, which is why conservative pundits spend so much time trying to feminize Democratic or liberal candidates. As long as you’re in the GOP. they won’t consider you a woman; at best, you are just a confused man making a grave error and at worst you are an abomination that needs to be killed or put in a camp somewhere, so you don’t corrupt the precious bodily fluids of our Republican youth.
If I’m off on that, I’m sure I’ll be corrected, :D.
And I tend to agree with him. The process is made easier because the MSM - again, IMO - is basically owned by the conservatives these days, so they can set and maintain the tone. The old saw about controlling the communications of a country to control the country is here with a vengence.
For clarification: Most people here know that I am also a TS, as well as a former conservative voter. I left both the movement and the country after the 2000 and 2004 national elections; it got tiresome being literally spit on by all those 'compassionate conservatives."
If you pardon me for making you a spokesperson for all gays and transsexuals. Do you think you catch more flak as a transsexual than an openly gay non TS man does? I assume you are a more readily identifiable target, but do you think it goes beyond being just an easy target? That people perhaps find transsexualism even more provocative than run of the mill homosexuality?
I’m still laughing over the fact that Spoofy’s hilariously off-target blog link quoted Charlie Brooker.
Charlie fucking Brooker.
Amazing.
Not that I can speak for JessicaM, but I would not assume it should be easy to identify a transsexual, in fact if the surgeons did a good job it should be very difficult. A transvestite on the other hand…
As for the topic of what makes homosexuality rub so many guys the wrong way, I suspect its the trans gender implications. I heard an interview with a well known gay guy (I can’t remember his name) on NPR or something several years ago. He said that he would not have much of a problem walking down the street holding hands with his boyfriend, but he didn’t think he could do it if he was dressed like a woman (as in you could still tell it was a guy dressed as a woman).
I strongly suspect that if all feminine connotations were removed from social expectations of a homosexual, that a lot less males would have a problem with it.
IE: If you took a random sampling of guys and ask them to disrobe a gay guy, and their description was very masculine (likes football, movies about war, and all that ‘hetero guy stuff’) with the only difference being that they preferred men to women, I think their level of disgust or hatred for homosexual males would vastly lower then it is now.
So basically, homosexuality implies a lack of masculinity and that is what is really offensive about being called a homo, fag, or whatever.
First.
Andrew Sullivan had an interesting post about that the other day.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/03/faggots.html
The word “faggot” is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form. She knew why Edwards qualified. He’s pretty, he has flowing locks, he’s young-looking. He is exactly the kind of straight guy who is targeted as a “faggot” by his straight peers. This, Ms Coulter, is real social policing by speech. And that’s what she was doing: trying to delegitimize and feminize a man by calling him a faggot. It happens every day. It’s how insecure or bigoted straight men police their world to keep the homos out.
And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men - and certainly nothing weak about many of them.
[…]
What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men “boys”? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that’s what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said - and conservatives applauded - that I and so many others are not men.
As usual, of course, he ignores what this means for women. And the other responses to Coulter has the usual accusations of her being a lesbian/man, doing almost the exact same thing in reverse.
It looks like you just discovered a cost effective and delicious substitute for high fructose corn syrup. Trade name? Irony.
I’m not sure what you mean. That she gets it back tells you something about her critics: that they are just as bad in many ways. But that doesn’t excuse what she did at all. And I’m not sure what you are saying about “what this means for women”.
This is a sort of tic with Ann, she called Clinton (Bill) a “latent homosexual”
http://mediamatters.org/items/200607260007
Bill Clinton. The guy’s poon addiction got him impeached. Seriously.
Ann isn’t as batshit crazy as she’d like everyone to think. She has cultivated a right wing Don Rickles act calculated to piss off the left and entertain the right. The more she can do the former the more money she generates from the latter. I’m sure she doesn’t care about the veracity of anything she says.
Well yeah - I’ve got no doubts that Coulter’s act is, well, an act.
That doesn’t make it any less revolting, and it doesn’t make it any less disturbing that a goodly chunk of a large political movement cheer her on.
Well, she complements the industry the left has created around being perpetually offended quite nicely. I’m not saying what she does is right, but your kind only encourage her and her fans. How many monocles must pop before you decide enough is enough?
I never!
“my kind?” Here’s where we run into the danger of taking our generalizations and applying them to individuals.
Coulter doesn’t offend me. She’s an idiot and a hack but I sure as hell didn’t pop a monocole (or whatever) over her calling Edwards a fag. That doesn’t make what she spews any less vile, and it doesn’t make it any less revolting that the conservative base agrees with her.
But seriously LK that is some twisted fucking logic you’ve got going there. I mean not to put too fine a point on it but you’re coming awful close to “Well she was asking for it, dressed like that…” Because people find the things Coulter spews hateful and offensive they’re part of the problem?
Quite a few men certainly seem to see a TS as some sort of a threat and that includes quite a few gay men. Before the 2000 elections, for example, the worst I have ever been consistently treated badly in public was in the gay areas of San Francisco, followed closely by the denizens of the conservative haven of Orange County, CA. It has been my experience, however, that the overwhelming majority of women either don’t see it as a threat or really don’t care one way or the other; 99% of the times that I have been hassled publicly, it has been by men. Whether this is from some deep-seated “anti-TS” attitude or not, who knows? My personal experience has been that quite a few men act threatened by the concept. I don’t know why for sure.
At the risk of seeming like a whiner: For all that we get more than our fair share of publicity, TSes are an easy target minority. There are very few of us compared to the population (maybe 50,000 in all of the US) and we’re not organized; even if we were, we’d have nearly zero effect, because we can’t mobilize a lot of voters or contributions. We’re also so far off the estabished ‘norms’ that, combined with our few numbers, it is pretty easy to toss us to the lions. It is no coincidence that the word “transsexual” is usually the first one tossed from equal treatment legislation proposed by GLBT groups during negotiations with Congress-critters; it is that or lose support for the whole bill. Most days I can understand the reasoning. I don’t like it, but reality can be like that.
Let me state upfront that I do have my days where I look like a truck driver in drag; I’m 6’4" tall, weigh in at over 200 pounds and on a bad hair day have been known to scare the crap out of bear-wrasslin’ lumberjacks. So yeah, I got my share of surprised stares and nervous laughter before 2000, certainly more than the average gay guy just standing around on a street corner. In some ways, many men DO find a male-to-female TS more provocative just because it is more easily identifiable. In general, though, it wasn’t a major issue before 2000; maybe 1 or 2 bad incidents a year. Most people seemed to have a live-and-let live attitude about the whole thing.
However, there was a fundamental shift in public attitudes after Bush II took office, one that became painfully obvious to me after the GOP took control of Congress in 2002 and the MSM began to shut out liberal voices from air time. Suddenly, it started to become OK to become ruder and more callous publicly toward a TS. Where before someone might do a double-take in the grocery store aisle, after 2002 and especially immediately after the 2004 elections, there would be a double-take and then maybe an ‘accidental’ elbow shot as the person passed by. Where once there might be raucous laughter and finger-pointing from a passing car, now it would be accompanied by a thrown bottle or soft drink cup and a loudly yelled “Fag!” I’ve posted elsewhere in these forums what it was like for me immediately following Bush’s re-election; I had to stay off the streets at night for a couple weeks, until things calmed down a bit. And this was when I was living and working in Santa Monica, not known as a hotbed of conservatism.
I pin this to the “leadership starts at the top” concept: if the leaders make it known that it is OK to do something, then people just do it. During the Clinton years, things got progressively better for me in public year after year. In the case of the GOP control of the government after 2002, it was a major crack in the social contract; it became OK to be violent, not just insulting. When people like Coulter, Hannity, Limbaugh, Donohue and their ilk are given major air time on CNN, Fox and the networks to spew their hate, with no reply allowed from less radical elements, then it becomes OK to demonstrate that hate in the minds of the dittoheads.
I find the whole thing ironic, not just because of the revelations recently about Foley and Haggard, et al; TS hookers have known for decades that their most loyal group of customers is to be found among conservative males who want a discrete and close-mouthed outlet. It was the topic of conversation at more than one support group meeting, believe me. Hell, for that matter, when I get hit on in hotel bars while traveling (yes, it does happen occasionally; I look MUCH better in dim bar lighting), it is almost always a straight, married, conservative, self-identified evangelical man wanting to take a little walk on the wild side. They’ll start out talking about their wife, kids and politics, then move to their church group activities, then move on to “Why don’t we continue this conversation in my room, where it isn’t so loud?” wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Yes, that is all mostly anecdotal; take it with a grain of salt.
So, to answer your question: It certainly SEEMS like there is more going on than just “Hey, guy in a dress; throw bottle and laugh!” That’s subjective, though, and doesn’t constitute objective evidence.
On the other hand: After two years in Europe, I have yet to have even ONE bad incident. There have been several cases of nervous public laughter, but that is it. No thrown bottles, no shouts of “Fag!” or the equivalent in the local language, no being spit on in the streets. It is a refreshing change not to have to be constantly on alert in public for violence from some right wing nutcase. Sure, there are some areas of Frankfurt or Paris I won’t go into after dark, but in the US, I was constantly on guard everywhere in public, day time or night time.
So, does that rambling missive answer your question? :D
It also runs into the danger of assuming that everyone who laughs at what Paul Mooney says hates white people, or everyone who laughs at Howard Stern (I’m assuming someone does) “agrees” with them.
But seriously LK that is some twisted fucking logic you’ve got going there. I mean not to put too fine a point on it but you’re coming awful close to “Well she was asking for it, dressed like that…” Because people find the things Coulter spews hateful and offensive they’re part of the problem?
I’m not talking about some generic, far away people. I’m talking to you, precisely, monocle and all. Because you think it is a hugely significant social indicator rather than just a form of entertainment you find objectionable because it hinges on breaking societal taboos (oh! the horror!), it is automatically a bigger problem than, say, Chappelle’s show. But by all means, feed the troll.
So, yeah. You was asking for it wearing that dress.
Lizard King not to put too fine a point on it but you’re being an idiot.
Which is notable because you’re normally not. If you really don’t see a difference between Dave Chapelle poking fun in a stand up routine or Howard Stern being crass on a radio show premised around being crass and a pundit being raucously cheered at a major political event for gaybashing then honest you’re probably the one who needs a monocole. Because there is a world of fucking difference.
Come on LK, what do you think would happen if Coulter had said “kike” instead of “fag”? There’s literally no difference there other than homophobia hasn’t been stamped out of polite society like anti-semitism has.